House hunting not as easy as Tinder

I wish matching my girlfriend and I with our first house would be as easy as swiping left or right. Then again, Tinder wasn’t set up with such a complicated array of ownership and title structures in mind as we’ve found ourselves bamboozled by.

In the weekend just gone, only our second of looking at open homes, we found a standalone house that was a unit title. What? Isn’t that arrangement just for apartments?

Then again, both Tinder profiles and real estate listings can be misleading. Flattering photos are abound in both, appearances bolstered immensely, through Instagram filters and on-point poses and trendy home staging respectively.

It turns out that house-hunting is a far more complicated (and frustrating) game than we had anticipated. Since we’ve only just started looking and haven’t yet placed any offers, the process hasn’t yet been a depressing one. But we’re sure it will be.

We’re already bracing for the rejection after submitting far-too-low tenders or seeing how quickly auction bids spiral up.

The biggest frustration, aside

OPINION:

from almost every open home seemingly taking place from 1pm-1.30pm on a Sunday, is knowing a ball-park figure for a given house’s price.

We’ve looked online in Lower Hutt as well as Wellington and have absolutely no idea what the relationship between rateable value figures and real world values is.

In Lower Hutt, it’s been three years since the RVs were updated, and more than a year in Wellington.

With everything up for auction or tender, no matter how clear an idea we might have about our budget, we’ve got no idea if many properties we like lie within it.

Another frustration, especially with apartments, has been a lack of vital information about the property’s title type on the listings we’ve been looking through.

Would we like a freestanding house on a unit title? Not as much as if it were freehold. Is it impressive when you only find that out at the open home? Nope.

Why on earth isn’t it mandatory for such title information, along with any body corporate fees, to be present on listings?

That sort of information would definitely help us with our swiping. We might even ‘‘super like’’ a house.

- See P49 for more on auction fever.