When Kare and Scott Beckett met seven years ago in a Stop & Shop in Dorchester, Mass., both knew they’d found something special. Ms. Beckett, a Boston native who lived in Atlanta, was in town visiting her grandmother. “But I was also looking for a change, if I’m doing the Hallmark version of our story,” she said.
The two kept bumping into each other in the aisles, and after a brief interaction at checkout, Ms. Beckett and her friend left.
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“I thought that was the end of it,” said Mr. Beckett. “But then they were waiting for me out front.” Two months later, Ms. Beckett, 37, moved back to Boston. The couple got a place together, then eloped the following May. “When he wants something, he gets very focused,” Ms. Beckett said.
In 2021, she convinced him to move down to Atlanta, which promised better home prices and a diverse punk rock scene for Mr. Beckett, 43, a drummer who also works as a sleep technician. Ms. Beckett had attended Spelman College and fallen in love with the historic houses on the west side of Atlanta. Jim Crow-era oppression had led her grandparents to leave the South for Boston, she said, so owning property in the region would feel “absolutely special.”
But Mr. Beckett was hesitant, in part because he thought a lot of houses they saw were overvalued. “I was concerned about people flipping houses and getting all HGTV about everything,” he said.
The couple casually looked for homes over the years. When Mr. Beckett’s father died, he left some money for a down payment. Then the couple had their second child, Jadzia, now 10 months old. They weren’t always on the same page about what to look for, and cycled through a couple of real estate agents along the way. As the tension over buying a house rose, they started couple’s therapy and made a timeline for the search.
In February, the Becketts found a new agent, Christine Love from Compass, who didn’t press them to rush into an offer. “It’s not normal to establish a trusting relationship with someone you’ve never met before, and as a Realtor you have to be sensitive to that,” Ms. Love said. “We took it one day at a time.”
As they looked around the city, they tried to anchor to Brookhaven and Decatur, northeast of Atlanta, near where Mr. Beckett worked and their daughter Yemaya, now 4, attended preschool. But they also loved some of the historically Black neighborhoods on Atlanta’s west side.
With a budget of about $600,000, their ideal home was a three-bedroom, two-bath house with space for a studio, a convenient commute, and a walkable neighborhood. Ms. Beckett craved a beautiful kitchen and good floors, and Mr. Beckett wanted something move-in ready. “I wanted to come into the door every day and have it feel like home,” he said.
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