House Hunting
To say our house hunting experience has been a roller coaster would be quite the understatement. In case you haven’t seen through my stories over the past months, Chris and I have been looking to buy our first house since we moved back to Southern California last year… which means we’re going on 8+ months of searching now. Add COVID-19 to the mix and it’s really been a crazy time.
Where we’re at now
When we moved back down, we decided to move in with my parents in Long Beach to A) give ourselves the time and flexibility to search, and B) save up a bit more money while we started to shop around. As nice as it would be to have our own place, I’m not mad that we’re saving on rent and not stuck in any long term lease - I’m actually extremely grateful for it.
We weren’t in a major rush when we moved down considering it was right before the holidays and knew it would be a crazy time in general. Once December passed, however, we quickly realized what an ordeal the whole house hunting process is.
The process
We spent January, February and March constantly watching Zillow and Redfin, checking daily MLS searches sent by our realtor and visiting an endless amount of open houses. At first we were only looking for turnkey, ready-to-move-in houses but quickly expanded our search to include older/”fixer upper” homes in neighborhoods that we started focusing in on. At the end of the day, we have been looking at such a variety of houses.
Once COVID hit and regular open houses were no longer a thing, it felt like we spent every weekend driving around to “explore” different neighborhoods and scheduling 1:1 viewings of all the potential houses we could find (including masks, gloves and foot coverings, of course).
It felt like it took awhile to find a house we both liked enough to make an offer on, and that’s when we quickly realized the search is only the half of it!
When we finally fell in love with a house and made our first offer, we hardly had an idea of what to expect. Unfortunately, many other buyers felt the same way about the property as we did and we ended up being outbid in the end. Trying not to be too discouraged about losing on our first offer, we continued searching but couldn’t help comparing everything back to that first property we made the bid on.
Eventually, we found another property that peaked our interest so we made an offer and again, outbid. Obviously I’m joking here, but it started to feel like shampoo instructions: Lather, rinse, repeat. See a house, make an offer/lose the bid, repeat.
The house fatigue became real. As much as I didn’t want to give up on searching (and potentially miss our future home come on the market!), I just got so over it. And I know Chris did too - he didn’t want to talk about any new listings that would come up and I really didn't blame him.
All of that to say, it’s the end of June/start of July and we’re still out here house hunting. We’re doing our best to stay positive, stay patient and be optimistic that whatever house is meant for us, will find its way to us (hopefully sooner rather than later!).
If you’ve read this far, thanks for following along! I’m sure I’ll continue to give sneak peeks of our search on IG stories and will hopefully have another blog post with an update in the near future… but for now, it’s back to Zillow and the MLS!
