House hunting
The House Hunting Spreadsheet: What to Track (and Where It Breaks Down)
The exact columns a home comparison spreadsheet needs, a weighted scoring formula that works, and an honest look at where spreadsheets stop being the right tool.
A spreadsheet is the default answer to house hunting chaos, and for good reason: it’s free, it’s flexible, and comparing rows is exactly the thing spreadsheets are best at. If you’re touring homes and drowning, building one is a reasonable first move.
But most house hunting spreadsheets fail for the same two or three reasons, and they’re worth knowing before you spend a Sunday building one.
Here’s what to put in it, how to score it, and the point at which you should stop.
The columns that actually earn their place
The temptation is to track everything. Resist it. Every column you add is a column you have to fill in for every house, and the spreadsheet dies the moment it feels like homework.
Identity and basics
| Column | Notes |
|---|---|
| Address | Also useful as your row label |
| Asking price | |
| Date toured | |
| Days on market | High DOM is leverage |
| Price changes | A drop signals motivation |
| Beds / Baths | |
| Square footage | |
| Lot size | |
| Year built |
Cost of ownership. This is the section most people skip, and it’s where the real money hides:
| Column | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Property taxes (annual) | Varies enormously between otherwise similar homes |
| HOA dues | And what they actually cover |
| Roof age | Replacement is commonly five figures |
| HVAC age | Same |
| Water heater age | Cheaper, but a sign of overall maintenance |
| Estimated immediate work | Your rough number for what you’d fix in year one |
True monthly cost. Add a calculated column. Asking price alone is misleading when one house has $9,000 in annual taxes and no HOA and another has $4,000 in taxes and $400/month in dues. Something like:
= (mortgage_payment) + (annual_taxes / 12) + (hoa_monthly) + (insurance / 12)Ranking on this column instead of asking price reorders the list more often than people expect.
Your scores. The same six categories for every home, each rated 1 to 5:
- Kitchen
- Layout
- Condition
- Neighborhood
- Commute
- Value
Freeform
- Best thing about it (one sentence)
- Biggest concern (one sentence)
- Link to the photo album for this house
Weight the scores, don’t just add them
A plain sum treats commute and kitchen as equally important, which is almost never true for anyone.
Assign each category a weight that reflects how much it matters to you, with the weights summing to 1. For example:
| Category | Weight |
|---|---|
| Layout | 0.25 |
| Condition | 0.20 |
| Neighborhood | 0.20 |
| Commute | 0.15 |
| Kitchen | 0.10 |
| Value | 0.10 |
Then compute a weighted score:
= (layout * 0.25) + (condition * 0.20) + (neighborhood * 0.20)
+ (commute * 0.15) + (kitchen * 0.10) + (value * 0.10)The setup is worth it for two reasons. It makes you decide what you care about before you’ve fallen for a particular house, which is the only point at which you can answer honestly. And if you’re buying with someone else, filling in the weights separately will probably be the most useful hour of the entire search. Arguing about weights is a great deal easier than arguing about houses.
One caveat. The weighted score exists to produce a shortlist, not a verdict. If it crowns a winner and your gut disagrees, the model has missed something, and it’s worth working out what before you override it.
Where spreadsheets break down
They tend to fail in roughly this order.
Entry friction. You’re standing in a stranger’s kitchen with an agent making conversation. Nobody opens Google Sheets on their phone and types into cell F7. So entry gets deferred to the evening, and by evening the detail is gone, which is the exact problem the spreadsheet was supposed to solve. This is the one that kills most spreadsheets, usually around house number four.
Photos live somewhere else. Your camera roll has 200 photos in chronological order and your spreadsheet has a column of Drive links you didn’t keep updated. When you’re comparing two finalists and want to check the bathroom tile, you’re scrolling through the roll by timestamp trying to remember which Saturday that was.
Comparison is still manual. The one thing a spreadsheet should be brilliant at needs setup most people never get around to. Comparing two rows properly means freezing headers, hiding the columns you don’t care about, and reading across. Fine on a laptop. Not something you’ll manage on your phone at a second showing.
When a spreadsheet is the right call
Use one if:
- You’re early and touring a handful of homes
- You already live in spreadsheets and will keep this one updated
- You care most about the financial columns (taxes, HOA, true monthly cost), where nothing beats a spreadsheet
- You want a custom weighting model that no app will give you
Skip it if you’re touring a lot of homes on your phone, or if you know from experience that you don’t keep this kind of thing updated past week two.
What we built instead
We made CazaHQ because of the entry-friction problem specifically. It’s a free iOS app: you log a home in about thirty seconds while you’re still in the driveway, photos attach to the right house on their own, and the side-by-side comparison is already there. Same columns, more or less. The difference is that you’re not the one maintaining it.
That said, if the financial modeling is what you care about most, a spreadsheet still beats every app on that dimension, ours included. Plenty of people run both.
For the tracking system itself, independent of tool, see how to keep track of the houses you tour.
FAQ
Is there a free house hunting spreadsheet template? Plenty exist, and most are overbuilt, with 40 columns you’ll never fill in. You’ll get more out of building a small one from the columns above, because you’ll understand what’s in it and why. Our free checklist PDF includes a printable scorecard covering the same six categories if you’d rather start on paper.
What should I track that most people forget? Property taxes, HOA dues, and the ages of the roof, HVAC, and water heater. Those five fields move the true cost of a house by tens of thousands of dollars and are almost never in anyone’s notes.
Should my partner and I keep separate spreadsheets? Keep one shared sheet for the facts and separate columns for each person’s scores. Independent scoring before discussion gives you much better information than scoring together, where one person’s opinion tends to anchor the other’s.
How many homes before a spreadsheet is worth it? Around four. Below that you’ll remember them fine. Above that, you won’t, and by the time you notice, the details from the early homes are already gone.