by Alexa Payne

Created on: April 05, 2007   Last Updated: October 30, 2011

You are searching for your dream home. It's got granite counters, hardwood floors, a deck with a view, three bedrooms... But wait-you are not just buying a house. You are buying a neighborhood. You are buying neighbors, friends for your kids, a school, that park down the street, the corner market.

How do you decide if the neighborhood is right for you? If you go to an open house take some time to walk around the neighborhood. Open houses are usually held on Sundays and that is a great time to chat up the neighbor who is clipping the hedge, or the one tossing a football in the front yard with his kid. Not only will you learn something about the neighborhood and your new neighbors, you can learn a lot about the house you are thinking of buying.

Make sure to visit the house at night on a Saturday. You'll want to know if there are neighbors who throw loud parties every weekend, or whose nine dogs bark all night long. Perhaps the cops get called to a certain house with regularity. Maybe there is a teenage kid whose garage band practices every night. If you have a teenager with a drum set, that could be great.

You can get certain stats on most areas on the internet. On many realty sites you can find out the average household income, the level of education, and the crime rate in your chosen area. Be careful with what you find this way, however. These sites tend to give these stats not for a neighborhood, but for a zip code. Zip codes can cut a swath across safe and dangerous areas, and by averaging the data make the bad places seem ok, and the good ones seem not so great. Do your homework. Abandoned shopping carts, tall weeds in the yard, stray cats, decomposing cars on front lawns, and litter may be signs of trouble.

Check out the schools. If you have children, when you buy that house you are buying teachers, and most importantly, peers. As kids age peers become a greater and greater influence in their lives until, according to a stack of research, they outweigh parents' influence. One of the most important things you can do is guide your child's choice of peers. One way to do this is to make sure the values of children at school reflect your own, so that your child will be getting similar messages at home and at school. Visit the school. Go to a football game. And remember, even if you have young children, visit the junior high and the high school. Kids grow up fast.

Finally, how will your day in and day out life in this neighborhood be? How is your commute? Are there parks and other recreation? How about museums, public transportation, restaurants, a grocery store you like? Make a list of your priorities and make sure your neighborhood has at least some of the things that are important to you.

When you buy a house, choose the neighborhood first. Many realty sites will let you search by map, which makes it easy to search just within the neighborhood you want. Ok, now you can look for those hardwood floors and granite counters.

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