First-time homebuyer

Rich and Emily Manno had daydreamed of buying a home while living in Jacksonville, but got serious about it after they moved back to Atlanta in 2011. Tracy Queen with Harry Norman, Realtors assisted the couple as they looked at homes listed in the mid-$300,000s in Sandy Springs, north Buckhead, Brookhaven, Virginia-Highland, Vinings and Smyrna.

The couple met in Atlanta in 2006 and got married in 2010. Rich, 30, who works in sales and marketing for Cox Media Group, and Emily, 29, who works in merchandise retail sales for Spanx, chatted about their home in Smyrna. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is part of Cox Enterprises' Cox Media Group.

Q: How did your search start?

Rich: The first house was located in Buckhead. We were so close to putting an offer on it. By the time we got back from Christmas break and got [back in] town, another offer had been accepted. We told Tracy, bear with us, we have no idea what we want. As we moved through December 2011 through February 2012, we really started figuring out what was more important to us.

Q: How did that happen?

Rich: We had one foot in the mentality of we wanted to live intown and wanted a cool neighborhood. The other foot was like, I don’t want to move into a place where if we have a couple of kids, we would have to move a few years down the road. Emily was the voice of reason, saying, it seems like a lot of space now, but it’s probably not going to be that way in two or three years.

Q: Did you make offers on other homes?

Emily: We actually put an offer on a house in the north Buckhead/south Sandy Springs area that was really a renovation job. When the offer ended up falling through, we were like, oh my goodness, if this would have worked out, what would we have done? We have no free time whatsoever to do any kind of home renovation, nor do we know anything about it. I told Tracy, “Look, even if I act like I’m interested in this, if it looks like work, don’t show it to me.”

Q: How did you find the one you bought?

Emily: Rich was absolutely insane about looking at Trulia.com.

Rich: I got a little obsessed about finding a property. Three ZIP codes [30319, 30342 and 30339] were the main target areas. I became a little bit of a lunatic about these new properties coming up.

Emily: He found this house the day it was listed. I remember he said from the living room, “Uh oh, something just came on the market, and you’re really going to flip out.”

Q: Why did he respond like that?

Emily: I actually baby-sat in this neighborhood [Orchard Gate in Cobb County]. I also really liked the fact that we are literally half a mile from our parents. I just felt like long term, once we have kids, that would be priceless.

Q: When it came to financing the home, what did you learn?

Rich: One major thing that I learned was a lot of lenders will push you into FHA loans. That’s not necessarily the best option for everyone. That’s an attractive situation with less cash upfront. I ended up talking with three different banks about the different options [they used Fidelity Bank]. Since we had good credit, by putting 5 percent down, we could pay the mortgage insurance upfront in a lump sum, at a lower percentage than an FHA loan would offer. The lender credited us that upfront payment since we agreed to slightly increase our interest rate to keep more cash at closing.

At a glance

Rich and Emily Manno’s home, built in 1995 in Smyrna’s Orchard Gate neighborhood, has four bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and about 2,500 square feet. They purchased it in April. Homes in the neighborhood are in the mid-$300,000s.