Buying a home can be a tremendous and wonderful part of the human experience. Too many people consider purchasing their home to be one of the happiest times of their life.
Whether you or any other person in question is purchasing a home for you yourself to end up living in, or you purchase the home to rent out so that someone else can live there, or you purchase the home so that you can sell it and make a profit down the line, there are a lot of things you have to think through before you ever sign any of the dotted lines.
Each of those dotted lines can end up meaning a lot, and thus the decision shouldn’t be made lightly or without a great deal of consideration.
Photo by Scott Webb
When a particular piece of real estate is the right place for you, it can be a truly wonderful experience in a lot of different ways. From the time you first get the place to the time you eventually end up parting with it, the difference between an okay property and a great property is an even larger difference than that between an okay property and a bad one. The differences come in a lot of individual moments and flavors of life.
The Size of the Place
When it comes to a property, size really does matter. For many people, the size of the place where they live is as important as how well it’s maintained, how clean or not it is, and other factors in their life such as the type of car they drive or how they style their hair.
Whether they own the place or rent it, the size of the place where a person lives is a crucial factor in their overall quality of life. This may seem strange or even shallow to some people, but for others, it’s as critical as the type of food they eat or the kind of job they work.
When you’re thinking about the kind of place a person might end up living in, the American standard is that most people want to have at least 600 square feet per person. For a lot of people, having between 1,000 and 2,000 square feet apiece is considered livable and enjoyable, possibly so that they can avoid being too close to anyone else.
But then, no matter what, you need to consider the type of person who’s going to live within the place you get. Even if you intend to live in the place yourself at the beginning, eventually, you’re going to want to pay some attention to what the next person is going to want from a size perspective.
The Amount of Fixing to Be Done
There’s a certain level of fixing up that virtually any kind of place is going to need. Before you even think about signing on for a place, it’s important to go through it carefully and determine how much it’s actually going to need. As tempting as it might be to think that a given place is going to need nothing at all, or only a small amount of cosmetic fixing up, this is a misnomer that could end up costing you dearly.
No matter how good a place looks, it’s always going to have something wrong with it. When you get this fact of life internalized, it becomes that much easier to mentally deal with the fact that you’ll have something to fix and some kind of headache to contend with once it’s yours. Working with places, especially where the people are very particular about how they live, is neither an easy matter nor one that’s intended for the faint of heart.
Once you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that every place is inevitably going to have something wrong with it, you can begin to deal with the next problem, whatever it is. The sets of problems you’ll deal with over time may vary based on the place. However, going in with the presumption that there’s at least one problem to be dealt with will mean you’ll be ready when this problem ends up striking.
The good news here is the more closely you examine the property, the more likely you’re going to be to find out what the problem to be dealt with is going to be before it becomes extremely urgent. Like all Los Angeles home buyers, the better you understand the problem when you first go into the situation at hand, the better you’re going to be able to deal with the problem once it has fully come up. Knowing what you’re getting yourself into will help you make a lot of decisions before you begin signing documents and putting down funds.
The Ultimate Choice
When you buy a home, whether it’s for you to live in, to rent out to someone else, or to sell, you have a huge choice to make about whether to get it or not. When you get a property, you become responsible for it no matter what happens, and this responsibility can be crippling if you aren’t careful. By taking the time to think through the choice you’re about to make, you can often pull a sizable profit from the place and have some good times in the interim.
The choice you make about what to do with the place, which place to buy, and even what area in which to buy will ultimately come down to a large set of choices you’re going to have to consider very carefully in advance. Whether the place you end up getting is the first you seriously look at or the thousandth, deciding whether it fits in with your ultimate goals is a vastly important part of the investing process.
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