How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Just curious - when my husband and I first moved into our home our block was fairly settled with a lot of older families. Now it seems like a lot of young people are moving in and it's been great to make new friends!!

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

I don't care about their age or whether they have kids or not, but I do care about whether they maintain their home and property.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

i agree with above, didn't care about ages just if they were scum. I have one scumbag across the street but luckily we haven't dealt with him since the week we moved in and i hope to keep it that way.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Agreed - we have been very lucky. Most of our neighbors keep to themselves but they maintain their properties as well. It's nice to see new people moving in every now and again refurbishing their homes, however :)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Hee-hee. DH is an EMT and we came here to go trick or treating (great way to meet your neighbors), he said "OH MY! don't tell ANYONE what I do!"

for some reason this block is very old... good sign, i guess. people don't leave...

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Dh and I don't have a house yet, and won't be looking for another year or 2, but this is something that is EXTREMELY important to me. We live in an apartment at my parents now and they have the most inconsiderate neighbors ever. Landscapers mowing at 7 am on the weekends, one uses the street as his personal drag strip, another had geese for a while (image that noise in the middle of the night and early am).
I just don't know how we'll go about finding out about the neighbors when we start looking for a house. I guess driving by at different times, etc.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

we hadn't thought about it at the time really. the other houses on the block are in pretty good condition and that we noticed, but we really didn't look at the people or they weren't outside at the time when driving by. but we lucked out in the neighbor department. They neighbors all around us are very nice. Different ages, but they all know how to have a good time. We BBQ at each others houses. It's great. At least this is probably our forever home, so hopefully our neighbors will be our neighbors for a very long time. There is only one neighbor that doesn't keep a very nice house, but I just try not to look at that house too much.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

I didnt care when buying, but now after meeting some, I have second thoughts and now am thinking that maybe everyone only stayed in our condo for 5 yrs bc of these neighbors

In our condo section, we are suurounded by older neighbors... I just had the one next door come over to me horrified that i was ripping out ground cover next to MY house that SHE planted... it looked like a freaking overgrown disaster... If anything, she should be worried about her own landscaping She also had the audacity to say "oh, you're husband goes out at 7:15 right? bc I hear him in the shed in the morning" (its attached to her condo)... She like watches everything it seems... very disturbing

Then on our 2nd day here, we had all neighbors coming up to us warning us about this one older couple next to us... It seems like no one likes each other in my section.... We try to keep to ourselves but Im sure we're already being talked about... Its disgusting...

I wish we had more couples our age living right around us... maybe help us gang up on all the older couples that have been here that dont like change... UGHHHHHH

Tell im frustrated??? So YES I would have def liked to check out my neighbors first

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

important but hard to judge b/c you don't get to meet them beforehand

i am glad we live where there is an HOA to kind of keep people in order...i actually just made my 2nd complaint to the HOA today about a neighbor - i'm probably the complainer on the block but i want our neighborhood to stay nice and since we pay so much money for the HOA they might as well enforce the rules...

ideally we would want young couples our age with young kids - but there are a lot of older people on our block. our neighbors on one side are great - an older couple, so friendly, we really like them. the other side hasn't sold yet, we have not had neighbors for awhile - which i kind of like, i think i'll be sad when new people move in...

our community though has lots of families so i think once we have kids we'll make a lot of friends...right now it's hard b/c we are the young couple and i notice it's mostly young families with babies or families with teens and then old people...

so we picked the neighborhood/community b/c of the people in it i guess, but not b/c of our direct neighbors...

Message edited 5/28/2010 11:33:39 AM.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

we didn't really care what they were...we hoped for the best!

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

It was important enough that we sat outside the house stalking to see who did what, hahaha.

My neighbors across the street annoy me because they leave their garbage outside like all the time--furniture, boxes, you name it. I don't really want to look at their garbage.

Aside from that, everyone maintains really nicely and I have no complaints.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

We didn't research but we did shy away from neighborhoods that seemed to have too many cars parked around houses for fear that they were multi-family homes (with extra familes) or illegal apartments. We were relatively lucky with our neighbors - nice, friendly, similar age or older and for the most part keep up the homes. Having lived here for 8 years though, one think I have found is that no matter what you start out with, even the same neighbors can change over time. Our one neighbor had 6 kids, the oldest in Jr. High at the time, but as they got older we've had to endure their rude friends throwing garbage on our lawn after parties, blocking our driveway, etc. and the neighbor, while OK at first, has been more lax about letting garbage cans hit the overflow point so stuff blows on our lawn more than I'd like. Two doors down on the other side, the neighbors we hardly noticed decided they would bring home the "chickens" from the childs school for the summer - surpise - they found out they adopted Roosters - and they don't just crow at sun-up. They crow at 1 AM, 4 AM, 3 PM - any time they feel like it. So even if you start out with good neighbors, things can change.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

I would never want to move next to house that looked sketchy or not well maintained, but it is scary becasue neighbors can always change.....

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Unless their place is a dump or they are loud and obnoxious I don't give a crap who I live next to...

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

new horrible neighbors moved in a couple months after we did! at least its only 1 house.

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

Re: How important are your neighbors to you (when purchasing a home)? (age, etc.)

The neighborhood I live in now is AWESOME. I live OOS but we live on a dirt road, 2 minutes from any shopping you could want, next to a farm field. Its strange and beautiful. I wouldn;t have cared about the neighbors to be honest since I love the block. Luckily the neighbors are great. Everyone is friendly but sticks to themselves for the most part.

This is a pic taken in front of my house looking down the road. On the left is the farm field