Sing, o Muse, of the home-buying odyssey of Sarah Bolmarcich, a classics teacher looking to buy her first home with no mortgage in the sun-baked valleys around Phoenix.
At least, that’s how Homer might have started the story.
Dr. Bolmarcich, an associate teaching professor at Arizona State University, studied in Athens as a Fulbright scholar and built a career studying ancient Greek statecraft. She started looking for a house in January after the rent on her suburban Phoenix apartment soared 30 percent, to $1,800 a month. She had two requirements: The house had to cost less than $400,000, so she could use her savings and an inheritance to pay cash for it. And it had to have a certain amount of age.
“I was really interested in a historic house,” she said. “I teach Latin and ancient Greek. To me, Phoenix is shockingly new.”
Dr. Bolmarcich, 50, grew up in Philadelphia and studied the Peloponnese, so she would chuckle at the sight of a historic plaque commemorating a church in the city of Tempe, near the Arizona State campus, that was built in 1901. The median year of a house built in Phoenix is 1983.
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A friend connected her with Sarah Jean Richetto, an agent with Re/Max Fine Properties, and they started looking around Chandler, a city outside Phoenix where Dr. Bolmarcich had lived for a decade. The homes she saw were spacious, and close to her friends and favorite restaurants and coffee shops. But many of the houses in the Phoenix metropolitan area — in Chandler and other suburbs, including Gilbert and Ahwatukee Foothills — were built in the 1980s or later. If she wanted an older home, she realized that she would have to look in central Phoenix, a 25-mile drive from Chandler and a longer commute to the Arizona State University campus in Tempe.
“I’d kept saying to Sarah, ‘Don’t let me look at any historic houses,’” Dr. Bolmarcich said. “Phoenix is too far off my path.”
But the pull of 1940s homes in the city’s older neighborhoods was too strong. Dr. Bolmacich is single, and didn’t need big closets, lots of bedrooms, a pool or even a second bathroom. But she had to have some vintage style.
“She ended up being true to her style and just saying, ‘I’m OK to drive 15 minutes to have lunch with a girlfriend,’” Ms. Richetto said.
Among her options:
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