“We want to buy a house in Vancouver”

There I was sitting in my little basement suite bedroom with the window thats no bigger than my head when I heard the words come out of my fathers mouth.

“We are thinking of getting a place that you could live in a rent out to students, how does that sound to you? We want you to start looking for a place that we can buy when we come to town next month.”

At the time it sounded like music to my ears but what I didn’t know was that for the next two months, my life would be sabotaged by Vancouver Investment Property Buying Disorder Syndrome. VIPBDS has consumed much of the lower mainland here and people of all ages, backgrounds and wealth are experiencing it.

VIPBDS is something I thought I would never have to go through. I thought that I would spend my entire university life renting and living in student deprivation. That is how it all happens though, at the onset of the disease your mind starts to wonder and you begin to imagine what life would be like when you “own” in Vancouver. I looked around my room and began daydreaming about what it would be like to have things like a closet, carpet and a window! Once the day dream stopped I knew what I wanted. I knew what my goal was. I knew that I was going to put everything I had into finding the nicest, best, coolest, best priced investment property in Vancouver for my parents to buy and for me to live in. I was on a mission and I was going to succeed! And thus, I entered the first stage of VIPBDS...

Chapter 1 “Here, take my card...”

Stage one of VIPBDS is about finding. Its about that obsession to find that consumes all of its victims. It causes its victims to bookmark MLS search and creep it more than they do their friends Facebook pages. Its victims spend hours and hours searching through listings, comparing prices, searching layouts and googling locations. Before they fall asleep at night their minds race through all the places the have seen and what they will see. The hours just fly by as its victims try to find the place that will help them get in on the market.

I became sooo ecstatic about finding a place that I even began to neglect other things that were priorities to me before. I think I did this because of the intense sense of urgency that automatically comes with VIPBDS. I truly felt so rushed to find the place that would make my parents happy and that would be a good use of their money. Also, since my parents were coming to town for only a week I felt as though I had to rush to make this huge decision work within the small window of time we had.

Rule #1 (for fighting VIPBDS)

Dont rush! Your buying a house for goodness sake! Schedule a reasonable amount of time every day to spend searching. Don’t try and do everything at once! Buying a house is a longer process than most students think and you don’t want to spend to much time on it an neglect other things like school (blah).

So now that I had found some places, I needed to see them because I was trying to make a list of places my parents could se when they were in town. Arranging all of this resulted in me calling agents during every single break I had at school, using day time minutes and me having a MASSIVE phone bill (its a pity I hadn’t read Nick, Kate and Nathan’s blogs at that point). Even worse than this was that I didn’t even have an agent. I was trying to do all of this by myself.

Rule #2

Get an agent! Before you look for a house, look for an agent. Know what you are looking for in an agent and get recommendations from friends or family about it.

Not having an agent is scary for a few reasons:

1. You won’t understand half the stuff the selling agents are trying to tell you.
   
2. Every agent you meet will become aggressively attracted to you (in a real estate agent kinda way) and will try and convince you to make them your agent and they will call and call and call.
   
3. This isn’t event the really hard part, it only gets harder and you will need that agent to work for you later.

So there I was in this madness of agents soliciting themselves and me just trying to find a place to buy and I finally met an agent I felt good about. The agent I found was straightforward, he didn't rush me and he was confident when dealing with other agents. Now that I had an agent I could start my real estate search effectively and efficiently. But little did I know that VIPBDS would rear it ugly head again soon...

To be continued...