I think you need a reality check. If you were buying a few years okay you could definitely do the whole "dream house" thing. These days, though, it just doesn't work like that. There's very little inventory and you have to act very quickly and aggressively to have any chance of buying. So, I'd suggest not holding on to some elusive "I'll know when it feels right" ideal and instead come up with a list of must haves. If a house meets all of your must haves, act on it. You'll learn to love it.

I knew by looking at the photos online. We sent the realtor to take some video (we live overseas) and put an offer in. There are still some changes I want to make, but I can see our family living there and enjoying ourselves, so that was a big reason for me to move forward.

I instantly loved the layout of our house. Much more open and spacious than anything we had seen in our area/price range. The downside - it needs A LOT of updating. But it was priced accordingly. When we bought we knew it needed cosmetic work, but we have since discovered some additional electrical etc we will need to do. I still love it though! We had to move very quickly to get it and it was down to the wire convincing DH.

This is not to say I haven't had moments of, what have we gotten ourselves into? Every time we find a new problem, I momentarily reevaluate our purchase. But I come back to how much I love this house pretty quickly.

Anonymous wrote:I knew it was the right house when I saw the photo on Redfin, in all its resplendent decrepitude. We had looked for more than a year, and bid and lost for houses that were in our desired location but for which I had not felt anything in particular.

Persuading DH to bid on it took 6 months, though! It was a cute (to me) 1920s white Dutch colonial with an ugly concrete parking in front instead of a proper yard (the owner had not lived in it, but just used it as a convenient parking near downtown Bethesda). Now it's well on its way to becoming a garden again, and we painted the door robin's egg blue.

I think it was the crooked roof corner that did it. Structurally there's nothing wrong with it, but it gives the house a charming personality. For me, of course.

Crazy, I know. Most people want new construction.

We also bought a dump..ahem I mean treasure.. in our desired location. We knew the price was fair and the location was perfect.

Op, the location is the one thing you cannot change about a house - get that right and you have a huge margin of error on everything else.

I just went through this and for some of the homes, I was 'talking myself into it' which I saw as a red flag Then, I walked into this house that I almost said let's not see and immediately LOVED it. I thought if the upstairs is half as good as the first floor, then it's mine and the upstairs was even better than the first floor.

But, I'm a person that can see beyond stained carpeting, cluttered closets and ugly shutters. But, just like you know when you're in labor, know with your wedding gown, you know with your home!

Be patient but as soon as you get the feeling, do it. Even though we bought just outside the DC region, homes are going quickly.

Let's see- we were out-bid on three houses, so when the 4th place accepted our offer, we said, SCORE! This is THE one!

(On a more serious note, we had a check-list of musts and a check-list of things that would be nice but aren't necessary. We saw dozens upon dozens of houses, including the three we had previously bid on, obviously, and then we compared each subsequent option with the houses we had thought would be great. The house we got has ALL of our musts including most of our "gee, that would be nice" things, so we really knew it was a good fit.)

We recently bid on a house about an hour after seeing it and are now under contract to buy it. But this came after seeing lots and lots of houses (probably around 50) in many different locations. We did start with a list of "must-haves" and a list of "nice-to-haves" which we gave to our realtor at the start. Our agent was able to help us think about different locations that might work and we looked in all of those, but in the end the "perfect" (for us--it still needs plenty of TLC) was literally right around the corner.
I will say that it helped to see a lot of places in person, and in spite of the bad rap that agents often get on this board, I feel like ours has been immensely helpful throughout (and super patient). Good luck!

We also "knew" as soon as we saw the house. We had seen a bunch of duds, so when one came up better than the rest just above our price range, we jumped at it. We never had buyer's remorse, and it served us well for the 10 years we lived there and never regretted the purchase.

We didn't "love" our house the moment we saw it, but it met all the items on our checklist. Schools, location, outdoor space, affordability, etc.

We were very rational about it (or so we like to think, haha) and just verified if it matched everything on our must-have list.

Throughout the offer process and even the renovations after the fact sometimes we would ask ourselves; is this what we wanted? I we simply mentally ran our checklist again, and the answer has always been 'yes'

I knew it was the right house when I saw the photo on Redfin, in all its resplendent decrepitude. We had looked for more than a year, and bid and lost for houses that were in our desired location but for which I had not felt anything in particular.

Persuading DH to bid on it took 6 months, though! It was a cute (to me) 1920s white Dutch colonial with an ugly concrete parking in front instead of a proper yard (the owner had not lived in it, but just used it as a convenient parking near downtown Bethesda). Now it's well on its way to becoming a garden again, and we painted the door robin's egg blue.

I think it was the crooked roof corner that did it. Structurally there's nothing wrong with it, but it gives the house a charming personality. For me, of course.

Crazy, I know. Most people want new construction.

Honestly, I couldn't do it. Every time we have bought something we have had to look at it, look at more stuff, then come back days or weeks later. I don't know how people "just know". The only time we have ever moved quickly was for a teardown/new build custom home since we knew we could make as many changes as we wanted to after we closed since the builder marketing it had concept drawings only at that point and we knew exactly what we wanted to tweak and had the ability to completely scrap the drawing and start over if we wanted to.

Good luck, OP. I hope it is true that some people know it when they see it and that you are one of them!

We lost and were sad! NOw we are still waiting for the one

For us, it took looking (in person) at many, many houses -- probably around 50 -- before we could walk in and say right away whether it was worth making a bid on a particular house. Looking online is nice but it only gets you so far.

For us, the minute we walked in, we just "knew". We'd looked at 100s of houses, and we knew what we wanted. It's still a scary thing to put in an offer.

We just got some good financial news that means we can move forward on buying a house this summer. I've been tracking listings in our target area for a few months now on a near-daily basis, and we've visited some open houses. We have our budget and target area pretty well narrowed down, and there have been one or two houses that come up about each week within our most narrowly defined parameters of location, budget, house size, etc.

There have definitely been some options where we thought to ourselves, "If we were ready, that would be a good possibility." But how do we know? I am guessing that sitting down with a realtor will help, and we're also pretty good about trusting our guts and communicating, but this will be by far the biggest decision we've made as a couple. We bought a condo together, but that was a much simpler process. We're planning to live in this house anywhere from ten years until they take us to the nursing home--and we know we will likely have to go without a couple things we'd really like (I wrote a thread awhile back about "which of these options would be most important to you?").

And, of course, there's the possibility that we will bid and lose a few times before all of this is said and done.

For those of you who have bid or bought recently, what gave you the sense that "this is the one"?