House hunting under lockdown

International relocation can be challenging, even when everything goes smooth. Wouldn’t you just know that as we got close to the end of nearly four years of planning, a massive monkey wrench would drop into the works in the form of Covid-19?Our original goal was moving to Porto around the beginning of July this year, so two major activities had to happen:

• Sell our home. We had no desire to be long-distance landlords, and we wanted the flexibility that the cash would give us for the next step.
• Find a new place. As Kristie and I talked this through over many evenings, we decided that for us the new place was probably a rented apartment in town, at least for the first year. We might buy at some point, but for now we didn’t want to commit to a single permanent spot. We had a bucket list of required and desirable features for both location and physical layout.

Simple, right? Well, as they say, the best laid plans … We had a final trip scheduled to Portugal for most of the month of April. At that time, we planned to set up banking, I was going to open my Portuguese business, and we were going to go apartment hunting. I had five different rental websites saved on my computer that I checked obsessively, and there was a good selection of places within our price and size requirements (3 bedrooms, 2 baths, minimum 120 square meters).

It was our very good fortune to connect up with an estate agent in Porto – Senhora Alina Costa, who works for ReMax. We had a couple of long What’sApp calls where we explained what we were up to, what we were looking for, and what we had seen online. Alina agreed to work with us, which solved a bunch of corollary problems like getting the rental contract in English, making appointments, and so on.

What surprised us was her fee, since we had gotten varying quotes about how much all this would cost, ranging into the thousands of dollars. “No,” said Alina, “The landlord pays for this, you don’t pay anything.” Nice!

As part of the original plan, as soon as we got home, we were going to sell the townhouse to one of the direct cash-offer companies like Open Door or Zillow. We’d had preliminary discussions with them, and we had a quote from Zillow that was within our acceptable range. Not top dollar, but no staging, no showing, and you had great flexibility about naming your closing date.

And then, things changed.

By the middle of March, it was obvious that flying to Europe in April was not going to be possible. We were worried that we’d have to postpone the whole move. How could we make plans when we didn’t know what the next few months would look like?

We decided to take a leap of faith and press on. Realistically, we thought to ourselves, it’s March now, in four or five months the world should be somewhat sorted out …

I started sending Alina lists of properties I was seeing online; she researched them and got back to us with feedback about locations, problems with nearby construction, and other pluses or minuses. From this, we were able to assemble a shortlist of places that we were actively interested in.

Alina then set up virtual tours of the apartments so we could see them – including filming down at street level so we got a good feel for the neighborhood, too. This was a little weird – there was a family who required Alina to cover her lens whenever their kids were in the room, they were adamant about not taking any video of their children – but we were actually able to get really good looks at places.

The one we settled on seemed perfect for our needs – big enough to give both Kristie and me workspaces, a nice-sized kitchen, plenty of light, washer and dryer included. The neighborhood was very much what we had been hoping for – three blocks to the Metro, three blocks to a large market, and bakeries, a vegetable and fruit market, coffee stops, and a bunch of restaurants and other shops in the surrounding blocks. Pricewise, it was extremely reasonable – probably half of what we’d pay for a comparable place in Portland.

Even better – it wasn’t available until August 1st, so life would have an ample opportunity to settle down before we actually moved. We decided to put down a deposit to hold it.

OK, destination sorted out (-ish). Now, time to make a deal on the townhouse! I called Zillow and confirmed the offer we had, but we were a little early to finalize a deal – they couldn’t do an escrow longer than 90 days, and we were at a bit over 100. Our representative put us onto his calendar to call back when we passed the threshold.

Unfortunately, he wound up calling us a little early, and with bad news – Zillow was freezing all cash offers for an undetermined time due to the Covid lockdowns. Great, NOW what are we going to do?

Zillow actually had a solution to suggest: if we were willing to consider a traditional sale, they would hook us up with an agent, and give us a 1.5% commission rate (2.5 for the buyers’ agent). That sounded pretty good, and we had to do something, so we gave the green light.

Martin Tjimes from Knipe Realty contacted us, and we had a good discussion about what we were trying to achieve. We shared that one of the reasons we originally planned on the cash deal was so we could avoid the whole staging and showing dance. We have a lot of stuff which we were already going to have to deal with, and that seemed like a horrendous burden. Plus, with Covid, we really didn’t want a bunch of strangers traipsing through our house – there was no way we were going to allow an Open House.

Martin had answers to it all. He had us do just a minimum of clearing and staging, then had a videographer and photographer come in and put together a detailed virtual walkthrough. In the listing instructions, interested buyers had to take the video tour and then drive through the neighborhood before requesting a showing – a loan preapproval was also a requirement to getting an in-person visit.

At the end of the day, we only had three showings – and we had two offers, and sold the house in less than three weeks, which was faster than we expected. So fast, that we had to arrange for a rent-back to get us through to the point where we’d be leaving. Escrow closed June 16th, and our departure date for Portugal is July 20 – only a couple of weeks later than our originally planned exit.

Not only that – by going with the traditional sale method, we netted significantly more for the place, money that goes to our nest egg.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering – Yes, we did talk to “House Hunters International.” I had a couple of exchanges with them, and they were very interested in our adventure, but they asked us to contact them closer to the move date, and preferably after we had found a place … you know that “reality” TV isn’t really real, right?

Anyways, they’ve gone dark on us for now, but I can’t guarantee that we won’t be hearing from them again!

Next episode: What are we going to do with all this STUFF?!?