Buying a home can be a difficult thing. I know some people that have bought sight unseen. Some did everything in an extremely short time. So your personality and needs and $ will determine what is right for you. We were living overseas in Germany and knew we would be retiring in about 3 years so we started to get serious in our search. We relied on the Internet to do our searching. We looked in FL as that’s where we thought we wanted to be. Our daughter was living in Jacksonville at the time. She was able to go view many places for us that we thought might be possibilities - that was very helpful (no, mom and dad, you don’t want “that” place). We went to a realtor that summer when we were home. This was just when the collapse in the housing market was beginning. We found a place we really like and made an offer. They would not budge on price and we were out of time. Disappointed we returned to Germany and began again to search for homes. Getting out and actually looking at places had really helped us to see what we wanted or could live with and - most importantly - what our amount of money could buy. That knowledge really helped us in our search that next year. The realtor we found then was also very, very helpful. We started looking in south Georgia as the homes there were more traditional in style than those in FL - and the prices seemed better. We found a place on-line and our daughter did the leg work for us again. She met a great realtor and that next summer we came home to “see” if that place was right for us. We looked at many, many other houses but finally decided on the place we had seen on-line. At that time it was more of a buyers’ market and that definitely helped us on the price. I gave all that history to say… don’t get discouraged. If you know you’re going to be in a place for a good while (10, 15, 20 yrs.) and can take your time, do so. A good realtor is a blessing. Ours was wonderful and we are very satisfied. Two years is a little long but not too unusual. Hope this helps some.
We’re very happy with our agent so far. I think to avoid going on too many tangents here we will have to be much more specific than we are.
The guy is working hard to help us and I don’t want to waste our time or his.
We’re just getting started and just really getting to see what’s out there. Trying to be more open minded is really getting to be a disappointment.
There aren’t a lot of homes in our range that have decent sized bedrooms. A lot of the housing here is new which are either McMansions or two stories with dinky bedrooms. The houses we prefer in our area were built in the fifties.
I think we’ll just have to hang in there and hold out even if it takes a couple of years
It’s all great when you see a beautiful place in your range until you remember how much stuff everyone has and whip out the tape measure