T-Minus 313 Days: Search Existing Homes

 We locked ourselves away in a cabin in the woods, free from distraction, so we could focus on searching for Florida houses. We spent an entire day looking at existing homes.

Our Financial agent told us to look at existing houses instead of new builds because he believed we should be able to get more house for our money on an existing house. So, this is where we started.

One of our reale state agents has put our requirements into a home search database. The database sends us an email every day of the houses that match our criteria. At first, I thought our agent was actually sending these emails and I was impressed with how much effort she was putting into our search. But after noticing all of the emails were identical.... I caught on that this was all automated emails. She isn't doing any work at all.

Nevertheless, we had a large number of houses to look through. We know none of these houses will be available when we are ready to purchase in May or June 2021. The purpose of looking at existing houses was to see what kinds of houses are available in the different areas for different prices. 

We discarded most of the houses our agent sent us because they really didn't meet our criteria. After a lot of searching, we narrowed it down to two houses that met our criteria, both were in Davenport. 

Next, we continued to search the existing houses. My wife and I took two different approaches to the search. Her approach was a scatter-gun with no systematic approach. Her thought was "If we had to move right now, could I find our house?" 

My approach was to explore the different communities to see if there was a house design we liked. When a developer builds a community, they only have 5 or 6 designs that they put into the community. If I find one house that I like, there is a good chance there are other similar houses in that community. When we are ready to buy, we can start our search by looking at the communities that have house designs we like!

Unfortunately, searching existing houses was time consuming and NOT fruitful. Out of the hundreds upon hundreds of houses we looked at, we only found two that we liked ( Occoee, and Apopka).

    

Many of the houses had smaller bedrooms than what we have now. Some of the houses claimed to have more square footage than our current house, yet all the rooms were smaller (how is that possible?). In the end, we were fairly disappointed with this part of the search. Our criteria comes from spending many years renting houses in the area, so, we expected to find a lot of houses that met our criteria. The low number of matches was discouraging.

In conclusion: searching for an existing house while holding a lot of preconceptions for what you want is difficult. We keep telling ourselves: we are only going to live in this house for 5 or 10 years, we aren't making a life long decision. But even with that knowledge, it was difficult to find a house with the layout, features, and price that we wanted.