What to Actually Look For at Your First Showing

The first house I walked through as a buyer, I spent about four minutes looking at the kitchen backsplash and zero minutes looking at the water heater. I liked the backsplash. I bought a different house eventually, but that showing taught me something: without a plan, you will spend your whole visit reacting to whatever the sellers wanted you to react to.

Staging works. That is the point of it. So the job at a showing is to look past the parts that were arranged for you and at the parts that were not.

Here is what I actually walk clients through, in the order I do it.

Start outside, before you go in

Most people walk straight to the door. Give it two minutes on the sidewalk first, because the outside of a house tells you what the inside costs.

Look at the roof line from across the street. Sagging anywhere along the ridge is worth asking about. Count the layers at the edge if you can see them. Look at where the ground meets the foundation, and notice whether it slopes toward the house or away from it. In central Indiana we have a lot of clay soil, and clay holds water against a foundation instead of letting it drain. Grading is one of the cheapest things to fix and one of the most expensive things to ignore.

Then look at the neighbors on both sides and across the street. You are buying into a block, not a lot.

Give the basement more time than the kitchen

This is the single biggest change I ask first-time buyers to make. The kitchen is the room you will notice. The basement is the room that will cost you money.

In an older Indianapolis house, get down there and look at:

• The walls, at floor level, all the way around. Efflorescence is the chalky white residue that shows up where water has come through masonry. It is not proof of a live problem, but it is proof that water has been there.
• Whether there is a sump pump, and whether the pit is dry, damp, or wet on a dry day.
• Fresh paint on a foundation wall, which is sometimes just fresh paint and is sometimes a cover.
• The water heater and furnace. Both have a manufacture date on the label. A furnace has a useful life of roughly fifteen to twenty years, a water heater roughly ten to twelve. If both are near the end, that is a real number you should be holding in your head while you think about price.
• Where the electrical panel is and what is in it. You do not need to diagnose anything. Take a photo of the inside of the panel door and the label, and let your inspector read it.

Turn things on

You are allowed to. Nobody minds, and it is the fastest way to learn something the listing photos cannot tell you.

Run the water in the kitchen and in the furthest upstairs bathroom at the same time and watch the pressure. Flush a toilet. Open and close a few windows, especially the original wood ones in older homes near Butler and in Irvington, because painted-shut windows are common and replacing them is not cheap. Open the door to the attic or the crawlspace if there is a safe way to look.

Look for the seams between old and new

A lot of Indianapolis houses have been added onto. A 1926 bungalow with a 2004 addition on the back is a normal thing to find, and it can be great. What you want to notice is the transition: floors that step, ceiling heights that change, a hallway that got narrow. None of that is automatically bad. It just tells you where to ask what was permitted and who did the work.

The same goes for finished basements. A finished basement with no visible egress window in the bedroom is not a bedroom, whatever the listing says.

Notice the things that cannot be changed

You can change almost anything about a house. You cannot change these:

• The lot and how it sits
• The street and the traffic on it
• The commute
• The school district
• Whether the house gets morning light or afternoon light

If a house is wrong on one of those, no amount of renovation budget fixes it. I would rather a client walk away from a beautiful house on a hard corner than talk themselves into it because the finishes were right.

Take photos of the boring things

Everyone takes photos of the living room. Take photos of the panel, the furnace label, the water heater label, the sump pit, the roof from the street, and any spot that made you pause. When you are comparing three houses on Sunday night, the boring photos are the ones you will actually use.

Ask three questions before you leave

I ask these at nearly every showing.

1. How long have they owned it, and why are they moving?
2. What has been replaced recently, and is there paperwork?
3. Has there ever been water in the basement, and what was done about it?

Sellers in Indiana complete a disclosure, and you will get it. But the disclosure covers what they know and remember. Asking out loud, in the house, often surfaces things a form does not.

What I do not want you doing

Do not try to inspect the house. That is not the job at a showing and you will only make yourself anxious. Your inspector is going to spend three hours on this with a flashlight and a moisture meter. Your job is to decide whether the house is worth paying an inspector to look at, and to gather enough that we can price it honestly.

Also, do not fall in love in the first ten minutes. Not because it is naive, but because it makes you stop looking. The buyers who get hurt are usually the ones who decided in the entryway and spent the rest of the tour collecting reasons.

After the showing

Write down three things you liked and three things that bothered you, before you talk to anyone. Do it in the car. Your unedited first read is worth more than the version you will have after you have discussed it, and if you see the house again it is useful to know what you thought the first time.

Then send me the list. Half of what people write down turns out to be fixable for less than they assumed, and the other half is the stuff we should be taking seriously.

If you are not at the showing stage yet and you are trying to work out whether you are close, the readiness assessment is the honest version of that question. And if you want to get clearer on what you are actually looking for before you start touring, start here.