Finding Nice Towns

You can look up various local newspapers online, and check out the classified ads. This also assures you that it's not just a nice town, but large enough for a newspaper. If there are at least a dozen houses for sale, you'll also have an idea about home prices there. To find the papers, just enter the name of the town and "newspaper" into a search engine.

One advantage of looking at the classified advertising of online newspapers, is that you'll see homes for sale by owners. You typically won't see these anywhere else online. There may also be homes advertised by real estate firms that are not members of the National Association of Realtors. These may be hard to find in other places online as well.

In addition to looking at the classified ads for homes, look for other things of interest to you. You can learn a lot about a town from a newspaper. For example, we scan the articles to see what events are going on in the town. We look at the apartments for rent, to see if we might want to buy a rental too. A front page story about a bicycle being stolen is a clue that not many bad thing happen there.

Call people in a town you are considering. Ask about the town, but be prepared to read between the lines. People won't always be as straight-forward as the man from the chamber of commerce in that town in New Mexico, who told me the town was going to run out of water.

We used to call any local realtor or chamber of commerce and talk to whoever had time. We asked about what stores were there, what projects were planned, and whether the person we were talking to owned a snow shovel (we are living in Tucson, AZ now). Talk to a few people if you can, so you aren't getting too much of one perspective.

The phone numbers are all online. You can find an official website for the town, and call a town official. You can find a phone number and the listing agents name when you look at listings online. You can even find online phone books now, and call local employers to see what the job situation is.

We love to start with a map on the table. We choose areas of the country we know we love, or those we have heard good things about. Then we go to www.realtor.com to see what homes cost. If they are reasonable, we move on to use the other research tools. You can also start with online maps. A map helps because if the town is nice, but a little too expensive, you can immediately see what towns are nearby - they may be much less expensive.

Use your list of criteria to quickly eliminate towns that won't work for you. Don't automatically eliminate those with prices that are a little high, however. Sometimes, especially in small towns, there may be many inexpensive houses, but none happen to be for sale right at the moment. Check again in a few weeks, and check the homes for sale in the local newspaper.

Even if you don't see many low cost houses, you still might be able to get one. When we lived in Anaconda, Montana, we watched as a house listed for $18,000 eventually sold for $6,000! Many nice towns that have had some economic troubles have houses selling for far under their listed price. The lesson is clear: make low offers to get low cost houses, especially in economically troubled towns. More on that in the section on negotiating your home purchase.

Cheap Homes continues with Chapter 5 here: Housing That Costs Less