Blog #02: Finding a property to build our custom home

Now that we had decided to build, we reached out to our real estate agent who had helped us buy our current house. While our agent was on a lookout, we also started scanning our neighborhood. We would walk by homes that were in rough shape, look them up on Redfin for price estimates, log details about them such as views, age, condition, square footage of home and the lot. We built a comparable sheet which included houses with recent sales to determine rough valuations for these older homes. This gave us an idea of what kind of homes we should be looking for and what we could find in our budget.

Our must-haves for the property

1. Lot size at least 4500 sq.

2. Property not assigned as an environmentally critical area making permitting and building expensive and subject to higher scrutiny.

3. Empty land or a lot with a house in a very run down condition. We did not want to pay & demolish a house that could be worked upon and retrofitted.

4. Some views of the lake. Our current home has gorgeous views of the lake and we wanted to not lose that completely.

Finding the property

Our first attempt to purchase a property in our neighborhood was in December 2020, when we found a rundown house a block away from us. We wrote a letter to the owner showing our interest in buying the house as-is if they were interested in selling and leaving it at their front-door.. We tried to differentiate ourselves by highlighting that we live in the neighborhood and like their home. We left our contact details but we didn’t hear back.

Similarly, in Mar 2021, we saw a 8200 sq ft land come onto market with a partially built house surrounded by Giant Sequoias. However after touring the property we were concerned that we would be restricted on what we could build because of tree roots expanding. We didn’t want to hurt the trees.

It wasn’t until we met with our neighbors and good friends and made an off-hand remark about how we were considering building a house. They commented that there had been a house, two blocks away from our current home, that went onto the market a year ago but never sold. We immediately walked past to take a look and the image below is all we could see. This property checked all of our requirements and decided to reach out to the owner.