Determining Wants and Needs

Prioritize your home search by deciding what you need in a new home

With a list of questions, priorities, and concerns, you will be better equipped to find the right home.

Understanding your priorities, and separating wants from needs, will help you make the right choice in evaluating a new home for your family. Why is this so important? With the large variety of homes available in Palm Beach County, it is easy to waste time and energy looking at the wrong homes. Frustration can lead to taking shortcuts in decision making which could mean picking the wrong home, wrong area, or wrong price range for your needs.

If You’re Not Sure Of Your Needs

Your real estate professional should be able to help you. As a professional, I take an interest in my customers’ needs. Life in real estate is more than showing properties and signing contracts. I help you solve your housing problems!

To prepare for a discussion with a buyers’ agent, start by making a few lists on a sheet of paper. This process will help draw out your priorities and separate the needs from the wants. The lists are:

• What you like about your current home
• What are the top three things that made you choose your current home to live in?
• What do you not like about your current home?
• If you could fix three things in your current home, what would they be?
• What is driving your decision to move?
• What is absolutely mandatory to have in your next home? (Note: this means if it doesn’t have it, no matter what else it might have, you absolutely won’t consider it.)
• What, on the flip side, must not be part of your new home? (for example, you couldn’t possibly consider a condo, or a home with a pool)
• What are the features you would like to have, and feel should be within your reach in the price range?
• How long do you think you’ll stay in the new home? When might your needs change?
• What would be in your dream home?

Prioritize

Now, go back to your lists only after you have written them all down. Review them, and make any changes. Then number the top three items in each list in order of importance.

This process is not designed to generate a hard and fast set of criteria to shop for a home. Rather, it is a starting point for your next step, a discussion with a REALTOR® about your home search. Select an agent you feel comfortable with and who is familiar with the area, and share your needs and priorities with him or her.

During the search, as you learn more about the properties available, you may wish to revise your search. Discussing this with your agent is the best way to narrow down your search. And don’t feel too bad if your first list seems fairly vague – sometimes it takes time to really understand the true needs and wants.