The Best House in the Worst Neighborhood – Avoiding a Common Buyer's Mistake
A common mistake when purchasing a house in Austin is to buy the "best house in the worst neighborhood". Of all the things that a flyer or MLS listing may tell you, you are unlikely to find much regarding your future house’s neighborhood .
A house may appear to be a dream house; the kitchen is the right size, the bathroom is nice, and the yard is just perfect. However, without a good idea of the neighborhood, and more importantly, the value of the houses, you may end up being stuck with a high-priced house in the middle of a low-priced neighborhood.
Scouting out the Landscape
One of the easier ways to avoid this is by simply being familiar with the neighborhoods which you are searching. If you know, more or less, where the "bad parts" of the neighborhood are, you don’t need volumes of pricing data to know that a house might be too expensive for the area it is in. This is, however, easier said than done, especially if you are moving to an unfamiliar city or a different part of the city that you already live in.
One way to get a visual idea of the neighborhood without even visiting it is to use a service such as Google Street View to browse the "look" of the neighborhood. Your realtor should have pricing information of houses in the neighborhood as well so that you can make sure your house is not significantly more expensive than other comparable houses in the neighborhood.
Contact an Austin Real Estate Agent
If you are looking to buy or sell homes in Austin, contact the Carvajal Group today at 512-419-7770.
