Pursuit of Happiness: Organizing

Once we had decided to look for a four-bedroom home in Marietta, we began our official house hunting process by meeting with a real estate agent. He hooked us up with his database (I also recommend Trulia and Zillow) and had us enter our long list of criteria into the search engine. Once we had 5-10 homes on our "like" list, he said he'd take us to see them.

I've had so many friends tell me that they looked at hundreds of homes when house hunting, but with our super picky specific criteria (and not many homes on the market due to poor sales), we didn't find many more than ten. As soon as we had nine on our list, we decided that we needed some sort of a ranking system to help us look at the homes objectively. Obviously, we made a spreadsheet.

We created columns of categories, then color-coded each category with green, yellow, or red (well, pink, because it's prettier) to convey the same thoughts as a traffic light would evoke: green was good, yellow meant to proceed with caution, and red was a red flag. We assigned one point to the reds, two to the yellows, and three to the greens. Each row was then tallied up. We were left with very clear rankings for our nine potential homes.

{Source for all: Trulia}

When we went to look at homes, we started with our number one, then went down the list. After seeing five in one day, our realtor told us that he thought three of the remaining four on our list would be too far out for us. We agreed that this would make our soon-to-be long commute worse, and nixed those three. We decided to go ahead and knock out the last house left on the list, rather than save it for another trip. After seeing six houses (and crossing three more off of our list), we sat down with our spreadsheet and narrowed it down to two.

We slept on it for a few nights, then discussed the pros and the cons of each house. It was interesting because we both seemed to play devil's advocate to the other's point, just to make sure every objection was covered. I suppose that's what I get for marrying an attorney! Eventually, we ran out of points to argue and a clear winner emerged.

Spoiler alert: We are under contract on that house! But first, the nitty gritty negotiations...stay tuned...

Anyone else have an awesome spreadsheet point system to help them make decisions?