One Square Mile, Then Zero in!

                Whenever people ask us about our triplex they always want to know how we found it. We actually just happen to come across this house while driving around one day. The house was in a row of three houses all for sale by the same real estate company. By this point we were working with a real estate agent so we gave him a call and had him look up one of the homes on the MLS that caught our eye.

                I wish I could say that this was all of the work that we did to find the house, because it really was just as simple as driving around and noticing a for sale sign stuck in the grass. But, you never know which method of finding is going to produce a diamond in the ruff, so it is important to use as many methods as possible. We used the following methods to find our house, and to speak truthfully my wife did pretty much all of the finding.

               

1.       We first narrowed our search to all of the real estate within one square mile, and tried to become the property experts in that area. This is an ongoing process because the market is always changing and new houses are being listed all the time.

2.       We drove around several neighborhoods looking for houses for sale

3.       My wife searched on Craigslist and other local online classifieds like ksl.com every day for about 6 months. Eventually we started seeing the same houses posted over and over again, but we looked through several hundreds of house listings.

4.       We visited properties with our realtor that he found for us and ones that we found online. But out of the hundreds my wife found online, we only visited about a dozen of them.

5.       One of my favorite things that we did was just walk around neighborhoods in the evenings. We noticed a lot more walking around like this than we did when driving. And it’s fun to just get out and take a stroll while admiring houses.

         I have no idea if these are the best ways to hunt for that perfect house, but these are the things that we did, and it seemed to work alright. If anyone knows of better ways (and I’m sure there are) to find real estate I would love to hear those ideas. We are always looking.