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There are a lot of things to think about in the home buying process. At times it can seem almost overwhelming.
There are so many homes to choose from and after looking at stacks of listing sheets and visiting 10 or 12 homes a day; they start to blend together and it is hard to remember what you saw or didn’t see and what you liked best of all the homes in the pile. The more you sort the more confused you can get. What do I want to see again, what do I want to eliminate. Top it all off you are scheduled to go to another bunch of homes tomorrow. It really can get confusing. Here is a little tool that might help.
Home Evaluation Sheet
Make a list of what you are looking for in a home. Divide the list into columns to make the process a little easier. What are the things you consider to be Must Have and what are the Wants. Here is an example:
How to use these sheets
- Download the empty Evaluation Sheet
- Make a list of Must Have
- Make a list of Wants
- Using Word or Wordpad fill in the form
- Save and Print out one sheet for every house
- Staple an Evaluation sheet to each listing sheet
- Check mark each item on the list in the house
- Total Must Haves and Wants
- Add them together for Total Score
- Check your notes and comments for additional thoughts
- Eliminate all the sheets that get a low score
- Assign numbers to those that remain #1, #2, etc.
- Try and keep these to 4 or 5 top picks
Each day you add new homes to the list do the same thing. Add that days picks to the top picks and check your scores and again weed out the lowest ones. Keep just the top picks.
This will help keep the task of narrowing down your selection from becoming overwhelming.
There are two forms One a PDF which you can download and print out. This one you have to fill in by hand.
The other is a DOC file which you can open in Word or in Wordpad. All windows computers come with a copy of Wordpad in the Accessories directory.
Fill it out. Save it and print as many copies as you will need.
Blank Home Evaluation Sheet PDF
Blank Home Evaluation Sheet Doc
Add Photos the The Process
If you are taking pictures of the homes you are visiting during the day; make it a habit to take the first picture of the homes address. At the end of the day you possibly will have more than 100 images. Taking a picture of the address makes it easier to associate pictures with listing sheets.
Final Suggestion for your evaluation
Keeping the pile small and the list short will help you weed out and eliminate the houses you really aren’t interested in making your next Tucson home.
It all starts by making that list of what you Must Have and what you Want. Discuss with everyone the items to go on the sheet and to which column they should be assigned. Take the time at each home to make your check marks, notes and comments. You will be surprised how quickly you can find these items and start adding up the scores.
The home evaluation sheet can take a lot of stress out of the process and provide you a good organizational tool to select your next Tucson home.
Dave – Great post. Hope you don’t mind if I borrow the form for my clients. I fondly refer to the blending of homes seen as cerebral-jello.
Doug,
Of course you can borrow the form. Hope you can get some use out of it.
Cerebral-jello, I like that, here in Tucson that’s probably stucco flavor.