House Hunting Picking Up Steam For Us

Well, my wife and I have started to spending more time looking for our new home. This has kind of been on hold since we were overseas, but our housing circumstancs are changing so that we need to find a new place to live as close to our return date timeframe (December) as possible.

My wife and I have been purusing the MLS listings on and off over the past 6 months trying to get a feel for what houses are going for in our area (Raleigh, NC) and what we are really looking for. We have previously talked about what we were looking for in our home, but by studying the listing out there we can get a pretty good idea of what it might cost us and where we would have to go to find it.

We have settled on an area to focus our search. It's a bit further away from my work location, but that helps us get the lot size we are looking for in our price range. We are currently focused on the $250,000-$300,000 price range, and don't yet feel comfortable paying more than $300,000 for our house. $250,000 would be my preferred price, but we won't be able to get what we are looking for at that price.

Starting a House Tracking Spreadsheet
Once we fine tuned our requirements we started tracking all the houses that fit that criteria - 2200-3000sq ft, .3-2acres lot size, 3bedrooms+bonus, at least 2.5 baths, wooded lot, 2 car garage. Any properties that we come across that match our criteria we log in our spreadsheet so we can track price reduction, final sales price, and compare to other properties we find.

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