Getting started: How tough is it to find a home to buy in the Kalamazoo area?

Editor's Note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan's Second Wave series on solutions to affordable housing and housing the unhoused. It is made possible by a coalition of funders including Kalamazoo County, the City of Kalamazoo, the ENNA Foundation, and the Kalamazoo County Land Bank.

KALAMAZOO, MI – So where are the opportunities in Kalamazoo County for first-time home-buyers? And where are buyers looking to move up in this tight housing market?
 
It depends on who you ask and how much you make, buyers and sellers say.
 
“There are starter-home communities but the starter home prices have gone up,” says Twala Lockett-Jones, owner of the Lockett-Jones Realty Group in Kalamazoo.
 
She says most of the young prospective home buyers her firm is seeing are pre-approved to purchase homes in the $150,000 to $160,000 range. “But we just don’t have enough inventory in that range. And when something hits the market, if it’s in good condition, and if it’s a desirable property, it gets multiple offers. And it’s gone in a day or two,” Lockett-Jones says.
 
So prospective buyers -- and sellers -- have to be prepared for a brisk selling market in multiple price ranges, real estate professionals say.
 
Jim Hess, a Realtor with Jaqua Realtors in Kalamazoo, says, “It used to be, we’d list a home on Monday and I’d get a call on Tuesday to show it on Wednesday. Now we list it on Monday and I get a call asking if I can show it in 5 minutes.”
 
Courtesy PhotoRealtor Jim Hess, right, says people are finding homes that are affordable at their income levels. They have included Drew and Shelby Novetsky.It’s a fast-moving market, but Hess says the most important thing is to understand the home-buying process. “And by that I mean you have to make sure you get all your ducks in a row,” he says.
 
He suggests that prospective home buyers:
 
• Meet with a lender to get pre-approved for a loan “because in this market you need to move quickly when things (buying opportunities) do come up.”
 
• Make a priority list of what you want in a home “and realize every home you look at there will be some compromise. You have to see where that compromise fits on your priority list. If it’s low, then no worries. If it’s high, then obviously move on.”
 
• Recognize that you need to be persistent and you need to avoid becoming discouraged if you miss out on something.
 
• Expect to do some virtual home showings. He says Realtors are doing a lot more of them to let buyers see a property remotely.

The search
 
“It wasn’t super bad,” Nick Wahl says of the six months he spent trying to find a house that would allow him to move out of his parents’ home in Comstock Township. He focused on a few Kalamazoo neighborhoods but ultimately found an older house in the Oakwood Neighborhood.
 
Buying a house rather than renting one distinguished the 2020 Western Michigan University graduate from his friends. He is a software engineer for a local brewery. He is 26.
 
“I think they were surprised,” Wahl says of his friends. “I think most in my generation are definitely still stuck in the renting style and can’t get out of it.”
 
He says living with his parents allowed him to save enough money for a down payment on the $170,000 house he bought in Oakwood. He made the purchase in March after looking at about a dozen houses, eight of them in person.
Courtesy PhotoNick Wahl, 26, was able to become a first-time home buyer with the purchase of this home in the Oakwood Neighborhood. 
Wahl’s house is a small, three-bedroom, one-bathroom, Cape Cod-style house that has no garage and will need some repairs. But it was $20,000 less than most other houses he saw in the area, he says, and “It’s still pretty d----d expensive for not (being among) super great homes. There are a lot of old homes in Kalamazoo and old homes are starter homes, and that’s what I got.”
 
He said he was qualified through his financial institution for a loan of up to about $250,000. But he says he would not have been comfortable spending more than $220,000.
 
Home-owners who are looking to bump up from what is considered a starter home are looking at areas like Texas Township, Oshtemo Township, Galesburg, Mattawan, Portage, and some outlying areas, Lockett-Jones says. Some are also looking in Kalamazoo Township and areas along 9th Street and  10th Street.
 
Courtesy PhotoRealtor Twala Lockett-Jones says a lot of first-time home owners in Kalamazoo are looking for opportunities at or below $200,000.“In the more desirable neighborhoods within the City of Kalamazoo or Kalamazoo Township are Westwood and Milwood,” Lockett-Jones says. “I would say it’s difficult to find a home and simply move into something in ready condition -- say, three bedrooms/one and one-half bathrooms -- for under $200,000. You’re actually going to be looking at closer to $250,000 to $300,000.”
 
The search for enough space to accommodate a future family is taking Drew Novetsky and his wife Shelby Suseland from a 900-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in Kalamazoo to a 1,700-square-foot, four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Lawton. The new location also makes sense for his daily commute to work in Benton Harbor and her continued  work in Kalamazoo. The 27-year-olds closed on their house on July 8.
 
Was it tough to find what they wanted?
 
“It could certainly be worse,” Novetsky says. “I would say it’s probably not super-ideal. You see a house come up (for sale) and it’s like, ‘Oh great.’ It’s in a great location and a great price. But it doesn’t have AC or these three rooms need immediate upgrades.”
 
Novetsky says they looked at houses in Kalamazoo, Paw Paw, and Dowagiac. Prospective home buyers, he says, “are really at the mercy of what just happens to pop up during the period they are looking.”
 
He says it was difficult to find what they really wanted. He rated the search a 7 to 7.5 on a scale of 1-10, in terms of difficulty. And quick action came into play. He says the house they found was listed on a Thursday for $299,000, with a deadline for offers on the following Tuesday. He and his wife out-bid at least four other bidders – after only seeing the house in a virtual tour. They made the purchase for a little over $300,000.
 
Hess says things move very quickly now because there are not a lot of homes for sale at the same time.
 
“It used to be you’d have 10 choices at once,” he says, referring to years before the American subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 to 2010, which added to the U.S. economic recession that started in 2008. “But now you might have one or two.”

In the meantime, high demand means the number of days a house stays on the market is shorter. That may also be attributed to more information being posted online about any property, Hess says.
 
“Fifteen years ago we didn’t have sites like Zillo, and Realtor.com, and Trulia,” he says. “They’re not the most accurate ways to search but there’s just a ton of information out there. So everybody has access to everything.”
 
Al Jones PhotoBuyers and sellers have to move quickly to make offers and close deals in the Kalamazoo housing market.Nicole Kragt says she and her husband Paul looked at a lot of houses in about a two-month period. They were looking to downsize their living space.
 
“I can’t tell you how many houses we looked at,” says Kragt (pronounced Croc). “Our son is going to college in the fall so we are downsizing.”
 
But she says the family, which was looking for its sixth home in the last 25 years, was also looking for a house with enough space to build a garage or pole barn to allow her husband to operate his automotive business. “We wanted to downsize but we didn’t want to go too small,” she says.
 
Other concerns were about how much they would spend, and about needing to have the seller agree to a contingency plan that would allow them to buy a new home before they sold their old home.
 
“If you’re looking at having to sell a house in order to buy a house, you’re going to need to be patient about finding the people who are willing to do that now,” Kragt says. “In our experience in the past, we have never had a problem making offers on houses on contingency.”
 
She says she knew there were buying opportunities her family missed because others had already made offers without a contingency.
 
After weeks of searching, the Kragts relocated about two weeks ago from Oshtemo Township to Kalamazoo’s Westwood Neighborhood. They downsized from more than 3,000 square feet of space on a wooded lot into about 2,200 square feet with a front and rear yard that will require more tending.
 
What was the toughest part?
 
“Out of all the houses we looked at, there were only three in total that we were even interested in making an offer on,” Nicole Kragt says. “A lot of it was that we didn’t feel the houses were worth what they were asking. They either needed a lot of work or they just weren’t the right size or the right price.”
 
Kragt says she and her husband sold their old home but did not get as much as they wanted for it. That previous home sold for about $380,000 and they bought their new home for the same amount.
 
Kragt suggested that home buyers try to be patient during their search. She says finding a house in your price range is tough, “particularly if you’re not looking to do a lot of work to a house.”
 
Novetsky’s advice for a first-time home-buyer, “For either someone who’s single looking for a house or (people who) are married or in a serious relationship, you have to understand what it is you’re willing to compromise on and what you’re absolutely not willing to compromise on,” h says. “My wife and I were relatively open-minded. It really does help you in the long-run so you’re not losing your time looking at stuff that you’re not going to be really serious about buying.”
 
Hess says the difficulty that first-time buyers have finding “affordable” housing is related to their incomes.
 
“It all depends on what your job is,” he says. “I’ve had first-time buyers buy $500,000 homes because of their job and their income.”
 
He says that during the last five years, he has not had a client who has not been able to find a good home.
 
“They’ve missed out on some (opportunities),” he says. “But the homes they got were as good or better than what they missed out on. That’s the persistence kind of thing that you have to have.”

 
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Al Jones is a freelance writer who has worked for many years as a reporter, editor, and columnist. He is the Project Editor for On the Ground Kalamazoo.