Since we leave Monday night for Austin with the purpose of viewing potential rental homes and hopefully securing one for June 1, we are scrutinizing the listings even more carefully. Listings include Zillow, Homesnap, Craigslist, and those generated by Stacey’s algorithm (Stacey is a real estate agent helping us).

In order to help us make rational decisions, we setup a spreadsheet yesterday with criteria that are important to us, and weighted them, so we can rank each house we view and have each aspect get valued according to its importance. Make sense? I was DYING to do this weighted thing on the original spreadsheet I made a few months ago which was about what city to move to, but we didn’t ever get that far and the thing is I wasn’t savvy enough to now HOW to set it up! Fortunately Rob could create it in a few minutes!

Weights are subject to change. We also reserve the right to override any rational conclusions derived from this spreadsheet.

And truth is, although we plan to use this spreadsheet this week to compare homes, it is most likely that our impulses will drive our decisions even more than the spreadsheet. Which is too bad but expected for humans obv.

In general, it would be nice to find a “sweet spot” where we are pretty near city things and in a house with a bit of character, but still have a space to spread out and be able to unpack some stuff and pursue “projects” and host our kids comfortably at our house. In our price range, of course. So far it feels like we are either seeing homes in prime locations with some severe downsides or, as you move away from the city, expansive, gaudy, boring executive-style homes in the broader area. Are there in-betweens??