Relationships and Real Estate: Maintaining Your Relationship While House Hunting

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Buying a home with your spouse or long-term partner can be exciting and fun if handled well. If it’s not handled well, relationships can be severely damaged rather than strengthened. When buying any new real estate, if you follow these helpful tips, you can move into your dream home with a solid relationship that stands the test of time as easily as the walls of your new house.

Communicate Clearly

Nothing makes house-hunting harder than when the two people hunting wants completely different things. But there’s more to house-hunting than the number of bedrooms and whether the place has a pool. Are you envisioning a forever home where you’ll raise your family while your partner is seeing this as a starter home while you save to find the forever home of your dreams? Communicate clearly to ensure that you both know what you want and that you want the same things.

Be Willing to Compromise

In the (very likely) instance that you and your partner aren’t quite on the same page, be willing to compromise. One of you might want a beautiful yard while the other wants the urban hustle. A compromise might be a smaller home in a suburb. One of you might be thinking of this as an investment while the other is picturing “home sweet home.” If so, try looking for an investment property that you can turn into a beautiful home for the two of you until you’re ready to move on. Remember not to get hung up on minor details that can be easily changed, like paint colors, hardware, or fixtures.

Hire Someone to Do the Legwork

It’s tempting to want to look at real estate all alone with your partner and without a real estate agent. You might think that it will save you some money and be more fun to do it together. However, it’s time-consuming to try to locate all the possible options in your area. Then you have to figure out which ones you should look at and which ones aren’t worth your time.

It’s best to hire a real estate agent to help you, especially if this is your first real estate purchase. A real estate agent can listen to what you want and need in a home and then do the hard work of finding potential homes for you. They’ll present you with only the options that meet your requirements, so you won’t waste your time looking at homes that aren’t a fit at all. A real estate agent takes a lot of the pressure off of you and your partner because all you need to do is look at the homes they find, instead of trying to do it all yourself.

Schedule Regular Date Nights

If you spend every spare minute of every day scouring real estate listings, going to open houses, or trying to get inspections scheduled, your relationship is going to suffer. And yet, searching for a house often becomes an all-consuming task without either of you realizing it. Avoid this relationship pitfall by scheduling some regular date nights. And on those date nights, don’t talk about real estate, house-hunting, or anything else remotely related to your home search. Just enjoy each other’s company and talk about all the other things you talked about before looking for a house took over your life.

Buying a home is a big deal. It’s a difficult process and so it makes sense that it would take a big chunk of your time and attention. But your relationship still deserves your time and attention. Without it, your relationship will crumble, and moving into your new home will be a letdown because you’re sharing it with someone you no longer love in quite the same way. Tend to your relationship during the house-hunting process and you’ll have a relationship as strong as your new home.

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