How to find a home in 5 EASY Steps

Okay, let's talk about something. First of all, I got a question from somebody who said, why San Diego? And it's a legitimate question. You know, the infrastructure pretty well sucks, the education system sucks, You know, they have state income taxes. There's all kinds of problems with California for sure. But San Diego has a few things going for it. Number 1, the weather. Number 2, the food. Number 3, and most importantly, this is what feels like home to us. We spent 10 years here making a new life for ourselves and raising our boys. And something with that gives you that attachment to a particular location. I'm sure it doesn't happen that way for everybody, but For us, this became our home, and that's a wonderful thing. Okay, let's be real for a second on this whole video, videography thing. I realize I'm getting— this is really hard. There's a lot of things to take into account. There's the balance between the fact that your eyeballs, I always have in my head, so thinking about what you're possibly seeing and what I have to record for you to see that, and balancing that with my day, uh, that's hard to do. And this is exercising that part of my brain that doesn't get used that often because I just don't like to try to think about more than one thing at a time. This is new for me. Future self, just remember this was hard. This was really hard. So I'm a bit obsessed on how to do processes like this. Searching for a house, it's kind of right up my alley. Step 1: always understand your, your market. I have been watching these, watching the real estate market for quite some time and also dabbling on the rental side, trying to understand like what's going on here, because we knew that we were going to be here at some point. But I'll watch this stuff for years before we actually make a move, and just so happens that now is the right time. So first of all, I already knew what the market rates were, but I didn't know the specifics. So step 2, have all of your sites that you want to be looking through already dialed in. I already know which sites are good, which ones have stuff that other, other sites don't have. So there are different sites for different locations, but in San Diego specifically, I have 3 sites that I'm looking at. Number 1 is Craigslist. They get pretty much anything that doesn't get into the typical, like, multiple listing service or on Zillow or those kinds of places. Number 2 is is a site called HotPads. And HotPads imports a bunch of other locations, and they put them on a map, and it's nice and easy, and it's very quick. And you can see all the descriptions and everything else. And number 3 is Realtor.com, which this is the one that like real estate agents use, and they put them on the MLS thinking that everybody's going to see them and nobody does. And those are actually pretty great. Look for those little caveats. So those 3 sites, that's what I go for. Number 3 is I try to put all of those properties into one place so I can just be really quick about driving around and finding what I want to find. Google has something called My Maps, and if you Google— if you Google Google— so Google My Maps, or just go to mymaps.google.com, and you'll see that you can create your own map. So what I do is I then go through all those sites, picking out the ones that I've already saved and liked, and I go put those on my map with a link back to the list, the original listing. Number 4 is to organize your map, or at least your driving directions, in a way that makes a lot of sense. So I try and optimize it, go start at one corner and move towards the other corner of the, the area. And as long as it makes sense and it's easy to drive, you kind of just pick the close— the next closest one, and that's, that's the one you should go see. So the goal with this step is to filter out all of those neighborhoods or the houses that looked great online. Maybe you did Street View or something, but you then, when you drive the place, you know that it's just that one block that's halfway decent and the rest of the area is terrible. Filter those out, get rid of them, mark them off, delete them from your Google Maps, your My Maps, and then keep the ones that are good. And maybe even find a way to make a star or something like that on ones that you really like. The goal here is to prioritize. Number 5, call all of these people. I'll be calling the ones I like the most to get an appointment and go look at them. Especially in these days, it's really best to just go and look at it once over by yourself if you can. Sometimes they'll do group showings here, which isn't great, but, you know, try and keep your distance and do the safe things. So there's some science behind the last step here. That's it, done with stats. All right, let's go drive. Okay, so that was a long day. A lot of driving. Uh, I have notes. Which of houses that I don't like. I have notes of houses that I do like. So now it's time to get down to it. I couldn't edit my map, so I'm gonna have to go in and do that now. And then by the time I'm done, I should— I didn't get them all in, so I got maybe half of them. I'm gonna edit through a bunch of them, get rid of a bunch. These are all like kind of the top ones anyway. I found a couple I really like, so now it's all just about ordering them and prioritizing them. So I'm gonna do that by taking the map that I made and I'm going to color code it. So I know this is super Type A. I'm not normally Type A, but in this case I gotta get stuff done. I've been here for a day and a half, so time to get everything done. I got one house already lined up to go meet tomorrow, so that's what I'm going to be doing tomorrow is working and then going to see that house, and then maybe in between I'll call a couple others and go check them out too. So it's time to eat and then do that. I don't know where I'm gonna eat. So the hotel I'm at is kind of up in this area that, uh, it's all about business parks and stuff, so there's really nothing going on. There's no culture, there's nothing, nothing happening here. So I'm trying to figure out, like, I guess I'll do delivery. I have some stuff for groceries, but it's like salads and caffeine. Yeah, so that's it. That's all I'm doing tonight. There's nothing else to see. Give me your videos. Step 1. So I'm a bit obsessed on how to process—