Ashley Joseph and Geoff Keller looked at about 65 houses before finding this one, their first home, in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Providence.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

As first-time homebuyers, Geoff Keller and Ashley Joseph say their 10-month house hunt was an experience that was at turns funny, sad, and surprising.

They say it was also frustrating, despite all the benefits of being buyers in a buyer’s market.

Their persistence paid off in May, when they moved into their newly purchased house in the Elmhurst section of Providence. The Tudor-style house has everything they wanted and more, and they got it at a bargain price. They ended up buying a foreclosed house, even though they weren’t specifically looking for a distressed property like a foreclosure or short-sale situation.

“We didn’t set out looking for foreclosed houses,” Joseph said. “But in our price range, there were a lot of them.”

“They had an investor mentality,” said their real-estate agent, Maria Tortolani, who works in the East Greenwich office of Residential Properties Ltd. “They were looking for a deal.”

Last year, the couple decided it was the right time for them to buy a house. Keller, 31, and Joseph, 26, were renting an apartment on Broadway in East Providence, paying $1,050 a month, and the rent did not include utilities.

They wanted to stay close to Providence, to be near the city’s nightlife and restaurants.

With a price ceiling of $230,000, they hoped to find a house with at least two bedrooms, at least 1½ baths, a two-car garage, and a small yard. They also didn’t want “a fixer-upper” that needed a lot of work, Keller said.

Keller is a mortgage broker with Bank Street Mortgage in East Greenwich, and Joseph works on the East Side of Providence, in marketing, for radio station WBUR. They met as students at Johnson & Wales University, and they plan to marry in the fall.

Thanks to Keller’s expertise, they knew all about their financing options. Finding the right house was the hard part.

At first, they confined their hunt to East Providence, but later expanded the search to include Cranston, North Providence, Providence, Warwick, and West Warwick.

Although there were plenty of houses in their price range, many were “just so overpriced,” Tortolani said. Keller and Joseph can’t remember exactly how many houses they viewed in person, but they estimate the number at somewhere between 60 and 85. Tortolani saw nearly every one with them.

“I think there was one night of house-hunting when I was sick,” she remembered.

Keller and Joseph said many of the houses they looked at were in rundown condition, and some had serious structural problems.

While walking around the exterior of one house, Keller noticed that one corner of the foundation had split apart. The owner had tried to bolt it back together with steel rods, but “you could put your arm in there,” he said.

Joseph and Keller said they were amazed when the agent showing the house told them this defect “was not a big deal.”

“’It’s not really a big deal?’” Keller said, shaking his head in disbelief.

At a historical house in Cranston, settlement had caused the house to shift so much that walking inside it “made you feel like you were in a crazy fun house,” Keller said.

At another house, the staircase to the basement was literally falling apart, and the basement “stunk like mildew,” Keller said.

At many of the houses, “the basements were always scary,” Joseph said.

At another house, they said, it seemed an agent tried to distract them from noticing the house’s many defects by showing them photographs of flowers that were in bloom in the yard the previous summer.

During their search, Keller and Joseph soon learned to identify signs of lives disrupted by foreclosure: a family’s belongings left in a Dumpster outside by the curb, or children’s toys and posters left in the bedrooms.

“Some of them had very negative vibes,” Keller said. Often, if the house was a foreclosure, “…it just had a bad energy.”

They made a full-price offer on one house, with the condition that the closing costs be added to the sales price so Keller and Joseph could include those costs in their mortgage. The seller objected to that proviso and rejected the deal. In a subsequent discussion with the seller, Keller said, it was obvious that he wasn’t aware that he had to pay a sales commission to his real-estate agent, and that the commission would come out of his proceeds. The house was taken off the market, and later relisted at a higher price, Keller said.

They made another offer on the same house, but again, it was rejected.

“It just wasn’t meant to be,” Joseph said.

During the months of their search, Keller and Joseph noticed prices coming down on a lot of individual properties. Still, they were so frustrated that they were about to take a break from house-hunting when Tortolani told them about the house in Elmhurst.

“I said to myself … if this one’s a dump, we’ll just take a year off” from the hunt, Keller said.

The three of them met at the house, which was unoccupied, and they roamed around in excitement. (Keller and Joseph do not want their address published.) The 1925 gambrel-style house was bank-owned, but it was in good condition, with an updated kitchen, a finished basement, three bedrooms, a large sunroom, a built-in cabinet in the dining room and a built-in linen closet upstairs. Keller said they knew immediately it was the house they would buy.

“We said, ‘It’s normal!’ ” Joseph said.

The asking price was $225,000. But like many buyers today, Keller and Joseph drove a hard bargain. They offered $175,000; the bank countered with $218,000. They offered $185,000; the bank countered with $211,000. They offered $190,000, and the bank countered with $191,000. They accepted that price.

Providence records indicate the house sold for $263,500 in 2006, and it is assessed at a value of $254,400.

Keller and Joseph had a deal. But closing the deal was another matter. Because of problems with recording the deed during the foreclosure process, the bank owner kept delaying the closing, always at the last minute. Keller said he would lock in an interest rate, and then the lock-in would expire because the bank was unable to close. This happened three times before they actually closed on the house, he said.

cdunn@projo.com