Touring Your Top Choices

The driving tour enables you to explore the various neighborhoods and communities and get a general sense of where you'd like to live. Touring the inside of homes helps you narrow your preferences about size, style, and amenities - and helps you determine exactly what you like or don't like.  It's possible you could find your dream home in the first day or two of your search, but it may well take a lot longer. Our goal in touring is to help you refine your thinking by giving you some very concrete things to think about, and by talking through these options with you as we're visiting the homes. We recommend that we begin by selecting the top 10 homes on your list from your driving tour. We'll then go through these properties together in one 3-4 hour session. This means that we usually spend only about 15 to 20 minutes in each home during this initial phase, but that's usually plenty to give you a feel for the range of options that are available to you.  After each stop, we'll ask you to compare what you've seen and tell us which one you like best so far.  That will help us further determine what things you are finding appealing and what things you don't care for.

Assuming that you won't find your dream home in these first few days, we then begin a more focused search process. We will continue to check for new listings in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS - the Realtor® database of homes for sale) at least once a day. We will also monitor properties that are being sold by owner and new construction being offered by builders. We will e-mail or fax the information on these new properties to you as it becomes available. If something looks especially attractive because of price or because of an especially close fit with your requirements, we will follow up the fax or email with a phone call. If a property looks like it is really on the mark, we will try to get out and look at it with you the day it hits the market if possible.  We want to avoid having that "perfect" property being scooped up by another buyer before you have a chance to see it. Finally, if we locate a neighborhood (or a condominium complex) that you have your heart set on, we may decide to mail to the owners of properties in that neighborhood to see if we can find someone who is thinking of selling a property that might fit your needs. In other words, we will work hard to follow every available avenue that might lead to your new home.