As I mentioned in the last post, it’s generally on the buyer to manage the whole house hunting process. Nowadays there’s a few real estate websites that show all the houses that are for sale so it’s pretty easy to see what’s available. It’s possible to call the seller’s agent and arrange and showing but open houses are far and away the way that most people check out house.
And what a way it is. Unlike in the States where a open house will last for a few hours, many real estate agents list multiple properties and will have multiple open houses every Sunday. This means that most open house are a half hour to 45 minutes tops. So every weekend you’ll go through and see which new properties have been listed during the week and figure out which open houses you can make on Sunday.
So for us, Sundays became open house sprint events where we would identify a few open houses we were interested in going to. It would be something like hit an open house at 12:30, run back to the car and drive a few blocks over to the next one at 1, rush over to one in the next town over at 1:45, and then squeeze in one last one 3. A lot of times you would see the same people over and over going to the same houses as you, and it wasn’t uncommon for two houses you were interested in to have open houses at the same 1/2 hour time slot. So you’d have to decide from the listing which one you liked more, and hope you could figure out a time to get to the one you couldn’t see later.
Overall it was a pretty exhausting process. The Wellington market was pretty nuts, so there were more than a few times when there was a queue to get in a house and there were a few where there were more than 60-70 groups through in a half hour. It didn’t make you feel good that you would be able to put in an offer that would beat out everyone else.
Next time – we make an offer (or 3 or 4).
Kiwi Bound 