Surveying The Land

Spent most of the day yesterday walking all over town looking for a building for the new location for the church we want to start next month. Easier than last time, because it’s not just me and S. Three guys from church came with me to comb the area we’re interested in. Don’t remember how much of this process I wrote about last time we went through this, but it can be pretty arduous and taxing. It’s easier with more guys. It was pretty much Language School 2.0 for me – spending hours talking and listening about real estate. A little out of my league, but that’s where the best learning happens.

Not really any real estate agencies or anything. Actually, I’m sure there probably are, but that’s probably a little elitist for us. Basically you just walk around until you find a place that posts houses for sale/rent. Usually it’s a business that does something else as well, such as laundry or a phone bar. If a business like that is ambitious, they’ll slap up a bulletin board on the wall and let people search for their new house on the wall. If you’re interested in a place, the bulletin-board owner will give the home owner a call, and he’ll come to pick you up and show you the house. If you buy, you owe the bulletin-board people some cash. It’s like having a real estate agent, just with all the most friendly, helpful service aspects sucked out of it.

It takes forever to get to see a house you’re interested in. It doesn’t help that we’re so picky – we want a big living room and as little else as possible. And we’re looking for a fairly big place by local standards. Usually a posting place will have one or two places that we’re interested in. Naturally, a system like this ends up with lots of places posted that are off the market already. Another problem is looking at the same houses twice. Like yesterday we waited for half-an-hour for an owner to show up to take us to see their house, but when she arrived, she immediately recognized us as the people she had showed her house to a couple of hours ago. Apparently it’s free or extremely cheap to post the house, so lots of bulletin boards are repeats. Nice.

Anyway, I think we found a decent place. The guys like it a lot. It’s a decent size – we don’t need a place as big as the place we’ve already got. My biggest complaint is the front door and the bathroom door open right into the living room. Which makes for two major distractions to a service. And the bathroom is right in the middle of the room. It’s a good, quiet location though, so I think we might end up there.