I am not sure my story is going to make you feel better, but I agree with the person above who says that in real estate, everything happens for a reason!! Your property is out there - don’t be too discouraged.
My DH and I looked, at least on an off, for almost 10 years. No gun to our head as I was fortunate to have (mostly) good boarding options, so it was not a full time effort, but we really wanted a very specific arrangement and we were picky. We looked at SO many places and most either had lovely horse facilities and McMansions, or lovely horse facilities and houses that were tear-downs. We were not interested in either of those options. I think we put in two prior unsuccessful offers for places over that period, one of which later sold for exactly the price we’d offered although the sellers didn’t bother to respond to us. The other went to someone else in a bidding war that I wasn’t willing to entertain.
I had alerts set up on all the listing services and used to scour horsey sites on FB and similar, but the place we ended up buying was a drive by. I used to pass what is now our farm every day as I drove to and from the place where I boarded. Cute little ranch house on a nice street of small private horse farms, really nice pastures, and it looked to have a pool too.
One morning as I was driving to a lesson, I saw a woman walking down the driveway with a yard sign. I stopped and asked her if the place was for sale. It was the realtor, and she said yes, she had just listed it that morning. I said great, I will buy it, you can just put the sign in my car. She replied, very coolly, that her first available appointment was at 2:30 and she was showing it on the half hour. Gulp. OK, I said. I will come back at 2:30. I don’t think I paid very good attention in my lesson that day. I raced home and frantically texted my husband who was out and about as he normally does on a Saturday. I was not able to reach him in time so I went to see the property by myself. I was not too interested in the house but of course they always want to show you that first!! Did a quick walk through, was pleasantly surprised that it was in decent shape, just crammed with furniture that was not my style, but everything seemed to be in decent condition and there had been some nice additions to the home which added a big master suite to the back on one side and a large great room and back porch on the other. Barn likewise had really good bones, six stalls with a nice sized washrack and a tack room. The arena was nothing special but it was well located and seemed to have decent drainage. The rest of the property was well laid out, too.
I told the realtor we would put in an offer that day and wanted to bring my husband back to see it. Her only remaining appointment for the day was at 5pm. We came back, DH had the same, “omg this is the one” feeling and we knew we had to jump on it. There was already a couple in the driveway presenting their offer while we were touring the house, but they were asking about things like perc tests and zoning and clearly planned to tear the existing stuff down to put in a McMansion. So we messed around a bit and waited for the owners to come back so we could meet them. We chatted about how great the farm was set up and how the horses would just love it here. These people had built the farm over the years and were justifiably proud of it - we knew they didn’t want it torn down. We did go over the asking price when we submitted our offer and got the property. I’ve chronicled some of our early renovation projects at https://hedgerow-farm.com/.
Good luck with your search!
