Once Fernando and Claudia Barboza started looking, they couldn’t resist a townhome in north Fulton County that altered their plans to eventually move back to Louisiana, where Claudia previously lived. Fernando, 27, associate director of youth ministry at Cathedral of Christ the King, and Claudia, 27, a nurse, chatted about their first home, in Morningside at the Park, a Johns Creek community.
Q: What led you to purchase in Johns Creek?
Claudia: We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Sandy Springs. I told (Scott Smith Sr., an agent with Keller Williams Realty First Atlanta), “If we can find a place in our price range in Alpharetta or Roswell, we’ll buy it, but I honestly didn’t think we would be able to.” It was a big deal for me, especially as a working mother, to live where I work (her employer has offices in Roswell and Alpharetta). It was really important for us to feel like we’re living in an area that was safe and was going to have good schools and would accommodate our growing family (they have a daughter, 1-year-old Katelyn Grace).
Fernando: By chance, we found a house that was on the market. We thought, that’s not in our plan. I was like, well, what do we do?
Claudia: It just sort of fell into our lap. We fell in love, and we were like, we’re going to put in an offer tonight.
Q: How did the townhome cause you to change your plans?
Fernando: It was unlike any other townhouses. The layout was different. There were hardwood floors and three bedrooms, but the selling point was it has a finished basement.
Claudia: For us, as we decided to make the move to stay here, (the basement) was a huge selling point for us because that means we can have friends and family come visit. It has a bedroom, bathroom and a little kitchenette down there. I never in my wildest dreams thought we could have bought as big of a place or as nice of a place in our price range.
Q: How did the negotiations go?
Claudia: We looked at it thinking we could afford it, but then when we made an offer lower than the asking price ... the agent realized that it was priced wrong (it was supposed to be a higher price). We ended up negotiating and working the numbers again and making it work.
Fernando: We did go up a little bit, and she (the seller) came down, too. We got a great deal.
Q: How much did you put down?
Claudia: 20 percent.
Fernando: Part of our dilemma was: Are we financially ready to buy a home? When we told our loan agent how much we were willing to put down, they were like, you’re ready, that’s significant. We weren’t going to get in over our heads. We wanted our mortgage payments not to exceed what we were paying on our apartment.
Claudia: That was our biggest fear, that we wouldn’t qualify (for a loan). We didn’t realize that having such a big down payment factored into the whole process.
At a glance
Fernando and Claudia Barboza’s townhome, which was built in 1989, has three bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths and about 2,300 square feet of space. They purchased it in November. Morningside at the Park has townhomes in the low $100,000s.
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