Looking for a place to call Home

I have been going down to Dallas pretty much on a weekly basis since the end of January. In all those weeks I had no time to go site-seeing and get the lay of the land. A couple of weeks ago, Dottie drove back to Indiana to visit the family and on that same day I flew out a day early so that I could spend Monday in Dallas trying to get an idea of the surroundings and to figure out where we might want to live. We had been doing a great deal of shopping on the Internet using the North Texas Real Estate Information System. It is a powerful search utility that taps into the entire North Texas database of MLS listings. Using this and Google Maps (in Satellite mode), you can type in the address and not only see an actual satellite view from 100,000 feet to down around 500 feet off the ground, but in many cases there is also a street-level view that allows you to see everything around the house and as much of the neighborhood as you want to scroll through. It's not like being there, but it does allow one to throw out a lot of listings due to what you can see that is around them. Basically, it allows for superior screening. For example, we found several nice homes and we would have wasted our time driving to them only to find out that they were behind warehouses, chicken farms, big ugly ancient baptist temples, shopping malls and redneck neighbors.

So, on my free day of wandering through the north DFW metroplex, I went armed with information. I had put together a list of homes in various neighborhoods from the search process listed above. I have a GPS which has a companion website where I can put addresses into my profile on the web and then it downloads to my GPS. Once on the road, I'd only have to drive where the cranky old lady inside the box told me to (if you have ever owned or used a GPS, you know what I am talking about).

I set my clock for 5am on Monday and my plan was to drive all the way out to the farthest community we had been considering, which was Keller, and time it so I drive in to the office during rush hour. This would give me an idea of what I was looking at for commute time.

Up at 5:18...snooze bar x2...which begs the question - why nine minutes? Why can't it be 10 or 15? Better yet, how about a 30 minute snooze bar? Anything less is just a major annoyance...but wait...maybe that is THE POINT! Anyway, I get dressed and head down to the lobby of the hotel. The company has a corporate rate at a really awesome Marriott across the street from the office and they have a Starbucks in the lobby. I head off the elevator, my head in a fog and I can almost taste the 4-shot latte. I round the corner and the counter is closed. Bummer. I am too early...imagine that. But of course there are Starbucks on every corner anymore. I was a bit annoyed because it took me almost 10 minutes before I came across one. On a semi-related note - try going to Toronto and find a corner where there isn't a donut shop. There are many within eye shot of another.

So I get to Keller in about 25 minutes - longer than I had hoped but within my 30 minute tolerance window for a commute. I turn around and it's pushing 7:15 - perfect. The drive back took almost 40 minutes - and without incidents - only traffic. My understanding is that on mornings when there is an accident, it can take upwards of an hour or more.

I spent the rest of the day driving around the towns of Coppell, Keller, Southlake, Colleyville and Trophy Club. I spent the most time in Keller as that is where the most homes in our price range were. The problem with Keller is it is growing faster than the infrastructure that supports it. This is not only true of the roads but of the schools as well. It's like Fishers or Avon on steroids, only with nicer homes. Which reminds me...you don't find any vinyl down here. Everything is brick and stone. You'll find the occaisional wood back-side or cement board, but mostly it's all brick. This has much to do with the amount of sand available (primary component of brick manufacturing) and also the fact that labor is cheap and the brick mason trade is still huge here.

At the end of the day, I had a pretty good handle on the towns around the office. I had ruled out Coppell and Colleyville, mostly due to the age and style of the homes and the communities weren't planned all that well. Southlake was very desirable, but not likely due to the cost of housing there. It is much like Carmel with the majority of homes just out of reach for the average family. That left us with Keller, Grapevine and Flower Mound and we decided to focus our search there.

I spent the next two days in meetings and then flew home to Indy where I spent some very compressed time with our family and a few friends and then we all drove back home on Saturday. We spent two days at home getting ready for real estate agents to come out and do interviews so we could get the home on the market asap.

Next up...shop till you drop...