Introduction by MaryEllen Tribby
Shopping for Homes: Easier, Faster, Cheaper |
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When it was time for my husband and me to buy our first home in 1996, I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.
We determined the town we wanted to live in by:
- Using the Internet to research schools in the areas we were interested in, and then visiting the ones that looked promising.
- Researching the neighborhood amenities of our target areas. This meant scouring the Internet for parks, shopping, cultural opportunities, and restaurants.
- Driving around the various towns.
- Speaking to friends about what they liked in those towns.
Once we determined the town we wanted to live in, it was time to focus on a specific community. We did this by:
- Going online and plugging in the zip code of each community, along with criteria for the kind of house we wanted.
- Watching local television advertisements for new homes.
- Listening to the radio to find out about local events in the various neighborhoods.
It wasn’t until we’d narrowed down our search to three neighborhoods that I even called a real estate agent. And I found her by:
- Asking friends and colleagues for referrals (word of mouth).
- Researching online to find out which agents had sold the most homes in the communities I was interested in. (I figured they knew those neighborhoods inside and out.)
- Reading the local newspaper.
After selecting Barb as our agent, we worked with her to draw up a list of homes we might want to see. From that, Barb got a good sense of our expectations. After doing some of her own research, she narrowed down our list to several options. We were able to view all of them online. With two of them, we took “virtual” tours.
Exactly 19 days after we started our research, we made an offer on our home.
For my parents and my husband and me, buying a home was the biggest, most important purchase of our lives. It took my parents 11 months. My husband and I did it in less than three weeks.
The ultimate outcome was same. We found a dream house in which we could raise our families. But the channels we took to get there were entirely different.
Since my husband and I started house hunting at the beginning of the Internet Age, we were able to take a multi-channel approach to making our life-changing purchase.
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