House Hunting Struggles

Whew, we didn’t realize that we were going to have issues with buying a house. I mean, according to HGTV, there are tons of options and you can go look at them all, debate them, lowball them and then get the house. Not on James Island in Charleston. We’ve been officially searching for a home since January 1st. You read that we decided we wanted to buy a “for now” home versus our “forever” home. We’ve been looking at a lot of homes and we’re definitely having some house hunting struggles due to the low inventory market going on here right now.

If there is a house listed on James Island, we’ve seen it online. I think we’ve gone through and looked at every photo for every home within a reasonable price range on all of James Island. We have the housing market memorized. When a house pops up, Morgan has seen it within 15 minutes and we’ve made a judgment on it within half an hour. In that time, we email our realtor and he’ll set up a showing if we’re interested.

We’ve gone to actually see around 15 houses. Of those, we’ve put one offer in. It was the perfect house. It had the amount of rooms we wanted, the right square footage, the right amount of work that needed to be done, the right size yard and the right price. We were the first people to see the house and put in an unofficial offer that night before finalizing it the next day. Problem is, the couple that walked in while we were finishing up our showing put an official offer in before they left the house and the seller went with them. We quickly learned our lesson (that was only our second week of looking!) and now are ready to write an official offer pretty much on the spot.

That’s just one of our house hunting struggles. We have been the first people to see a house several times on houses that have gotten offers that night. It’s insane. You have zero time to think about it before you have to make a move. All these houses in our price bracket move so quickly. When you’re trying to be as picky as we are, it doesn’t leave much time to consider the features of a house or debate the value.

So we put the offer on that one house and have liked a few others. For one reason or another, they weren’t quite right. See, we’re in a situation where we live in a beautiful condo and aren’t being rushed out because we own it. So we kind of feel like we can be a little picky and can wait for houses that are perfect. We’ve definitely seen everything that has been right on paper, but they weren’t quite right in person so we haven’t put an offer in. We’ve been trying to decide lately if we need to change our expectations. I mean, in one sense, we’re seeing things that are almost right and we don’t have to rush. On the other side, are we being too picky about exactly what we’re looking for?

It’s going to be interesting in the next few weeks and months. Morgan is incessantly refreshing all the realtor sites every five minutes, so hopefully we’ll see something soon, but it also makes it seem like it’s taking a long time since things aren’t constantly popping up. Oh well, guess we’ll see what happens.

Any advice for first time home buyers on finding your house?