Shotgun Home Buying

As you probably already know, I'm a planner... And somewhat obsessive about trying to spend conservatively...  It took me a whole year to figure out what kinda of car to buy, and I researched the most financially sound way to do it till I was blue in the face.  This fact probably made the dealership salesman nervous, as I like to ask questions to see what his answer was, then tell him he was wrong and give him the actual answer!  Not because I was trying to be rude or show off, but I have an innate lack of trust in salesmen, so I like to make sure he knows what he's talking about before I believe he's got my best interests as a priority!  The process of buying a home, to me, is no different, just on a bigger scale!  Or so I thought...

In finding a place to rent, I spent two weekends up here.  One to look at the area and figure out the right neighborhoods, the other to look at specific places, then I signed a lease.  To me, that was fast!  One of the summers that I interned at Goddard, I did come up here to start work without a place to rent, which terrified me, but it was only a summer internship, so not as big of a deal.  I don't think I could handle a big move to somewhere without having a place to live yet, as one of my best friends recently did!

My plan was to have a good 6 months to settle in, get to know the area, and find a home.  When I bought in Atlanta, it was a 2-3 month long process where I looked at a dozen places, evaluated them, figured out the best, and picked one!  They were all still there weeks later, I had plenty of time.  I was going to do the same here...  Except DC's housing market is radically different.  Things sell so quickly around here, that you have to do what I've termed "Shotgun Home Buying"!

Basically, it goes like this:

1. Obsessively check the internet for new properties, spending hours pouring over sites like Trulia, Zillow, and Realtor.com
2. Set up email alerts that spam you every 10 minutes with updates so that your real email gets drowned by housing emails
3. After looking at the same 10 listings that have what you want and fit your price range repeatedly so that you know them by heart, discover a brand new listing that you think you might like
4. Email the listing to your realtor.  When he doesn't answer in two minutes, text it to him.  When he still hasn't answered five minutes later, call him.  Repeat until you get his attention
5. Go look at the listing as soon as humanly possible, no later than tomorrow morning
6. If you like it, don't think, just put in an offer ASAP, as the deadline for offers is probably the next morning.  If you like more than one, pick one and make an offer, forget the others, they'll be gone by the time you find out if your offer won
7. Sit tensely the next day at work and wait to hear back about how many other offers they received, figuring it was probably many, so start step 1 again
8. In the off chance that your offer was the accepted one, jump up and down with joy, because you just bought a house and you're done with this whole ridiculous process!  On the other hand, if you were beat out by 7 other offers, continue not doing the work you're supposed to be doing and getting paid for by starting over again at step 1

So yeah, that's pretty much been how it's gone for the past month since I started looking.  Most listings I like are on the market 5 days or less before they sell.  I submitted an offer on one home I like, figured I'd go just above list and make a statement to have a better chance of getting it, only to find out they got 7 offers, and the winning one was probably close to $50,000 above list price!  I'm pretty sure last week I spent at least half of every workday trying to buy a house rather than working...

But in the end, the gut wrenching roller coaster of non-planning will pay off.  Eventually, you find the right house, at a semi-reasonable price (Oh, add step 5.5 in there, seriously re-evaluate what you think a reasonable price for a home is, because you're wrong!).  Then you'll have found your dream home and only have minor panic attacks when you go to bed at night about whether or not you're going to like the home or are spending too much or picked the right neighborhood or can make the mortgage payments or have just made a huge mistake because you didn't have time to think about it...  Don't worry, it'll all work out in the end!