They were like hunters staking out the terrain, analyzing the choices, pinpointing the target, then striking, pausing and striking again.
That cool, calculated process and bold final move by Michael Leist and Keri Burnell bagged their tri-level contemporary house in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha despite hovering competitors and a quick-speed market that favors sellers.
They and their 8-year-old son, Jesse Burnell, plan to close Sept. 25 on the $157,000 house, Leist said.
“I’d like to think we did a decent job. We definitely got what we were looking for–the house we wanted, at a fair price, on the terms we wanted,” said Leist, 28, operations manager at Blackhawk Energy in Brookfield, Wis.
The couple’s determination not to get emotionally involved with any house “was a little less true for the one we put an offer on,” acknowledged Burnell, 34, a systems administrator at Kaztex Energy Management in Brookfield. “We didn’t even get all the way into this house and we knew, after looking at so many, that this was the one.”
It was only on the market one week.
“The house went on the market on a Sunday, we got details on Monday, saw it on Tuesday and made an offer on Wednesday,” Leist said.
The next few days were nail-biters.
After a similar house on the same street sold for its listed price in a bidding war, Leist said he and Burnell spotted one of the unsuccessful bidders touring the house they wanted.
“It was two days after we made our offer, the broker had scheduled an open house and in walked one of the people who’d lost out on the other house,” Leist said.
“It was a real concern, that someone would take it from us. So we moved up our offer before they’d responded to our other offer. And the seller accepted.”
Final price was “a little less than asking,” he said.
They credit Elm Grove appraiser Donald J. Moore and his on-line service, Moore for Homes, with helping them clinch the deal.
“He knew exactly what we wanted and he’s a pure buyer’s broker,” said Leist, who described himself as “leery” of conventional brokers because they work on sales price-based commissions. Moore’s fee is based on the services he provides.
“Don knew exactly what this house was worth. We knew what we could go to and were confident that the price we offered was good enough.”
Their home search started early this year.
“We absorbed all the information we could–books, Internet, conversations with just about everybody with any experience in buying a house. We got ourselves pre-qualified with a lender so we knew what we could afford. Then we looked at a lot of houses. And we told ourselves that we have to think that there’s more than one right house out there, that we cannot afford to fall in love with a house,” Leist said.
In March, they started house-hunting, viewing more than 50 houses the first 40 or so simply to familiarize themselves with the market.
“In our price range, it was definitely a seller’s market right from the start,” Leist said. “The houses were going close to asking, if not selling for what was asked. And they were moving very quickly. We saw very few on the market longer than two months.”
Though renting in New Berlin, Burnell said, “we wanted to be in Waukesha. That’s where I was born, grew up and had family. We wanted a contemporary house and we looked at bi-levels and ranches, but liked tri-levels better.”
Then they began to winnow their wish list.
“With a 7-year-old son, excellent schools are more important than whether the house had a deck,” noted Leist. They wanted to be close to his school, with an ample back yard and close highway access.
They hired Moore in June. He put their “house wanted” information in the Metro Multiple Listing Service’s computer databank, where new software automatically signals a matchup between seller and buyer. Moore checked daily for matchup alerts, while Burnell prowled the Internet for new listings.
After their first offer, Burnell said “it was very tense. We were very worried that someone would overbid us.”
Even the second, higher offer didn’t diminish the pressure, she said.
“We tried to keep from worrying by looking at other houses, tried not to get too emotional. But we were still tense until we heard that night that they accepted our offer.”
