Choosing a new home is exciting, but it can also be a stressful and daunting process – after all, it’s the biggest financial commitment you will ever make and a major long-term investment for your family and lifestyle. With so many different options to choose from, how do you know when a house is right for you?

Here are some indications that you’ve found your dream property.

1. You use it as a benchmark to measure other properties against

If you see a property you like but aren’t quite ready to commit, the way you think about other homes that you view may be an indication you have in fact already found ‘the one’. When you find yourself constantly referring to the original house – the layout was better, the garden was bigger, the kitchen had more work surfaces – you may have already found your next home.

2. You can envisage yourself living there

During the first viewing, did you immediately picture where you would put your favourite sofa or pick out the room that would be perfect for a home office? Could you mentally calculate what your daily commute would be like, where the kids would go to school, or how practical the garden would be for summer entertaining? If you already feel at home in a property, it’s a good sign that you’ll be happy living there long-term.

3. The house has ‘good bones’

Very few houses are perfect – even new builds or properties that have been recently redecorated may not be entirely to our tastes. But if you walk into a property and find the things that you want to change are cosmetic (for example, the colour of the carpet or bathroom tiling) and all the structural, hard-to-change features tick the proverbial boxes, you may have found your next home.

4. You lose interest in seeing other homes

Viewing houses is exciting, but it takes up a lot of time and energy. If you’ve enthusiastically been scouring local property sites to look for new additions to the market but suddenly find yourself spending more time looking at photos of the property you’ve already seen, you may have lost the energy to continue house hunting because deep down you already know what you want.

5. You feel like you already own the property

Buying a house is a long, drawn out process that can take several months. If you start to feel possessive about a particular property before you even make an offer, there’s a good chance you’ve found ‘the one’. Be careful about getting too emotionally attached in the early stages of the buying process – this can lead to overbidding in an effort to beat out other interested buyers, which may end in disappointment if you lose and financial difficulties if you win. Setting a firm budget at the start of your house hunting process will help to prevent this situation.