Determine Your Priorities

Once you’ve determined how much you can afford to spend on a home and found the right agent to help you through the process, you should start to talk to your agent about what your ideal home looks like. During this time, you should consider:

• Location: Which neighborhoods would you prefer to live in?
• Type: Would you like a single-family house, multifamily house, townhouse, condo, etc.?
• Lot: How much land, if any, are you looking for?
• Size: What is your ideal square footage?
• Bedrooms and bathrooms: How many bedrooms do you require? Does every bedroom need its own bathroom?
• Age and condition: Are you willing to do work on the home?

Although your real estate agent will send you listings after you’ve discussed your needs, it’s useful to do a search yourself prior to this conversation. By conducting your own search, you’ll be able to get a sense of what’s available on the market.

You won’t have access to your local Multiple Listing Service, which provides your agent with a full list of all homes currently on the market. However, you can browse homes listed on various websites online, which will allow you to see the many homes on the market and filter the results by price, location, type, square footage, rooms and year built.

As you begin to look at listings, you’ll most likely notice that your perfect home is not available on the market or in your budget. That’s to be expected – after all, it is your ideal home. That’s why it’s vital that you figure out what your priorities are now before you get deeper into your house search.

Determining your priorities really means that you need to decide what you’re willing to sacrifice. Start by asking yourself: Which aspects of a home do I absolutely need and which would I prefer to have?

For example, if you have three children, is it necessary for all of them to have their own bedrooms, or is it more important that the house is close to the best schools?

Finding the best home is all about the give and take, so make sure you know what you’re willing to give up and what’s absolutely necessary to take.