How I ended up with a spreadsheet instead of a shortlist
We started the way I think most people start: eleven tabs open, three favourites, and a vague feeling that we would know the right place when we saw it.
Four months later the favourites had rotated twice and we had not moved a step closer, so I did the boring thing and opened a spreadsheet. One row per property, and columns for the things that actually changed our mind rather than the things that photograph well: how far the nearest bus stop is, whether the building has a lift, which way the main room faces in the afternoon, how many stairs from the street to the door, and whether the kitchen window looks at a wall.
The listings I track come from https://global-property.investments/ and I paste in the address together with my own notes rather than the description, because I want to remember why a place stayed on the list three weeks later.
What the sheet did quickly was make the decision obvious. Two of the three original favourites failed on the afternoon sun column alone. A place we had ignored for months, because the pictures were taken on a grey day, came top on almost everything we had written down.
My wife calls it overthinking. I call it the only honest record of what we have seen, because after twenty viewings the memory of the fourth one is a hallway and a smell of coffee.
We are going back to Portugal in February with the sheet printed out, which is possibly the least romantic way to look for a home by the sea and also the reason we will not spend another year on it.