Have you been going from property to property just to come home tired, confused and without any real prospects in sight? Maybe you’re starting to feel a bit stressed that the process is taking so long that you may miss your window for good interest rate or even your set price budget? I’m here to ease your nerves and share my tips that will help you make most of your search!
If you followed tips from my previous post: ‘Process of buying a property: top 5 things to know’ you should be all good and ready to start your home search! So…what can you do to make your search seamless, productive, time efficient and stress free?
1. Pre-view Listings
Take your time in the comfort of your home to preview listings before setting showing appointments. Keep in mind pictures can be very deceiving. Especially when it comes to the size of the property, however things like total square footage, and individual room square footage will help to get better understanding of the actual home size. Pay attention to things like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, garage space, and other details that could easily be checked, making sure you’re not going to see places that don’t meet your bottom line requirements.
2. Eliminate listings
Once your very bottom line requirements are met, go through the chosen listings again and see if there is anything in them that you really don’t like. Things that you know you wouldn’t want to take time to fix… Eliminate those!
3. Set appointments
Set appointments for the listings that you’ve chosen, don’t be afraid to book 5 showings in one day. I would advise to keep it to a maximum of 5. More than 5 in one day can feel a bit overwhelming. If you have, say 15 chosen listings, make time to see them as soon as you can. That way if you’ll have couple that you like you hopefully should have time to revisit before offer presentation date to prioritize your choices.
4. Rate listings
Make sure you rate each listing you go to. Rate it by how the property felt to you, and by whether you could see yourself living there, and then make notes on different things that appealed to you, and different things that perhaps were a concern.
5. See properties again
You should be able to narrow couple of properties now and I would recommend seeing them again. Second visit usually reinforces the feeling whether you’ve chosen the right property.
Thank you.
Now that you have some tips on making the most of your showings you might find my next post very useful. I’ll talk about the process of making an offer on your chosen property!