Aron Pinto
How To Get the Most Out of Every Waterloo Region House Hunting Trip
The idea of searching for your perfect new home can be a very exciting one. However, the actual reality of Waterloo Region house hunting can be rather different. Rather than the enjoyable day out exploring new neighborhoods and enchanting homes, it can quickly become a stressful, confusing and exhausting process, especially for first time buyers who have never been through the house hunting process before.
There are, however, some things you can do to minimize those stresses though and make the whole experience a lot more useful and enjoyable:
Determine What You Will Not Accept in a Home
Many homebuyers insist that they will not know what their perfect new house looks like until they see it. This may indeed be true but wasting time and energy on viewing properties that never had a chance of matching your ideals is frustrating.
Almost everyone buying a home has certain things that they know for sure that they do not want and so decide what those things are before you begin looking at homes for sale and discuss them with your Realtor so that she is clear about them too and won’t show you properties that are never going to meet your expectations.
Take a Camera and a Notepad
If you see several homes in one day by the end of the day they can all begin to blur together, something that happens to even those who are on their third or fourth home purchase. To help you keep the different homes straight in your head, by all means, take photos, but make notes to go along with those photos too. They do not have to be complex, things like ‘house with green bathroom but great bedrooms’ should help you remember what did, and did not, impress you about each property you viewed.
Don’t Take on Too Much in One Day
Rome wasn’t built in a day and most people do not find a home in one either. House hunting is an adventure best undertaken in small doses, however keen you are. Lining up ten properties to see in one day is possible but at the end of that day you – and your Realtor – are likely to end up exhausted, grumpy and for your part, thoroughly sick of looking at other people’s homes and desperate to get back to your own.
Instead, accept the fact that house hunting is likely to be a process that takes more than a single weekend and have your Realtor schedule showings in such a way that you can spend plenty of time in each home and still have time for a bite to eat at lunchtime as well!