Choosing Your Home

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Choosing your new home is not just buying a house

 

Choosing your home is not just buying a house. You are making a decision about your life style and quality of life for all time, or at least until your boss calls you into his/her office to outline your next great career opportunity.

 

Real Estate Agents are great at identifying five prospective homes. They are good at that, since they know the properties that have just come on the market, particularly those they have listed. But they are not as good at helping choose the right home. Their goal is to close the deal as quickly as possible, before other agents and other buyers get into action.

 

How to Choose Your Home. Don't feel forced into choosing your Agent's First Five! The time honored approach for choosing a home is to have the agent show you the five or so that seem to meet your requirements, and then you make the final decision by crossing the street, looking back and making the final 'curb-side' assessment and decision. But after you have seen five houses, and seen so many different floor plans, is there a way to quickly assess and compare the strengths and weaknesses of each house or home, and bring all family members into the decision? Yes there is, and here it is.

 

Two overarching objectives are key in choosing a home. Experience suggests that the two most important objectives in choosing a home are the Building itself and the surrounding Environment. Call these your overarching objectives. Your expectations, and those of your family, must be met for both of these objectives.

 

Let's take the Building first. Separate the most important attributes that you desire for the building into ‘Musts’ and ‘Wants’. The ‘Wants’ could be brick or stone on exterior walls, 4 bedrooms, two with an ensuite bathroom, 1˝ other bathrooms, 3 car garage, modern kitchen opening onto family room or lanai, full finished basement. OK, you are unlikely to find all of these in your price range. But you ‘Must’ have some of these; make a list of those.

 

How about the Environment? The ‘Wants’ might be a large fenced lot with great garden potential, close to schools and shopping, with a mass transit stop a few blocks away, lots of young children, sidewalks on both sides of street, great curb appeal. Again, identify the attributes that you Must have.

 

There will be a number of specific criteria that you will be able to define which will be the basis for measuring how well a specific house will contribute to achieving these two objectives. We can suggest nine criteria that will help you compare and choose your home:

 

 

 

The Building	The Deal	The Environment
Features	Price	Lot
Quality	Maintenance	Neighborhood
Upgradeability	Resale Value	Location

 

Use a check list to help you make the final decision. A check list and a plan for rating, ranking and comparing will allow you and all members of your family to evaluate how each house measures up to your expectations for your home.

 

Making it even easier, you can download and use the free "Choose A Home" evaluation demonstration tool from ProGrid Evaluation Solutions.
to download and try the demo. It's a simple tool that makes it easy to quickly compare different houses and make a confident decision, or avoid making a serious mistake.

 

The evaluation results will give you a grid that shows how well a house meets your overarching objectives, e.g. The Building and The Environment. If your evaluation of a house falls along the upper curve of the grid shown below (as does the red dot labeled '1'), your expectations have been largely met and you may well have a winning home! If your evaluation falls on the lower curve, the house has a number of serious faults and you might consider removing it from your list of prospective homes.

 

After evaluating and comparing the five or so potential homes that you are shown by your real estate agent, if none are close to the upper curve, walk away, have a good night's sleep, and try again tomorrow. You are making a life time investment, you should be confident that it satisfies your needs and objectives.

 

 

Sample Criteria for Choosing Your Home
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