This blog is a journey my wife, I, and our 6year old are taking to build our dream home. We are farther into the process thus far into our Ryan home so this post will be somewhat of a catch up from our start to where we are at today along with the rest of the build.
A little bit of background about us. We moved back to Ohio in 2011 after I was medically retired from the Marine Corps. I became a stay at home dad while my wife started working for a software company. After about 4 years of renting we started looking for a place of our own. We looked at both older homes and new homes/resale’s, over 400 online listings easy, but never did find what we were looking for. I found a Ryan ad in a “junk mail” ads packet we get every week so I started looking on the web site and found communities I liked and models.
The next big thing was to get the wife on board with the plan. Getting the wife on board wasn’t that hard. I knew what she wanted, a big open kitchen and floor plan, but not an oversized house since it’s just us and one child. I found the florence and it was a model home in the community close to us, 10 minutes down the road. So on father’s day we went and toured the model home. We fell in love with the florence model on our first walk through. The wife loved walking into the kitchen and how open it was. The model had the gourmet island so it was not in the middle of the kitchen taking up floor space.
We sat down with the sales rep to get all the numbers for everything. We got a sheet with all the incentives they offered for the community and the prices for with a basement/on a slab along with the different elevation prices. Our sales rep asked us what were absolute must haves for us in order to build the home. All I seen was a sea of numbers.
Over the next week we went over everything, all the numbers and location of the community. We even drove around to all the different communities in the area looking. Ours only had about 17 homes and will end up being 53 in total with phases being added on later. We liked the community and were close to where we are now and the kid will stay in the same school district (which was a pretty big deal for us). We called the sales rep and made an appointment to come in and see about getting pre-approved with NVR mortgage.
At the appointment the wife and I let the sales rep know what we decided we definitely wanted in the house. The sales rep was able to type up a new cost estimate sheet for us. Then we filled out some paperwork providing our income information and account information that was then sent to the loan office at NVR. While waiting on the call back from the loan officer, of whether we were pre-approved or not, we started picking out exterior options.
While picking out the options for the exterior we received the call from the loan officer stating that we were pre-approved for hundreds above what our current estimated monthly payment was showing on the cost estimate papers. It was a great feeling knowing that we were set to continue moving forward and start really getting excited about the process.
After finding out we were pre-approved we sat down with our sales rep to discuss the price. My wife and I had read on other blogs where they were able to negotiate the price. So the wife and I put in an offer for the house. We went on the lower end to see what ryan homes would come back with. We offered them a price of $8,000 less than what was currently listed on the paperwork. Our sales rep it would probably take a day before she heard back so we went ahead and provide her with a check to hold our lot.
The next day we got a call from our sales rep saying that ryan homes came back with $6,000 off the price. The wife and I happily accepted the offer. We told our sales rep that we would be in that night to sign the sales agreement. When we went in there was tons of paper to go over and sign. That night we signed off on all the fixtures through the house and of course the sales agreement was signed.
Our sales rep let us know that we would shortly be getting an email or phone call from rite rug (our flooring) and guardian ( security and electric) to setup appointments to make our choices. At this point it felt like it would be forever before the house would actually be started.
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