Searching for a House, the Online Edition

Alright fellow House Hunters and blog-readers, we talked a little bit about my 5 Must Haves earlier this week and I promised a conversation about the MLS. The MLS (or Multiple Listing System) is a tool that Realtor's use to list their client's homes, and search for homes for their buyers. If you're not a Realtor you would use various websites and services such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The danger of all of the sites is that they don't update regularly. They update about as often as your grandmother updates her facebook account. Or maybe as often as mine. You could have a very socially active grandmother, who am I to judge?

Zillow has, on multiple occasions, shown me a house for sale that I loved, only for me to find out that the listing was sold or withdrawn entire months before I even saw the home! I try to keep up with the various apps and services so that I can better understand what my potential clients are seeing, but sometimes I get sad.

Now, down to MLS. The wife and I decided to actually start taking one night a week to look at local listings. We have our "must haves" and we know where we would, optimally, like to live. We have a general idea what we want the bones of our home to be and that we don't want to have a crawlspace because snakes live down there. So when I went to input our search parameters I was relatively sure my search would be limited, with not a lot of options out there, right? Wrong. Even thought the current Real Estate landscape is definitely in the favor of the Seller, there are a lot of properties out there, they're just not all...perfect. Or you know...good.

I had to narrow and narrow my search, almost nitpicking the homes I didn't like. "Well, this one is facing north so, mildew might grow on it and there's a chance I could see Jesus' face growing in there and I don't want all the added attention... and this one is neon-purple in places it shouldn't be and who paints anymore?" I know, I know exactly what you're thinking, is there any place where neon-purple shouldn't be?

Didn't get enough club at the club? Well we brought the club to your room. Now you can club, even when you get home from the club.

You're welcome.

The reality is that the wife and I have been taught, through years of hard education, plopped down in front of DIY TV, specifically: Property Brothers and Rehab Addict...to look past the paint and current decoration or even layout. But at some point, you (the buyer) have to remember that, looking past the paint, the carpet, the kitchen, etc...it can get expensive surprisingly fast. If you find a home that's listed for 30K under what you're okay with spending then, yes, look past everything! If you have room to remodel and redesign then you should! Make your new home truly yours (well, if you have the time, desire and know how to actually do the work.)

But, let's say your price-ceiling is 200K and you find a home that you feel needs a lot of immediate work, listed for, let's say, 190K...unless you manage to get your lower offer accepted, you may end up living in a house you don't love...and a general fact of life is: if you don't do it (whatever it is) when you first think about it, then you probably won't. There's a good chance that if you buy a home with "plans to remodel in the future" that you'll just end up living in a house you don't like talking to your friends about how this kitchen is so getting redone next year.

So we've begun to narrow down our search even further. We're okay with purchasing a home that needs small amounts of work that I can actually do on my own, or is affordable to have done (say carpeting one or two rooms.) We're okay with problems that are mainly decor based, although after seeing pictures of about four homes with male, graphically, intensely-nude statues in the front yard and one home with what I'm pretty sure was a mounted jackalope on the wall, I understand why my clients sometimes have issues looking past what they see immediately.

Elmer Fudd's unicorn.

Since we aren't actively ready to buy quite yet, we also eliminated any houses that had just the one picture--of the front of the house. To me that says two things:

1) There is a good chance that this house isn't real, it's like Clint Eastwood real--a prop house that may or may not have been the background for a shootout or two. You know, the kind of place where you can walk in the front door, right into the backyard.

2) Or, entirely more likely: this is a horribly lazy Realtor (or the property is Bank Owned, or both.)

Many of the photos we saw on our first day of searching were like this:

Admittedly this would be fine for a hardware store, or a tile show, but this leaves out important information like...where is it? What does the rest of the bathroom (I hope it's a bathroom) look like?

Sweet! A curtain! Even if the Seller did decide to leave this precious gem behind for me to treasure forever, and possibly ever...I hope the Realtor knows that I can, in fact, buy a new shower curtain.

Buy the end of our first night of actually looking for a home I'd found as many ways to not be lazy as a Realtor or crazy as a home decorator as I had actual houses I was interested in. (And we found quite a few homes we were interested in.)

If you have any funny house hunting experiences or things you've seen that can't be unseen, hit me up in the comments below, or on facebook!