Last week, we went on a trip to New Mexico with the family we bought our house from earlier this year. Being a realtor, I can attest to the fact that this is not normal. More often than not, the buyers and sellers never even talk to each other to protect the best interests of each party. But this has been a very unique situation and I 100% believe this is how God intended it to be.
Ryan and I had been "watching the market" for a little over a year. We bought our first house in 2017, but knew we'd be moving relatively soon to get the kids in a better school district. Enter March 2020 and we had basically put our home search on hold because of that whole global pandemic thing. Everything was so uncertain and people were losing their jobs left and right. We were scared of the unknown just like everyone else.
Although we weren't entertaining the idea of buying at the time, I kept our new listing alerts active just to stay up to date on the market. On April 9 (less than two weeks after the Shelter at Home orders were released), I received an alert that peaked my interest. I quickly sent to Ryan and was almost as quickly shut down with a text that resembled "WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING?!" After some further persuasion, I convinced Ryan to go with me to check the house out. Not because we were seriously considering buying, but more to get out of the freaking house and get an idea of what kind of bang for our buck we'd get in our ideal neighborhood.
Given that you already know the ending, I'm sure you can guess that we went and fell in love with it. I fell in love with the coziness and floor plan. Ryan fell in love with the acreage and massive shop. It literally checked off all of our boxes. We left the house talking about how we're going to wait for something like that to pop up again AFTER things go back to normal. (Let me remind you that we had been watching the market for over a year and hadn't found anything remotely as exciting.) We were both pretty emotionally attached to the house (ok, maybe more so me...), but decided that the most logical thing to do was wait. After all, we still had 2+ years before our kids would start school, so we had plenty of time. So, we did nothing (except a little mourning on my end).
Fast forward two weeks and I see that the house is still on the market. I eagerly called Ryan and am yet again met with "WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU THINKING?!" Admittedly, he had a point. The house was beautiful, but buying a house at the peak of a global pandemic is ill-advised, to say the least. However, I just had a feeling. After careful convincing (are we seeing a theme here?!), we decide to go back and check it out. Normally house showings are scheduled through a showing service, but Ryan was running late from work on this particular night. I reached out to the listing agent to let her know we'd be pretty late and that we may need to reschedule. She gave me the seller's number to coordinate timing directly. Again, this never happens and we probably wouldn't have bought the house if this hadn't happened.
Long story short, we went a second time and neither of us could deny the fact that the house just "felt right." In the days to follow, I made the 40 minute drive from our old house roughly 500 times to get a better feel for the neighbors and honestly to talk myself out of what seemed insane.
Eventually, we definitively decided we wanted the house. Remember I mentioned we wouldn't have bought the house if we hadn't been talking directly with the sellers? We came to a very unconventional agreement with the sellers about the purchase of the home and the rest is history.
We bought a house in probably the most unpredictable market since 2008. I'm a realtor and know a lot about the housing market. Everything in me was telling me to drop it and wait for things to normalize. But God ALWAYS knows best. Despite what our best judgment was telling us, we simply couldn't ignore the push we were both experiencing.
6 months later, we took our kids on our first big family vacation with the sellers and their kids and it was such an incredible trip. We've gained so many rich relationships with our neighbors and their kids. It just feels like home.
Let me end on this note...trust your gut instinct.
That really uncomfortable one that God places inside you.
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