First-time buyers kept losing bids. Then they found this East Falls townhouse. | How I Bought This House

The buyers: Heather Nelson, 40, software architect; Ari Gass, 34, assistant professor of digital media at Drexel University.

The house: A two-bedroom, four-bath, 2,000-square-foot townhouse in East Falls built in 1984.

The price: Listed for $400,000; purchased for $405,000.

The agent: Benjamin Camp, Elfant Wissahickon.

The ask: When Ari Gass and Heather Nelson moved to Philadelphia in 2024, buying a home felt like the next step. Gass wanted the stability that came with ownership — “the safety of knowing that someone can’t evict me for identity-based reasons,” they said.

Nelson, a self-described “big dummy who likes to do carpentry,” also wanted a place she could renovate without worrying about a landlord. “I started doing things in rentals that I probably shouldn’t have done, like building floating beds into the wall,” she said, laughing.

Once the pair began looking, the process proved more confusing and expensive than they expected. “We had no basis for any of the decisions about how much we could reasonably offer or what percent down we could afford,” Gass said. Their first attempt — a quick offer on a home in their development — ended with them being outbid by $50,000. The couple took that as a cue to wait a year and save more before trying again.

The search: By spring 2025, when they reentered the market, prices had softened. “We noticed a lot of properties had dropped $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 while we were waiting,” Gass said. Even so, the couple kept getting outbid in Manayunk and Roxborough.

“We were looking for two- or three-bedroom homes with enough space for both of us to have a home office,” Gass said. But they were competing with buyers who “seemed to have second-house money,” or people leveraging equity from a first home to buy a second. They also ran into all-cash offers from investment firms converting homes into rentals.

“We were just in a bad position because we had a very finite amount of cash,” Nelson said.

The search: The couple looked at lots of houses that Gass had a strong, positive reaction to. The house they bought was not one of them. In fact, the couple’s initial reaction was, “it’s weird,” said Gass. It had two bedrooms and four bathrooms and was 2,000 square feet. “The master bedroom had a spiral staircase leading to a wood-burning stove,“ said Nelson, “and a banister perfectly sized for your child to either slip through or get their head stuck in.”

“It is the most child-unfriendly home,” Gass said, especially for a “family-friendly cul-de-sac in East Falls.” That worked in their favor. “No one else wanted it because everything looks like a death trap in this house if you were to have a kid,” Nelson said.

The couple got past the house’s family-unfriendly nature, though, because it met Gass’ criteria for being close to SEPTA. “Our backyard is the train station,” Nelson said. “People throw their cigarettes into our postage stamp backyard.”

They also appreciated some of the house’s quirks, like the lofted bedroom and the spiral staircase. Mostly, they liked that it was a house “they could actually get,” Gass said. “It was that middle ground where there is stuff we liked, and we could afford it,” Nelson added.

The deal: The house’s location sealed the deal. They made an offer a few hours after their tour, coming in at the $400,000 asking price. The sellers had one other offer and asked them to increase to $405,000, pay 1% of the seller fee, and waive $5,000 of the inspection.

It was still far less aggressive than the offers they had lost. “It felt like the safest offer we’d made, the most conservative, and the one we could actually afford,” Nelson said.

The sellers accepted within the week. “They had put it on the market a year before, and it didn’t sell,” Nelson said. “I think they were just happy to get out of the market.”

The money: After losing that first bid in 2024, Gass and Nelson spent the next year saving. “We tightened our belt throughout the year and just tried to save every dollar we could,” Gass said. By 2025, they had each saved more than $40,000. Part of Gass’ amount came from their IRA. “You can take money out as a first-time homebuyer without penalty up to a certain amount,” they said.

They were determined to put 20% down to avoid private mortgage insurance, so they capped their budget at $400,000 and stuck to it.

They put down $80,000 and used the rest of their savings for closing costs. The total “came in slightly more than we wanted,” Nelson said.

The move: Moving in was “chaos,” Gass said. The closing lined up with the end of the semester for Gass and a work trip to San Francisco for Nelson. To simplify things, they hired Mambo Movers to pack and move their belongings.

A delayed mortgage start date gave them a free month in the new place before payments began, which let them start on house projects. They redid the basement floors, built a wall to divide the space and added a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf.

Any reservations? Nelson and Gass bought the house while planning their wedding, which left them with little time to work on it. “It was a very chaotic time with not a lot of downtime,” Nelson said. As a result, getting settled has taken longer than they hoped. Five months in, the house still doesn’t fully feel like theirs. Nelson thinks it may take about a year. They continue to spend most weekends on projects.

Life after move: The couple say the best thing about their house is the neighbors. “You’ve got to know your neighbors,” Nelson said. “When you’re buying a house, take a walk and be kind of weird. Look through people’s windows. Look at what their yard looks like. You want to make sure you’re not moving in next to someone who isn’t taking care of their house.”