When Heather Anderson and Chris Kinney got engaged last June after dating for three years, they started looking for their first place as a couple. But a cozy one-bedroom wasn’t going to cut it. Both of them had two teenage children from a previous marriage, so they suddenly needed a house fit for six.
Before the engagement, Ms. Anderson, 45, had been renting a small Cape Cod cottage in Verona, N.J., where she raised her son and daughter. Mr. Kinney, 49, was living 20 miles south in Clark, N.J., where his daughters would spend weekends after his divorce.
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“When my kids weren’t with me, I would usually go down and stay with Chris, but going back and forth all the time was challenging,” said Ms. Anderson, a school social worker. “We wanted to try to be together more.”
That meant finding a turnkey house with at least three bedrooms that could comfortably handle a rotating combination of parents and children from one day to the next. “Blending a family is a process,” she said. “Our kids all get along nicely, but it takes time, and you want people to really be able to have a little bit of space and not have the home environment be a stressor.”
The couple homed in on Essex County, though they knew their $800,000 budget would go further in towns like Verona and West Orange than in more expensive ones like Montclair. “Originally, we were looking at $650,000 being a starting point, but quickly realized that for the area and type of home we were looking for, that would not be a reasonable range,” Mr. Kinney said.
For guidance, they hired Lizette Brown, a broker with Compass who lives in Verona. “Whenever someone gives me their budget, I tend to start $100,000 lower because of bidding wars,” Ms. Brown said. “That’s what we did, and it opened my clients’ eyes to see what they could actually get in their price range.”
Even with a down payment secured with the sale of Mr. Kinney’s Clark home, the couple began to doubt their chances after visiting more than a dozen listings.
“I started to feel like it was going to be impossible to find something that would check all of our boxes and also be in our price range,” said Mr. Kinney, who figured they’d end up in another rental before they found the right house to buy.
Among their options:
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