Hoofing it While House Hunting

For the past 11 days I've been without my car. It's a long story but it all boils down to being stuck walking around or depending on the boyfriend to shuttle me around (which he has been a real champ about). Last week my lack of having a car did make life a little more complicated but it didn't affect the house hunting because nothing new in my price range came onto the market.

This week there has been two houses I wanted to look at. The first time I was able to hijack the boyfriend's car, the second time I had to call my agent and cancel. In a market where you have to push people over to get to the house I've been really wondering how people without cars are able to do their house hunting, especially for houses outside of their neighborhood.

I wasn't able to find much information about this online. I'm sure if you have a neighborhood agent they don't mind putting a few ticks on the pedometer to take you from home to listing, but for people like me who live an hour from where they are looking you would definitely have to be crafty. Does the agent do the preliminaries and only have you look if they think it meets your qualifications or do they walk around with a camera clicking every little plus or minus for your inspection?

Biking is very popular in Northern California (opposed to Southern California, where biking is saved for trails and 9 year-old girls)so I guess the athletic might see the house buying trek on two wheels as an opportunity instead of a nightmare. As a sane person I see this as a nightmare.

The website Redfin does tours where bunches of buyers jump on a bus and are carted from house to house. I see many problems with this, but for the carless it might be one of the few options. This of course, points out many societal problems among them classism (though there are many worse class issues in home buying), lack of decent public transportation, and a market where you can't even take a breath. Where I live people are continuing to beg for better public transportation but it continues to be an unsolved problem

Home buying in California, at least outside of San Francisco, definitely means you need a car and I'm ready to have mine back!