Real estate is one of the most significant purchases you’ll make in your lifetime. And that isn’t just because of all those zeroes on the price tag. Real estate is one of those rare purchases that you’ll have to live with every day, an investment into your ongoing happiness, convenience, entertainment, and future prospects.
Therefore, you can’t approach homebuying the same way as, say, you’d approach purchasing a new TV. You have to be unwaveringly methodical; you have to do loads of research; you need solid representation to guide your considerations; and you need to be brutally honest about your priorities.
The whole process starts with narrowing the field. In this article, let’s review the all-important first step in home hunting: finding your ideal neighbourhood.
“Get Your Priorities Straight”
“Get your priorities straight” isn’t just sage advice for someone acting ridiculous. It’s also a fantastic guiding principle for the homebuying process. Essentially, you need to be clear and concise about what matters to you. In a notebook or online document, list your priorities and criteria. Here are a few examples:
- Proximity to work/low commute time
- Ample parks and green space for activity
- A hopping nightlife scene
- Great neighbourhood schools for your future (or present) kids
- Transit score/a lack of car dependency
- Cafes, restaurants and businesses geared toward young professionals, etc.
Once you have a shortlist of your must-have criteria, you can rank them according to personal importance. This document will serve as a roadmap as you start brainstorming potential neighbourhoods with your realtor.
Research, Research, Research
This is probably a good time to tout the benefits of a quality real estate agent. Agents wear many hats during a real estate transaction, but one of their most important roles is leveraging their experience to find you the right neighbourhood and home. The best realtors, like the ones at Harvey Kalles Real Estate, bring to bear years of local experience to matchmake you with the perfect neighbourhood. Use their expertise.
In specific, pick their brains about researching various aspects of your prospective neighbourhoods. There are several angles and metrics by which to approach the research process, but here are a few key considerations to start with:
- Demographics (e.g., is the neighbourhood predominantly young families or retirees?)
- The quality of nearby schools
- The crime rates
- The presence of green spaces like parks, reserves, community gardens, etc.
- The proximity of amenities like grocery stores, pharmacies, post offices, etc.
- The general tenor of the residents (which you can discern via online forums, communities and social media groups).
Throughout this research process, you are vetting neighbourhoods to determine if they neatly align with the criteria and priorities you established in the first step. Your “winner” will be the neighbourhood that ticks the most boxes.
Touring, Talking, Wining and Dining
There’s only so much you can glean about a neighbourhood from government statistics, forum cross-talk, and walking that little yellow man on Google Maps street view (his name is “pegman,” by the way). At a certain point, you’ll have to get out in the streets.
Once you’ve narrowed your search to two or three viable neighbourhoods, take a weekend to visit them. You don’t need a magnifying glass to find cracks in the pavement or a clipboard to solicit local residents about their opinions on the neighbourhood; this is an exploratory trip.
Go for coffee at a local café. Dine at a neighbourhood establishment. Kick your feet up on a park bench and take in the view. Watch the residents interact with one another. Basically, get a feel for what it might be like to live there.
Keep an Eye Out for the Future
As you narrow your search to specific areas, the last thing to consider is its future potential. Are there any planned developments that might alter the makeup (and price) of the neighbourhood? Can you find any public projects or improvement plans in the works? And what’s the market tone of the area – do realtors use words like “hip” or “trendy” in their listings?
Your realtor can help you with this part of the process. Great realtors tend to know which way the wind is blowing before most people, and can point you in the direction of an up-and-coming neighbourhood with healthy future prospects.
While some home hunters focus solely on the structure itself, it pays to consider the neighbourhood as well. After all, it’s where you’ll be spending much of your time once you make the big move. Working with the best realtor in your area, follow the above four processes to narrow your search and find the ideal location.
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