We suspect if you are like most buyers, you have been tinkering around on your favorite real estate search website, zooming in and out of the real estate photos and have laid your eyeballs on a few homes you are now excessively drooling over. Before you enter into a steamy romance that could result in a bad breakup the minute you walk through the front door, we suggest implementing one extra step into your home buying process. Have you ever Google Mapped your potential home address. Yes, we said Google Mapped! Take your new dreamy address and paste it into Google Map and zoomed in further with either Google Aerial or Google Satellite views or walked down the actual street using Google Street Map views.
Why would we suggest these extra steps?
We understand that buying a home is quite an emotional process and want your love affair to last long after you walk through the front door, but honestly we want you to not waste time trekking through houses you have no intention of ever wanting.
The last thing we want to see is a client arriving at the home they were super excited about, then discovering the listing agent omitted a few key facts about the property or its location during their marketing efforts. We have seen this dozens of times and know it is totally buzz kill souring the home buying experience. The property could appear online one way, but when seeing the property in person the home could back to a neighborhood roadway, a major thoroughfare or the home could back up to or align neighborhood amenities such as tennis courts, pools or playgrounds. While being within close proximity to these neighborhood perks could be awesome try to imagine yourself enjoying a quiet evening at home or your wee one is trying to catch a snooze and it seems like the entire neighborhood is having a gigantic birthday at the next door. While you would hope your neighbors would be respectful, that isn’t always the case as these neighborhood amenities are offered allowing others to enjoy themselves without your approval.
These are just a few of the reasons we suggest taking a few moments after crafting your list of homes you’ve fallen in love with and making sure that there isn’t going to be negative impact down the road whether it be a residential or commercial hinderance. Sadly, any deal killer information is not likely to not be displayed in the listing detail or the real estate photos and always often is discovered when a potential buyer arrives onsite. So this is why we highly recommend completing a little more due diligence before hiking from property to property and walking away feeling let down.