From City to Mountains; Answering the CallI have no idea how many properties I actually saved in my favorite folder, but it seemed like a million or more. I kept forgetting and becoming overwhelmed and tried to come up with a system that helped me compare apples to apples and keep track of the properties that we wanted to make sure to see.
I guess I should preface this section with the fact that I love to research and sort. It was my happy job to do this for us as well as weed out the places that didn’t fall into the criteria we had decided on. I’d show Joe the highlights and he’d say if he’d like to see it or not.
At first, I printed every listing out that I could find on realtor.com that I wanted to save. Then I’d highlight all the things I wanted to remember. When I went to show Joe, however, I’d look for the ones with the most highlights and more often than not, I’d find they mostly had things I wanted to remember because I didn’t like them, for example, they had a cistern, or it was only 1/2 acre or things like that. So, of course Joe didn’t want to see those properties.
At the beginning I hadn’t realized how many properties were available with our criteria and that’s another reason that I printed everything out, to make sure we had some places to see. I soon learned, though, that Colorado is abundantly beautiful in most areas of the state and every section had at least one place for us to see. We had to become pickier about the places we wanted to make sure to see.
So me being the computer guru that I am (haha) I started copying and pasting the listings and color coded the pros, cons, and just cool things about the place. Obviously I used red for con and blue for pro, then I used green for interesting good things and finally orange for my last thoughts on them, like if they were move-in ready or building ready.
I’d copy the picture of the cabin or land and write the specifics about it, such as:
- asking price
- address
- how many acres
- bedrooms
- bathrooms
- square feet
- how long on the market
- how far away it was
Then I’d glean the comments from the listing agent and write the ones I thought were interesting like:
- what animals were listed or shown in the listing
- if there were trees or neighbors
- accessibility
- if there was an HOA (yep, even in the mountains….)
After all of that, I’d look for what utilities were available. Some were relatively easy to find while others didn’t say much of anything. I’d make comments like “doesn’t say anything about electricity but shows lights in the pics.” or “pics show a bathroom but doesn’t say anything about water.”.
Last, but not least, I’d make a list of why I wanted that property, which really was just a summation of all of my blue pro markings.
After I got everything onto the computer, I could arrange it any way I wanted. I had one stack by areas, one by price from high to low and vice versa, one by acres and on and on. When we’d go look I’d take my stack and write notes on the page of the property we were looking at. At the end of the trip to that area, we’d toss out the ones we for sure didn’t want and kept the ones we weren’t sure about.
We started planning on the areas we’d go to for the weekend or days off. I’ve lived in Colorado my whole life, as has Joe, and we’ve been to places we didn’t even know existed and saw things we’ve never seen before. More on that later……