Four Factors I considered when choosing a home, Part 1

An article titled “The Cheapest Generation” stirred up a conversation about what led some of our young professionals to choose their current or future homes. We’re pleased to present this series, Four Factors I Considered When Choosing a Home, to shed light on what homebuyers may be looking for. Feel free to share your own factors or thoughts in the blog comments section!

Name: Micah Kemp
Hometown: New York, NY
Current: Richmond, VA
Education: James Madison University
Job Title: Single Family Servicing Program Support Trainee

Four Factors I Considered When Choosing a Home

Looking at new places to live is a lot of fun. Each place has different features that make it exciting to imagine yourself there. When it came time for my wife and me to look for a place to live, I was lucky enough to find myself in a position to buy a home. Before we started, we sat down and thought about what our priorities were for a new home. We found we had four main factors we considered: proximity to activities, adequate yard, quality of home and resale value.

Proximity to activities: Some people might call these amenities or some other fancy word, but I like activities. We wanted to be close enough to do stuff: go for long walks, play in a park, grab dinner down the street or walk to go see a movie. Even with all those desires, we wanted to be close to the action, but not necessarily so close that we were overrun by pedestrians out for a walk.

Adequate yard: We wanted a place with a large enough yard for a small garden and a place for a dog to stretch his legs. My wife and I are both pet people, so having somewhere we could let a dog out to play was important. Eventually we settled on a place with a rather small yard, but in very close proximity to a huge park (“our yard 2.0”). We figured we could deal with the smaller immediate confines if we could walk a hundred yards and be somewhere with huge amounts of grass I wouldn’t have to mow twice a week.

Quality of home: We defined the quality of home as the solid makeup of the building itself (including piping, flooring, etc.) and the overall physical appeal of the home. We wanted an attractive place to live that we could decorate and which we know was built to last.

Resale value: As newer entrants to the workforce, we knew we would likely be relocating before too long to find new work. While we’re both very much invested in our jobs and our home, we wanted to be sure that this wasn’t a place that we would lose money on if we sold it or needed to rent it out in five years. We took a long look at housing trends within the city, and got professional opinions of the home’s resale value to make sure we were making a smart financial decision.


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