Wendy and I got married on March 7th of this year and it was absolutely the best day of our lives! It was just a perfect day, with perfect weather, a perfectly planned wedding and one absolutely gorgeous bride who was foolish enough to actually go through with marrying an immature, fart joke loving, grocery store singing, spreadsheet making nerd like myself. The day could not have gone any better and the honeymoon the week after was he perfect extension to that. No, seriously, check out the pictures here.
A few weeks after the wedding, reality had begun to set in and Wendy and I decided that our beloved little puggle, Riley, needed a home of her own and that we should really start looking into buying our first home.
The timing of it all was working in our favor. Thanks to the ever-so-generous American government, Wendy and I as first time home buyers were entitled to $8,000 of your hard-earned cash. But only if we pick a house, get it under contract, find a lender and actually close on the house before December 1st. With 8 months left, we thought we'd have EONS of time to take care of all of that. Also, as you may have heard, house prices had taken a little bit of a dip recently and buying a house that we'd actually want to live in was slowly becoming an option for us. For a while there I didn't think buying a house was even going to be an option for another 5-10 years.
So we started out our search like most everyone else would and stumbled upon a few great websites, which turned out to be really helpful down the road. Sites like www.trulia.com, www.zillow.com and www.realtor.com were what we started out using to take a look at houses that we liked. Trulia and Zillow are a bit more helpful than Realtor.com since they will actually give you the address of the house you're looking at. But the best website, by far, that we found was actually linked from the Orlando Realtors Association website.
www.myfloridahomesmls.com
Bookmark it now. It is awesome. It is as close to real MLS that any normal person will have. It gives detailed maps with aerials, large photos, detailed descriptions of the house including room sizes AND it will actually show you houses in the neighborhood that have sold recently and what price they sold for. "Sale Comps" for those who know the lingo. They aren't always the most comparable of houses, but it at least gives you a good idea. Maybe this is just cool for me since I'm a real estate appraiser, I dunno, call me a nerd if you want.
Basically we scoured the internet for the first month, doing some research and determining what neighborhoods we wanted to live in and knew we could afford, what neighborhoods we wanted to live in and wished we could afford and deciding for sure neighborhoods that we did NOT want to live in, for any price. For us, we narrowed it down to Winter Park, Maitland and possibly downtownish near where we were living at the time. Our next step was to take a few looks at some Open Houses in those neighborhoods and maybe speak to a few Realtors in the process.
Im finally feeling sleepy! Woohoo! Time for me to call it a night. Check in next time for a few interesting Open House stories and possibly a chime in from the wife. Adios!
Allan
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