House Scoring - Quantify Homes in your Hunt

This is clever. Allen Wastler, a columnist/commentator for CNNMoney, published a scoring system that regular Joe and Jane house-hunter can understand and use to quantify how much they like a house. What this means is that with his score sheet, you can compare apples and oranges because you know that really good orange juice is worth X points and a crispness in an apple is worth Y points. So for the analogy-haters out there, this means you can put a number to how much you like hardwood floors versus how much you like having that extra bedroom.

The scoring system breaks down into 9 categories and Wastler assigns them points. I think you should take this list as a starting point but put the categories you think are important and assign them their relative points in your mind, adding them up to 100. In his scoring system he values the neighborhood (which is very important in my mind too) but is a driveway worth 5 points if you know you’re looking at homes without one? Maybe the neat stuff is worth more than 7% of the score. Change them to what you’ll use.

Anyway, his categories are:

• Neighborhood (25 points)
• Bedrooms/rooms (10 points)
• Kitchen (10 points)
• Bathrooms (10 points)
• Curb appeal/yard (10 points)
• Driveway (5 points)
• Bones (15 points) - This means infrastructure.
• Ceilings/Stairs (8 points) - Ceiling heights n’ stuff.
• Neat stuff (7 points) - Everything else.

via CNNMoney.