The Real Buyer's Guide · Section Eight
The hard part isn’t finding houses. It’s still being able to tell them apart after you’ve seen six, and not talking yourself into the wrong one because you’re tired of looking.
There isn’t a right number, but there are two wrong ones.
Too few and you’re guessing. If you buy the second house you ever walk into, you have no idea whether it was good value — you have nothing to compare it against, and neither does your gut. Seeing a handful of houses you won’t buy is how you calibrate.
Too many and you stop deciding. Past a certain point every house gets measured against a composite of the best features of all the others, which is a home that does not exist. If you’ve seen twenty and nothing qualifies, the problem is usually the budget or the list, not the inventory.
My rough guide: if you can’t articulate what was wrong with the last five, slow down. If you can, and it’s the same thing every time, go back to Section Six — you’ve found a real requirement, or a real budget problem.
Most buyers walk in and react. React second. First, do the boring things, because they’re the ones you can’t recover later from a photograph.
The seller styled the house for the photographs. The tap, the panel and the ceiling are the parts nobody stages.
I sit in on the photo shoots for my own listings, so this isn’t an accusation. It’s a description of the craft, and knowing it makes you a better looker.
Buyers see a house that’s been listed a long time and assume something is wrong with it. Usually something is wrong — but it’s almost always the price, not the house.
That distinction is worth money to you. A sound home that was priced optimistically in month one and has sat since is a very different opportunity from a cheap home nobody wants. The first is a negotiation. The second is a warning. Telling them apart is most of what I do on a showing.
Ask me for the price history, not just the days on market. A listing that has been reduced twice is telling you something specific about how the seller is feeling.
After the fourth house they merge. You will confidently remember the kitchen from one house and the yard from another as belonging to the same place, and then make a decision based on a home that doesn’t exist.
Fill this in before you leave the driveway, not that evening. Type into it on your phone — it saves on your own device.
The changeable-or-permanent column is the one that matters. Three houses scored 7 out of 10 look identical in your memory a week later. One of them had a dated kitchen and two of them backed onto a road, and that is not a tie.
If a house makes your shortlist, see it a second time, at a different hour of the day, and ideally on a different day of the week. It costs you an hour.
The second showing is where you stop being impressed and start noticing. Bring somebody who isn’t excited — a friend, a parent, anyone whose job is to say the unwelcome thing. And walk the neighbourhood on foot rather than driving it.
The third-house problem.
Somewhere around the third or fourth house, most buyers get tired — and a tired buyer starts arguing themselves into a house rather than about it. The tell is when you catch yourself explaining away something you’d have walked out over on day one.
If you hear yourself saying “we could probably live with the...” about something in your permanent column, stop for a week. The market will still be there, and so will your standards.
Speed is sometimes correct. It is correct when the house genuinely fits your permanents, you’ve seen enough others to know what fair looks like, and you’re fully pre-approved so an offer is credible — see Section Three.
It is not correct because someone told you there’s another offer coming. Urgency that arrives without evidence is a sales technique, and you should treat it as information about the person using it. Ask what the actual situation is. A straight answer is easy to give when it’s true.
Cecil Hawthorne, REALTOR® · Utah License #319617-SA00 · Sun Key Realty LLC · 801-870-6509 · cecil.hawthorne.realtor@gmail.com
General information about the home buying process, not legal, inspection or appraisal advice. Nothing observed on a showing substitutes for a licensed inspection. Nothing here is a representation about any particular property.