Adventures in Moving: Chapter 1 - The house search parameters

I'm going to talk about the various elements of our house search to help make some sense of all of this before I talk about the houses themselves.

Since it's such a buyer's market we had a lot of houses to look at, in various shapes and sizes and in various conditions.

I was already schooled in house hunting from back in 1995 and knew the things to watch for/avoid/lust after.

Examples of things to avoid:

• House near commercially zoned land.
  
• House on busy street.
  
• Land sloping towards house.
  
• Undeveloped land bordering house (could turn into a Kwikee Mart or a Sewage Disposal Facility).
  
• House near power lines.
  
• House in bad school district.
  
• Basement shows signs of flooding .
• Yards so small that you can reach from your back deck into neighbors fridge and grab beer (and it's a brand you don't like, to add insult to injury).
  
• Ancient Indian burial ground on premises.
  
• Necronomicon found in basement sitting next to dusty tape recorder.
  
• Mogwais frolicking in backyard next to Chupacabra.
  
• Giant swastika pattern etched into landscape that can only be seen from the air.

Examples of things to lust for:

• House in excellent school district.
  
• Street in cul-de-sac.
  
• Low traffic street.
  
• Far away from power lines.
  
• Close to main roads.
  
• Hooters within walking distance.
• Yards have some kind of foliage to give privacy from other yards and look nice
  

And now the house itself.

My wife was concerned with the main interior..how many bedrooms, bathrooms, all that stuff. I was concerned about that stuff too, of course. But we divvied things up, divide and conquer. My number one priority was to scout out the basements and the backyards. Keeping not only our needs in mind but the needs of our two boys.

Often times we came up with different opinions based on what we saw .. a great backyard but a crappy house, a crappy basement but a great upstairs... awesome house, dangerous backyard or no backyard. The trick was to find a house where all the components were acceptable.

But wait, there's more.

There's the financial status of the owner in regards to the house to consider as well. We not only looked at houses that were being lived in but also houses that had been vacated for various reasons. Abandonment, foreclosure, job relocation, or the people simply owned two houses and were living in the other one. Depending on this variable.. things could be smooth or tricky. A great deal, no deal, a long drawn out negotiation, an instant sale.

To add to the fun some of the houses were foreclosed, others were short sale. Foreclosed means the bank owned it and kicked the ex-owners out. Sometimes the ex-owners trashed/looted the place on their way out. "Short Sale" means the owner owed more on the house than it was worth and tried to talk the bank into reducing how much he/she owed if he/she sold the house for a lower price. The owners other option at this point is to lose the house and declare bankruptcy and then the bank is saddled with the house. I guess the gist of this one is, the bank was willing to take a moderate loss if they could unload the house and no longer be owed money by the owner. Less work for the bank.

We couldn't afford to wait, we only had a month to find a new place. So "short sale" houses were out.. those deals can take many many moons to work through. One of the simpler reasons for this is.. the sheer volume of people trying for a short sale to unload their house. Stacks of short sale requests sit on overworked bank employees desks.. waiting to be looked at as time permits. And thats only after the owner figures out how to file the correct paperwork to the correct person. UG!

So we were armed with a battle plan and knew our individual duties. And off we went! With our real estate agent, who was a great person but desperately needed a GPS but didn't have one..

next blog: backyards.