With so many homes on the market, many buyers house hunt for months, even years before finding “IT“. Here are five indicators that a particular property you’re viewing might be “IT” – the home on which you’ll want to place an offer:
1. You feel possessive about it, instantly. I once showed a less-than-fabulous home to a buyer who stepped in the front door, opened her eyes wide, and uttered “OMG.” Somehow this property made her instantly possessive. She didn’t just want it – she had to have “IT” immediately. If you walk through a place and leave wondering how quickly you can get your offer in, how much you’d offer to beat someone else out, or what you can do to lock it down quickly, it might be “IT.”
2. You start rationalizing its flaws away. Parkway noise? Next door neighbor with crazy yard decorations? If you find yourself viewing a home with traits that you would normally deem undesirable or as deal-killers, yet you like the place so much that you instinctively compile a mental list of reasons those traits just don’t matter, you might have found “IT.”
3. The bathroom and kitchen don’t disgust you. It is true that generally speaking, other people’s kitchens and bathrooms hold definite gross-out potential. There’s just something about what goes on in those rooms that seems exceptionally intimate and even unsanitary. So, if you happen to find yourself falling in love with a home’s serene master bathroom or drooling over the 6-burner stove, that’s a sign that you’re falling head over heels with a home that might just be “IT.”
4. You involuntarily envision your own family, furniture, decor, and daily activities here. They say, that the best staging helps prospective buyers envision their own idealized lives taking place in the staged home. But whether or not a property is staged, if you find your mind’s eye placing your family and furniture into the rooms, and your morning coffee or tea in the kitchen – or even start mentally removing walls entirely – it’s entirely possible that the home you’re in could be “IT” for you.
5. You lose interest in seeing other homes. I once took some buyers out for their first house tour in my area after they’d spent years looking for homes in a other areas, without finding “IT.” I’d planned to show them five homes, but when they got to the third property, they declared that they’d found their home, and they neither wanted nor needed to see any more. I insisted that they see the rest, to confirm their choice and to avoid feeling later that they hadn’t seen enough nearby homes to compare theirs to. They humored me and saw the last two places, then promptly bought house #3 and still live there, blissfully happy, to this day twenty years later. When you find “IT,” continuing the house hunt you may have obsessed over for months, even years, starts to seem silly, like a waste of the energy you could be using to move into your new home.
