By Jason Rivera
I was a strange 16-year-old. Sixteen was the year that I started my endeavor of purchasing a house. It was a long term goal of course, but I wanted to start preparing myself for the day where I would be able to hold the key to a house and see a “sold” sign and know that it was mine. I started visiting open houses, saving money, going into model homes, working with my dad on side jobs (as he is an electrician), and I really started paying attention to the costs associated with homeownership. Seven years later and in the midst of a global pandemic, I had found myself living that dream!
I was hired on staff at RIT a little over a year and a half prior to Spring Break 2020. I was lucky enough to fly home to visit my family in Colorado, for what I thought was a week. One week became two, which then became four and a half months. While my goal was to have a house by the beginning of fall semester 2020, it seemed COVID19 had other plans for me, but I am pretty resilient. All of the past six years of research, and my little understanding of the greater Rochester area had to be enough! I was fortunate to have a good group of people available to help me (i.e. drive around a house to see if it looked like the pictures online and let me know how the neighborhood feels, even do a video call showing of some places), not to mention, my family in the same place as me to support me as well.
Overall, buying a house is a scary thing. No matter what kind of precautions you take, inspections you have, background checks you do, people you ask, etc… There is always going to be stress behind the biggest investment you have ever made, let alone doing all of this 99% virtually 1,500 miles away from where the house actually was! I called, texted, and did everything short of sending messenger pigeons to all of the people that I needed (lenders, agents, inspectors, bankers, etc…). I did my due diligence and then some. There was a moment when I thought that all of my efforts might have been for nothing!
My real estate agent went missing in action for three days (and in my world, anything more than 8 hours with no communication was bound to give me a panic attack), turns out she was switching teams in her business and forgot to tell me. On day 2 of her silence I found someone who could help me. My new agent looked into houses that had already been purchased by other buyers in the time that I asked about them to my previous agent, and set me up with a new online platform to find my home. The second day I was with him, and this house showed up in my life. I was apathetic to it at first, I was feeling like nothing was going to work out anyway so unless a miracle happens even if I *loved* the house it wouldn’t matter. But I asked for a virtual showing, and that house ended up being the one! Long story short, out of 30 offers on my house, I was the grand prize winner! The process still takes months after finding a house when going through a mortgage officer and using a grant like I did, so I had a little more time with my family. I flew back to Rochester the day before I closed on what is now my new home.
Moving trucks arriving in an ally-way of a street at 10 pm and left at 3 am; many TikTok videos explaining the lessons I have learned, visits from brothers helping me install things like my dishwasher, going on walks in the neighborhood and finding myself on a hike in a hidden forest, and a lot of DIY fixes have brought me to today, where I could not be prouder of my home and the past seven years of excitement and preparation. This step in my life could not be more unique and I could not be happier about it!
