I am a member of the American Association of Realtors - NAR and regularly receive their newsletter. In the last issue there was an article entitled - The Best Advice You Can Get. I thought to myself - breh, what kind of advice could this be and it hit me to also write what is the best advice I can give when buying real estate. And the best advice in my opinion is LISTEN TO YOU, listen to yourself.
As a broker, I spend a lot of time on viewings and have seen all sorts of things. For example, a young gentleman goes to buy an apartment in Plovdiv, from another city, and with him the family to the 9th knee. Grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, all on his head, you have to do this, you have to do the other, he's shaking his head. One of the biggest mistakes a person makes is seeking advice from the wrong people - relatives, friends, people in his immediate environment. People, they can't give you good advice, you're going to live in that dwelling, not them. They can give you advice from their prism, from their point of view, how they would feel inside, not how you would feel inside. And it starts, advice, advice, advice, ma here this is not the way it should be, this needs to be done, this needs to be changed, and it becomes much harder to make a decision.
Listen to yourself. I like to say buying real estate is love at first sight - you walk in and you know it's your property. Nothing more. It's down to feel, you feel it when you're inside, you feel that you're home. That's exactly why we realtors use a bunch of tricks to educate our sellers on how to arrange their homes, what to have inside, what to smell like, where and how the lights should be, and various other things to make the buyer feel at home. Buying a property is an emotional decision, act on your emotions. Even if you're buying for investment purposes, still. There are people go, see a property and say - I feel this property is going to blow up, it may not be the right time now, it may not have a good return, but the neighborhood will develop and in say 3 years it will be top. There's some kind of gut feeling like that, we all have it, like when we buy shoes - you see them, you measure them, you're like those are, top. It's the same with property, it's just ... a bit more expensive.
Especially if you're going to take out a loan - how come someone is telling you what to buy and how to spend your money so they don't have to pay it back. It's on your head, you'll be paying a mortgage for 30 years to listen to this and that. Listen to yourself. Come on we realtors try to be impartial - um we try, but that's our business. If you don't buy the property in question, we don't get a commission, we don't get a referral, very clearly we're going to try and nudge you into buying a particular property. Or if we take a commission on both sides, as many people have, your soul will sell just and only to buy the relevant home. It's not yours, but you're only and only compromising because someone told you to.
So having said compromise - buying property is the perfect compromise. There is no perfect property, there is a perfect compromise. A property is not perfect, it becomes perfect, it becomes a home after everybody leaves some mark in it. Until very recently properties were basically sold plastered and putty - "they customers will do it how they want", in recent times there are more and more properties finished and furnished, most people are not space minded, they can't imagine it, not to mention the masses don't bother with handymen anymore they want to get in, strip down and look at their quaff.
So use advisors, but for things you don't understand - for documents, for technicalities. For habitability and how you feel inside and which property you will buy LISTEN TO YOURSELF.
