03/17/2023
By Kate Stone Lombardi
The last time my husband and I shopped for a new home, the was no Internet. It was 1988, and we visited homes with a realtor, who handed us a piece of paper on each property with the house’s specs – square footage, taxes, etc.
Now that we are looking to move, I figured the process would be so much easier. Zillow! Realtor.com! I could look at hundreds of houses without leaving my family room couch, and learn everything about them!
Well.
I’m back on my family room couch as I write this, after a day of visiting a bunch of different homes for sale with our new realtor. And – why am I surprised? – the houses in person bore little resemblance to their listings online.
Some were nicer, and most were less nice. But between the fish-eyed camera lens for interior shots – the devil of distortion – and Photoshop, these listings are incredibly misleading. And then there are the “water views” which look fabulous in the photos, but turn out to have been taken by drones, providing views not available if you were, say, living in the house on the ground.
Then there was the house that had a big construction project going on next door and the one with the unexpected swamp in the backyard.
So even with that new fangled world wide web thing, it turns out that you just have to do it the old-fashioned way, and get out there and look.