They Tested Their $600,000 Budget on the Lower East Side. Which Option Would You Choose?

For two years, Lauren Beltrone and Max Coleman shared a one-bedroom rental on the Lower East Side. The apartment was dark and cramped, with the refrigerator in the living room and a noisy bar on the building’s ground floor. They paid $2,250 a month for their 330 square feet.

“We loved the location,” said Ms. Beltrone, 26, who walked to her job in the financial district, at a company that makes interactive voice-response systems. Mr. Coleman, 30, took the F train to the 7 train for his long commute to Citi Field, where he works as a gardener for the Mets.

But they “didn’t want to get stuck in the cycle of renting a small place in our 30s,” Mr. Coleman said. So they socked away enough for a down payment on an apartment, with a budget of up to $600,000. Last spring, they went on the hunt for a one-bedroom co-op on their beloved Lower East Side. It needed to be quieter, bigger and better laid out than their rental — “something that had more of a living-room-with-a-window situation,” Ms. Beltrone said.

[Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com]

They enlisted the help of Liz Lawton, a licensed saleswoman at Compass, referred by a colleague of Ms. Beltrone’s. “They wanted a true, functioning one-bedroom,” Ms. Lawton said. “This neighborhood has changed dramatically in the last five years, with everything happening at Essex Crossing. Price per square foot has risen here greater than any neighborhood I have seen.”

The couple found that spacious one-bedrooms in the area’s walk-up co-ops were generally out of their budget. And much of the housing stock was in newly constructed condominium buildings, where one-bedrooms were even pricier and tended to require larger down payments.

Among their options:

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