Kathleen Li and Matthew Molnar met online in September 2019, and before they knew it, they were pandemic sweethearts.
“Otherwise, I don’t know that I would have seen another living soul during the first year of the pandemic,” said Ms. Li, 36, who grew up in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and moved to the city in 2010 for a job at Google, where she works as a software engineer.
Three years later, she and Mr. Molnar, also a software engineer, became pandemic-era newlyweds. And in late 2023, as their lease on a small Lower East Side two-bedroom was about to expire, they considered the age-old question: Was it better to buy or to go on renting?
As they perused Zillow, the numbers came together quickly. They saw apartments listed for not much more than they had sold for 10 or 15 years earlier. Some sellers were even dropping their prices to lure buyers after the feeding frenzy during the early years of the pandemic.
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“The stock market was doing fairly well, and we had some investments that we could utilize,” said Mr. Molnar, 39, who grew up in Ohio and bought a house there before moving to New York for a job in 2017. The house, which he kept, was generating rental income.
Almost immediately, a spacious Flatiron loft caught Ms. Li’s eye. “The renovation was really beautiful,” she said.
When the couple asked to see it, Zillow matched them with Eric Zollinger, an associate broker at Elegran Forbes Global Properties, and the three instantly clicked.
“They were by far the best buyers I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Zollinger said, adding that the pair did their homework and came to every showing with a positive attitude and an open mind. “It was the easiest deal from start to finish, mainly because they did everything I asked them to.”
The couple set a budget of $1.7 million, and their wish list included enough space to start a family, the need for only minimal renovations and minimal noise. With both doing hybrid remote work, they wanted home-office spaces and the shortest possible commutes to her office in Chelsea and the co-working sites used by his employer, Button.
Among their options:
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