thehunt@nytimes.com<\/a>. Sign up here to have The Hunt delivered to your inbox every week.]<\/p>\n\u201cI thought that was the end of it,\u201d said Mr. Beckett. \u201cBut then they were waiting for me out front.\u201d Two months later, Ms. Beckett, 37, moved back to Boston. The couple got a place together, then eloped the following May. \u201cWhen he wants something, he gets very focused,\u201d Ms. Beckett said.<\/p>\n
In 2021, she convinced him to move down to Atlanta, which promised better home prices and a diverse punk rock scene for Mr. Beckett, 43, a drummer who also works as a sleep technician. Ms. Beckett had attended Spelman College and fallen in love with the historic houses on the west side of Atlanta. Jim Crow-era oppression had led her grandparents to leave the South for Boston, she said, so owning property in the region would feel \u201cabsolutely special.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Mr. Beckett was hesitant, in part because he thought a lot of houses they saw were overvalued. \u201cI was concerned about people flipping houses and getting all HGTV about everything,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The couple casually looked for homes over the years. When Mr. Beckett\u2019s father died, he left some money for a down payment. Then the couple had their second child, Jadzia, now 10 months old. They weren\u2019t always on the same page about what to look for, and cycled through a couple of real estate agents along the way. As the tension over buying a house rose, they started couple\u2019s therapy and made a timeline for the search.<\/p>\n
In February, the Becketts found a new agent, Christine Love from Compass, who didn\u2019t press them to rush into an offer. \u201cIt\u2019s not normal to establish a trusting relationship with someone you\u2019ve never met before, and as a Realtor you have to be sensitive to that,\u201d Ms. Love said. \u201cWe took it one day at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n
As they looked around the city, they tried to anchor to Brookhaven and Decatur, northeast of Atlanta, near where Mr. Beckett worked and their daughter Yemaya, now 4, attended preschool. But they also loved some of the historically Black neighborhoods on Atlanta\u2019s west side.<\/p>\n
With a budget of about $600,000, their ideal home was a three-bedroom, two-bath house with space for a studio, a convenient commute, and a walkable neighborhood. Ms. Beckett craved a beautiful kitchen and good floors, and Mr. Beckett wanted something move-in ready. \u201cI wanted to come into the door every day and have it feel like home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Kare and Scott Beckett met seven years ago in a Shop & Stop in Dorchester, Mass., both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[300811,306787,243665,74],"class_list":["post-711403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-atlanta-ga","tag-decatur-ga","tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}