I sense a move in our future. It will be a well considered move if it happens. There are some things you don’t give up to improve your position in residential real estate. For the last eighteen years it has been our good fortune to be able to walk out into virtually a private park every morning when we wake up, to be able to hike in the woods and around the marshlands, to walk miles straight out our back door without encountering another person, to let the dogs run free, to scatter herds of deer and flocks of turkeys, to listen to crowing cock pheasants and smile at the bunnies squirting out of the brush ahead of the dog. In the winter we feed the birds, and incidentally the squirrels. There is seldom a time when less than a dozen different varieties of birds are represented in the back yard — downy, hairy, and red-bellied woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, a flock of cardinals, blue jays, mourning doves, juncos, two or three different kinds of sparrows, and goldfinches all regularly appear together only to disappear when a hawk takes a perch in the windbreak.
This little northern paradise, thirty-three acres of our own set within almost a thousand acres of Nature Conservancy, protected State Dept. of Natural Resources lands, and adjacent farms protected forever from development by conservation easements is a twenty minute drive from the Capitol steps, from the University, from downtown Madison. So why would we think about moving? Maybe, if we take our time and explore our options we can take some equity out of our place, trade out for a place that is nearly as wonderful but a tad more “conventional,” and plump up our retirement savings.
I went digging into the online MLS searchable listings to try to get a sense of our options. The web provides a window on the market, but the tools we have available to explore housing choices are very narrowly bounded. It seems like it’s more art than science to search the listings. No fuzzy logicians need apply. The search parameters you enter regarding price, square footage, number of bedrooms and so forth will lock you into search results that almost certainly will not include all the options you would prefer to consider.
The industry is addressing standards for online listings. I hope they’ve thought to include flexible search options.
[tags]great horned owls are nesting now[/tags]
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