House hunting while 10,000 miles apart

Because we had been considering a new home for some time, we often shopped together on real-estate websites, not realizing then how urgent the purchase would become. We would both open our browsers to the same real-estate website, browse through local listings, and leisurely send instant messages about our dream house over Messenger at the same time.

Using instant messaging let us talk more often, and saved me a fortune in phone bills.

But now we had to act fast. Giving my wife the news that we had to be out of our house before she returned from Thailand would be hard—and that was one of the few times I actually used the phone to talk to her. Given the new circumstances, the big question we faced was "can we do this now?" The alternative was to wait for her return, but that was risky. In the end, we decided that it’s a virtual world, so why not take care of this piece of business online?

Our virtual house-hunting project was launched in earnest that day with the help of Messenger and Internet Explorer. Now the chats took on a much more frantic tone. Instead of cartoon monkey icons, my wife was sending links to webpages of available houses and pictures culled from real-estate websites. Luckily, I was able to keep track of each webpage by displaying them on tabs in my Internet Explorer browser window. As we discussed properties, I switched back and forth easily between the tabs to follow the conversation.

Our correspondence always involved sharing a lot of information, including addresses and new real-estate URLs. And, of course, I wanted to be a good husband and remember all of the little things my wife wanted to find in a house, what she liked or didn’t like about each one, and everything else that husbands are supposed to remember but never do. Because I was able to save each instant messaging conversation in a text file and put it on my hard drive, my memory appeared to be much better than it really was.

Every day, my wife surfed the real-estate listings and sent me a list of 10 to 15 houses to drive by and check out. Having lived in the same Indiana, USA, neighborhood most of my life, I thought I knew the town well. But, as it turned out, I needed help finding almost half of the homes on the list. Using Bing Maps, I was able to get accurate maps to each house and plan my route for the day. I also discovered that I could get an aerial view of the actual property before dropping by.

The aerial view saved me a lot of time by enabling me to cross houses off the list without visiting them. Pictures and descriptions on real-estate websites always make the houses look better than they are. But the aerial view was more realistic, and it gave me a picture of the entire block and neighborhood. I could see ahead of time that one house was a block away from the railroad tracks and another had no yard at all. In one case, Bing Maps showed me what the real-estate agent’s description of plenty of open space really meant. The property was in a block full of vacant lots and burned-down houses. We both had long lists of requirements for our dream house. And our Boston terrier, Pladook, had a requirement of his own—a big, fenced-in yard.

With Bing Maps, I could see ahead of time when houses were too close together or had yards that were too small.

“Make sure to take pictures in every single room,” my wife said, and she meant it. Once we narrowed our choices, my wife wanted to see as much detail as possible. I never went anywhere without my digital camera.

I didn't want to share the pictures from our house hunt with anyone but my wife. Using Messenger made this easy. All I had to do was drag the pictures I wanted to show her into the area where I typed my instant messages. This started a slide show in Messenger where my wife and I could look at the pictures together and share our thoughts and feelings about each one. My wife saved the pictures of the houses that we liked to her computer.

We carefully examined all of the details of each house we were considering. My wife kept coming back to the quaint and colorful European-style home on Victoria Street. Even without an in-person visit, she was confident that this was the home for us. That's all I needed to know. We made the offer.

On the day of my wife’s return, I was nervous when I picked her up from the airport and drove her to our new home for the first time. But there was no need to worry. She was thrilled with the house, and it was everything she thought it would be. Today, we work side by side in our dream-home office. And she still uses Messenger to chat with her friends back in Thailand, telling them all about our beautiful new home. While she chats, Pladook enjoys rolling in the grass in his backyard and talking to the neighbor’s dog on the other side of the fence.