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This is part II of a series on buying our first home. Part I dealt with the initial search for a broker and a property. Today I’ll take a look at the next phase of our search: this is when things started to get serious.

As winter started to fade and the weather got nicer and nicer, M and I decided that one reason we didn’t find anything to buy the year before was because we were dealing with our broker’s assistant instead of himself.

So we emailed him (email was the main communication channel throughout this whole process) that we wanted to go out with him personally and he said no problem.

Here’s how it worked: we told him what we didn’t want to compromise on (two bedrooms, central air, no garden units) and the area we wanted to be in (Lakeview/Lincoln Park). He would pick us up at our place and drive us around to a series of appointments he had made.

The Places

Let me get one thing out of the way first: our broker knows his shit. He’s been doing this for 17 years and he knows the developers, he knows the city, and he is good at what he does. No doubt about it.

The places we looked at all matched our “must have” list, but there was always something funky about them. Sometimes it was a weird floor plan or a cramped living space or a dank-smelling stairway.

But there was always something. This would keep happening at every place we visited until we got home one time and talked about whether or not we were being picky. Were we being stupid? Were we not taking advantage of the down market that Chicago real estate (and all US real estate, really) was going through?

Redfin’s Role

As time passed and we visited more and more places, the quality of units we visited started to fall. Maybe it was us or maybe it was the places, but we felt like we were getting further and further away from what we were looking for.

So we started looking online on our own: and this is where Redfin played a huge role. As soon as we discovered the site, the game changed. We would find properties we liked and we’d email them to our broker. He’d do a quick review of which ones sounded/looked good, and then he’s schedule the appointments, pick us up, and take us out to see them.

This made the whole process MUCH easier. It forced us to pre-screen each place and from that point on each place we saw was our fault if it didn’t meet our needs/wants. For more of a walkthrough on Redfin, check out my write up on Wisebread.

It gave us a jump start and made the whole process fun again. At that point, we had probably seen some 50 properties altogether.

But still we found nothing we’d want to buy—not even close.

Persistence

We went out with our broker time and time again and now that we were seeing pictures and details of the places before we physically visited them, things got better.

We felt like we were moving in the right direction.

In the meantime, the market kept getting worse (or better, depending on which side you were on). Prices and rates kept going down and the first-time home buyer’s credit loomed on the horizon—it would end at the end of the year.

This put even more urgency into our search.

At this point we had seen around 70 places and it just didn’t feel like we were going to find anything, which was an awful feeling. We felt bad about going to this many places without ever coming close to putting in an offer, especially since our broker was used to million-dollar homes and we felt like he was doing us a favor.

But we kept looking: it was addictive to go on Redfin and hunt for new places in new neighborhoods. At this point we were off the high rise idea and had moved on to anything that met our specs, as long as the location was close to the lake and in the neighborhood we wanted.

One bad thing that came of seeing this many places is we got a lot pickier: all of the sudden our list of must haves grew: washer/dryer in the unit, a separate dining area, top floor only, and parking.

After seeing so many different places that included one or the other of these details, we felt said to ourselves “Hey, that would be really nice to have. Let’s add it to the list.”

Which made us even picker and got us feeling like maybe we were being unrealistic. It was a tough time because we were all over the map: our price limits varied (fuzzy math is a powerful thing), our demands for being in certain neighborhoods fluctuated when we saw we could get more for our money further away from the lake, and we felt more and more confused about what we wanted.

We were lost.

But Wait, There’s Hope!

Then one day we got into our broker’s car and drove a block north of where we lived. M and I gave each other a look that said, “Well, we know we love the area.”

We walked up to the third floor (!) and checked out the three-bedroom (!!) place.

This was a place we could live in. This was more like it. Could it be that we had finally found a place we liked enough to put an offer in?

We’ll find out next week on the next episode of Buying a Home.

Check out Part III

Image by tukanuk

Other Posts You May Like:

• Looking for Real Estate to Buy
• Buying a Place: The One That Got Away
• Carnival of Money Stories #67
• Buying a Home Part IV: Closing Time
• Buying a Home Part III: Will it Ever End?