Sunday, September 28, 2014

Introduction and our first visit to Greenbelt Station

Since I couldn't find many blogs out there about building Ryan Homes's Strauss model when my husband and I were trying to make a decision on whether to buy, I wanted to start this blog to document my experience.  We are already in the process of building a Ryan Homes Strauss Townhome. Our home will be in the Greenbelt Station community in Maryland.

When we first discussed buying a home, we researched what was on the market in the greater DC area for about a year.  We knew we wanted to be close to metro if possible, since traffic in this area is terrible, and we only have one car.  We decided that we would aim to close on a house in May/June 2015, and thought we would end up with a fixer-upper not very close to metro.  Then one of our online searches showed Greenbelt Station, and we thought that it must be too good to be true.  We are familiar with the Greenbelt area since we both went to University of Maryland.  We knew the area wasn't perfect, but it has a lot of potential with talks of the new FBI headquarters being in the area and the new Hyattsville Arts District just down the road.  We decided to get a realtor and schedule a tour of the model home.  (With Ryan Homes you have to have your realtor with you on your first visit to the model home or Ryan Homes will not pay the realtor's commission.)

We made our first trip to the model on September 28, 2014.  At the time, the community had hardly any homes built.  The sales reps working in the model home were very friendly and not too high pressure.  My husband fell in love with the home immediately.  I really liked the home, but wanted more time to crunch the numbers and see what else was out there.  After we left the house, we set up more home tours with our realtor to see more new construction since we were now sold on the idea of a new construction townhome.  We saw homes by Lennar and Beazer as well as another Ryan Homes community.  Nothing else compared, so we set up our appointment to go back to Greenbelt Station.
Strauss Townhomes at Greenbelt Station on our first visit 9/28/2014