Ever traveled to a foreign country in a different time zone, with a different climate, culture, currency, and language? I don’t mean “touristing” to an Americanized resort meant to mimic all the comforts of home you left behind. I mean “traveling.” Backpack, tight budget, buses and trains, youth hostels.

Think back to that first 24 hours, when your eyes are wide, you’re taking it all in, figuring out what’s safe, what speed things are moving at, what the heck people are saying.

You eventually find the “flow” and the experiences and memories are un-matchable. But in the beginning, that first day or first week or however long it took you, you were getting calibrated to your new environment. Humans are infinitely adaptable animals, but that adaptation, that “calibration”, is not immediate. It’s a process.

Buying a home is a process. For some, it gets more comfortable the more times they’ve been through it, because it’s less mysterious than that first or second time. But it never stops being a process.

Add to the process the fact that the market — any market — is always changing. Markets are dynamic. This one that we’re in now is perhaps the most dynamic in the last 75 years. Lending policies change daily, tax incentives come and go, rise and fall, foreclosures affect non-distressed properties next door… it’s all in flux, all the time.

So when you begin the process of shopping for a home and are serious about actually buying in the relatively near future, an important part of the process is getting calibrated to the market you’re shopping in.  

How? By seeing a number of homes, how they’re priced, how long they’ve been listed, what’s selling and what isn’t. And as good a tool as the internet is with photos and video and satellite imagery and mapping, it’s no substitute for getting TO and INSIDE a number of homes.

You’ll “feel” the homes’ character, the size, the setting, the sounds and smells, the light. You can usually feel the pride or lack thereof of the various owners. And you match that sensory input — sent by the things that add up to create the “condition” — against the price, and you combine those to determine “value.”

Then you go on to another home, and you run the ”value” test again. And after half a dozen or a dozen homes, depending on the homes and on you, you reach a point of being calibrated, and knowing what level of “value” will ultimately inspire you to buy. Again, it’s a process, it requires seeing a certain volume of homes, and it results in your assuredness as a ready-buyer.

I’ve had first-time and repeat buyers enter the market and buy the first house they see. But we still went and looked at a handful of others to ensure they were calibrated, and then they went back fully assured that they indeed want to buy house #1.

I’ve also seen buyers repeatedly insist for months — even YEARS — that EVERY house on the market is wildly overpriced, even as those houses sell to other buyers again and again. Some people cannot be calibrated. They remind me of the travelers who never do find that state of ”flow” during a trip. It’s a constant fight against the new culture, language, food… everything. And you wonder why they ever left home in the first place.

The process will calibrate you if you just let it, and it is truly a beautiful thing.