Picture your dream house and what do you see? A gourmet kitchen with a wraparound front porch on 80 acres? You bet, we can do that. A perfectly adorned downtown condo, if that’s more your style? We’ve got a few of those.

Bet you that dream house fantasy comes with perfect weather too, doesn’t it? Sunny and 70 degrees? If it’s the New River Valley, it can be winter in the morning, and summer in the afternoon! 

But really, I think you should see a house in the rain. My goal is to get you into a house you’ll love for as long as you’d like to stay. That means you still need to like the house on its bad days too. When you look at a house on a nice day, it’s hard to really know what’s ahead when the rain comes pouring down. That’s not always possible, I know, but there’s no better time to see a home than when there’s a nice soaking rainstorm going on.

Picture this: two inches of rain, a car full of groceries, a kid or two crying, and your check engine light on. It happens, we cope.

What we really want to prevent is all that AND a wet basement on top of it. Bad days happen, but if you’d looked at the house in the rain, you might have noticed some problems that needed your attention–or made you turn and run! What shows up as a mop in the pantry on a nice day might be puddles in the basement after it rains. True story – I was showing a house to a client several years ago and the seller, who was at the house, actually offered without prompting “the basement is dry as can be”. When we went down there, there was a squeegee, everything was up on pallets and shelves, and there was a small river flowing from the foundation to a drain in the middle of the room. Yep – dry as can be.

I’m a big fan of a good fishing trip but it has to be on the New River, not in your basement. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without a lot of honesty–with my friends, with my family, and with my clients, both buyers and sellers alike. I’m not going to sell a house and hide a leaky roof or wet basement. I’m also not going to let a buyer be blindsided by an issue down the road if we can find out about it, first.

With me–and everyone else at  Nest Realty–you can count on transparency. We’re going to see a house as it stands that day, rain or shine. If another realtor tries to push you to wait for a little sunshine, give me a shout. I’m not afraid of a little rain, and it won’t bother my hair, anyhow.