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The astute readers amongst you will notice that we’ve changed the title of this here blog. It was our intention to document the search for our new home, but that is over. I still plan to go back and revisit a few of our strategies, but truth be told - it’s all just a matter of keeping your head. We certainly aren’t the first to buy a house and most definitely are not the most experienced. So - with that little preamble, let me announce that we will be expanding the contents of this blog to cover not only house related details, but to keep family and friends in the loop as to what is going on in our lives here in the Boston area. We’ll include photos when we can, but feel free to click through to my galleries over at the Google photo site (click on photos to the left to get there).
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As the first new post on this newly incarnated site, I want to tell you about an event that we will be taking part in here in Boston on October 4th.
About a year ago my sister was diagnosed with a form of cancer called chronic myeloid leukemia. This diagnosis came within months of me shifting the focus of my own scientific research to the battle against cancer. Coincidences like this can happen, but surely they make one look to capital F Fate and higher powers. My sister is doing ok - a little tired from fighting the fight and raising two young children, but she is a strong woman and she has the help of friends and family. The prognosis is still unclear, but thanks to research and therapies developed by my colleagues she has a fighting chance.
Cancer touches everybody. When I tell people that I am in cancer research, I inevitably get a cancer story back. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad. My latest experience happened during my high school reunion where my old football coach told me that he is being treated for the exact type of cancer that my company is leading the way in on therapy. It was an emotional moment for us both.
In my professional life I put my mind, heart and hands to work against cancer. It is a complex disease that comes in many forms and differing degrees of severity. We can hope for a cure, but hope only goes so far. To bring that hope to fruition we need to support both the basic and applied research that scientists like myself and my devoted colleagues are undertaking.
It is a difficult time for research funding in our society - over the past 5 years and for the next forseeable future the money spent by the government (which is to say *OUR* tax money!) on basic reasearch funding has flattened and in some instances decreased. As citizens we cannot let this continue. We are a wealthy society - we hold the power in our hands to work towards a future that is free of disease. It may not happen in our lifetimes, it may not happen in our children’s lifetimes - but if we do nothing, it will not happen in any lifetime. The fight must continue and it can continue with your help. Cast your votes with the needs of basic research in mind, and when you can’t vote with a ballot, vote with your wallet. If everyone in the US and Canada were to give as little as $4 per year, we would have over a billion dollars a year to fund the research that ultimately leads to defeating disease.
This October 4th we are going to walk on the Boston Common in honor of my sister and for all the people who are battling or have battled cancer. I am inviting you to walk along with me - please donate what you can afford here.
Thank-you.
Byron, Barb & Tyler.
There haven’t been many entries here for a good reason - we were moving through negotiation phases over the purchase of the house.
One thing about negotiations - information is king. There have been Nobel prizes (in Economics) awarded to mathematicians who showed that the side with the most information will get the better of the deal.
There is probably a good chance that the person we bought the house from has never seen this blog. But on the off chance that the seller is internet/blog-savvy, we decided to keep this site a little on the dim side as we passed through these particular phases of house buying.
Negotiations are effectively over - we close at the end of July and at that point it is our intention to open up to our faithful readers the information that we were privy to as well as explain some of our tactics during the process. Both of us spent time attending Stanford Business school lectures on negotiation tactics, and I think that we were effectively able to put into practice some of the things we learned there. In the end we were able to get a house that met all of our criteria in a competitive market (the Boston/Cambridge area) at a price that was slightly below its appraisal value. Not only that - we did it on our first try. A little bit of luck was involved, to be sure, but as the saying goes “chance favors the prepared mind”.
Here are some highlights:
-how we used deadline based tactics to exclude competing offers
-how we used middle-ground bargaining to get price reductions
-how we used partial mortgage deals to force complete competitive deals out of the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” driven mortgage sales market.
In the end, I really don’t think we could have done any better with the financial resources we had and the market that was available. I’d hesitate to use the word perfect, as there were a small bumps along the way (including a brief period where it seemed that a broken doorbell would derail our wheeling & dealing!) but in the end our market research paid off and our process obviously works. We will be moving into our new home in a few weeks and no longer will our monthly living expenses go into a landlord’s pocket.
Well, we didn’t get to do too much documenting on our search for a house near Boston. There were strings of Sundays of open house tours with really nothing special to report. I have a few stories of run ins with nasty realtors, but I’ll save those for another day.
We have found our can.
Because of a lease that we are currently locked into, we had decided that late May was the earliest we could consider making an offer on a house, taking into account ~60 days as an average closing time.
Our hunt just entered the serious phase - that is, late May was upon us.
After struggling with a string of mediocre realtors, we met Michelle from Coldwell Realtors at an open house, and she introduced us to her partner Caroline at an informal house buying tutorial last Thursday evening.
The following Sunday we did our usual trot out to a few open houses. We ended with a drive-by look at a property that was in a nice neighborhood but was a little above our price range.
On Tuesday morning Barb noticed that the price had dropped to within the upper end of our price range and set up a viewing after a quick email to me. Barb toured the house Tuesday afternoon with Caroline. Barb told me that it looked great and Caroline was gracious enough to give us a second tour that evening after I was finished with work.
We both realized that this was the best house we’d seen in 4 months of open house Sundays. I’d call it a Goldilocks fit - some houses we’d looked at were a little on the big side, most were a little on the small side, but this one was juuuust right.
The property was breathtaking - it is set into the side of hill but is easily accessible. The neighborhood was quiet - that is to say it was not near busy Route 2 like most of the other single family homes that fell within our price range.
And best of all, we were probably one of the first few people to be aware of this place. The price drop had placed it into the target range of a lot of other people, so we knew we had to move fast. There was a couple looking at the place with their realtor when we made our second evening tour of the house.
After sleeping on it Tuesday (Barb actually didn’t do much sleeping), we made an offer Wednesday morning.
The seller was out of town, but managed to reply an hour before the 8pm deadline, rejecting both our lowered price and the timeline we had set out for the purchase.
We had been prepared to pay the asking price but thought it worth the try to shave a little bit off, especially when we learned that there had not yet been any other offers.
We countered with an increase to the reduced price that had originally caught our eyes but held firm to our timeline.
Later that evening the buyer accepted our offer and we were in the Coldwell office signing papers on our very first home.
So a recap:
Sunday - drive by. Nice place, too expensive. Sigh.
Tuesday - see lowered price and take two tours.
Wednesday - the place is ‘under agreement’, which is to say that we have agreed to buy (pending inspection, financing, and final negotiations) and the seller has agreed to sell (pending the same stuff).
4 days of intense work after 4 months of relaxed searching and we are firmly on our way to moving in to our very first home.
We have the inspection this Saturday morning. I’m working to combine our various little piles of money into one big pile which will shortly be handed over to the current owner.
Mortgage shopping will be a headache, but I’m sure well worth it since we are borrowing a good chunk of money to pay for this place. If anyone reading this has insights on how best to set up a mortgage, please leave a comment here or get in touch with us.
Pictures to follow (a change on the server I’m using has blocked my normal route of picture publishing!).
Word of mouth on the Arlington single family home market is that there are currently more buyers than homes. Judging from the crowds at the open houses we went to today I’d say that the buyer’s market probably is breaking up. Perhaps things will change as more homes come on the market with the approach of spring/summer.
We went to two places today. I liked the first way better than the second - I hope we will be able to find more places like it when purchase time draws near. A word on that - it looks like we will have about 3-4 months of low key looking and then two months of prime time purchase searching (June/July). If we were to find a place like (1) still available in May, I think I’d jump on it with an offer.
We also took a drive to an area that I’ll call abandoned hospital hill’. I’d mentioned this area a few posts ago. It isn’t nearly so bad when you see it in person - the abandoned hospital is largely screened from most views in the area. The neighbor hood is really nice and reminds of some of the money looking places we checked out in areas like Newton & Lexington. There are some awesome views of Boston from this area and a lot of single family homes. We might be able to score a house in the area if we are lucky, but it would be at the upper end of our purchase range.
Anyway - on to the houses we saw today.
1) 36 Park Ave Ext.
We both loved this place. If we were in a position to buy I would be putting offers in on this! Wonderful layout, great woodwork, and a nice lot (that included a pretty damn cool playhouse w/ slide!). The basement was a little ratty, but definitely not the worst I’ve ever seen. The neighborhood and school district were both acceptable. Park Ave can be busy but the extension region isn’t that bad.
2) 82 Sunset
This is a house that I’d say is ‘ok’. I could settle for it in a pinch, but it would not be my first choice. The home is essentially a single floor setup with a converted attic that would work for a combination child’s room/play area. My guess is that it gets pretty damn hot up there in the summer. I didn’t like the color too much, whereas Barb said she did. Siding color is a minor thing, but on a marginal choice like this it certainly helps tip it towards the negative side for me.
We are making schools a top priorty in our search.
For reasons such as price (we’ve got money but are by no means rich!), proximity to my work, and intangibles like ‘having a good feeling about the neighborhood’, we’ve narrowed our search down to just a few towns, and Arlington came in at the top of the list. Since they have only one middle school and high school (both of which have very respectable reviews) we don’t have to worry about them.
So - the only variable is grade school.
It probably has minimal impact on my son’s future.
I think the biggest impact of grade school ranking is on resale value. We don’t need the absolute best. The guiding criteria here will be similar to how we elect our politicians - don’t pick the bad one.
I’ve been using a couple of sites to help filter through the standardized test scores. I think that these numbers are publically available, but I have been unable to find an easy place to download them.
The free sites I’ve found so far are:
If anyone out there knows of a site that has more insight on Arlington schools, please let me know (leave a comment!). Like I said - primary motivation here is to avoid a really bad school. It is easy to find schools that look really good. For instance, Brackett school appears superb when only viewing test scores - it was ranked 5th out of 900 schools based on their 3rd grade results. Does that translate into a stepping stone to a great academic career? I doubt it, and so does “rogue” economist Steven Levitt. Levitt wrote an entire section in his book regarding the falsehood of taking standardized test results as a sole indicator of a school’s quality. The quick summary of what he wrote is that just because we can measure them, it doesn’t mean that they are right!
The standard Gaussian or “bell” curve applies to school testing results - what happens to those kids at Brackett who are riding in the -2 and -3 sigma zone? Do they get extra special attention? It would seem to me that added pressure to perform on standardized tests is a little more than what the average 8 year old kid really needs in his life.
I loooove Google Earth. We used it when we first moved to Boston to check out rental places that our Real Estate agent chose to show us. We had always planned on renting for about a year when we moved here - that would allow us to figure out the best place to buy (and give the current drop in housing prices a chance to continue in our favor).
One of our priorities in finding a place is to pick a great school for our 4 year old. He won’t be starting grade school for another two years because he was born in September, so we have time to wait and seize the best opportunity we can to ensure a great kick-off for his formal education.
One of the things that is difficult when looking through listings for houses is that they won’t always list school districts. People without children probably don’t care (unless they are worried about resale values), but everyone I know with kids has this high on their list of priorities as well.
So - I took Google Earth’s editing function and drew out the Arlington school districts from the somewhat scattered Arlington school website. They do have the school districts there, but the information is presented as separate scans from a paper map outlining the different districts. It is annoying, because it is very difficult to check on whether a house is within a particular district or not.
Now with my new Google Earth tool, I simply type in the house address and it zooms me into some satellite imagery (showing parks, neighborhood, busy roads, etc) that is overlaid with the school district. I even traced out the MinuteMan bike path which I am planning on using to get me to the Alewife T-stop for my daily commute.
The interface looks like this:
There are 7 different school districts (schools indicated by yellow pushpins) shown here. The MinuteMan bikepath starts from the red pushpin in the lower right (Alewife Station) and runs through the middle of most of them.
The white circle near the rightmost pushpin is the graffitied area that I mentioned near one of the houses we looked at last weekend. I’ve already been able to use it to rule out a suggestion that a real estate agent sent to me - I was able to see that although the house she suggested was in a good school district, it was located next to a fairly busy road as well as a rather large graveyard.
We checked out three open houses this weekend:
10 Lennon Rd
-the house was in need of some serious overhaul. Knock $100K off the price and I would consider it more closely
5 Ernest Rd
-nice house, close to a decent school, but terrible neighborhood. Here is the ratty looking aparment complex directly across the street
And the graffitti covered corner store about two streets away.
Houses in this area are blacklisted from future trips!
And finally, a house that restored my confidence that we will be able to find a nice place -
36 Valentine
Nice layout, great neighborhood and a clean, modern interior. There was a great playroom area near the kitchen that led out to a very cool balcony. Yard space was small, but the balcony space definitely compensated. The basement was adequate, although the furnace looked like it didn’t have many years left. A door led directly from the basement into the garage. After chipping ice off of our currently ungaraged Volvo, we’ve decided that having a place to protect our car from the elements is high priority here in New England.
Hi!
This is our family blog documenting our search for a home in the Boston area. Come back to http://delabarre.us for regular updates.
In the meanwhile, if you have come here looking for some photos of the DeLaBarre family in action, head on over to our photo album.
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