Determining Your Must-Haves When Buying a Home
As we stood under the cathedral ceiling looking over the stone-tiled patio, we could hear the owner and his son playing their XBox in one of the bedrooms. It was penned off from the rest of the house so that Cujo wouldn't get loose.
I thought the top-level townhome was in pristine condition considering they had a Cujo, until I peered into the room and saw a tiny 10-pound pug sitting attentively in front of the television!
There were network connections wired into every room, and this being Silicon Valley, we asked the owner if it was standard CAT-5 or CAT-5e. The gentleman, in his decidedly French accent, said with a bit of sheepishness, "You know, I'm not sure." (He was a little redfaced because we'd talked about his job at Cisco.)
So I asked whether he had a wireless network and his face lit up. He hopped over to the storage closet in the entryway and eagerly showed off the router, neatly and carefully wired into the connectivity panel. He didn't check for CAT-5e because he didn't need it.
The network drops were a "nice-to-have" for my client who does a lot with multimedia. They weren't a dealmaker (and as he discovered not a dealbreaker) but given that this was the first home he'd seen as a potential buyer, he was eager to get some experience looking at houses under his belt so that he could really experience firsthand what his requirements feel like.
In the back of people's minds, most people start off with a list of requirements that I rank order informally using the "MoSCoW" method:
- Must: What they know they want
- Should: What they think they want
- Could: What they don't have strong feelings about
- Won't: What they don't want
For any number of reasons, what people say they want doesn't always line up with what they really want in their minds and hearts.
A lot of times that's because of the difference between theory and application: being able to actually drive the commute or experience how many flights of stairs there are gives people a clearer picture of "could" vs. "won't".
The tricky part is separating the borderline "must-haves" from the "shoulds." And with my client in the early stages of his home search, we needed to setup a stable foundation so that we'd learn those differences from every property he would see on the rest of his search.
Mar.22.2007 [ Filed under: Home Buyers, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Mateo, Foster City, Real Estate Stories ] 1 Comment »
After all, it had everything he wanted: from an outdoor, ground-floor patio for his barbecue to the connected living and dining areas he could use as a large home theater (60" plasma), plus it was within walking distance of his favorite places in the Bay Area and was in his price range even with competitive bidding. 
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