Moving to Traverse City and Buying a Home

So you're a relocating buyer.

Yeah, yeah, so relocated from Maine, um, last August, September, somewhere in there. I am originally from Southwest Michigan and grew up little town on Lake Michigan, you know, lived there 20 years, went to Michigan State, but then moved away and kind of lived all over the country for a long time. But then life changes, and I was in Maine up until last summer, and wanted to come back to the home, the home terra firma, I guess. And I had no better place than Traverse City, I think, in my mind. After visiting here for, I don't know, different vacations and weddings and visiting family and friends, and over the past several years, I, uh, kind of wanted to put my roots down for good. Here I was. Yeah, yeah.

So went through some life changes over the course.

Yeah, yeah, make them all. Yeah, yep, yep. Got divorced and wanted to get back closer to family where I was born and raised, and they're still located down, down south. But Not too close, you know, not much.

But where was that in your hometown? New Buffalo.

New Buffalo. Yeah, which is a great little town, exit 1 on 94. So like right as you're coming out of the state into Indiana before Chicago. Yeah. But very flat. There's not a whole lot of outdoor sort of life richness down there. So this is a lot more my speed.

Yeah. Yeah.

Great outdoors and northern Michigan.

You're in the medical profession, you can kind of choose.

Yeah.

Really, you're probably in such demand, your employment is in such demand, you could really pick anywhere to live. So Traverse City area is where you chose, and then you kind of, you know, you and I met, gosh, when, you know, that was probably a year ago, right?

Oh, still, no, I mean, it was sometime last summer or July.

Okay, that's true.

Yeah, so coming up on a year. Yeah.

My cousin Rick's interview.

Yeah. Word of mouth. Yeah, family, friends are always great resources. And yeah, I'm glad we got that connection made. Yeah, I think we met over at Oki's.

And that's right, that's right. Oki's had some lunch and a beer with your dad, right?

Exactly. Yeah, that's where I got kind of the lay of the land, more or less. Last summer, came in, coming over here from Maine in an RV, trying to— thinking about doing the building idea was kind of what I was really looking for when I first set my sights on Traverse City and finding property. And that was the initial plan. Yeah, have a— do sort of a family build, him and I, and maybe a little help here and there, but try to build kind of a simple small place off the grid, but at least in a rural waterfront. Ideal would be the ideal situation, but that was just me kind of daydreaming and sort of being very, I think, aspirational about what I could do out here. I think I was lucky enough to get a job pretty quickly. And the jobs I was able to, to land are sort of eastern a little bit— Grayling, Kalkaska. And I did— I mean, I love Leelanau and I love northern Benzie County. That's where I was really hoping to put my foot down as far as like a, a building property. And it just wouldn't have made much sense at all trying to build something there and be so far away from where I was going to be working. And that's all Exactly true. I mean, it was sort of showing up into Traverse City with like, here's what I think I would like, but then things evolve or change and sort of, you know, you can't really experience or fully appreciate something until you experience it, I guess, is the way I would think about it. And so yeah, I think we kind of met up last, late last summer, June, July, August, and had this like pie in the sky idea about land building. Let's get something framed out, the roof on it before the winter. Starts coming in, and I'm glad there was no hasty moves or purchases. Or I think we went and saw just a couple— I don't know if we even saw any land, but we just went and saw some property sometime last fall.

And yeah, we, we looked at 5 or 6 different places, I think.

Yeah.

And then ultimately you decided to, to rent a place.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All some time.

Yeah, yeah. I thought, you know, the RV— I'll be in this RV for X amount of time before the winter comes, but I want to be in a home to own before it gets too cold. And it just became kind of an unnecessary ticking clock that I didn't need to set. And, and yeah, yeah, I just got a rent in a place here in town on 12th Street. And I'm glad, I'm really happy and very grateful that I, I was able to do that, just because I did get my, like, bearings a little bit more. And I was able to use that central location to kind of branch out and feel the different kind of neighborhoods and rural versus in town. It, yeah, and I think that really started guiding my decision-making to when we, you know, we kind of took the holidays off, stopped our, our hunt, our search, and then sometime start of the year is when we really wanted to go looking again, you know, January, February. And at that point I was kind of narrowed away to like Central Traverse, you know, in the city of— yeah, with like walking, biking distance, you know, to downtown is kind of what I started really putting my focus on because I, I have much more grown to love the city life here and that kind of urban community that it's— I've lived in big places. I've lived in Houston and Chicago and Miami and like big, big, big cities. And we have our, what people call city here, but it's nothing like, it's nothing like, it's nothing to the extent of some of those. Other places where, yeah, the traffic is a real problem. The maybe crime—

well, believe me, we— people around Traverse City do complain about the—

oh no, I know, doesn't stop you from complaining. Never stops, but it makes me just laugh because it's just when everything's relative. Yeah, so it, uh, it just— when I, when I hear some, some of these complaints of like the people who live out of town, or they live in Mancelona or wherever, and they say, "I gotta come into the city," thinking they're saying Detroit. It's like, "Oh, Traverse City." Like, "Oh, okay, yeah." So once I got kind of used to that, the disparity between like the worries of the city life, which are I think minimal in my opinion, I was very like, "Yes, this is the spot." Like, I want to be able somewhere in the kind of energy of the town. And I know I haven't even experienced a summer yet, so we'll see what I think about it mid-July.

Oh, I think he's— it's gonna, you'll double down as far as your enthusiasm for being in, yeah, the city.

Yeah. And I, that's, I think, my impression too going into it, that there's just such a robust kind of active group of people in this town. I like people who love to be out walking their dogs, running, riding their bikes. Yeah, playing volleyball. The town's always bustling even in the wintertime, you know, it's pretty alive. I mean, again, it's all relative. I came from Maine. I lived in big cities, Houston, these places on the East Coast. And but then Maine is the opposite of the spectrum. It's very quiet, very remote, very insular. So like, I think the mix that I found here is kind of right in the sweet spot. What I'm looking for.

What drew you to that particular home?

Yeah, I don't know. It's one of those things where I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It reminds me of my childhood home, for one thing. So that's kind of a funny— when I've been reflecting about it a little bit, when I walked up, it kind of had that appearance. So I think that has something to do with the appeal. It's just, it's got— it's a nice small home for a single guy by himself and a dog. It's not big, it's not expansive. It doesn't have unnecessary rooms or sort of weirdly shaped kind of attic spaces, like the place I'm currently renting. I can't really like live in. It's like they, they kind of shoehorned some kind of livable space into a weird attic. And then I just really love this kind of periphery where it's at. It's in town, it's— but it's not— I mean, I think ideally I would have loved to have been in the, the central part of town. That's not in my budget to kind of find a house that would fit my needs to live in like a there were some homes that were for sale in my budget, but for 700 square feet that were— I don't know how you could even call them a house really. But where the place that we'd found just had like a lot more of the boxes I needed to check off my list, and including like a great yard that I'm like sort of, uh, already envisioning the kind of things I can do and have. Yeah, barbecues and parties.

Sunstand and large, large. Yeah, yeah.

It's like it's a corner lot, so I have, uh, literally one neighbor, I think, on the south side of the property, an alleyway behind. It's barely ever used, I think. And there's no other neighbors really across the street, but it's all fenced in. Yeah, and it's got a kind of an interesting layout, in my opinion, where it's— the home is here and the garage is here, and then the yard kind of wraps behind the garage and behind the house. So it's got this own private sort of space in the back, which has got a real tall 8-foot privacy fence. And, you know, that's like, uh, important to me because I think I do— I have that still, that urge to be in the quiet, in the rural sort of farmland, you know. I think ultimately that's where I'll go one day. But that little, whatever it's going to be, tenth of an acre space in the back of the yard is— will be my own little escape, I guess. So, yeah, I think it's, it's got some like rough edges like any house does, but That to me, I mean, I think most people might look at that as kind of a downside or like a, like that, I don't like to look at that, that's, that's, that's too bad. But I felt it was like an opportunity to put some like my own touches on it. My dad being a builder and us gives us an opportunity to say, how can we then tinker with this place, renovate here or there, and put some of our own embellishments on them, you know, things that I'd like to do and bring out in the place. I think that Those are the highlights, you know, as far as like where I was like really drawn to it. I mean, I think it was one of those where I warmed up to it. We walked in, kind of did our thing, walked around, took our first viewing, and yeah, I don't know, walked out. And there was something about it over the weekend. I think revisited like the Monday afterwards and just kind of, you know, had some time to marinate on it.

Got to the point where we wanted to make an offer on it. Good.

Yep.

They had gone through a series of price reductions already.

Yeah, yeah.

I think they started above $400,000. The price had been reduced down to $325,000, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, are you comfortable talking about the prices?

Yeah, sure.

And then we offered $295,000.

Yeah, yeah. I think when I first learned about the home itself, it was like a price reduction. It went from like— I got an alert or something the red arrow on Zillow, or maybe the listing that your, your service—

my automatic notification.

Yeah, yeah. Said like drop from like $365,000 to $325,000. Like, that's a huge drop, you know. It's like a whatever, 8 or 9% drop in the price. Yeah. And that's for whatever reason that place came on my radar. And so the question is why, you know, why does the price keep falling? You know, that's like sort of me before I'd even looked, before we'd been in the building, obviously before I'd done any kind of research, looking through the quick pictures of it, you know, sort of say, well, what's, what's, what's wrong about the place, you know, why does the price keep falling? And yeah, I don't know, that was sort of one of the things when I was suspicious about when we did do our showing, our viewing, and I was like really trying to overturn that, you know, the reasoning for like, you know, it's unusual for a home to be on the market in Traverse City for 90 days or whatever, 120 days, whenever they listed it in like November, it was on for like 2 months and then it went away. They relisted it in like January, February or something like that. So that was a little bit— threw off some red flags. But I think going back to where you're saying about that marinating kind of component, because I was trying to keep my finger on the pulse of the market, sort of like what does $325,000 in Traverse City get you? You know. And when I was doing my own little comps in, in the central area of Traverse, it's like, it's an oblong-shaped shed shack that's— it's not a home, it's like a shed that somebody put on a piece of property. Yeah, I guess that was kind of like the, the first thing that caught my attention. I was like, okay, there's a house here with a nice yard and nice lot for a decent price, so let's go check it out. And I think we did some We got to the point where we thought it was worth putting an offer on and you said $295,000, like we did. We had our negotiations and settled on a price. And then thankfully, we did our due diligence and we uncovered a couple things that I think were important that you definitely helped navigate and address and sort of how can we sort of get this not to be a deal breaker, but something that we could also manage and see if there we can find some common ground and some compromise with the the whole sewer line component, which—

Yeah. So let me expand on that a little bit. So yeah, so we were in the negotiation stage. We offered $295,000. They were— they had just dropped the listing from $365,000 to $325,000, which is what caught your attention. Then we came in and looked at it and you thought it was good enough to make an offer on. We offered $295,000. They countered, I want to say, at like $315,000. We ultimately settled at $310,000.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, and then, okay, so now we have a, we have an agreement, but there are contingencies in that agreement. Contingencies obviously are financing, the appraisal is part of that financing, and then of course inspections. And then we did our inspections, and you did, uh, I think more thorough inspections than most buyers do. In particular, you wanted an indoor air quality Yep.

Right. Yeah.

So you did a regular home inspection. You did— we did radon, right?

I need help with that. Yeah.

I have a radon machine and I like to do that for clients. It's the very same machine that the inspectors use.

Yeah.

Other buyers out there considering buying a home in a municipality that has a sewer system, I think that is sometimes ignored because they just figure that's the city's problem. Yeah, but the, the homeowner is always responsible to get your sewer from your home to the city's main line. And so that, we inspected that and we found that there were some issues.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there was a, the, we, our general inspectors, they were, they, they kind of were unable to find a specific problem, but the, the way that the plumbing of the home situated, they weren't really able to access the main line all the way out of the house. They just said, we can't see much.

So then we got Williams Bay to come out here. We actually went through the cleanout in the yard, right?

Yeah. And they— and I think there was a difference. So when TC Home Inspectors came, there was snow on the ground, so they weren't able to see the actual cleanout. And then like within that week period, the snow had melted. Williams Bay found that cleanout and they did their thing and they ran their camera down towards the sewer. You know, they could go distally, they could go like from the cleanout to the main city line.

Yeah, they couldn't, they couldn't go back because of the curvature of the—

Yeah, they couldn't clean back toward— Yeah, right. So they went towards the road and they said, yeah, that pipe is crap.

When we looked at it, they had the camera there and we looked at it, we could see that it was the old clay pipes that were broken.

Yep. And, and thankfully, I mean, the sellers were kind enough to share some of their— they had reports given from a Roto-Rooter company from the past 4 years. They were— I did my own little like due diligence, deliberate sort of analysis, and that I had like—

you graphed it?

I graphed it. Yeah. I did like 5 years of data showing like the frequency of how often they had to do the cleanout and the cost, and that line was going up. They were, they were having to do more frequent cleanouts, and every year the cost was going up. So that was like another one of those, like, what, something's happening?

So, so we knew there was no issue from the home to the cleanout, right?

Um, yeah, thank goodness. Yeah, yeah. And that was a credit to Williams Bay. Like, they, they did an awesome job, um, alleviating those fears, because I think that was where we were kind of on pins and needles for a day, or that day, while they were doing their assessment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyway, now we needed to get— negotiate with the seller, open, reopen negotiations because that's our choice. If we find something of concern during the inspection period, we can either walk away from the deal entirely, we can renegotiate with the seller, or we can just accept the property in its current condition. And obviously we chose to renegotiate.

Yeah, yeah.

And we got a bid from Roto-Rooter.

Yeah.

That to do all of that work. And they, they bidded it without the signage and the cost of blocking off the city street.

Right.

And that was somewhere around $14,000, as I recall.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because then we had Luke Pop at Pop Excavating, hadn't gotten any information back regarding the signage or the cost of closing down the street yet. And so he was then He was in the range of, I think, like $7,500 or something. Came in about $9,000.

Yeah.

Yeah. Is what, is what it came in at. And so then, then we negotiated with the, with the seller. What do we do about them?

Right. Yeah.

And there was some back and forth on that.

No, I think it was, it was, it was nerve-wracking for sure. I mean, I guess you, when you get ready to get into a house, you're just like, okay, it's all going to be great. You step right in, it's all going to be golden. But I think you did an awesome job helping me, like us, try to like manage what would be the most appropriate and sort of most advantageous solution. Because I think it was one of those where there was like you just outlined a lot of options, you know, take it, take it as is, negotiate or walk away. And, you know, I still like the house sewer line. You know, that's kind of a, obviously a critical function of the home.

But later we learned that the appraisal came in $15,000 above what we had gone under contract. And that's rare.

Yeah.

So that was great news as a buyer to learn that the appraisal came in high.

Yeah.

You know, $15,000 more than what you agreed to pay for it. So that was good news.

Yeah, totally.

But yeah, one of the things that I try to counsel my buyers through, or any client as to whether it's a buyer or seller, is I want to make sure they avoid regret later, you know?

Yeah.

And, you know, I've seen— I've heard some agents talk about inspectors as deal killers because they'll find too many things wrong and, and then that kills the deal. Well, I want deal killings because, because I don't want later my client to be like, well, I wish I would have known.

Sour. Yeah. I guess the sellers— the title company has my money actually, because I put that down as part of this agreement. The sellers were insistent that, you know, the concession money went to the repair. I mean, I understand they didn't want me just to like be playing hardball just to get that money and keep it and not make the repairs. So the repairs are going to happen because I do not want to have a plumber in January or February or any time. I'm much more of like a maintenance. Let's just do things right the first time and then keep them up. And rather than trying to like keep putting Band-Aids on things and hoping that the thing doesn't pop loose.

Right.

Yeah. So I think, yeah, it was definitely one of those situations where it was, we navigated real gently and trying to not overextend ourselves. But I think in the end it became like a, yeah, it was fine.

You know, covered a lot of ground too.

Yeah. No, I mean, I just excited today has come and it's gone. The closing is here. I think all a lot, 99% of the hard work is in and I thank you and Joanne, your team, and it's been A real pleasure, you know. I'm just so excited to become a full-blood citizen. It makes it that much sweeter, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I know we've been through a bit of, uh, strife to get there.

You know, not all transactions have this many moving parts.

Yeah. So I'll call you for the next one. Yeah, whenever that's down the road, you know.

Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks a lot.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Of course.

Thanks so much, Sander.