Visit the neighbourhood three times before you buy the house

A showing is the one time the street is staged. It is booked for a quiet hour, the seller has moved the cars, and the buyer spends thirty minutes inside and thirty seconds outside. Then they commit to living on that street for years. The house you can inspect. The street you have to observe, and you cannot observe it in one visit. I tell every client to go back three times, without me, before they write an offer or before they remove subjects.

Visit one: a weekday morning

Go between seven and nine on a working day, and go early enough to see the street wake up. This is when you learn what the commute actually looks like from this driveway, not from a map. Watch how long it takes to get out of the cul-de-sac or onto the main road. Notice whether the school down the block means a line of idling cars on your street twice a day, and whether the buses stop at the corner.

Look at parking. Are the driveways full and the street empty, or is every curb taken because the homes have suites and the suites have cars? That tells you something about the street that the listing will not.

If you will be driving to work, drive it now, from this exact address, at the exact time you would leave. Not the day before, not on a Saturday. Fraser Valley commutes change completely depending on which crossing and which hour, and a route that is fine at ten is a different route at seven thirty.

Visit two: a weekday evening

Come back after dark on a working day. This is the visit most buyers skip and the one that changes minds most often.

Listen first. A street that is quiet at two in the afternoon can carry highway noise, train noise or the sound from a nearby business once the daytime background drops away. Stand in front of the house for five minutes with the car off.

Look at the light. Is the street lit, or is the nearest streetlight three houses down? Are porch lights on, are people home, does it feel like a neighbourhood where someone would notice a stranger? How does it feel to walk from the car to the door?

Look at the neighbours' houses now that they are lit from inside. This is when you see how many units a "single-family" street really holds, and how close the back windows of the house behind are to the bedroom you would sleep in.

Visit three: a weekend

The weekend visit tells you who lives here. Go in the afternoon and walk, do not drive. Are there kids on the street, and are they the age of yours? Is the park at the end of the block used, and by whom? Are the garages open with people working on things, or is every door closed? Is there a house that is clearly the party house, and is it next door?

This is also the visit to talk to a neighbour. Most people are happy to talk about their street if you ask a real question. Ask how long they have lived there. Ask what they would change. Ask if there is anything going on with the street, the strata or the neighbours that they wish they had known. You will get more honest information in five minutes on a sidewalk than from any document in the listing package.

Walk the route you would actually use

On at least one of the three visits, do the things you would do every week. Walk to the bus stop or the SkyTrain if you would use it. Walk to the school with the timing a kid would take. Drive to the grocery store you would use and see whether the left turn back onto the main road is possible at that hour. If you have a dog, walk the loop you would walk twice a day and see whether there is a sidewalk the whole way.

A listing says "close to everything." Only your own feet and your own car can tell you whether it is close to your things.

What the showing cannot tell you

The showing tells you about the house. It cannot tell you whether the neighbour runs a pressure washer every Saturday, whether the street floods at the low corner in November, whether the empty lot across the road has a development sign that was taken down for the open house, or whether the "quiet crescent" is a shortcut at rush hour. Those are things you find out by being there when nobody is expecting you.

How I handle this

When a client is serious about a home, I ask them to make the three visits before we write, or at the latest during the subject period, and I ask them to send me one line after each visit. Morning, evening, weekend. What did you notice.

If the notes come back and the client is still excited, we proceed and I know the offer will hold. If the notes come back with a "but", we talk about whether that "but" is the kind that fades or the kind that gets worse every year. A commute you hate at seven thirty on visit one will not improve on year three. Better to learn that on a sidewalk than after the completion date.

Thinking about buying or selling in the Fraser Valley? Message me and we will go through your options.