After meeting in Boston, where they attended graduate school, Emma Colley and Shom Mazumder moved to New York City, renting a one-bedroom on the edge of Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, not far from Pratt Institute, where Ms. Colley had studied architecture.
Their small, dim ground-floor unit, which had just one closet, cost $2,400 a month.
“It has always been a dream of mine to decorate and renovate my own place,” said Ms. Colley, who has wanted to buy a home “ever since I was an HGTV-obsessed middle schooler” in Rochester, N.Y.
“We started with back-of-the-envelope math to prove that — if we could pull together a down payment and be approved for a good mortgage — making mortgage payments would be a better financial decision than making rent payments,” she said.
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The couple contacted Matt DeSilva, an associate broker with Corcoran, whom Ms. Colley had met a few years before when she had a side hustle drawing floor plans for real estate agents. She now works for a nonprofit developer that builds supportive housing, and has a graduate degree in urban planning from Harvard University. Mr. Mazumder, who is from Cleveland and has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, is a writer and a cook.
The couple, both 30, focused on co-ops priced up to $500,000, to translate into a monthly outlay of less than $3,000.
When it came to price, “they were realistic, which is a breath of fresh air, because a lot of people are not,” Mr. DeSilva said. “A lot of the time, the lower somebody’s budget, the higher their expectations.”
Although Ms. Colley was happy to stay in her old stomping ground, Lower Manhattan won out. The couple knew they would get only the basics — no elevator, no dishwasher, no laundry.
“I’ve been pretty used to not having those things,” Mr. Mazumder said. “A walk-up is the name of the game. I didn’t think we had an elevator budget.”
Kitchen counter space was important, though, as were closets, both of which had been lacking in their rental.
Among their options:
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