Last month I shared our goal to buy a house this year along with my tips on how to start looking for your dream home (you can read about it here) and this time I’m back with a status update on where we are in the process. I’ve partnered with realtor.com to showcase their app and website, which is something that I’ve been using for awhile before we connected up. It’s the most comprehensive and accurate information for home buying out there so it’s really a one-stop destination if you’re in the market for a house. I especially love to use it when I’m traveling, which has been a lot lately, to see what the market is like in other cities. You can never be too educated (or nosy 😉 ).
At this point in our home-buying journey, we aren’t quite sure where we are going to land. Paul finished school last year so we are technically not tied to living in Utah anymore, which is both freeing and perplexing because, well, what do we do now? Where do we go? As you know, I have dreams of living in the south of France, but it doesn’t really make much sense at this point (perhaps a winter home though…that makes a LOT of sense to me! 🙂 We could head west–I’m from Southern California–and I LOVE the East Coast, but there’s really no place we HAVE to be. Every time we travel to a new city we ask ourselves if it’s somewhere we could see ourselves and to be honest? I could see myself living in a lot of places, specifically a cute apartment in the West Village, a penthouse with a garden terrace on the Upper East Side, or place in the Hollywood Hills. I’m SUPER easy to please 😉
That said, Utah has been really kind to us since we moved here four years ago. While we’ve been here I’ve been able to move into a studio, expand offices and grow our team and it’s been going well and I’m so grateful. I’ve met a supportive community of fellow creatives and friends and life is good! I mean, it was never my dream to move back to Utah (I attended school here) and suburban life is not my ideal (I love the city!), but it’s been good–sometimes a little boring, but good!
So, where does that leave us? Looking in Utah! I guess…Ha! It sort of seems like the decision is always up in the air.
Whenever I live in a place, whether I’m there long term or not, I get really good at figuring out what houses I would settle in if I was to live there permanently. To be quite honest, I haven’t really figured out my ideal place here in Utah, so we set out on the hunt to familiarize ourselves even more.
With the realtor.com app we’ve been checking out our options nearly daily in order to see what types of places go on the market and their value. Sadly, it’s a seller’s market right now and I don’t know when that will end, but I love educating myself to know what the prices are like.
For now we’re researching what types of neighborhoods and features we prefer. We don’t have kids and don’t know if that’s something that will happen to us so we aren’t necessarily focused on school districts. To recap the things that are most important
- Character
- Ample space for our needs
- Natural light–I need light, light, light always!
- Good neighborhood–sometimes just being in a great neighborhood is all you need, right?!
- Price
- Garden space–I need a place for my dream rainbow garden. It’s going to be garden central!
And I’m happy to report that I now know that there are options that I’d be thrilled about and we took a tour around town to showcase some of the beauties. The realtor.com app is great for locating neighborhoods, especially because it has a great filtering system. It also provides in-depth home search features like the ability to find realtor property listing details including prices, sales history, property tax, school information, and more, also gives you the ability to easily contact an agent directly and schedule a viewing or attend an open house. In fact, we’ve attended a couple of open houses through the app and they’ve been so helpful in familiarizing ourselves with the process and connecting with the realtors.
The home-buying process can be discouraging, but I’m super glad to have something that’s on our side helping us in our hunt. I have my alerts on for a number of listings and because we aren’t in a rush, we have all the time in the world to find our dream scenario and when that time comes, we’ll be using realtor.com to help place an offer with confidence. Wish us luck!
Tell me your secrets for successful home-buying and WHERE you think is a good place to live. I’d love to hear them!
This post is sponsored by Realtor.com® but all thoughts and opinions are my own.
Photography by Anna Killian for The House That Lars Built
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