Search like it's your job

The idea

The failure mode of month two isn't looking at too few homes. It's looking at hundreds, remembering none of them, and losing four months to a feed.

How a listing reaches you. When a home is listed with a brokerage it goes on the MLS® system, and from there it's distributed to sites like this one through CREA's Data Distribution Facility. That's a real feed with real refresh cycles, which is why portals sometimes disagree about what's available — one has pulled a sold listing and another hasn't yet. A listing you love that's suddenly gone probably didn't disappear; it sold a few days ago and you're seeing a stale copy somewhere.

Read a listing critically. Price is the least interesting field on it. What tells you more:

Days on market. A home that's been listed for four months is telling you something — usually that it's priced above what buyers think it's worth, occasionally that it has a specific problem, sometimes that it was listed badly. All three are useful and all three affect what you'd offer.

Price history. Two reductions in six weeks is a different conversation than a listing that came out yesterday.

What the photos avoid. Twenty-two photos and none of the bathroom. Every shot taken from the same corner. No exterior photo in daylight. Photographers are good at their job; absences are deliberate.

The fine print. Taxes, condo fee, lot size, year built, and the remarks. "Handyman special," "as-is," "quick possession preferred," and "estate sale" all mean something.

Compare monthly cost, not price. This is the habit worth building this week. Two homes thirty thousand dollars apart in price can land within forty dollars a month of each other. Two at an identical price can differ by three hundred a month once condo fees and property taxes are counted. The card number on this site is principal and interest only at 10% down, 4.34% fixed, 25-year amortization, principal and interest only — a comparison tool, not your actual bill. Use it to rank, then use Week 7's scorecard to get the real figure on your shortlist.

Search hygiene. Three rules, and they're the whole week.

A rhythm, not a habit loop. Pick two or three days a week and a time budget. Twenty focused minutes on a Tuesday and a Saturday beats forty distracted minutes every night, and it protects you from making a large decision because you were tired and a listing had good light.

A shortlist cap of five. When a sixth home earns a place, something has to leave. This forces comparison at the moment you have the information, rather than at the end when everything has blurred.

Permission to ignore everything else. Most listings are not for you. That's the system working.

When nothing appears. Common, and usually a filter problem rather than a market problem. The fix is to widen deliberately — decide in advance which filter loosens first, before you're discouraged enough to loosen all of them at once. Usually it's area before price, and price before your top-ranked need.