House Hunting is for suckers!

This is a note to all real estate agents the world over... GIVE US A PRICE RANGE!

Suzy and I commenced what promises to be a long and painful campaign to find a new house, today was more of a preview for us to get an idea of what sort of house we could get for the money we have, and where is best to look.

We saw 14 houses today, from the crap and noisy, to the beautifully presented and right through to the totally insane. The last is definitely worth a look if you are in the Leichhardt area, it defied description, and I can't believe the agent is seriously trying to sell it as anything more than a block of land with pile of bricks inconveniently stacked on top of it.

What drove me crazy about the whole process is that when you go looking on the various real estate websites, the sheer number of agents who don't give you a price range is staggering. Why in hell would I go to see a house without SOME indication of whether or not we can even hope to afford it?

Lesser offenses include a lack of pictures, or no floorplan. Those aren't deal breakers for me, but it just doesn't make sense for people to skimp on a few hundred dollars of advertising to try and sell something for more than half a million bucks. For gods sake you idiots, make an effort!

We will be going the whole hog when our place goes up on the market, floorplan, pictures and price range. We are planning on de-cluttering the house something fierce, move some of the furniture into storage and banish the fur-factory to his country estate.

When we bought this house, it had been on the market for a while and had been dropped in price twice I think. The only explaination I can think of was that the agent made no real effort to sell (when we saw it, he didn't even bother to tell us about the lock-up garage out the back!), it was crammed full of the renters crap and it had clearly been painted by a blind mental patient. People on the whole seem to be inable to see past a bit of mess to what the house itself is actually like, which worked out well for us because we got a townhouse that cleaned up a treat for about 40k less than we realistically should have paid.

Today was completely exhausting, but we found 3 or 4 houses out of that lot we saw which we really liked, and could have seen ourselves choosing if we were ready to make an offer on the place. We also saw plenty of dross for the same cash, but at least now we know that there are properties out there that we like, at a price we are willing to pay!