Picture this, you just got a job offer that’s going to require you to move to a new city. You’ve never been to that city, but the pay is good. You look to see if there are any homes for sale and you are presented with a map of a city you don’t know with hundreds of homes for sale. You narrow it down to ones that meet your requirements, and the number of pins goes down. But there’s still a lot and many of them are far apart. Which do you pick?
I found myself in a similar predicament this year. I wasn’t offered a job like most people switching cities, but I found myself in similar shoes. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, my landlord needed my place back. His situation was totally understandable, and I would do the same thing if in his shoes, but I was faced with the predicament of where to go now. And of course, being the person who wants to leave here and who wants 10 fallback plans, eventually I started looking at other cities. My main job while in the office can technically be done remotely since I built out the infrastructure for that.
The situation
Thankfully I did end up staying local and I’m kicking myself for thinking I might have to consider moving away from my friends for something cheaper, but it gave me an experience I’ll never forget. I looked at basically every city recommended to me but the one I liked the most was Denver Colorado. It doesn’t exactly top the chart in any category, but I loved how it mostly had everything I was looking for, even if individual things weren’t as good as other cities. It was colder, had nicer weather, was near the mountains, had a large airport so I could see my family for cheap, is currently having an urbanism phase, has decent walkability, has a lot to do, is very dense, and increasingly better public transport. It was also the one that many of my twitter followers were talking about and moving to, so it had to be good right? To top it all off, a lot of people at work were talking about moving and while we all had different priorities, somewhere on everyone’s list was Denver or at least a neighboring suburb. I can totally get the homies there with me, so it rocketed to the top of my list. So, the city seems great, and the housing was actually cheaper than here while looking nicer, what’s the problem.
Which one?
Denver seemed like a great place with all these things I like, cheaper houses, and a lot to do but where in Denver do I pick. When looking at a large metro like that, all the problems of searching for homes are amplified. Here in Lancaster when I put in my requirements and budget, I get a hand full of houses that I can probably see all in a day. In Denver, those same requirements coupled with my budget having more buying power led to housing overload. There were hundreds of listings that fit everything and they where scattered all over the many cities that make up the Denver Metropolitan Area. Some of these houses are over an hour away from each other while being in the same city. If I only care about the house I guess I can just sit there for a while and look at all the pictures while saving ones I like in my bookmarks, there were a lot of ugly houses in that search after all. But even if I do that, it leads to the next problem.
Location
Where in Denver do I buy? I live in California, I can’t just pop up there every weekend to look around. Even worse, I’m not ready to buy yet since I’m just being an idiot and making backup plans for the backup of my backup plan, so I’m not going to bug a realtor up there to learn about the location. My reason for looking may have been dumb but how many people more serious than me want to consider a city? And even though my plan was dumb, it still wasn’t a bad idea to look since I do eventually want to leave where I’m at. There are lots of reasons to look at houses when you aren’t ready to buy yet, that means one of the best sources of local info is off limits unless you want to be an asshole and waste people’s time. So here I am presented with a bunch of nice houses scattered across an unfamiliar map. What do I do?
The answer is spending an insane amount of time on google maps looking at where these places are, googling that part of town, checking like 10 different websites for things like school districts, crime, RTD maps, etc. for every single house I would consider. I didn’t end up doing that because I was able to stay but what if I was serious? Was I really supposed to research and basically write a whole report for every house I’m considering like I’m back in high school? Zillow has some helpful resources like the walk score, bike score, and nearby schools but that doesn’t answer so many questions you might have. Questions like; How far is the nearest grocery store, what restaurants are nearby, what is there fun to around there, where is the nearest park, does that park do events, how far am I from various essentials, etc.
These are datapoints that are not available in a home search. When I ask my realtor friends about this, their response is always to ask a realtor but not only was I not serious yet, can I trust a single realtor to have a good, unbiased knowledge of an entire metropolitan area and be able to match my weird needs to specific areas? It’s a wonder many Americans don’t like where they live and why the problem of soul crushing suburbs continues. The data is not exposed so most of us just go by how pretty the house is. My house being pretty won’t help if my neighbors are jerks and I get stuck in traffic trying to buy groceries.
To compound this further, Denver may have been top of the list but it wasn’t the only city I was looking at. Again, I can do remote work so in theory, I can work anywhere that has a decent internet connection. The world is my oyster but there isn’t really anything to guide my choices. Maybe Denver is actually a terrible choice but in the process of trying to find where to live, very little flags have an opportunity to pop up. House searches can help you find out how much a city costs to live in and what some of the houses look like but nothing more. It’s up to you to extensively search every city you are considering while ignoring cities that are potentially a better fit that you haven’t heard of.
After I had moved and dropped this search, something interesting happened. I start seeing people talk about Minneapolis and posting pictures that made me want to look into it. What would have happened if I had moved to Denver? Would I potentially be in a worse city because I didn’t know to consider a different city? There are so many holes that a home search does not cover. Even for out here in the Antelope Valley, Zillow will show Lancaster and Palmdale but its up to you to know about surrounding communities like Lake Elizabeth, Littlerock, Pearblossom, or Rosamond which depending on where you work, can be closer while being cheaper. This means anyone out of town has to pray that they get a good agent who will consider this fact.
The Solution
Like many things in Real Estate, the solutions are out there already and are easier to implement than many people think. Almost every company that has this data would be more than happy to license it to you. And because its real estate, we are already kind of used to this with how many MLS feeds we have to license to build anything. All it would take is someone to realize this gaping hole and throw more data at the issue. There are already countless pieces of software for real estate that are aimed towards the agent which can do things like this, they just aren’t available to individual consumers and you have to hope the agent you pick pays for some of these tools. Everything we need is out there, someone just has to build it.