House-hunting couple who made personal postcard plea have a deal
A Toronto couple who sacrificed personal privacy in a bid to find a house in Toronto now have a home of their own in which to raise their young son.
Not only that, it's detached, in their target area, and they got it for under asking and below their maximum budget.
"I'm very happy. Very happy," Val Woloshyn says.
"Njacko is relieved and really happy as well."
"We know another family on the street and have a couple friends a couple streets over. It's in the area we want, close to schools, close to the ravine," she says.
Woloshyn and her partner, Njacko Backo, went public earlier this spring with a radical approach to stand out from the hordes of fellow home buyers.
The couple put pictures of themselves and their two-year-old son, Koko, on a flyer and placed them in hundreds of mailboxes throughout their neighbourhood. The glossy, postcard-sized handouts featured a personal plea outlining how the couple had been renting in the area for some time, loved the great schools and parks, and were looking to buy their first house.
At the bottom was a personal entreaty from their agent, Patrick Lowney.
"Please help me find them a place they can call home!"
Story strikes a nerve
The flyer didn't mention a price range and the couple prefer to keep that private, but their budget was on the lower end for a detached home in that neighbourhood of Toronto.
The couple's plight and innovative but controversial strategy struck a nerve in the red hot Toronto real estate market.
After their story appeared on CBC News, the couple were inundated by interview requests from other media outlets.
Backo initially had reservations about putting their faces — and especially their child's face — and story out in public.
"It's a little bit scary," Backo told CBC News last month.
But in early June, they went to visit a house and a week later made an offer that was accepted.
"[The sellers] are an elderly couple who are downsizing/relocating closer to their children, and the husband actually remembered Val and Njacko from our showing," Patrick Lowney, Woloshyn and Backo's agent, told CBC News in an email.
Was it worth it?
The home was one of the hundreds of houses in which he had placed the couple's flyer in the mailbox.
Although the postcard wasn't the reason the sellers decided to accept the couple's offer, Lowney says it was a factor.
"I brought the postcard and a thank-you note (handwritten by Val) with me when I presented the offer to jog their memories, and [the sellers] told their agent they wanted Val and Njacko to get the house, because they were such a nice young couple. The wife, who hadn't met them, loved the pictures and description on the postcard and was won over as well."
Lowney says the property is a two-storey detached house with a finished basement, owned by the same family for 42 years.
He says it ticked almost all of Woloshyn and Backo's boxes.
"It's pretty bang-on. It has the space in the basement for a guest bedroom/studio, two large bedrooms, a decent backyard, etc."
Even though the postcard didn't lead directly to the sale, Lowney says the strategy proved successful.
"It didn't get us a house, obviously, but I would do it again. The reception I got was much more positive than if I had just said, 'I'm working with buyers who are looking for a home.'"
Woloshyn echoed that sentiment.
"It worked out the way we wanted. Our approach always was to connect with people and that is what happened," she says.
