CLEVELAND, Ohio — Naomie Miller grew up in Haiti, where she shared a one-room home with nine family members. Now Naomie, her husband Alex and their extended family are celebrating the holidays in their new Solon home, after winning the Better Home Giveaway.
The Better Home Giveaway makes home ownership easier for families, according to the Better Home & Finance Holding Company, a leading digital homeownership company.
The Solon home is large enough to give everyone in the seven-person family a bedroom of their own —Naomie, Alex, their 5-year-old son Emerson and Naomie’s four siblings — a brother, 20, sister, 19, and twin sisters, 16.
“It was hard to believe. The thing that we most needed in our entire life was a home, so we felt incredible relief,” said Alex, 39. “We felt so blessed – we still feel blessed.”
The Miller family won $500,000 for a house, based on the challenges they’ve faced in buying a home and the impact they’ve had on their communities, Better Home and Finance said.
Better Home and Finance’s technology platform, Tinman, allows customers to see mortgage rate option, get pre-approved and close their home loan in as little as three weeks, the company said.
Naomie, 36, and Alex met after Alex traveled to Haiti as part of a medical relief team that responded to the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Naomie moved to the United States and into Alex’s apartment in South Euclid in 2012. The couple married the same year.
In the years that followed, the couple lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They eventually decided to move back to Northeast Ohio and buy a house to be closer to family.
While researching mortgage applications in January 2023, Alex stumbled on the giveaway on Better Home’s website and applied. In the months that followed, the Millers bid on many homes, but kept getting outbid by other prospective buyers.
By April, the Millers still hadn’t found their new home, but decided to move into Alex’s parents’ home in Beachwood while they continued their search.
That same month, four of Naomie’s siblings moved to the United States and into the Beachwood home as well, as refugees under a new visa class established in January 2023. The Millers now not only needed a home, but a home that could accommodate six adults and one child.
That’s when they finally heard back about the giveaway.
“I woke up the morning of April 15 to find out we didn’t get a house we were really excited about,” Alex said. “But a couple of hours later we got an email from Better Home saying that we were one of 25 finalists in the giveaway.”
The next step was for the Millers to record and submit a five-minute video about the family, what they do and their life together. About six weeks after making the video, they got a call saying that they were one of three finalists. A winner had been chosen and a team would be coming out to film the Millers when the announcement was made.
That’s how the Millers found out they had won.
The giveaway awarded the Millers $500,000 for a new home. The house they picked exceeded that, so they were required to take out a mortgage for the difference.
Alex works for University Hospitals Ahuja Medical Center, and Naomie is a dental assistant in Solon.
The family then started their home search once more, and when they first saw the Solon house they would ultimately call home, Naomie knew it was the one immediately.
“When I first saw the house, I liked the way it was built, it felt solid and there were a lot of bedrooms for everybody so they could have their own room and feel comfortable,” Naomie said. “I looked at Alex and said, ‘This is it’ and it happened.
The family moved into the house in September.
“There have already been so many firsts in this house,” Alex said. “Naomie’s siblings saw their first snowfall here and made their first snowballs. We had our first Halloween celebration with everyone in costumes trick or treating in the neighborhood. We had our first Thanksgiving. This house really feels like a new beginning for so many people who are looking to start a life here.”
Julie Washington covers healthcare for cleveland.com. Read previous stories at this link.