Buying A Home
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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.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
How many houses did you see before you found "the one"?
I apologize if this has been asked before.
DH and I are going to see our first two houses this Wednesday and I'm really excited- learning so much from you gals! 
Re: How many houses did you see before you found "the one"?
Saw 4 the first week and bid on 2, one the offer was declined next day and higher offer accepted (we offered $2K more than listed price) and the other one offer got accepted (offered $3,102 more than listed price) but issue was a) inspection showed so many issues and seller wouldn't do repairs and b) was short sale, waited 2 months for bank to approve and they came back with counter offer for more money from us and less seller-paid closing costs so we decided to back out.
The next house we saw was the one, we offered $100 more than listed price and got accepted in 5 days. I highly recommend looking at houses where you're making offer to seller/owner, not bank for foreclosed houses because you get into bid war since listed prices are usually low and several people are bidding (I personally don't care to be in bid war) and short sales take months - make sure it's really approved already by bank before getting inspections done and wasting time and $, good luck!
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First. I love your boston.
We were looking in a very specific area so we had very few options for homes.
We would find a house we were interested in and do a drive by at night to check the neighborhood (and because it was winter and got dark at 5pm.) This helped narrow down about 6 or 8 houses.
We actually went with our realtor to 3 homes and went to 4 others open houses.
We went to under 10 open houses and our realtor showed us prob under 20 or so. We had a day that we saw 4 in a row and that's nice to just knock them out. H and I looked online together a lot esp him - he loved looking around for what we could afford in the neighborhoods we wanted to look at. Just be prepared because for some people it takes a long time to fall in love and other people get lucky and find one right away.
ellahella- Thanks!! So do I! x)
Thank you so much for all your responses! I love how they vary- it comforts me to know that its OK if we are searching for months or happen upon something lucky. I'm kind of hoping we find something by xmas though- it would be awesome to spend it in our new house! hehe Just a thought!
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It can definitely happen. We were searching last August until October, were engaged at the end of October and got really serious about house hunting. We found a house early November, put an offer in that day, waited for the homeowners to get back from a week vacation and still managed to close a week before Christmas, though we were moving in right up til Christmas Eve! Good luck!
We spent 18 months looking for a house and saw at least 60 houses (maybe closer to 100. After a while, they all just blur together). We had failed contracts on 3 houses, and finally closed on deal #4. It was worth the wait, heartache, disappointment, and frustration to get our home. It's everything we never even dared to dream of.
Our process took a long time because we were looking in a high priced housing market filled with newer homes (average sale price is $650-700k) with a modest budget (under $500k) during a time when there are very few sellers because house values have dropped and many of the newer construction homes were built during the boom and are now worth less than what the owners could sell for. We basically had to wait for new options to come on the market, and then hope that we could close the deal. We cancelled deal #1 based on inspection results, deal #2 became null & void when the sellers did not fulfill their end of the short sale process paperwork, deal #3 failed when the seller's bank just stoipped responding during active negotiations and the contract expired, and deal #4 was the winner.
On deal #4 we paid over asking price and had no closing cost assistance because we were in a multiple offer situation. The sellers had already turned down 2 offers and there was another couple that was preparing their offer, and the house had only been on the market for a week. In our area houses that are in decent condition and priced appropriately will sell within a week for full price or more because they are so rare. FWIW, I just did a redfin search, and there is currently 1 house for sale in the entire county that would have met our standards (in west county, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 1+ acre, not a split level or a rancher)
We saw about 25-30 houses within about a month. It was very stressful because it was starting to feel like we weren't going to find a house that we loved. We decided to raise our price range just a little bit and the first one we looked at after that ended up being "the one". Good Luck!
We looked at about 7-8 total, which kind of shocked me. I'm definitely a see-all-my-options kind of person, so I figured it would be much more - but when we walked into our house (the 2nd one we saw) it just FELT right. We loved pretty much everything about it, and after that I started comparing the rest of the houses we saw to the house we ended up buying. I just felt like if I was to work with a builder, pick out everything, etc. it would have been very similar to what we ended up buying. We put in an offer and ended up negotiating all the way to a sale =]
I think it just depends on where you are looking (IE, the more populated the area, the more options you'll have) and what your budget is.
Good luck!