How to find your perfect house.

{A post by Joe}

Guess what this picture means?

Yes, you guessed it.  We're buying a house!

We have been in the same rental house for 80 months now.  When we arrived in 2007, we had a 1 year old Ian and a very small section of the moving company's semi-truck worth of furniture.  The half-duplex we've been in has been perfect!  We selected it very methodically by scoring it on a spreadsheet against other candidates using weighted sums.  Our selection criteria were much simpler then, but were comprehensive, nonetheless.

Here's a look into how we make all our major life decisions (including, but not limited to: housing, employment, children's names, and car purchases).  First, we pick categories that we think are important to us.  For our first rental for our first job, we picked the categories that we thought we would be able to appraise during that 3 day house-hunting trip two months before I was to start work.  You can see the categories below included things about the location (both town and neighborhood), and the house situation itself (interior and exterior features).

Then, based upon these key features, we gave an importance score on a scale from 1 to 10.  Interestingly, the things that were most important to us in 2007 were the categories of:

• Noise (we had been in an apartment with neighbors above and below us in Provo... we weren't willing to do that again!), 
• Laundry (we had a 1 year old, and required regular access to a fresh batch of clean onesies),
• Size (no use in moving to a place where you have no room to expand for a few years).

Then, we scored each of the houses that we looked at according to our perception on each of the categories.  It was important for us to be as fair as possible and would go back and look at the other housing scores in specific categories, and readjust as necessary.  This was the best part.  We could be just as choosy as we wanted, critical and complimentary.  HONEST.  For a baseline comparison, we added our Provo Apartment to the list.  One of our objectives is to always be moving up in the world... which is to say, if a house is not better (in general) than our last place, we should wait and see another one.  

To arrive at an overall score, I computed the weighted sum of each category of importance for each house's score (e.g. Paul's neighborhood contributed 8*5.5=44 to the score), then normalized by dividing by the maximum number of points possible to make it more like a percent (i.e. the number of points if the house got all 10s).  

The following table summarizes the results of  4 housing alternatives compared with our Provo Apartment, as available to us in 2007.

Category Importance Pauls Phyllis's Corey's Call's Provo Apt Neighborhood 8 5.5 7 9 6 7 Commute 6.5 9 8.5 4 8.5 9 Cost 8.5 9 8 6 6 9 Niceness/Quality 7.5 8.5 7 9 8 6 Ian-Compatible 8 9 7 3 9 9 Size 9 8 9 8.5 7 6 Yard 6.5 7 9 3 1 6 Luxuries 6.5 7 8 8 8 6 Guest Ease 3 6.5 8.5 8 3 5 Noise 10 5 9 9 8 1 Laundry 9 3 7 8 10 10 69.61 79.73 69.64 71.12 67.27

Here's what I see:  

• All of the options were an improvement over the Provo Apartment.  (which we loved, especially our neighbors)
• It's tough to beat a commute walking up the hill to campus.
• The house we ended up with had the most usable space and the best yard.
• Our current house was only the BEST in three categories (Size, Yard, Guest Ease), but was consistently favorable in the various scoring categories.
• We didn't go with the cheapest, or the nicest... but the one that was the best for us.

Through the careful methodology, we really found just the right place for us.  It's true.  Even better, we've fallen in love with many of the things that drew us to this house.  The culdesac, our basement, our forest and wildlife, our neighbors, Ian's school, the ease of access to work/Boston/shopping.  Even as our family grew and we had to get creative with furniture and space utilization in our half of the duplex, it was difficult to see that any alternative rental could meet our priorities the way this one has.  Many, many factors have gone into us knowing that things were lined up just right to put is this house for this period of our lives.

SO...back to the picture above.  Yes, we are moving.  Yes, it's nearby.  Yes, we'll give more details soon.  For the inner nerd in you, I present to you some of our analysis of the 7 houses we toured (with virtual tours, internet snooping, and drive-bys, it's possible to skip all the "junk" and go straight for candidates these days!)

Note here that our categories are more specific now, based on 10 years of marriage, a real estate agent who wanted to know exactly what we were looking for in a house, and a realization that we wouldn't be able to get everything on our list.  We tried to cluster the categories by must have, should have, and wish list, with a additional subjective categories at the top.  We ended up making offers on H Ave: 1936 (they scoffed), M St: 1920 (they countered almost the same as list), M Rd: 1989 (they competitively countered, we chickened out), and C St: 2009 (they countered, we counter-countered, then we re-offered their counter, because it's the house we really want!).  (Identities of the houses obscured to protect the innocent.)

There's SO Much to say about the house, but I've already gone long on this entry, so I'll leave it to you to consider the priorities we wanted for this house, how beautifully this house scores, and how giddy we are that we received a mortgage commitment letter this week for our first house!

More info to come.