Choosing a house

I believe life can be much more complicated than ours, but let's put it in a more simple way:
house market in US is FAAAAAAAAAAAAR more complicated than we are used to in Finland.

We bought, sold, and renovated two homes, one apartment and a row house, in Finland, with challenges, difficulties, success stories, but overall satisfaction. Filling in papers, signing agreements, etc. took about a day. You got all the information about a property, proper land maps, floor plans, and most of the cases a comprehensive condition report.
All the rest happened and was coordinated by the bank clerks, who made sure you paid the sales tax, they got the money and/or paid the money, and it was all done in 1 hour.

At first glance, the purchasing seem to be the biggest challenge one faces here.
If you have kids, and not too much money to afford a private school, your number one priority will be the school district.
Make sure you check the
- the school boundaries
- use address lookup to see the school boudaries
- academic performance of the schools
- parent's feedback

Some places to look for the information are www.greatschools.org and the schools' own web site. Some of them maintain rigorous statistics about their performance, so go and ask for it.
Most importantly, ask your friends, and check where the people with same background and priorities move.
Some of the things nobody will tell you, because they are politically correct, that you might choose places where even though you can afford a rent when moving over, but you might not afford buying a decent house.
That's OK if you never plan to buy..
If you want to buy,  and thinking back to our experience, I believe you rather buy a house that is not perfect but good enough and make sure you won't have to move again soon, rather than wait until the best house ever comes to your way.

When you have chosen the schools, you found a house, unless it is s new one of course, you will soon face the problem of not having enough data when you make the offer.. And here is where all your nightmare starts..