Val & I are still unpacking in our new house. I can tell you something about our search and move experiences.
The first thing we did was to talk about what we wanted and didn't want. For us, the major points were:
- Price point
- Standalone home (rather than an apartment/condo)
- Single level (as we get older we don't want to deal with stairs)
- Garage
- Minimum number of bedrooms 3/bathrooms 2
- Within 30 minutes of WDW, but not in a tourist or short term rental community (we didn't want new neighbors every week)
- Pool, or ability to add a pool
- traffic congestion
- School system was not important to us, but may be for others
We then spent part of our WDW vacations driving around the neighborhoods near WDW in order to get the lay of the land. About a year ago we contacted a local real estate agent. (I'll be happy to share his contact info, just PM me). We met with the agent and outlined our criteria.
Based on this we spent a few days with the agent (spread over several trips to WDW) looking at homes on the market. This was when we realized that we were going to have to re-evaluate our price point. While we had looked at the listings of homes and thought we could get what we wanted in the range we originally thought, it became apparent that the listings were "over selling" the actual property. We found many that we thought would be perfect were in short-term rental areas. Once we reviewed our finances a bit we then went back to the agent with a new number.
Ultimately, we decided that the existing home market wasn't going to work for us. Many properties we saw were bank owned and apparently the banks don't like to put any money into the homes so they look good, or to fix obvious problems. That, combined with a lack of good maintenance by the owners, made many of the homes a no-go.
With our agent, we began looking at new construction. Found several good options and ultimately settled on a development called SummerLake. We signed our paperwork with the builder to construct the house in late June 2013. In late July 2013 we had an appointment at the builder's design center to pick out various options for the interior. Actual site work began in September and we watched the progress over the course of several other visits to FL. We closed on the new house on January 29th, 2014.