This is the key. You have a pretty good idea of what you want. Their job is to find you something that matches what you want. If they are good at their job, they are paying attention to the houses they show and visit with others so they should have a good idea of what price range for you to get what you're looking for. They also should have a good idea if what you want is available in the area, what neighbourhoods, etc etc.
My realtor did one thing for me that was the best thing I could ask of a realtor; she got me a login to their proprietary website to search on my own. Had she not done that, she'd have been fired. I didn't threaten that to her, she decided the houses she was showing us weren't fitting what we both wanted and came up with a solution. Whether you are talking about a doctor, lawyer, realtor, etc a credentialed professional who can solve your problem is a person worth keeping and one who can't is worth replacing.
Anyways what I wanted was a little different from you but combining the searches for garage, basement, minimum acreage and a minimum square footage, I sent her the ones I wanted her to vet (ones that didn't specify HOA, ones she was familiar with neighbourhood, etc) and then used the pedestrian sites for things like crime stats. You aren't going to find a 3+ car on a 0.3 acre lot with a HOA very often. So while the searches can help you, you have to do some common sense work to sort through the bs.
I saw a home with a 2 car detached that was all but fallen down, 2 car attached that was converted into an exercise room with shelves installed in front of the garage doors, and a full basement that was finished badly and had a sliding glass door you could tell it's where used to be a garage door. This house was listed as having 'a 6 cars garage'. People will do anything to sell a house. Between you and the realtor it should be easy to catch most of the bs ones.
the 2008 bubble
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I say set a budget and stick to it.
The 2008 bubble was about predatory lending and banks being above the law. If you try to pull a fast one on a bank and it's going to cost the bank money, someone in that company is going to catch it. If you met the right criteria and the bank could sell you a loan guaranteed to fail, default, or whatever after or beyond their reach they'd do it. It was all about where the buck stopped. Banks have to have quarterly reports and shareholders and all the business stuff. The govt was more or less a willing patsy to all the shenanigans.
It was much much more complicated than you trying to bite off more than you can chew. that's plain old bad judgement and the housing market can survive a few people making bad decisions on the scale of individual borrowers. I don't know the numbers but wouldn't be surprised if every major city in the US at least one home gets foreclosed upon daily due to someone not being able to pay (anymore, perhaps) their mortgage.
Anyway. If you are concerned, I started out the same way. I wanted to have my mortgage, insurance, tax, all housing related costs come out the same cost monthly as what I was paying for rent & insurance on my apt. The end result was houses that were too small or lots too small or too much work needed to get what I want. And I don't mean like a reno or addition. I mean like pretty extreme regrading, 'digging out the other half of the basement' in more than one case, structural work, etc to support what I wanted.
When I decided I could afford more house if I did more stuff at home, stopped seeking entertainment outside the house and settled for going out once a week or so was good enough, we found much more room in the budget for house costs and increased the asking price until we found what we wanted. It took a 50% increase in what we originally thought we were budgeting but it was within what the bank had approved us for to begin with, and I wound up purchasing a house 75% of the cost they had approved us.
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