BRADENTON, FLORIDA — My wife Ina and I have been renting our whole lives. Once you are in your 60s, it seems like that’s just the way it will be forever.
We moved to Florida in 1994, and into this duplex in 2015. Almost immediately, it felt like home.
Three bedrooms, one bath, reasonable rent, and a landlady who felt more like family than anything else.
Over the years, Joan (our landlady), became a really important part of our lives. I was happy to do whatever handyman work she needed done on her properties. We exchanged Christmas gifts. Joan would check in on us and we got to be very close with her whole family.
In 2021, Ina was headed out of town to visit her daughter. Joan wanted to drop by and say goodbye before the trip, but she wasn’t feeling well. So these two close friends just talked on the phone.
Looking back, that August was the last time we would see Joan. She passed away in the hospital from COVID-19 on September 19. Her brother, also a close family friend, passed the same day.
We were heartbroken.
After their deaths, Ina and I knew that Joan’s son would have to sell the rental we called home. He really wanted to sell this duplex to us, so after a lifetime of renting we started the scary pre-qualification process.
As a former U.S. Marine, I looked into a veterans loan company. But they could only qualify us for a pitiful $100,000. Comparable properties to our rental were listed in the $275,000 range.
As much as Joan’s family wanted us to own this duplex, they also couldn’t just give it away.
Not only were we sad about the death of our friends, but now we carried the added burden of grieving the loss of our favorite home. We didn’t know where we would live next. It was really depressing because we love being here. We love everything about this place.
That’s when we met Aaron Pyman with NextHome Excellence and he completely changed the course of our story.
Aaron was referred to us by Veterans United. He took the time to connect with us and help us commit to what we really wanted. We really wanted to stay in this home. So Aaron went to work.
He connected us with a different lender who re-ran the numbers. This new lender remembered that the property we wanted to buy was a duplex – meaning we would immediately have rental income from the other half.
With this adjustment, we qualified for just enough to make the sale work!
Aaron devoted four months of hard work to helping get this sale ironed out. He even took a significantly reduced commission to get us across the finish line.
When it came time to close on the property in January, I had a panic attack. It wasn’t because of anything to do with the sale. Aaron was a master at making sure we felt confident about every detail. We had texted each other constantly for months.
My anxiety was because I knew that after that sale, I wouldn’t have Aaron as my advocate anymore.
Come to find out, I didn’t have anything to worry about. He reached out just recently and asked how our first month of homeownership went.
I don’t even think Aaron knows how much he means to us. We can never thank him enough for helping us own this place.
We’re still amazed that it’s our own house. We just about cried when we came home in January because it really hit us. This is our home now, and no one can take this away from us.
Although this place has always been our home, now it is our forever home. Ina is planting a garden to honor Joan, who always had a green thumb. We can easily afford the mortgage and we have an added income stream.
Aaron changed our lives. He is more than a REALTOR®
