Buying Back Your Childhood Home Has Never Been Easier

Michal Czerwonka for the Wall Street Journal

As a child, Robert Easton relished summers at his grandfather’s house near Bedford, Ind.—the nearby limestone caves, the crackling electrical storms, the fireflies at night.

“You could shoot guns and set off fireworks and all kinds of stuff you can’t do in the city,” said Mr. Easton, a retired electronics engineer, now 71 years old.

Mr. Easton’s family sold the home, a 2,250-square-foot cabin that his grandfather bought in the 1930s, more than 50 years ago, but the memories remained. In 2010, feeling wistful at his home in Westlake Village, Calif., he looked up a satellite image of the address. The first search result was a for-sale listing.

“It was exactly the way it was the last time I saw it,” he said. Two days later, he flew out and bought it for $110,000. He now spends more than half the year there.

Who says you can’t go home again? Thanks to widespread interest in genealogy and a wealth of public records online, it has never been easier to track down—and put an offer on—the old homestead. For those with pangs of sellers’ remorse, it’s also a chance for an overdue reunion, no matter the cost.

In Upland, Calif., Brian and Kathie West in 2012 paid $880,000—almost $100,000 over asking price—for a Midcentury Modern house that Mr. West’s grandfather built.

Brian West holds an old magazine that featured the home built in 1965 for his grandfather. Brian and his wife presented some of the original, brightly colored couch cushions to the home sellers to persuade them to accept their offer. They bought the home in 2012 for $880,000—almost $100,000 over asking price. The couple is currently renting out the home.

Michal Czerwonka for the Wall Street Journal

The hexagonal house was built in 1965 as a retirement home for Mr. West’s grandparents, prominent citrus growers in the area. Measuring over 4,000 square feet with three bedrooms, the house was unusual for its futurist aesthetic, including an acoustical teak wood ceiling with a built-in sound system. Mr. West, 56, who owns a construction company, lived nearby as a child and often swam in the home’s circular pool, surrounded by orange and apricot trees. Mr. West’s grandmother sold the home in the 1980s.

In the mid ’90s, the couple missed a chance to buy back the house, because they were in the midst of a renovation on their own home nearby. “We regretted it,” said Mrs. West, who says she was more adamant about buying it than her husband. “It was part of their family heritage,” and had been a conversation piece at family get-togethers for years.

In 2012, Mrs. West found an ad on her front door listing the home for sale. It was just a coincidence that the broker, Matthew Berkley, left the ad, he says. Despite a tepid market, the house had 10 offers, but the couple had a secret weapon: Mr. West had kept the original avocado-green and robin’s-egg-blue sofa cushions from his grandparents’ living room—an heirloom passed down by his parents. When the sellers heard the couple’s story and saw the cushions, they chose the Wests, despite a matching offer from another buyer.

The couple has yet to live in the house—they have rented it out for about $5,000 a month—because they are still working on their current home, but they plan to retire at the house, just as Mr. West’s grandparents did.

Growing interest in family trees, with TV shows like PBS’s “Finding Your Roots,” has been a boon to DNA-testing companies and genealogy websites, such as 23andMe and Ancestry. The availability of digitized census records back to 1790 make the hunt for the old homestead easier.

“There’s a burgeoning mini-industry of heritage travel,” said Ancestry CEO Tim Sullivan, whose company has about 2.4 million paid users. A more recent service, starting at $2,300, pairs users with professional genealogists to craft detailed family reports.

Sometimes the past reaches out. Frederick and Cindy Ecker, both 60, didn’t set out to live in an ancestral home, but after buying a circa 1770, center chimney Cape-style home in Yarmouth Port, Mass., in 2014, they found not one, but two bloodlines. They bought the home for about $850,000, according to public records.

Mr. Ecker, a historic-preservation consultant, was mounting a framed family tree when he noticed for the first time the name Dorothy Thacher etched on a rock besides the tree engraving. The home they bought was widely known to be the Thacher residence.

“It was one of those a-ha moments—like, holy moly,” said Mr. Ecker, who traced the relative back to 1600s Plymouth, England.

It’s been a series of discoveries since then. Mr. Ecker, while removing cedar shingles on an 1830s addition to the home, found the family name Hallet, another relation, carved into the underlying wood. At an antiques store, the couple found a painting of a clipper ship with the flag of another ancestor—the Sears, a family of ship owners related to Mr. Ecker’s grandmother. That painting now hangs in their living room.

Historic details abound. The 3,033-square-foot home has seven fireplaces and an 1800s soapstone sink in what is now their dining room. The 1.3-acre property also includes a historic barn and space for Ms. Ecker’s organic garden. Similar homes in the area have listed for close to $1 million, but the couple isn’t interested in selling.

Kristen Deane and her husband Joseph Cornelius, both 30, bought her grandparents’ 1958 split-level home in Kensington, Md., for $479,900 in July. She found the listing online. “My dad was ecstatic,” she said, when she confirmed the address with him. He lived there for two years in his early 20s and still lives nearby. Listing agent Mary Noone of Compass said the seller had another offer, but went with Ms. Deane because of the family connection.

The interior has changed dramatically since Ms. Deane’s childhood, when she drank root beer in the den with her grandparents. But there was one relic: Tucked in a basement closet, they found her father’s old BB gun. “He just drops by sometimes,” Ms. Deane says about her father, whose recent reasons included checking the new sidewalks and spraying the weeds.

For Mr. Easton, who bought his grandfather’s Indiana home, the appeal is in rebuilding memories. He says he spent “significantly more” than the purchase price of the home to replace the shingle roof, recreate an old-fashioned kitchen and other projects. It’s all in the service of restoring what he loved about the home. A lead-crystal window shoots rainbows into the 50-foot great room when the light shines in. A wood post in the kitchen marks his height at 5 years old.

He returned to the home stone sculptures and equipment that belonged to his grandfather, Harry Easton, whose firm worked on such projects as the columns for the National Archives Building. He even found missing jigsaw-puzzle pieces “that made my sister get mad at me” when they were young.

Mr. Easton would like to see the home stay in his family, and has some relatives who have expressed interest. One thing’s for sure, he says: “It’s not for sale at any price during my lifetime.”

The post Buying Back Your Childhood Home Has Never Been Easier appeared first on Real Estate News and Advice - realtor.com.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2dmNGsX