Home Real Estate Looking - Even When You're NOT Selling/Buying

Parent Cafe
1

Raise your hand if you spend as much time searching Zillow or Realtor.com at homes as you do on CC - even when you’re not looking to buy/sell??

I LOVE home searching. I’ve entertained the idea of doing real estate - except I would probably hate the business/paperwork/legal side of it.

As soon as I see a house I’m intrigued about while I’m out and about I’m looking it up online. I’m not creeping on the FAMILY I’m creeping on the house and what it has to offer in layout, yard, etc. All so interesting to me!

We may entertain a move before too long - in town largely. So my looking has intensified as I key in on some new areas to live.

Anyone else have the real estate bug? Has looking ever prompted moving when you least expected it? Any realtors here? What are the pros and cons of your job?

2

I don’t spend as much time on Zillow as CC, but I do like looking at our area and my parents’ zip code. I’m enjoying seeing the value of our home rise as city-dwellers are escaping to Maine! We’re not planning on moving for a few years, but it’s fun to look.

3

Yes, I love to look online. When I’m out for a walk and I pass a For Sale sign, I look up the house when I get home. When I meet someone new, I often look up where they live and then look up their house. I’m a huge fan of house-stalking and I love looking at the photos and figuring out what I’d change if it were my house.

4

I do this ALL the time. I’m still getting automated listings from our old neighborhood in MA that we left in '99, and I’ve even started surfing listings in other countries to see how prices and lifestyles compare. I probably check out 20-30 houses a week. I had a blast a few months ago screening houses online with our son when he was looking. He’d FaceTime me and we’d sit at our respective computers and give each other addresses to look up in the area he was considering. Then, we’d go room by room discussing the pros and cons of each. That was probably the most fun I’ve had with him as an adult. The day he gave me that one address “I’d really like your opinion on mom,” I knew he’d found what he was looking for, and I totally agreed. It’s killing me that we haven’t been able to see it yet.

I’m not interested in being a realtor, but the reason I hunt is I’m never absolutely convinced that our current house is our final house even though we always think it is. We’ve moved around enough to know that it’s not hard to do, and if we should stumble on that “perfect” place, it’s not out of the question that we’d move. Right now, we’re eyeing northern New England again. I’ve got my virtual finger on a house in the Berkshires that is very close to a dear CC friend. Who knows?

5

Guilty here! I look at the local market as well as South Jersey waterfront communities all of the time. Won’t pull the trigger until D is finished with college. Mentally relaxing.

6

Guilty! When a house in the neighborhood with the same floor plan as ours went on the market, I looked at interior pictures and loved how they renovated the master bath and sent the owner an email asking for the name of her contractor (she was a realtor, selling her own house). I was afraid she would think I was creepy but she gave the info willingly and I have a gorgeous new bathroom ? I love getting decorating ideas and keep up on new trends that way.

Plus, my home is an investment so I look at real estate listings the same way I keep an eye on my stock portfolio!

7

Bingo!

8

Glad to know I’m not alone!

Outdoor spaces are really important to me so I’m especially interested to see what I CAN’T see from the front of a home!

Maybe I can create a job niche - not a real estate agent but a neutral party who goes along with couples when they are looking for a home and points out the pros/cons that they might not see! :wink: Like a sub-in parent!!!

9

I look at the online listing pix for the decorating ideas and am not that impressed. I used to look at the NYT ads and was baffled how folks could spend that much money on the dwelling and then either have next to no furniture or it was just blah. I’m better off with decorating magazines than the real life examples.

10

I have done it, I should start again as I have plenty of free time lately. My reason is I never got to house-hunt. I lived with my parents, then for a couple of months with DH in his sister’s basement, then this house was offered to him to live in as part of his new job. We bought it 5 years later. It’s great, and we have no plans to move, but it’s fun to look.

DD’17 likes houses. She has gotten a taste of getting to be in some of the nicer houses in her area by dog-sitting. She would be good at staging them. She says someday we’ll do real estate together. She would sell, her cousin would take the photos, and I would do the closings (I already do that as part of my current job).

I see now @abasket asked about doing it as a job. I’m not a realtor, I’m an accountant and paralegal and in Iowa many closings are done by lawyers. I don’t get to show the houses or make the sale, just do the paperwork. I work on the deed packet, type the title opinions (that’s an Iowa thing), gather all the numbers, assemble the closing statement, coordinate a time that works for everyone, deposit the money, disburse the checks, record the deed, etc.

When it all goes smoothly, I don’t mind it. When there are issues that make me wonder if it’s going to come together on time, I get so stressed. And when we have to deal with a big bank (Quicken Loans, Wells Fargo, etc.) it’s the worst. You work with a different person at every stage, sometimes your person disappears, communication is poor, the HUD-1 prep is confusing, it’s all so disjointed and impersonal. Then you get a huge packet of paperwork because they don’t meet with the borrower, so the attorney basically has to do the banker’s job in addition to his own. Versus working with a local bank, they take care of all their own expenses and paperwork, and send the buyer to our office with a check.

So there you have it on the paperwork end, yes it can be a pain but paperwork is kind of my thing so it’s pretty satisfying when it all comes together.

11

Guilty! I love looking for our next home. We will probably down-size in the next five years or so. This big house is expensive to maintain. The problem is that we don’t have any idea where we would move! I look near our siblings, our out of state kiddos, our parents, old friends…
One of my siblings recently moved to another part of the state, so I spent an entire afternoon looking at listings in that town. It always amazes me what some realtors will post online in the photos. Even if the property is occupied by renters who won’t pick up their mess, the agent could at least close the lid to the toilet before snapping the picture!

12

Yeah, I could never be a realtor because I just don’t have the business skills and motivation to be a SELLER. But I do love the hunt!

I like decorating magazines too (though I never seem to make time for magazines anymore) but honestly while I can get ideas that way, I probably can’t afford to replicate - where as real homes that real people are living - that is reachable.

13

I’ll never forget a feature of Metropolitan Home that I devoured in the 80s. The magazine showed on two facing pages two rooms that looked almost identical, but the left page was was $$$$$ while the duplicate look was $$. The accompanying article described how to achieve a palace look on a cottage budget. For example, the expensive room had museum-quality art, accessories, fabric, etc. while the same colors, shapes, and patterns were executed on the opposite side with reasonably-priced substitutes. The vase on the mantle on the left was Ming, on the right, a flea-market find of similar shape and color. If you had never seen the left page, you’d still be wowed by the right.

That lesson has stayed with me. I always (only?) look at properties and magazine spreads way beyond my budget because I know that I can usually duplicate what I like about them at reasonable cost. You can achieve a look without copying every detail. Whenever I want to re-do a room, I start with professional pictures of the look I want to achieve and back into it based on what I can afford.

14

I am a zillow/realtor/local RE site addict. I check listings nearly every day for one town, and at least weekly for several others. We’ve owned a dozen houses, and I’ve seen most of them online years later when a subsequent owner listed them.

The owner of one former home went bankrupt a few years ago and the house was a wreck. No updates had been made in nearly 20 years and the appliances had been removed. For us it had been such a nice home and we hated to leave it when H was transferred. Seeing most RE listings of former homes have been fun. I’ve often thought how nice it would have been if we’d had the funds to make the improvements that others made after us. One backyard makeover was amazing with its outdoor kitchen, terraced lawn and gorgeous pool.

I enjoy seeing different decorating styles and am curious about what’s the norm for house sizes and prices in different parts of the country.

15

I’m another one in the RE surfing club, although not consistently. As we’re thinking about relocating for retirement, it’s fun to see what’s available in various places.

16

I’m another Zillow/RE addict. I love looking at different homes in the area, as well as in different locations we might want to retire once our kids are through college. Its fun to plan and get ideas.

17

We had a few years between deciding to move cross country, and being ready to do it. I had contacted a Realtor at the start, and took time every day for about three years to check out the listings anywhere close to our price range. So I really really knew our market. After we bought, I kept checking for about two more years to make sure we shouldn’t have waited.

I made online friends on CC with someone you all know and love. On her own, she decided to go see in person every home we were looking at in our target area (her own home turf). So we not only had the Realtor’s view, we also had a very knowledgeable second opinion of value, potential, neighborhood, etc. not to mention what kind of fixes could and should be done! This was priceless since we were house hunting from 2000 miles away. We didn’t see the house in person until we were in escrow. I am still grateful.

Then for a couple more years, I kept checking the listings to suggest flips to her just for fun.

Sometimes after walks, I’ll look up the listings for houses along the way. And glamorous houses bought or sold by famous people that show up in local real estate news.

18

Example of the houses I might look up:

https://www.estately.com/listings/info/17111-el-vuelo–2

19

I do! I have an active search for homes in NYC (Manhattan specifically), Maui, HI, Portland, OR & Long Beach, CA on realtor.com, which sends me new (and many stale) listings daily. I happen to be interested in those areas, and have little to no interest in purchasing. I do enjoy going through the listings.

My 2 best friends that I travel to Maui with have both asked me to let them know if anything super comes up in Maui as we may have a desire to buy in together - for us that would be no less than 2 bed/2 bath with enough space for us to be together if we were to do that, and potentially use as a vacation rental.

20

“Maybe I can create a job niche - not a real estate agent but a neutral party who goes along with couples when they are looking for a home and points out the pros/cons that they might not see! ;)”

Done that recently. Our younger friends were looking for a house, and in our crazy market, it was impossible to make an offer contingent on any inspection. Plus, you only had 30 minutes to check the inside of any house (‘cause Covid!). We went along with them to three homes; we knew quite well want to look for and were armed with tools and a ladder! They did win the bidding war on one of these houses…

I still check Redfin for homes in the area where they looked. Some look a bit less dated… None come with a 1/3 of an acre, usable lots!