I remember so many debates over the color of walls, the type of appliances, the wallpaper with a rip in it and other positives and negatives when viewing open homes or homes for sale in general.
I don’t know what the average number of homes people look at before they buy is. Realtor.com reckons its around 10. I think that’s probably on the mark. Sometimes people will buy the first house, we did that once and other times it can take years. It took us probably a year before we found the property we wanted with 2 full sized houses on it.
I tried scrap books, I tried an Excel spreadsheet on my phone and took lots of digital photos. Sometimes I took photos, mostly of negatives more than positives and sometimes I didn’t. The phone had all sorts of notes about where a photo was taken but I didn’t think of checking it. At one time with my digital camera I sometimes noted the number of the photos and logged it in a notebook.
Today the camera provides a whole lot of information about when the photo was taken and if it’s from a camera or device it even contains the coordinates where the photo was taken.
That means that using products like Google Maps or the popular photo site Flickr, you can even see where the photo was taken using the coordinates of the photo.
There are lots of other ways you can record information including when and where the photo was taken as well as ‘drawing’ on the photo or adding notes.
Another thing you can do is use the panorama function available on most current Smartphones. That way you can capture a room in one shot, rather than just looking at a specific feature of a room and not remembering which house it belonged to. My wife and I have had plenty of discussions about which house had the Bosch bench-top and which had a separate oven.
Insinkerator and Bosch Oven
Today you can edit the photo even while it is in the camera, or use cheap software to annotate the photo or even draw on it to highlight a feature you want to remember. Again there is also software you can use to capture the location.
This is a great way of getting a better idea of what you were looking at using technology you mostly already have with you when you are house hunting.
