When making a big purchase, Consumer Reports or Amazon reviews normally become my best friend. Conducting routine interviews of friends, family and coworkers is also part of the process. It's not easy for me to part with any chunk of cash.
Since I couldn't quite kick the research habit, I used Zillow.com to browse houses for sale in the area and look at our options. Zillow is nice because it:
- Maps the houses for you
- Has a lot of fun filters that are useful to narrow down your search
- Allows you to save searches
- Provides the house's value history
- Displays what houses in the area sell for (even if they are not on the market)
- Has pictures
- Is free!
As great as Zillow is, only after falling in love and making an offer on a house, do you have the opportunity to get a professional opinion about a home via the home inspection (more on that later.)
Therefore, knowing what you want, where you want it and how much you can afford will be your only search criteria. You may get lucky and find the perfect house. However, for the rest of us, you need to categorize the must haves from the nice to haves (our list.)
After providing our dream home information to our real estate agent, she setup MLS (Multiple Listing Service) searches for us. If we found a house we liked, then we drove by it because:
- Pictures on MLS can be deceiving
- We wanted to check out neighboring area
- Determining if a backyard is sunny can only be truly done in person
- It's the only way to scope out the neighbors
- We didn't want the house to be too close to our neighbors (no offense - we just wanted lots of garden space)
When using MLS, help out your agent by marking homes that you are interested in and deleting homes you would never purchase. Seems obvious but throwing it out there since according to our agent - not everyone does these things.
Since there were over 300 homes that fit our criteria (blessing in disguise??), I skipped straight to the pictures and looked for a sunny backyard. If the house didn't have one, then I moved onto the next. If the kitchen was nice and the backyard was questionably sunny then I marked it anyway. My husband calls this process "winnowing the chaff" (had no idea what he was talking about either.)
Since the houses start to blur together after awhile, I recommend adding notes to the ones you like. For ex: "Sunny backyard but not sure about neighborhood" or "Beautiful kitchen, need to checkout garden potential."
One last piece of advice: after looking at pictures of the 100th house on MLS, my eyes started to bleed so take regular breaks :)
Happy Hunting!
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