When Wrong Became Right.

A note from Eric

Andrew and Alyssa came to me through a referral from Alyssa’s dad, someone I’ve known for over 15 years. We used to be neighbors in Sabin, and I can still remember seeing Alyssa going for runs around the neighborhood with her dad when she was in high school. It was genuinely fun to reconnect and help their family now.

This one was a marathon. We looked at 28 homes total, the most I’ve ever toured with any buyer. We wrote offer after offer. The buyers of their Fargo home were waiting patiently on the sidelines for months while we searched, and we had to sign an extension to keep that contract alive. And at the end of it all, Andrew and Alyssa ended up in a home that looked nothing like what they came in looking for.

They couldn’t be happier. I think it’s a wonderful home for them, and I’m excited to watch their family grow into it.

Ninety Days

Andrew had accepted a new job opportunity in Kindred. That set everything in motion at once: sell their Fargo home, find a new one, pack up a toddler and two golden retrievers, and get Andrew within a reasonable drive of his new shop. The deadline was June 30th.

And they closed on June 30th.

They knew what they wanted: a rambler, a larger yard, something outside of Fargo toward Kindred. No split-levels. No newer developments in town. Space for Haiden to roam, room for their dogs Murphy and Gus to run, a driveway wide enough that Andrew didn’t have to rearrange three vehicles every time he came home with the boat.

Selling their Fargo home? Neither of them was worried about that. “Everybody that walked into our house always said how cute it was,” Alyssa recalls. “Multiple people wanted our house.”

They were right. Seven offers came in, not one of them under asking, and several with escalation clauses that pushed the final price well above list. They were focused on finding somewhere to go.

The Contingency

When the sale of their Fargo home went under contract, it came with a condition: Andrew and Alyssa wouldn’t close until they’d found their next home first. For the buyers on the other end of that deal, that meant waiting.

Weeks turned into months. An extension had to be signed to keep the contract current. Their buyers were patient and gracious, far more than most people would be. But the pressure was real. Every week without a house was another week those buyers couldn’t move forward either.

It made the search feel like it was running on two clocks at once.

Twenty-Eight Houses

A rambler with land outside Fargo doesn’t come up often. When it does, a lot of people want it.

• There was the ugly red house. The Walcott house, where they came in twenty thousand over asking with an escalation clause and still lost.
• The Cossette Drive house, where they started with a lower offer and countered.
• There was a rambler near Kindred that had water coming in from both the roof and the basement — swampy, close to a floodplain, with a layout Alyssa genuinely loved and a condition that made it a hard pass.
• Another rambler where the interior trim had been cut clean in half around every single doorframe, an intentional renovation choice that was inexplicably terrible.
• A house with a two-story office building looking directly down into the backyard.

By the time they toured the home they closed on, Alyssa had already reached out to a farmer outside Kindred asking whether he had anything available. They were looking at rental properties. The timeline had taken everything they had.

“We were definitely getting discouraged,” Andrew says.

The Day It Changed

The same afternoon Alyssa texted that farmer, they walked through the bi-level.

It was not a rambler. It was not in the country. It was not outside of Fargo toward Kindred. It checked almost none of the boxes from the original list. But it had a garage with a driveway wide enough for three cars so Andrew wouldn’t have to shuffle vehicles every time the boat came home. It had a fenced backyard and a sliding door so Murphy and Gus could get outside without a production. It had a corner lot with more yard than they expected, and a neighborhood the sellers described as full of good people.

They put in an offer.

What They’d Tell Someone Starting Where They Started

Andrew’s advice is practical: know the difference between fixable and unfixable.

“Don’t be afraid of a little bit of work,” he says. “But don’t settle on stuff that’s unfixable. A lot of people get nervous about things that are pretty easily fixed and overlook the things that aren’t.”

Alyssa keeps it simpler: keep an open mind.

“Look at things you wouldn’t want to look at. We ended up with exactly what we didn’t want, and it’s a good house.”