Late last year, Elizabeth King and Brody Touchet embarked on two life-changing projects at once: a wedding in Guatemala, and their first home purchase in Florida.
Ms. King was born in Guatemala, where her American father met her Guatemalan mother while serving as a missionary. They eventually ran an orphanage there. “I had a fun childhood with like 15, 16 kids around me at all times,” said Ms. King, 31. The family moved up to Sarasota, Fla., when she was 9.
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Two decades later she was still in Sarasota, the small Gulf Coast city about 60 miles south of Tampa, when she met Brody Touchet on a dating website. He was living 75 miles down the coast in Fort Myers. Before long, Mr. Touchet moved to Sarasota to be closer to Ms. King, and he began working at her father’s residential construction business. Around the same time, Ms. King, an architect, started a new job designing high-end custom cabinets.
Life was moving fast as the couple prepared for their November nuptials, and they decided it was time to invest for the future. “We needed a tax write-off, so we were like, ‘Let’s buy property,’” said Mr. Touchet, 33.
With a budget of around $500,000 and a plan to spend up to $150,000 on renovations, the couple wanted a house near downtown Sarasota, which offers a variety of museums and performing arts venues (and, as the longtime home of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, calls itself the “circus capital of the world”).
Thinking of it as an investment, Mr. Touchet was aiming for a home they could flip. Ms. King was thinking longer term, figuring that any big renovation would be broken up into phases.
“My theory was if I’m living here in Sarasota, I want to live close to what the city has to offer,” she said. “I wanted to be less than 15 minutes from downtown and not spend my life driving.”
The couple contacted Andrew Haddad, a Sarasota-based broker with Compass, who suggested applying for the Federal Housing Administration’s 203(k) program. It insures mortgages covering the purchase and rehabilitation of a home, with a down payment requirement of just 3.5 percent.
“The FHA 203(k) loan lets you turn a fixer-upper into your dream home,” Mr. Haddad said. “It’s the key to building equity from day one.”
With their wedding just weeks away, the couple began hunting for a house they could rebuild into something that might or might not be their “forever home.”
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