If this civilization wasn’t so advanced, and we didn’t already know what we liked and what we didn’t like, we’d have to do some testing. If we were hunters not because we liked Filson jackets but because we needed to eat, then we’d go out hunting. We’d wander around and kill some living things. If we lived in town, we could ask the townspeople about the things that we see while hunting. For instance, we’d tell our town friends that we saw a small, gray colored animal with big ears, and it hopped around the woods, preferring brambles and thick piles of wood and brush. We’d ask if this animal was good to eat, and people would say that, yes, it’s good. So we’d shoot it and we’d make stew of it.
If, however, we didn’t live in that town, and we lived on our own, out in the wilderness like the old guy in Jeremiah Johnson, then we’d just shoot that thing, stew that thing, and eat that thing. If we liked it, we’d do it again. If we didn’t like it, we’d look for other things to shoot at, and we’d leave the gray hopping thing alone. This is how trial and error works, and this is how preferences are developed. This, as you can imagine, isn’t about rabbits. It’s about houses. And we need to start taking a few bites to see what tastes right.
It isn’t difficult to search for real estate. It used to be, back when newspaper advertisements were the only portal through which the public could consume inventory. But this is not then, this is now, and if my 11 year old son wanted to find a house to buy in British Columbia, he could do so within a few minutes of finding out where we hid is iPad. Inventory is easy to see, easy to digest, and opinions are easy to form. You could even be like some of the people I most dislike, and glean all of your lakefront real estate information here and then buy a bad house on the lake from someone else. Information is everywhere, and you can either benefit from it or allow it to overwhelm you, depending on how you act on it.
You could choose to sit at your computer, just you and your thoughts and so much Lake Geneva inventory, and teach yourself about the market. This is perfectly acceptable and entirely reasonable. You could take that to the extreme, and choose to only review the information on your own, and then when you’re ready to buy you could go around calling only listing agents and tour those homes. This way, you only hear positive sales pitches and never the negatives, and if you think you’re smarter than the entire market, you could act on this. But you wouldn’t do this, because doing so would be to consider all of the information and opinion available to you disregard most of it.
The proper consideration for a lake home purchase is a fine mix of all of the above. Read about the markets. Read opinions. Review inventory. But then do the single most important thing you can do during the early stages of any property hunt– come up and look at some homes. You must take samples from these homes, view the ones you like and the ones you don’t think you’ll like. Look at expensive ones that cost more than you can spend, and look at cheap ones that you assume are beneath you. Look at the market, touch it and feel it, take bites from it, and if you’re doing this in the right manner, you’ll be doing this with me as your guide. Without engaging in this style of market primer, you simply can’t learn what you like and what you dislike. In the absence of this tangible exercise, you’ll be stuck forever asking the townspeople what they prefer, and we all know the townspeople to be rather unintelligent.