The most popular phrase in real estate!

• Proximity to routines:

  If you love to eat out, look for restaurants nearby. If you are an at-home cook, look for grocery stores. If you love to run or hike, look for trails. The priorities depend on what you intend to do every day. There is no point living near nature if you are a person who loves going to bars often.

  Don’t make yourself change routines just because of the location of your house.

• Commute:

  Measure commute on a weekday during office hours (use google maps for it, don’t drive). Also, think of the possibility of switching jobs in the next 5 years. Can the commute get too bad?

• Schools:

  Every real estate agent will bend over backward to tell you about schools because it is the one number they can use to quantify ‘location’. However, the score itself is a vague number that is driven by polls and can’t be taken at face value. As long as the school rating isn’t 1 or 2, the score won’t matter too much.

  Instead what matters is the school district. Public schools are pooled into school districts that fall under a single administration that determines, most importantly, funding. The funding comes from taxes on homes that fall in the jurisdiction of that district. So, the higher the general value of homes in the area, the more the funding and (typically) the better the schools.

  Look for maps of school districts and their borders and try and find a home within the borders of a good district. (e.g. on the Eastside of Seattle, there is Lake Washington School District, Bellevue School District, and Issaquah school district)

• Friends and family:

  This is an often overlooked criterion when determining location. Most people buy their first house as young adults, and this is a phase in life where it starts getting difficult to make new friends. If you have friends and family in town, and you are a social person, don’t head too far away from your social circles.

• Buy at the bottom:

  Buy near the bottom price range of your preferred region and neighborhood. If the house is the most expensive on the street, there is a high chance the cost may be inflated by aesthetic features rather than the intrinsic value that will grow with time.