Location, Location, Location” is a blog about choosing where to live. There are many factors to be considered, not just the price of houses, but whether the neighborhood is safe and has good schools, and whether the commute is bad or taxes are high. But in today’s economy, almost all of these factors play a role.

The trade-off between housing and location is important because it affects everything from the quality of life to how much you actually spend on housing (and thus how much you have left over for other things).

The single biggest factor in a house’s value is not how much you spent on it. It’s where you bought it. In the same way, it’s all about location, location, location:

As the saying used to go in real estate, “location, location, location.”

The question was not if you’d buy a house in the right place (of course you would); the question was where.

Buying a home is a lot like buying a car. You want to get the right price and features, in the right location.

But you can’t do that until you know what you are trying to buy. The wrong house might be cheap and convenient, but it is likely to be a problem: a place to escape from, or one where the neighbors smell bad.

The right house might be expensive, but inconvenient: no nearby grocery store, or too far from work.

You can’t tell what you’re looking for until you know what it is.

The house I bought was in a neighborhood called “The Village.” As I’ve written before, there are no bad neighborhoods. But a lot of people think there are, and so do I.

In fact, if you’re looking for a neighborhood with good schools, good people, and low crime, you can find them anywhere. You don’t have to live in a place called “The Village.” It’s all about location—location within the city or region where you want to live—and location within the kind of housing you want.

I know that sounds obvious. But it hasn’t always been obvious in my experience. My son went through several houses before he found one that seemed like a good fit. We started looking in Westport, but he wasn’t happy there (too many Tysons). We looked in Bethesda and Potomac, but we weren’t thrilled either (too much traffic). We made it to Woodley Park before giving up on the whole idea of suburbs.

Then we moved to McLean, and suddenly everything clicked into place: the schools were great; the neighbors were friendly; it was close enough to Washington that he could commute easily; it was safe enough for him to walk home alone at night from the metro station; we

Location, location, location – is that really the most important factor in purchasing a home? I’m a real estate professional who has spent many years helping people buy homes. In fact, I can tell you that location is almost never the most important factor in purchasing a home.

In my opinion, the top three factors are:

1. The size of the house or condo you want.

2. The quality of the construction (the use of materials and workmanship).

3. The price of the home or condo.

Location is the single most important aspect of buying a house. Location, location, location. No matter what else you do, that’s what you need to worry about.

Location is what makes or breaks a neighborhood, and the only thing that matters about the neighborhood is its location relative to where you want to be.

If you’ve never bought a house before, you may have assumed that the real estate agents who helped you find your home would tell you all about the neighborhood. But they don’t know much, and it’s not their job to tell you. If they did know everything, they wouldn’t be real estate agents any more; they’d be real estate gurus. And real estate gurus aren’t worth much money.

So it’s up to you to figure out what all this means for where you should live, which means figuring out how to figure it out for yourself. It’s not hard if you have an idea of what kind of person might want to live in your neighborhood and whether there are enough of those people so that prices and rents will go up or down enough for someone like them to buy something there.

You can see over the last century what happened to cities: they grew up around the train, not the other way around. But in the late 20th century, we turned this process on its head. If a city, town or neighborhood is near but not in a city, it is dead. It has no future except as a bedroom community.

A classic example of this phenomenon is Palo Alto, Calif., home of Stanford University and some of the country’s best schools, where many people think that it’s a good idea to buy a house. In Palo Alto you can buy an unbuilt lot for $350,000 and put up the most expensive house on earth.

Palo Alto has become famous for two things: its proximity to Silicon Valley and for having some of the best schools in America. But neither of those factors will sustain it long: Silicon Valley will eventually stop being so hot, and nearby schools will eventually become less selective.

You can see this sort of thing happening all over the United States: There are places like these all over our cities, towns and suburbs, where people have bought into some dream that they’ve got all figured out; then everyone else discovers that they were wrong about what was going on behind their backs.