Maine Nesties
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Homeowners come in...
I'm beginning to get frustrated by our search for the perfect home. We found a place that we were really excited about and the price was amazing, but 10 people made offers on it within a 2 day period so even though we offered over the asking price, we were out bid. Since then, nothing seems to be quite what we're looking for. We've seen at least 20 places in the past month. So I guess my question is for those of you who didn't build your own home, how many houses did you look at before you found "the one"?
Re: Homeowners come in...
We did a lot of searching online with our Realtor since we were in Florida. When we came up for our big looking at houses we were scheduled to look at 10, but one of them we ruled out once we got a feel for the area. We had 2 final contenders and put in an offer on the place we're in now. We got really lucky and this place is wonderful. It had been on the market for a solid 4 months or more, so that was in our favor.
In our price range, there were a lot of crappy houses we saw. This one was pretty ugly on the surface, but with the help of our Realtor (isn't it funny how I'm suckered in to the whole capitilizing the R thing- I've been brainwashed) and being able to see through it, we could tell it had good bones. But if we hadn't found this place, we were ready to fly back to Florida without putting in an offer.
I think it is definitely better to trust your gut and keep looking for the right place instead of settling just to have a house to call your own. It's a big and expensive purchase, and even somewhere that seems absolutely perfect will end up having flaws and things you don't like. To start off with something that already doesn't feel right I think would be the start of something you'd really regret.
Chin up! You'll find something- try to be patient!!!
When I bought my first house, I think I saw about 5 or 6 before I saw the one I bought. However, this was 2004 and it was a hot sellers' market so I didn't have a whole lot of time to mull it over before I put in an offer. Basically, this house was vastly better than anything else in my price range so I went for it.
My first house did not have everything I wanted. I wanted a garage; I didn't get one. I wanted a 3 or 4 bed, 2 bath house; I got a house with 2 small but decent bedrooms, a so-so bedroom in the attic, and one bathroom. I wanted everything to be reasonably up to date and move-in ready; the kitchen was good but the bathroom was gross and I decided to remodel it before I moved in (and the remodel took longer than planned and I had to shower at my office building for 3 weeks). The house also had several smaller issues that I had to take care of, including replacing some outdated or missing fixtures, replacing the front door, replacing some of the deck railing, fixing a giant hole in the drywall of one of the bedrooms, etc, etc, etc.
I guess what I'm saying is be realistic about your "must haves" and think about what you might need to compromise on based on time and/or money. If you don't mind waiting or paying more, maybe you can get your perfect house. Your real estate agent should be able to give you an idea of whether your expectations are in line with reality.
We looked for over three months and viewed about 30 houses in person. We had found "the one" early on but then found out it was a short sale, we weren't up for dealing with the headaches that may come from that. We also had the issue of finding the right neighborhood. There were lots of great houses that were in amongst rentals or areas that I wasn't sold on.
I think the most important thing is to go into a house looking at its potential. We looked at houses in a variety of price ranges and ultimately even the ones at the top of our budget weren't perfect. We went with something less expensive but that had a good layout and structure. We knew that we could invest some money into it because it was large enough to be a forever home vs. a starter home.
It is definitely worth taking your time with and you may not get EVERYTHING on your list so just prioritize what is most important to you.
We looked for about 5-6 months for our house. Due to our budget, we knew that our first home would not be our "dream" home. Having an affordable mortgage was more important to us than having the perfect house. Our mortgage right now for a 3 bedroom, 3 acre house is less than we were paying when we lived in S. Portland for a dumpy 1 bedroom apartment. Which is pretty crazy and why we looked up north for homes. Because of this we didn't really run into having to compete with others for bidding on houses. ....so I can't really relate to that aspect of home buying.
We knew we would only be here for a few years and then hopefully when it's time to look for our next house we can be able to be a little more selective in what we ended up getting and hopefully get something that has more of everything we wanted. We were in somewhat of a time crunch too. We were staying with family and had to be out in July. We didn't want to go back to renting, and we didn't want to get in over our heads with a mortgage, so the amount of houses we had to select from that weren't completely run down fixer-uppers was pretty small. LOL. We just stuck to our budget though and selected the house that was the best out of the top 3. I like our little house, it's so much better than renting, but I wouldn't want to(and don't plan on) staying here forever.
My first home took me a year to find! I looked at TONS of houses.
This house took us about 5-6 months to find but it was a case of knowing someone who knew someone who wanted his house to go to someone who wouldn't sell it to Bates.
Hang in there-- it's like a husband. You know, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince!
We looked at about 20 houses and made offers on 4 before we ended up with the house we have now.
I dont know if there is such a thing as the perfect home on the market. You will always want to change some things to make it perfect for you. Our house was a cosmetic nightmare when we bought it. We are not afraid to get our hands dirty and did all the work ourselves. We are thinking of moving soon but we really love our house now and hate to leave it!
We took our sweet time and over about a year we took 8 or so outings with our Realtor to look at between 1-5 houses any given time.
We fell in love with a couple (but didn't bite because they weren't realistic for what we wanted spacewise, etc) but never put in an offer until the house we are currently in. Our house has pretty much everything we could have wanted, but it doesn't "look" like the house I had imagined buying as our long term house. I'd always pictured wanting an historic home with tons of character, but in the end found a raised ranch on a beautiful property. We didn't fall in love with this house until we kept thinking back to all the pros it had for us over a period of 2 months. The day we came for our inspection, I realized the house was even better than I'd remembered it, phew.
Obviously we were lucky that it was still available at that point, but i always go with the philosophy that what is meant to be, will be, especially when making any kind of purchase.
This was almost exactly us... it went on the market Thursday, we saw it Friday (first ones) and put an offer in that night. We'd been looking about 6 months and knew the market well enough to know it was a great house. We knew it would be a "starter," and that we'd be able to put some sweat equity in to make it look good enough to sell in a few years when we outgrow it.
we spent lots of time on the mls website- knew what area we'd be willing to move to. We always drove by a house before we went to look at it on the inside. I think we saw three houses before this one.
The photos of this house did it NO justice at all.
I am not sure how many we looked at. We looked at everything in our price range in the area we wanted to live in. We knew with a limited area we had limited choices, so we wanted to know all the options before we bought.
We started looking in beg. Jan, saw our house in late Jan, narrowed it down to 2, picked one to try for and if it failed then go for the other one. We closed on 1st choice beg. March.
Our market is not hopping, there was no pressure to buy what you like now before someone else does, to bid, or to offer above asking.
Our second choice house is still on the market, over a year later. There is nothing really wrong with it, just a slow moving market.
Thanks for all your input ladies. I'm beginning to feel better about this process but I feel like we're running my poor realtor ragged. We're trying really hard to think in terms of potential so we have a very short list of "must haves". Our search resulted in over 200 possibilities. We were able to eliminate about 125 of them right off the bat, and we've done a ton of drive-bys and requested disclosures for more places than I can count, but even with all of that we've still only narrowed the field to about 75.
I keep getting caught up with scenarios of "well, house x has these qualities that we like better than house y but house y is cheaper or house z has these other qualities that we like but what's more important to us, the good qualities of house x or the good qualities of house z?" I'm just really hoping we know it when we find it.