Nancy and I haven’t house-hunted in over 20 years –
since I accepted a new job here in Columbus with Huntington National Bank, and
moved from northern Indiana. Now, as we
end the lengthy process of deciding to where our final move will be, we sometimes
reflect on how house hunting has changed in the past two decades, along with
the roles and duties of real estate agents.
For starters, the breadth of knowledge of RE agents,
and their attention to detail, seems much diminished. Perhaps the industry has seen too much
litigation based on agents’ recommendations of non-core services (house
inspections, etc.), or perhaps there is no longer a need to maintain knowledge
because the necessary information is widely researched on the internet. But, we have found it necessary to chase down
many suppliers ourselves, and be much more proactive in nagging agents to
perform a necessary action, than in any of our previous three house purchases.
On the positive side, researching and filtering the
plethora of available houses in a given locale is certainly much easier using
the internet instead of manually paging through MLS books in an agent’s
office. Here, we are surprised in the
vast difference in the usefulness of a given realtor’s web site. Some allow moderately sophisticated filters
based on distance from downtown, neighborhood type, or accessibility beyond the
standard filters of size, bedrooms, and price.
Other sites, however, employ few filters and force the viewer to look at
too many houses that are not appropriate.
Given the number of real estate site templates available for reasonable
prices, it is hard to understand why any realtor would tolerate such a
substandard approach.
Speaking of substandard approaches, the disparity in
the quality and usefulness of photos for different houses was astounding. While some gave a wide variety of views and
presented the house in a flattering light, others were obviously taken by an
amateur with a cell phone and showed few positive attributes. Again, why would any realtor allow such bad
photos to be used on their site?
As a result, I suspect that most buyers now
physically look at fewer houses than in the past. In our move to Columbus in 1993, I looked at
approximately 110 houses, and brought Nancy in to look at perhaps 30 of
those. In our pending move to
Hendersonville, we have looked intensively at only two houses, and only lightly
looked at about 15 because we needed to compromise on some important
attributes. It was quite a saving when
one is using one’s own time and money to look for housing 400 miles away.
Finally, the biggest change in house hunting might
well be the availability of Google Maps.
We physically drove to nearly twenty cities in our search and looked at
a smattering of houses in each. I cannot
tell you the number of times I have been driving down a street in a new town
and Nancy has told me what the next store will be, or what is around the next
corner. Thanks to Maps, it is almost as
if one need not ever be a stranger in a new town. A most impressive age
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