Guest Post by Tom Kuplic

Two years ago, my wife and I were caught in one of those house buying/selling situations that are pretty common in today’s market. We had a house to sell, but couldn’t find one we wanted to buy. We were expecting our first child, and knew we wanted/needed an extra bedroom, and we had narrowed our focus to the near east side of Madison.

When the first attempt to sell our home ran into a snag within the chain of buyers/sellers down the line, we thought we had more time to keep looking. But before another weekend went by, our house had another offer on it. We had to make a decision about whether it was better to sell now and keep looking or wait until we found the perfect home. Mark, our realtor at Forward Realty Group, reminded us that the time between contract and closing could be pushed out a little, and he assured us that we would just need to keep looking and clarifying what we liked and wanted in our next home. In other words, trust the process.

Exploring all our options
We tried to believe that mantra, but in dealing with the impending birth of our first child, adding any element of uncertainty seemed silly. Nevertheless, we kept at it and looked at houses and even a few apartments in case we needed to sign a lease. After about five weeks of looking at homes and dropping in on open houses, we still hadn’t found a home we liked, but we lucked into a great apartment opportunity near the Capitol and Lake Mendota. It was a chance at lake living on a budget, and it seemed like a great place to live until we found the right house.

We told Mark about the apartment and he asked us to hold off on signing the lease until he showed us one last home that had just been listed. It was a few blocks out from where we were looking, but he had a good feeling about it. We went to the home with Mark both out of curiosity and, frankly, to humor him. In fact we had a security deposit check for what we thought would be our apartment in our car when we met him at the house.

When everything changed
All plans changed after two minutes into the walk through. My wife and I were looking at each other the same way we did when we made the decision to buy our first home ten years earlier. Apparently, we have the worst poker faces in the world, because it was immediately apparent to everyone that we were buying this house. In the next hour we tore up our security deposit check and made an offer. A day later we learned that we were going to be proud homeowners again and that our soon-to-be son would be an Madison eastsider by birth. The leap of faith we took in selling our house without having one to buy turned out better than we could have imagined. And while it took some convincing, in the end, we did learn to trust the process.