House Hunting

Last week we went house hunting in Cincinnati.  It was a crazy whirlwind experience.  I was so pumped!  I spent countless hours researching, not to mention all the hours and hours I have devoted to watching HGTV as prep.  After we found our realtor (we found them through a physician loan program) we were set up with an mls portal.  Through this the realtors were able to load houses that fit into our criteria with all the fancy mls data (more stuff than is on zillow).  I combed through about 150 houses before we even met with the realtors and had narrowed it down to about 30 houses.

Wait back up, how are we buying a house we have no money?
Correct, correct.  Someone had the genius idea to create a mortgage product specifically for new doctors betting on the fact that they were a really low risk pool.  I thank this person.  Basically coming out of med school you have no money and debt (all kinds) up to your ears.  There are banks that say here we shall give you 100% financing like before the housing bubble burst.  I feel like it is the universe finally giving us a break in the $ department after 4 years of med school suckage.

So finding the house...
We drove out to Cincinnati with 2.5 days to find a house.  We needed to be under contract by the time we returned to St. Louis.  Oh yes, we also had our baby.  Luckily the residency program hooked us up with some amazing people to stay with who are our new friends.

We focused on three neighborhoods, turns out we did not like what we thought were our top two.  That was stressful for a few hours, then we moved on.

Strange things we encountered:
Smells: Smoke was the most common.  I think this should be listed with all the other house info, such a waste of time for everyone involved.  I probably didn't even walk into at least 4 or 5 houses based on smell at the door.  It was gross.

Fish:  One house had a very strange fish filtration? system in the basement that connected to tanks on all the floors.  All the tanks were filthy and only contained snails.

Dead Squirrel: One house did indeed have a one in the back yard, upside down.

Neighbors:  All kinds of strange, from falling down houses next door to sketchy apartment buildings.  Most of these we didn't even get out of the car for.  One house we really liked had neighbors with a compound that had probably 6 structures on it including a house, trailer (for people living), above ground pool, and several green houses.


In the end doing second looks at our favorite houses helped to clarify everything and we found the house.  Our realtors are amazing and wonderful and every superlative I can think of.  More on house later.