How were you doing your house search? Did you let the real estate agent present you with choices and then bring you around?
This is too late for you now, but might be of interest to others:
When I bought my house last year, I did the 95% of the search by myself. I spent about a year browsing zillow.com and virtually eyeballing the properties with both Google maps and Bing maps. Zillow has interior photos, listing history (it's morbidly fun to see how much the previous owners paid for their properties during the boom time and are now hoping for the short sale) and tax history. Later on when I settled on an agent, I checked their website also where I discovered that they had other properties not yet showing on Zillow. Google maps was very helpful for showing bus and train stops (I need to commute to work). It's actually gotten better since then because now it even shows you what bus lines are at those bus stops. Bing maps offers rotate-able views of all 4 compass directions of the property, as opposed to Google maps' fixed view. And sometimes these 4 images are at different times of the year, so a winter shot can give you a better view of the lot because the trees are bare.
Of the hundreds of properties I checked out online, I only actually physically visited 3, one of which was the house I bought. I didn't have a lot of time to window shop, so I figured it would be more efficient to find a few the piqued my interest in the same general area, then have the agent arrange access to check as many as possible in a day. Unfortunately, for the first dozen or so, she kept coming back telling me that they had already accepted an offer. Like you, I didn't realize how many buyers there were out there. I was running under the impression that with the foreclosure crisis (I was most active just after freeze on foreclosures, due to the robo-signing scandal, was lifted), there were more people trying to unload their houses than buyers to absorb them. Zillow shows how many days the listing was on the market, so I figured I had time for those that had been around for a several months, ie there must be lack of interest. I was wrong. I see now Zillow has a new listing status of "pending offer" to help out.
Anyway, congratulations on the house!
Try to rebuild your cash reserves for emergencies. And while you're doing that, try to add a little extra principle to your mortgage payments. Even just rounding up will help cut a year or two out of your loan.
