She Bought a Manhattan Home for Less Than $400,000 — Sight Unseen. But Which One?

Before she moved to New York, Kendra Pyne had been to the city only a handful of times. “I didn’t really know too many people in New York, so I never had a reason to visit,” she said. “Doing the touristy things and the sights was pretty much all the experience I had.”

After graduating from Penn State in 2014, Ms. Pyne moved to Denver for a master’s degree and then spent five years earning a Ph.D. in global medicine at University College London. In England, she also worked remotely for an American cybersecurity company, saving money all the while.

“I knew I wanted to live in Manhattan,” Ms. Pyne, 30, said. “It was a gut feeling after years of thinking about it. New York sounded so magical.”

Renting a place would have been typical for someone in her situation, but she had heard the “horror stories about how renting is so expensive,” she said. “Renting would quickly deplete my savings.”

So this summer she set out to buy a studio or a small one-bedroom close to a park that her cocker spaniel, Remi, would enjoy. With her savings, she figured she could spend up to about $400,000.

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Further complicating things: Ms. Pyne would be hunting remotely from London. She didn’t want to pay for an expensive trip to the United States just to search, and she would have had to make arrangements for Remi in her absence.

“I didn’t have a Plan B if things didn’t work out from abroad,” she said. “It sounds very irresponsible when I say it out loud.”

Online, she found David Gay, a salesman at Compass, who had some experience with remote buyers. “Virtual showings took off during Covid,” Mr. Gay said — although it still took an intrepid buyer to take a place sight unseen.

Ms. Pyne liked the streetscape of the Upper West Side, which she had visited once. But one ground-floor studio in a co-op building there, listed for $300,000, was in rough shape. Another studio, in a condominium, was appealing because it required only a 10 percent down payment, but the price was too steep at $515,000.

Mr. Gay explained that she would need a down payment of at least 20 percent, as well as 24 months of post-closing liquidity.

“The cost-benefit analysis pointed to a co-op,” Ms. Pyne said. It also pointed to the Upper East Side, where prices were more in line with her budget.

Among her options:

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