It’s a silly ol’ world. Here I’ve just licked the really last nasty bit in the yard, and we’re thinking about selling the house and moving closer to Victoria. We’ve talked to a realtor and a mortgage broker, and our house is really close to being on the market. The problem is finding exactly what we’re looking for. Geography is the primary constraint: I want to be close enough to downtown to cycle to work, but it also has to be family-friendly, near schools and in our price range. My head starts spinning when I try to reconcile all of these factors when we look at a house.
The good part is that by buying our house when we did, our financial situation rose with the market, but it does seem funny to be looking at houses in the $350,000 range which I know were about $230,000 the last time we looked. We have a certain amount of buying power thanks to the appreciation of our house; I couldn’t imagine trying to break into the market now.
If it all comes to naught, I won’t cry about it. We’ve still got a great house that’s slowly getting whipped into shape, but it would be nice to be closer to work, among other things.
I would have thought a skilled spatial analyst such as yourself would have all the areas computed by doing some simple map algebra with a few selected raster layers. You must have Spatial Analyst on that laptop of yours. No excuse…really!
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I know, but it’s one of those problems where there are too many constraints to solve for. Many of them are subjective. How would you solve for "Oooh, I like this neighbourhood" or "there’s a crazy woman with lots of cats living next door"?
True, but you could create a suitability map for the realtor, and they could then call you with a listing and tell you it ranked an 8 or 9, and it’s in your price range. This would cut down on the number of listings you would need to investigate, and it would also be easier to make the crazy cat woman vs good neighbourhood trade-off if you have already taken care of the other tangibles.