54 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
their first child, due in May,
and they wanted to be out of
their rental well before then.
A few hours after they
made the offers, Sangara, 32,
refreshed her Zillow app
and saw that the Highland
Park listing had changed to
“pending.” They knew they
hadn’t gotten the house, be-
cause their real estate agent
had not called them with
any news. “We were heart-
broken,” Alvarez says. De-
spondent, the couple went
to brunch.
“I had a full rack of ribs
and a glass of rosé,” Alvarez
says. “How do we move on
from this?”
They were back at home
that evening licking their
wounds when their real es-
tate agent, Jeromy Robert of
the Agency, called to confirm
that they had indeed lost the
Highland Park house. But he
had surprising news. Their
offer on the stucco house in Pasadena had
been accepted. No counter offer. No condi-
tions. The sellers had simply accepted their
offer of $1.05 million.
Alvarez and Sangara were stunned. “We
were like, why?” says Alvarez. “How did that
happen?”
Their agent said the sellers were struck
by the letter the couple had included in their
offer. Alvarez and Sangara hardly remembered
this letter, written so long ago and included in
every offer they’d made. “What was this magi-
cal letter that can get us a home?” says Sangara.
Sangara dug up the letter she had written
months ago. “We can picture our French bull-
dog, Jackson, running around the back yard
and our first child (due in the spring!) sitting
in the front yard saying hi to the neighbors,”
it read.
Alvarez could see why it worked: “It just
made us sound like very wholesome people."
The three-bedroom house, set on a quiet
street, with views of the San Gabriel Mountains
in the distance, needed work. The kitchen was
small and outdated with narrow cabinets and
no dishwasher. The bathrooms were dated. But
once Alvarez and Sangara moved in, they knew
they’d landed in the right spot. “I didn’t real-
ize it in the moment,” Alvarez says. “But this
was the best home for us.” □On a Thursday mOrning in January 2022,
Natalia Alvarez and Rauvynne Sangara saw
seven houses and bid on two: a dated single-
story stucco house in Pasadena, Calif., and a
three- bedroom in Highland Park, Los Angeles.
They didn’t think they had much of a shot at
the Pasadena house. It was listed for $1 million,
the top of their budget, and the couple figured
the price would spiral in a bidding war, partic-
ularly since it had just hit the market. Besides,
they had their heart set on the Highland Park
house, which had been on the market for a few
months already. They offered $1.08 million,
more than $100,000 over the asking price.
“We thought we had a great chance at this
home,” says Alvarez, 32, an emergency physi-
cian. “We were really excited.”
By then, they had been house hunting for
three months, and had lost seven bidding
wars. Their roughly $1 million budget didn’t
go very far in Los Angeles, where the typical
home value is just under $1 million, according
to Zillow. They were also up against a dead-
line: Sangara, an ob-gyn, was pregnant with