“Andy said, ‘I love it,’ and usually he is very critical,” Mr. Jawaid said. “We took a selfie and knew this was going to be it.”

The apartment had been on the market for three months, originally priced at around $1.05 million, but the price had dropped to $999,000; monthly charges were around $800. Inside, the 880 square feet featured an open kitchen with high-end appliances — although the kitchen was unimportant to the pair. “We don’t cook,” Mr. Jawaid said.

A small back room had a closet but no natural light source, apart from a small cutout window. For sleeping quarters, it would do.

But the price, they felt, was high for a ground-floor unit with no real bedroom and no outdoor space, Mr. Tedjasukmana said.

Image A well-placed condo duplex on Wythe Avenue, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had a basement bedroom that opened to an outside patio, but they were worried about the risk of flooding. Credit... Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times

They offered $880,000. “Nobody seemed to want this property, even though we really loved it,” Mr. Chen said. He suspected that concern over the looming L train shutdown was dampening interest, as was the location on a fairly busy street.

“If you didn’t have the window shade down, people would peek in, and for a lot of people that’s disqualifying,” Mr. Chen said. “What might be a defect to some people was an idiosyncrasy or a nuance, but simply not a problem for us.”