March 27th, 2017

Starting the Process

Hello All, thank you to those of you that have posted of this process before and I hope that this can serve as a helpful tool to those continuing to go through the process as it has helped me. It's funny, I get so wrapped up looking through so many of these different builds.  Sorry if things don't translate over well, as this is my first time.

Well to give a little background, my wife and I moved to Richmond, Virginia approximately 3 years ago and have greatly enjoyed our time here. We are currently living in the West End of Richmond, Virginia in a very convenient area but I have to say that I have pushed my wife a little to look into the housing process more and more each year, I just have never liked the idea of paying rent and would like to start paying and building into our future.

We were shocked when we arrived in Virginia after moving from Birmingham, AL (One of the cheapest housing markets) to find out what the prices were for considering to move into a home.  So over the past couple of years I have been looking into the housing process and what we would need to do to continue to make progression into purchasing our first house. We had not really saved up very much money for a down payment at this point so we had not looked very seriously into the idea of contacting a realtor or starting the process.

Upon a housing search on Zillow over the past few years, I had always known that we would likely need to move either outside the city for the prospect of better schools (Future Children?), more property, less crime, and obviously for us this would be the cheaper option. Or we could continue to look in the area we were currently living in, in which we enjoyed so many amenities and would likely need to spend more money on a property that would need to be a project for us to continue to work on.

I had focused my previous searches on the Hanover County area because I thought this is where we could get the most bang for our buck, that is until another night on Zillow I looked at a new community that had just started taking reservations in New Kent, called the Arbors at New Kent.  I really did not know much about this area but the prospect of purchasing a house for just over 200k (Currently offering pre-construction pricing) in the Richmond area was really intriguing. Side note, I am also originally from Nebraska, so selfishly upon doing a quick background search this would be out in a quiet area with the prospect of more property and in between Richmond and Williamsburg while also being that much closer to the beach (Not too many of those in Nebraska).

I contacted the Ryan Homes website related to the Arbors community to try and get a little information while also looking to set up a visit at the model home to try and speak to a sales representative regarding some of the questions while taking a look at the community.  We were all set to meet with the SR on April 2nd. We actually thought of this as just some preliminary research of Ryan Homes as we really did not have any savings at this point and thought that there would be no way of being approved for any type of housing financing.