First Looks

 A Dog's View

Today was our first trip to New York since my retirement. The purpose: to find our new home.

We have been in touch with a real estate agent who sent us some online listings. We used those to refine our search criteria and ended with five potential properties. We asked the agent to schedule viewings for this week. He was able to get us two showings tomorrow and three on Friday. Today, we loaded up our MTA cards and explored some neighborhoods.

The first neighborhood ticked every box for me. I'm looking for something that will be comfortable for my dog, safe (for my dog), near a park (for my dog), convenient to shopping and convenient to public transportation. We walked and expanding spiral out from the co-op and were delighted all along the way. I was ready to call our agent and cancel all the other showings.

Jon's cool head suggested we should see what the other properties have to offer first. He also thought it would be best to see what the actual co-op looks like, too.

The second property was not too far away so we hiked over. I had walked the streets before we left Ohio using Google Maps Street View. It seemed like a potential fit for us from the comfort of my desk chair. In real life there is no park, there is an on-ramp to a highway. We contacted the agent and cancelled the showing. There was no sense in wasting his time with something we knew would never be a good fit for the dog (even though it was a larger co-op).

The third neighborhood preview was not as immediately agreeable as the first one we looked at, but neither was it as bad as the second. There is a small dog park at the other end of the block, but this is an area where the blocks are bigger. There's more street and sidewalk traffic than the first, but not nearly as much as the second. This is also the smallest and most expensive of the co-ops we're considering, so it's going to have to have a spectacular view if it wants to edge out the first candidate.

We'll see what what we think after the tours.