Let's Go See!

So you found a place you'd like to go and check out, you've contacted a few realtors, and now you're ready to go and take a look.  This is the fun part!  There are, however, some things to know before you go.

You've hopefully  been checking the internet, looking at properties online, and also having your realtor send you some listings that he/she thinks fits what you are looking for.  John and I spent many hours doing this,  and even though sometimes we'd get up from the computer cross-eyed, it was a great help and was also a lot of fun.  Eva, our realtor, sent us at least ten listings a week.  We'd go over them separately, then together, and totally eliminate some for one reason or another.  Here's a word of advice, the picture doesn't tell the true story all the time.  There were many properties that looked wonderful, and sounded even better, but when we went to see them, we found out the camera was taken from an angle that really didn't give the true picture.  You just have to go out to see them, and then experience will start helping you weed through some of the jargon.

We were looking for property, not a house. After many trips down to the area not finding something that "spoke" to us, Eva, now knowing exactly what we were looking for, wanted to take us to a property that had a house and two other buildings on it.  We were surprised when she first mentioned it, but she said, this property is exactly what you want, and the house is uninhabitable.  The owners bought it to flip, but didn't winterize it, so the pipes had burst and the entire house was damaged.  We agreed to go and take a look, and she was right!   It was exactly the property we had in mind, in fact it was even better than we thought we'd ever find!   But those buildings! It would add so much work, and money!  We let it go for awhile, and kept looking.  But I'm sure you can figure out what happened.  We never found anything to match that property.  More on this in future blogs.

Here, though, is my most helpful tip when you are going out to look at properties - (or even at houses), take your camera and a notebook!  Since the properties we were looking at were far and wide, we saw about three or four in a day.  We'd go for the weekend, so that meant we'd see about eight to twelve properties on a trip.  You think you can keep it all straight in your mind, I even wrote notes on the property sheets Eva had given us, but I quickly became aware that they all started to blend after we got home. Eventually, I even started writing down in my notebook the numbers of the pictures I was taking to go with each property.  It made our lives much easier later when John and I went over all that information when we got home.  You'll thank me later.

Till next time.