House Hunt Fun

House hunting. What a chore. What a window into possibilities. What an inefficient use of time. What a way to learn the neighbourhood.

We never really decided to buy a new house; we just started looking at houses to “get an idea” of the market and suddenly were seriously putting on offers, whilst deciding which agents to sell our house through. I think many homebuyers are drawn in into the process.

Many a weekend we spent driving from one house to another, dragging along our three-year-old daughter. At times, it was a struggle as inspection times overlapped – we developed a great knowledge of local short cuts trying to minimise the drive time so we wouldn’t miss out on the next inspection. And we all got very good at taking a few bites of food between properties, as most open houses are conducted between 11:00 am and 2:30pm and that’s a long time between meals for a pregnant woman!

It’s a lovely mental challenge to spend that much time with real estate agents. It’s like learning a new language. “We’ve got a few offers in the works” really means a few people said it was nice; “great views” indicates that you’ll need them as a distraction from the house; “add your own touches” means the previous owners had extremely bad taste and the décor shows it; “it’ll sell today/this weekend” translates as “ please put an offer in now!” And then there are their estimates of selling price …

Viewing so many houses each week also boosts your social life. Each house viewed means at least a few minutes chatting with the agent; making chit chat and avoiding any commitment whilst gaining as much information as possible. Both sides are playing a mind game and it is rather stimulating to always watch your words and responses. The agents are always friendly and try getting to know the real you.

After a weekend of looking for the perfect house, you end up with a collection of lovely glossy pictures. We have thought of continuing to collect them so we can wallpaper our study with them. Of course, we don’t keep the ones of the houses we really wanted but missed at the last minute – we only want positive feelings in our study.

We’ve had our new house for just over a year now, and we showing withdrawal signs from the house hunting lifestyle. In fact, we have seen two houses in the last week …

Tash Hughes is a Mum of two in Melbourne. She is also a writer and owner of Word Constructions. Tash is available to write articles and profiles for any business, as well as doing other business documentation projects. You can see her site and services at www.wordconstructions.com