How to Use Open Houses to Find the Right Home For You
Open Houses are used by sellers to get a lot of foot traffic and hopefully get an offer or two. For first time buyers, Open Houses are different – especially if you are not 100% sold on the home before you walk in the door. They are a great crash course in learning how to look at homes for sale. And if you’re coming into town from out-of-state, they are a great chance to see a lot of homes in a small time frame. Here’s how we tell our clients to use Open Houses to find the right home.
Get a Feel For the Neighborhood
For many first-time buyers, once they get their pre-approval letter from a mortgage banker, they typically go straight to Zillow and spend hours looking at house photos in their price range. Beware, Zillow often does not have the most up-to-date information and even has some fraudulent listings too from time to time, Drewkern.com and realtor.com are more accurate sites to search. While fun browsing the web, doing so doesn’t give you a feel for all the other aspects of a home – such as the neighborhood it’s in.
Spending a Saturday or Sunday going to open houses – even if you’re not 100% sold on the homes – gets you out and seeing the other side of things: How long is your commute going to be from that part of town? How close are family and friends? Is it too easy for your mother-in-law to ‘pop in?’ Are you going to be spending too long in your car (or not long enough)?
If you’re coming from out-of-state, a marathon of open houses gets you quickly up-to-speed on what daily life will be like – how close the grocery stores are, the schools, et cetera.
See How You’ll Live
This is specifically for first-time buyers. But when you’re looking at buying a home, you need to think about how you’re going to live in it. By looking at homes that you didn’t fall in love with on online, you start to look for reasons to say no instead of reasons to say yes – a key part of finding the perfect home.
You might see the living room as too small, or how laundry will always be in the way, and then you can start to envision your daily life. Say you eat out more than you cook in – that beautiful kitchen, while nice, all of a sudden isn’t a priority anymore. But if you take a lot of work calls at home, having a quiet space becomes really valuable.
Being able to look at a home with a discerning eye takes training, and seeing half a dozen or more open houses in a weekend will go a long way in getting you to build your deal-breaker list without having to live in a home you don’t love for a few years. If you’re looking to buy a home in Miami-Dade and are not sure where to start (or even if you are), we are here to help. Contact us to get started and we’ll show you around.
