Unlike many recent New York City transplants, Dina Elachi and Victor Wong started looking for a house in the Hudson Valley in 2019, before the Covid pandemic supercharged the market.
“We had been coming up here a lot for biking, hiking, rock climbing and ice climbing,” said Dr. Elachi, 36, a neonatologist and assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
The couple had known for a while that they wanted to move out of their East Harlem apartment, but it wasn’t until Dr. Elachi was about to finish a three-year fellowship and start a higher-paying staff position that they got serious about their search. Another catalyst was Wonton, the Jindo mix from Korea they adopted mid-pandemic.
“The area we were in wasn’t good for Wonton,” Dr. Elachi said. “There were a lot of rats in New York City that he liked to hunt, and there were dogs in our building that would jump on him and scare him.”
The timing thrust Wonton’s humans into a fiercely competitive Hudson Valley housing market, as many New Yorkers were scrambling to find homes outside the city.
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Dr. Elachi and Mr. Wong, 34, an environmental engineer for a New Zealand consulting firm, hoped to find a sizable property in Ulster County near the Mohonk Preserve and Minnewaska State Park Preserve. At one place they visited, they started chatting with the listing agent, Laurel Sweeney, an associate broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Nutshell Realty.
“It was really tough for buyers then,” Ms. Sweeney said. “And they were going to have a mortgage, and we were up against cash. They knew in this market that they would have to make some compromises.”
The couple’s budget was about $700,000, and they planned to finance the purchase through a special loan for physicians with medical school debt, which would allow them to offer a small down payment and forgo private mortgage insurance.
Of course, as Ms. Sweeney reminded them, “For most sellers, a lower down payment would not be a good thing. It was up to me to sell the story of allowing someone with debt to do what Americans want to do, which is own a home.”
The search was “very exhausting,” Dr. Elachi said. “I came up after being on call and sometimes after long shifts to see houses, because it was very time sensitive.”
Among their options:
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