Many advise against buying the first house you look at; we did. Our friend alerted us to new construction in a great location. I entered the address into the GPS (yes, it was that long ago) and off we went, except it didn’t take us to the place in question. This neighborhood was so new that the years-old GPS had no record of its existence. As the crafty engineer, I pulled over and reasoned through where this location should be and, after a few minutes, found the address. We toured the model; it’d end up being our new home.
However, we didn’t know it at the time. We liked the location, but the builder priced it out of our comfortable price range. Initially, we found Linda, a real estate agent with whom we had great rapport. She ended up driving us into neighborhoods, showing us many homes. That first neighborhood had only built homes for about half the lots so far, so we even toyed with the idea of building our new home.