Buying a House, Part 1
Simultaneously exciting and anticlimactic, we got our first house. Overall, this process has been frantic yet also relaxed and as of this post, we’re not done-done yet, I like to think that we’re on the final stretch: a perfect opportunity to sit back and collect some thoughts on the process so far.
Quick Links
First steps
I think there is an urge to start with a realtor and to jump into the ‘fun’ bits of looking at houses, but the ideal flow (IMO) is to start with all the boring (or scary) bits up front. For many of us, this is likely going to be one of the biggest purchases we make so above all, I would recommend interviewing all the people you’re going to be working with up front.
It’s important to understand how everyone gets paid and the best interest they represent - don’t be afraid to ask this! This is a factual question with a factual answer. If your candidate isn’t forthcoming, then it’s probably a good idea to move on to the next candidate.
In our specific case, there were four types of individuals to interact with:
Mortgage Broker: figure out what you can afford
Lawyer: once you finally get your offer accepted, you don’t get burned by a bad experience due to a bad-fit with a law firm; this is a good time to address any cross-border and divorce/widow gotchas
Accountant: figure out if there are any broad tax considerations to watch out for, particularly paying attention to cross-border considerations (i.e., in Canada, we can pull money from RRSP to contribute towards down payment - how does that impact foreign taxes?)
Realtor: Interview a few different candidates — this is the person you’re going to interact with the most during the ‘fun’ bits; make sure you find someone that’s on the ball and you work well with
How we found a place
1. Come up with a process to filter out listings
In an ideal world, you’d get a chance to see every home you think you like under identical conditions but that just isn’t practical or realistic: there’s just not enough time to zip around to every house you might think you like. Depending on how specific you are with your requirements, that could be a really big number! One more thing to consider is just how crazy the housing market is where you are (it’s nuts in Canada) - there is a limited number of hours in a day and many homes are just on the market for a couple of days so you’ll need to prioritize.
Before we started our house search, we were mostly expecting to get priced out of our region.
We get along great with our neighbors and the community and location is great but we don’t have a specific attachment to this region; we we’re looking for home that we liked, could afford and were a good fit. In the beginning, we had a bit of difficulty getting focused since we really didn’t care where we’d end up, so long as it was within 100km or so of my work (a 100km radius is huge).
Filtering a house listings is no different than filtering computer parts.
Every house listing is a collection of objective facts, subjective attributes and some degree of intangibles — just like computer parts.
Objective facts: # bedrooms, # bathrooms, garage size, availability of services ➞ what processor, what RAM, what amperage on 12V rail, how many M.2 slots? power phases?
Subjective attributes: layout of front foyer, layout of kitchen, flow of laundry, what type of fencing is available ➞ what color is the shroud? what’s the brand? RGB vs matte
Intangibles: is the house on a curve? busy street? lots of children? ➞ is there an extra power rail for stability? dual BIOS? BIOS reset button? how much DRAM cache?
Once I had this realization, it was super-easy to brute-force all of the listings in a 100km radius. We settled on the following flow:
Initial search. In Realtor.ca, you can save your searches and it even saves the ‘zoom level’ so you can scan and re-scan a consistent area again and again. I found viewing the results in the list rather than on a map made it super easy to brute force the results. In this initial search, you can broadly filter things like ‘price window’, what type of building you’re hoping for (detached, townhouse, apartment etc.) and possibly things like number of bedrooms and bathrooms. In my specific case, I set the budget to be a bit broader and specified the building type I was looking for (single-detached) and left everything else wide-open - the more results that come back the better.
Rough-filter. The first search you perform may return hundreds, maybe even thousands of results depending on how loose your filters are and how broad of an area you’re searching. Once you’ve processed all of the existing listings, you can reduce the background noise by only showing listings that are newer than a specific date. Even then, you can get dozens or hundreds of results. The rough filter allows you to very quickly reject a property without even opening the listing.
You want (or don’t want) a specific city
You want a specific feature that you can tell instantly from the initial photo: maybe you don’t want 1-car garages, or you want a covered porch or you specifically want an all-brick construction
Medium- & fine-filter. If a property makes it to this point, I’ll open the listing and start to fill out a row on a tracking spreadsheet. As I fill out the fields for this listing, either the property gets eliminated or it doesn’t. The medium filter handles attributes about the property (i.e., well-water? septic? gigabit?) and if the property makes it through that, then I perform a deeper dive on the available photos, scrutinizing the rooms that matter to me. It’s super important to know exactly what your must- and mustn’t-haves are.
Partner buy-in. If a property makes it this far, then I had my wife look at the property and add her comments (and/or reject) the property. If you are buying a property with someone, it’s crucial that all parties are onboard. Everyone needs veto power, even if it’s just “I can’t articulate why I don’t like it, I just don’t like it”. Everyone needs to be onboard!
Viewing. Hopefully you can get a viewing and then decide if you want to go down the road of making an offer!
Tip 1: Keep a running list of houses that made it past the rough-filter but were rejected and a very quick reason why you rejected it. We didn’t do this initially and we’d see the same property come up a couple times and wonder why the hell we didn’t add it to the list and waste time blasting through the listing only to realize that on picture 35, it showed a feature we didn’t like or something.
Tip 2: If you’re buying a house with a spouse, make sure you have the discussion of what your absolute max number is. For us, this was a number that, unless the house was an absolute miracle, we wouldn’t go a single penny over. It also has to be a number that, up to that number, there won’t be any resentment or complaints about.
2. Defining your criteria
For many (most?) people, homebuying is a pretty emotional process and while a ‘good fit’ is important, I think it’s important to be able to articulate why you like (or dislike) a specific property. It can be a bit of an eye opening journey as you articulate your specific must-have, would-be-nice and mustn’t-have features: I certainly found that I was a lot more particular about certain things than I initially thought I was. You don’t need to come up with this list all up front — I didn’t realize certain things until a few viewings into the search.
At this point, I guess it’s no longer a surprise to me anymore; just like with every other market segment, I am not a typical type of customer. Based on how homes are presented, the things most people seem to care about are practically worthless to me. This is doubly so in homes that are ‘professionally staged’ — I knew I was bothered by something about staged homes but I couldn’t put my finger on it. A friend of mine hit the nail on the head when he described staging as ‘how would you post this house on Instagram?’. Sigh. Won’t be able to unsee that.
I’m not the target audience for anything. Ever.
Rough-filter
The point of the rough-filter is to be able to eliminate a listing without even opening the listing details. One example is a specific city you don’t want to look in. Beyond this, how effective a rough-filter is depends on whether or not there are any tell-tale signs you can see from the main photo or not. In my case, there were a few cities I didn’t want to consider but the bulk of my rejections were based on the garage.
Garage. I need a garage of some sort for my workshop. I would make an exception if a property had a detached shed/barn/structure that I could work out of but barring that, 1-car garages were out. I would consider a 1.5-car garage if it hit a certain square-footage and/or had a specific compelling feature. For the most part, I was looking at 2-car garages
Always an exception: if the structure was a long/deep 1-car garage (typically something you’d only see as a freestanding, detached garage or barn/shed), I would consider it. But it’s needs to be a perfect fit.
Pre-filter: Medium
Properties that made it past the visual inspection needed to pass an attribute check to make sure that there weren’t any gotchas. Mostly, this involves loading the listing page, checking if the address qualifies for certain things and verifying information typically found directly in the listing. For us, any of these were an instant rejection:
Price sanity check: we have a specific budget window in mind and in some cases, our realtor steps in to let us know that a given property is going to blow well past it
Internet service: Must have a specific service from a specific provider
Septic Sewage or Well-Water. I’ve never directly experienced either, but my wife has, and specifically has experienced the negatives that go with it, so that was instant-rejection
Wood fireplace. We didn’t want the insurance hassle of a wood-burning fireplace and seriously, the 1700s called, they want their heating solution back
Garage space. If the floorplan was available, I’d figure out the square-footage of the garage
Commute range. Ironically, the software industry hasn’t really adopted remote work, so I will need to take into consideration the commute time
No pool. I don’t ‘water’ and pools are a huge maintenance hassle for something you can use for a fraction of the year; Nicole didn’t want a pool at all
Always an exception: there was a single property that had a [small] pool that made it past this filter (we even put an offer on it!). This was purely on the strength of the rest of the house
Fine-filter, deep-dive
Once the absolute criticals were met, then we can scrutinize the photos much more intensely. Sadly, the two rooms I care about are never really featured: the garage and basement (finished or otherwise).
One thing about listing photos though: so many photos are shot with crazy, almost-fisheye lenses and with fucky camera angles in an overly desperate attempt to make a specific space look bigger. Those are usually enough to spot but some photos are taken by photographers that seem to know what they are doing and are shot to intentionally minimize other aspects.
Shed. I’m okay if it doesn’t come with a shed (or comes with a small one) so long as there is space to build a suitable shed for us
Street location. A bit intangible and difficult to describe but I didn’t want to be backing into the driveway on a big street (since everyone drives bumper to bumper anyways); I also wanted to avoid curves in the road for a similar reason
Driveway. Primarily wanted a 2-car-wide driveway. It’s not a huge deal with park single-file, but if we can get side-by-side, then why not. Generally speaking, the 1.5-2 car garage ensures this is the case, although we did see a single property with a detached 2-car garage and a long single-file driveway
Laundry room. The laundry room is a big afterthought - make sure to pay attention to the flow of the machines and which direction the doors open
Fireplaces in general. So many properties had fireplaces, it was a little ridiculous; sure it’s nice to look at and sit by the fireplace, what, twice a year? No thanks. My bigger gripe though is that many fireplaces are placed front-and-center in a living/family room. Funny enough this is where people want to put TVs - so now you have a TV perched up 5-feet off the ground and everyone can watch a movie with broken necks. Bonus: there was a house that came through that had three (3!!!) fireplaces
Always an exception: in some cases, having a TV above the fireplace can work such as when there is a sight-line from a kitchen to the TV (if you like to have something to watch in the background while cooking)
The Kitchen
I like to cook and apparently, I’m quite particular about what I want in my kitchen. Thankfully, the kitchen is generally the single most glamorized room in a house — who knew everyone liked to cook so much? And then I remembered that kitchens are presented with a ‘what would Instagram do’ mindset. There are so many UX disasters
Sink should be by the window or have dedicated lighting — I can’t wash my stuff if I can’t see it
Bonus points if the sink (or a second sink!) is on an island; in many cases, this island will feature a breakfast bar (awesome!) — but if that’s the case, the breakfast bar needs to be raised to accommodate a backsplash on the island
If there is an island with a sink, the dishwasher should probably be on the island as well
In most cases dishwasher should not be next to a wall or corner
The range should not be against a wall - [1] can’t use large pans against the wall and [2] oh god the splatter on that poor wall. If there’s a backsplash on the wall directly adjacent, then, this may be acceptable. A similar idea applies to having the range directly next to a doorway - asking for an accident to happen
Points lost for having a microwave over the range. Not only will the hood performance be worse/limited, this generally means that if I rip the microwave out and put my own hood in (which I will) - then there hasn’t been any thought (from the builder) as to where to put the microwave
Points for a plumbed fridge: not so much that the fridge comes with a waterline — I can easily buy my own fridge, but more so that the plumbing is in place for it
Points for good lighting. Our current kitchen setup is horrendous for lighting
Points for a dining table space where the table does not block a patio door
Points for having smart cabinet solutions
Points for having sufficient outlets for all my countertop appliances, double points if they are on different circuits
Points for having a natural gas hookup outside (for a bbq). For the main kitchen, I prefer induction over gas (since there’s a long term plan to deploy solar panels) but both are acceptable to start
Is the fridge right up against a wall (meaning, you can’t open it)?
Bonus points if the microwave spot, if there is one, fits our microwave
I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate it but there is a specific flow and spacing of range + sink + dishwasher that works for me and a small variance that I find acceptable. There’s a lot of variance because the overall shape of a kitchen and whether or not there is an island (with, or without plumbing) changes things a lot. For example:
stove ➞ dishwasher ➞ ➞ sink is not acceptable
stove ➞ ➞ sink ➞ dishwasher is acceptable
If the last bit is a bit odd, assume for a moment, that the dishwasher is in the open position at all times — and if you’re going to be tripping over it during a cooking cycle, then it’s no good. Points are lost also if fancy acrobatics are needed to work between the stove and the sink (usually a problem if the sink is far away or directly behind the stove, on an island).
Obviously, you know you — these are just some requirements applicable to my style in a kitchen.
3. Viewings
Due to COVID-19, house viewings are limited to 30-minutes: we initially thought this would be challenging but we found that on average, we only needed 10-15 minutes to clear a house. Some of this is having a partner to divide-and-conquer with and some is knowing exactly you want or don’t want (most of the analysis has been done during the deep-dive through the photos). It’s really the fun bit: to get to go through a home and QA it. Generally by the time we get as far as a house viewing, we have a rough idea of what areas of the house we want to check, for me it’s all about checking UX:
Kitchen: open all of the fridge, dishwasher, cabinet doors — are there tight points, restrictions or being too close to walls (i.e. with a dishwasher in a corner, you’ll likely be bumping elbows into the side cabinets), are there cabinets that you can’t reach (common with U-shaped kitchens), run the hood fans to check for rattling
General: Where is the breaker box? Is it easy to get to?
Computer Room: where are the outlets? is there enough span for our desks
Garage: so apparently [a] people still smoke and [b] people smoke in the garage. Unfortunately, we rejected a few properties based on that. Make sure to check the height and if possible, the location of the water taps (ideally at the driveway end) and outlets (ideally all around)
Laundry: is there room for the washer/dryer doors to open? How well lit is it? Is there space to put stuff?
Basement: where is the breaker box, how much power do we have, how much room is there, where are the outlets
Sure, a lot of problems can be worked around and/or can be fixed or mitigated, but for spending this kind of money, I tend to be a bit more choosey. Here are some amusing things we saw:
Metrics
This is the fun bit (at least for me). I don’t know enough about real-estate or whether or not my filtering process represents ‘normal’ or not, but it’s certainly neat to look at some of the pretty charts that can come out of all this raw data!
26 viewings in less than 20 days
It took is a bit more time to get started than I originally thought but I think we had pretty good pace once we got started. Our awesome realtor was able to keep up with the rate we were processing houses and getting us booked into showings!
Candidate Houses and the Filtering Process
On paper we had about a 20% hit-rate with the houses we viewed but that number was slightly artificially low - if we include houses that had offer-date time conflicts (sharing a offer date with another property that we also liked) and some of the smoker-houses that were sufficiently aired out, our hit rate goes up to almost 40%.
Widening our search radius
I looked at the high starting prices for houses in our region as well as the meteoric pace of going over-asking from our local competition and then Toronto buyers coming in with absolutely massive budgets, and initially thought that we were ‘getting priced out of the region’.
While that may be true, now that we’ve seen a whole bunch of houses in a spread of distances, I’m not so sure I would apply that label. In the above chart, the houses we put offers on are bolded. I eventually took on the mentality that ‘so long as the house was within an acceptable commute distance, all houses were the same — I was there to buy the house, and not the location; location would be a bonus only’. (understandably, others may prioritize the location first i.e., schools, daycare etc.)
Breakdown of the house hunt
It’s super neat to see how much of a reduction each progressive stage in the search goes.
Google My Maps, putting comps into perspective
One important concept around bidding on a house is getting a feel for the pricing of similar houses in the area. I’m not going to begin to suggest that I have any expertise in coming up with a number to offer on a house but I can appreciate data and picturing it. Enter Google My Maps. My Maps allows you to create a map with custom markers that are grouped in layers that can be toggled on and off. In the past, I’ve used it to plan cross-border trips: plot out all the stores I want to visit and once I have an idea of where everything is relative to each other, I can figure out the order to visit them.
You can add custom labels for each data point — price, notable features, a link to the listing etc. and you can also make use of the standard Google Maps features like putting together directions or measuring a specific distance.
You can group your comps by layers and toggle them on and off as a group — this way if you’re looking at multiple properties in a single area, you can toggle entire groups of comps on and off at a time. For me, as a non-expert, it’s interesting to step back and look at the all of the comps in the area and try and figure out ‘what might explain this price’. Depending on the location, you can spot some additional intangible attributes such as being on the ‘correct’ side of train tracks so that you’re never affected by a train on the way to/from work or a neighborhood that has lots of different ways in and out of it from multiple main streets,
Retrospective
Things I hated
To sum it up simply, it’s the ‘Instagram factor’. More often than not, there is very little useful information shown in listings:
Hit and miss on floor plans. Floor plans are a start but there’s the entire factor of height too!
It’s super rare to get callouts in listings about insulation
Outlets. Outlets. Outlets. Everything in marketing apparently is terrified of outlets. Companies Photoshop cords off of products, stagers hide outlets behind vases. It’s ridiculous.
The need to angle everything in corners: angled microwaves, angled stand-mixers, angled knife-blocks. It all very jarring - I see the ‘nice’ kitchen and think “ok this person appreciates cooking” and then I see the angled microwave and think “ok this person is an idiot”
Things to keep in mind
House buying is an emotional process and it’s super easy to get lost in the details and let’s be honest: the professional stagers know they are doing. Staging a house is done because it generally works!
Don’t buy a house for appliances! I know of more than a few cases of purchasing decisions being swayed because one house had ‘stainless steel appliances’ and another didn’t. In my case, I already had very specific appliances in mind and there was next to no chance of any house we viewed to feature any of it. Just like computers, there is a certain amount of synergy the comes with appliances which means if you have $5-10K in a range, the whole kitchen is $25K+ and these kinds of houses don’t show up in our budget
For renovations, keep expectations realistic. It’s very tempting to think of saving money up front and doing a renovation but keep the following in mind
Cost of materials (specifically lumber) is stratospheric right now
Labor may cost more (and take significantly longer) due to pandemic limitations
Everyone and their grandmother is doing renovations so you may be booking a long way out
Renovations after the fact are out-of-pocket costs (you can build this into the mortgage but we don’t like that idea)
Even if you do it yourself, it’s still time you need to set aside (with work and family considerations)
There is a limit to what you can do with renos. Without delving into drastic, structural renovations (something I didn’t want to consider), you can’t really add new space where wasn’t working room to begin with
Things that made it easier
A flashlight. Unless you’re looking at huge properties with lots of land, a shorter-throw, floodier light will make your walkthrough so much easier. Dim basement? Can’t see under the stairs? Want to look under the deck? Scheduled a late evening viewing? Doesn’t matter anymore.
Measuring tape. We have a fairly large microwave (2.1cu-ft) so checking that it can fit into a space is important; also handy for checking the width of stairwells, width of refrigerator stalls, how far out fireplace mantles protrude, how much space you have in certain places to fit a TV
If you’re going in the winter, a thermal camera. Unfortunately, the weather was a bit warm during our visits so the thermal difference isn’t very clear
Once you’re more sure about a property, either a better camera or even something like a 360-camera. This way you snap everything
[Back to Top]Recommendations
This is our first house purchase and we’re not out of the woods yet, but our journey so far as been super smooth - I can’t say enough good things about the entire process. The single best part of this process has been working with our realtor, Keshia. This is our first home so everything is still a bit strange, new, exciting and scary.
Working with Keshia has been a wonderful experience. As with any specialized field, you work with a professional because you want expertise-driven guidance, recommendations and results. Keshia delivered on all fronts: during viewings, we could run-along and be tourists while she looked for (and found!) real problems with the house and when the time came to put in offers, we had a ton of confidence in the legwork she did to arrive at the numbers she did. Everything about our experience felt tailored specifically for us and our unique wants and needs. And what impressed me the most? She was able to do all this while keeping up with the intensity we were running at without breaking - most humans just don’t work well at that pace.
Keshia Williams, Realtor
As first time buyers, working with Keshia was the best possible choice we could have made: Keshia did the heavy lifting before, during and after viewings and supported us at every step along the way. Every interaction felt personalized, detailed and professional and we felt extremely confident every step of the way.
