We Bought a Home Sight Unseen (Here’s What We Learned)

When eager buyers snatched up our home just 24 hours after we listed it, we didn’t have the luxury of checking out open houses to find our next place.

“No. Absolutely not. Stop looking at those. Put your laptop away right now.”

This is how I talk to my husband, and I’m not proud of that. But having lived in three different houses during just six years of marriage, I was nervous to find him browsing real estate listings last summer. Can you blame me?

Our moves haven’t been around the block, either. From the booming (and baking) city of Austin, TX, to the bucolic and rural village of Sharon Springs, NY, to the New York City metro, we’d lugged our possessions across 2,000 miles of highways.

Our houses had been equally disparate in style: an eco-friendly house in Austin, a 160-year-old Italianate Victorian in upstate New York, and a glass box on a mountain in New Jersey with a view of the Empire State Building.

Now it was time to move again. While we’d enjoyed our adventures, our growing business and desire to be close to family pointed us in another direction: Nebraska. We got our New Jersey house prepared for sale, expecting it to spend a little time on the market. Instead, it sold within 24 hours. Oops.

House hunting from far away

Forced to act fast — with no time to fly to Omaha to view properties — we dug into home listings. We narrowed options down by budget and location, looked for houses that hadn’t been updated (as designers, we’d do that ourselves), and pored over each photo to pick out details.

I printed neighborhood maps and highlighted nearby restaurants and parks for our dog. We enlisted the help of my parents and hired a family friend as our real estate agent, sending them to tour houses on our behalf. Dad measured rooms while Mom toured the neighborhood. Any bit of information they could gather was invaluable.

I finally walked through the house the day before closing. Roger was in New Jersey finishing packing, and I had driven out in advance. In person, I could see where our homework prepared me — and what remained a surprise.

The view out the windows, the way light played through the hallways, the “aroma” of a long-clogged garbage disposal — some things simply weren’t captured by the photos we’d seen. The living room was smaller. The dining room was square rather than rectangular. The smelly, grimy kitchen, which had been a “sometime next spring” renovation project, immediately got bumped up to the top of the list.

All in all, we love our new home, and most of the surprises — from architectural details to friendly neighbors — have been pleasant ones.

Would I recommend buying a house without having seen it first? I think it’s doable with a little on-the-ground intelligence from people you trust. Will I do it again? Absolutely not. I’ve told Roger that we’re never moving again. And this time — fingers crossed — I think he agrees with me.

see original ad https://www.zillow.com/blog/buying-home-sight-unseen-219656/