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Camping
out to snatch
up a new home |
Parties spend the night outside the DR Horton sales
trailer to be first in line to reserve a lot |
By Gunnar Olson, Newberg
Graphic reporter
E-mail Gunnar at golson@eaglenewspapers.com
|
The night of Sept. 27 was hotter than usual, and windy, and in a
new-housing development there was an unusual gathering of people.
It’s not unheard of for people to camp out overnight for concert tickets
or movie premiers. But camping out to buy a house?
But there they were, Kristina Seivers and Ryan Barrea and the Boyers —
Shane, Kelly, Mackenzie and Brooke — parked next to a backhoe, spending the night in
their cars outside the on-site sales office of DR Horton. Thirty-one lots for Phase II of
The Oaks at Springbrook housing development behind Fred Meyer would be available at 10
a.m. in the morning, and both parties were going to get the pick of the lots.
“I’ve never hear of anything like this in the Newberg area,”
said Brett Grantham, a real estate broker for DR Horton.
The Boyer family had heard at the DR Horton office that another person
planned on camping overnight. He asked himself: “Is this going to be a Krispy Kreme
situation or what?”
Shane Boyer admitted it seemed silly to spend the night outside the sales
office to buy a house, and as of Wednesday no one at ARE Manufacturing, the Newberg
company where he works, knew of his overnight escapade. It was a good thing he was on
vacation and the Boyer daughters were so excited about the idea of camping out.
When Grantham got to the office in the morning, by his estimate there were 18
or 19 people waiting in line, including David Kelsay, who got there at 4:30 a.m. Most of
the time, he said, a group of 30 new homes will be sold at a rate of one to two houses a
week. Of the 31 houses DR Horton had to offer that morning, 16 of them had been reserved
— the next best thing to being sold, Grantham said — by the end of the weekend.
“We might not have gotten the lot if we hadn’t gotten there
early,” Shane Boyer said.
The Boyers got their second choice of a lot — it turned out that their
first choice was also the first choice of the Seivers — and it worked out for the
best. Of the two lots the Boyers were interested in, only the second one would accommodate
the house they wanted to build.
The Boyers had been looking to relocate from their house in Dundee, where he
and his family live on a hill. Living on a slope year around was one of the reasons they
began shopping around.
There were a couple of benefits of The Oaks of Springbrook development that
appealed to them. First, Boyer said, the quality of the homes was evident. Second, the
rules of the homeowner’s association were attractive.
The house is also two minutes away from where Shane Boyer works.
The Boyers got to meet a couple of their neighbors that night. There was the
skunk they watched come out of one unfinished house and enter another. And there was the
young couple looking for a house.
Turns out that the Boyers had met one of them before they knew she might be
one of their neighbors. Seivers works at the orthodontist’s office where they took
their daughter to for the first time that very day.
If the world doesn’t seem small enough, there’s one more thing: the
Boyers bumped into the orthodontist Saturday morning, too. He was at the DR Horton trailer
to reserve a house. |
|
From Oct. 4,
2003, Newberg Graphic
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