The unlikeliest of outcomes

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

If you noticed some pigs flying by your living room window earlier this summer, the sun rising in the west and a fine frosty crust settling over Hell, don’t worry; it was just me. I bought a home in Sandpoint.

I have hesitated to write about this new chapter in my life for fear that if I penned these words, I’d wake up and realize it was all a fever dream. Alas, it really happened. I couldn’t be happier.

Shortly after returning from our travels to the Balkans in June, my partner Cadie and I toured a house we noticed had popped up on the market.

We’ve been “looking” for almost 10 years; but, to be honest, I gave up on ever owning a home in my hometown years ago.

I had a chance to get into a decent place before the pandemic, but the price (just north of $200,000) seemed far too expensive for what it was. Then, the world shut down and I thought, “Ooh, we’ll be able to get into something better now that the housing market is set to return to Earth.”

The opposite happened, of course. Homes that sold for $200,000 in 2019 were going for three times that amount with cash offers — sight-unseen — as the world began to reorganize and city-dwellers sought refuge from the ailing world in our little shire.

As a result, the housing market went through a period of chaos when homes sold as quickly as they were listed, all for prices that locals couldn’t dream of affording. After all, how can someone making a middling income ever compete with out-of-state buyers who bargained with cash and offered prices substantially higher than asking? No matter how you crunched the numbers, it was always a losing scenario for people like us. 

Even if you did find a place you liked, by the time you got home, talked about it around the dinner table and decided to make an offer, the house was already “pending” with a half-dozen other buyers jockeying for position in case the accepted offer fell through.

No, my plan was to publish this newspaper until it claimed all but a few marbles left still rolling around in my head, then scuttle out of town to live on a jalopy boat in the Caribbean until a storm or a hungry shark took me, once and for all.

Now? Well, shoot. I don’t quite know how to plan for everything working out like gangbusters. Two months after closing, I’m still in complete shock.

To be fair, the sellers did receive other offers for the home — two, in fact, and one that went above asking price. That fateful morning, I spoke with our agent and realized we were third in line and it wasn’t looking good. To make matters worse, my partner’s landlord decided to raise her rent for the second time this year, charging about $1,000 more than she was paying the previous year.

For about seven minutes, our fate was uncertain. Would we stay in Sandpoint or leave town to live somewhere that actually gave people like us a fighting chance? Was this it?

But the universe did its thing and we ended up on the receiving end of a kind gesture that restored a bit of my faith in humanity.

The sellers (one of which is a Sandpoint business owner) liked the idea of selling to another local who was going to live and work here, so they made an incredible decision: They took our lower offer. The relief we felt after our offer had been accepted was incredible.

After a summer spent packing and cleaning, we moved into our new home last week and have been busy with the usual 800 or so tasks that new homeowners face.

To add a cherry on top of this beautiful sundae, Reader Editor-in-Chief and my best friend Zach Hagadone lives right next door. We’re fence neighbors. What are the odds? 

[Editor’s note: Among Hagadone’s greatest pleasures these days is sticking his head over the fence and yelling at Olson whenever the former sees the latter poking around in the latter’s backyard.]

Buying a home in Sandpoint as a local can be a difficult ordeal. Everything, it seems, is against us staying here in the town in which we love.

The only way this worked out for Cadie and me is because another local decided to forgo a higher offer and let us have a fighting chance to own our first home. I’ll forever be thankful for that selfless decision.

I encourage anyone looking to sell their homes to first check around with friends and work circles, because you never know how many years someone has been trying to put down a root in the town they love. It shouldn’t require a stroke of luck just to buy a house in your hometown.

Finally, I urge anyone looking to make the transition from renting to owning not to give up. If I can do this, so can you. Let’s help each other out and maybe — just maybe — we can retain some of the local character this town so desperately needs to avoid becoming yet another soulless gentrified resort town. 

This is our community, and we all deserve at least a chance to remain a part of it.