The Home Buying Process
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As an experienced real estate professional, I will guide you through every step of the home-buying process and make things understandable, easy, and even fun! And, engaging my guidance costs you absolutely nothing.
If you are a first-time buyer, or if you haven’t purchased a home in several years, you may not know what to expect. I will explain every step of the process to you, and guide you through each of those steps.
There are three primary phases involved in purchasing a home:
- Finding a real estate professional to help you
- Financing Your Home
- Finding Your Home
- The Escrow Process
Finding a Real Estate Professional to Help You:
If you try to find just the right home without the help of an experienced professional, you will find the process frustrating and very time-consuming. And it doesn’t cost you a penny to do so. Check out why it is important to you to have a buyer’s agent on your side.
Financing Your Home:
The second step you must take in purchasing a home is to get “pre-qualified” by a lender.
Getting pre-qualified will tell you how much you can spend on your home, which ensures that you will not be wasting your time looking at homes outside of your approved price range. Also, it is customary to provide a lender’s pre-approval letter to the seller when you make an offer on a home: many sellers require that you do this. No seller wants to take their home off the market only to find out a week or two later that the buyer is not qualified to purchase the home.
Before a lender begins the process of pre-qualifying you, find out if they will charge you any fees to do this. If a lender requires that you pay a fee to get pre-qualified with them, go to another lender. And, speaking of fees, be sure to ask the lenders what fees they will charge you if you do get your loan from them. You must factor this in when comparing loan programs.
I will help you through the process of getting pre-qualified. And I will help you recognize “junk fees” or inflated fees that you should not have to pay.
Finding Your Home:
There is so much to consider in selecting your home: location, schools, price, floor plan, lot size… And, in virtually every home buying experience, some trade-offs will have to be made. Everyone wants a “perfect” home, within their price range, that has 100% of the items on their wish list: this is seldom achievable.
Before you begin looking at homes, think long and hard about what is most important to you. For example, unless you are looking for a home in an upper price range, you will find that newer homes are generally (but not always) on smaller lots than older homes. What is more important to you? A large yard or a newer home? Then, be sure to share your priorities with your broker. This will save you time.
Once you start looking at homes, try to focus on the home’s “bones”, rather than on things like paint color, some dirt on the carpets, or how tidy the home is. Items such as these are easily and inexpensively changed, while things like floor plan and condition may not be.
Once you find the right home, I can provide you with information about what similar homes have sold for to help you decide what price to offer on the home. And I will guide you through the contracting process which involves many important decisions.
The Escrow Process:
Once you are under contract to purchase your home, there are numerous activities that start to unfold. Most of these activities are ‘homework’ for me, but there will also be some things that you will need to do, and every item of ‘homework’ involves a due date as specified in the purchase agreement. I will help you with these items and make sure they are completed on time.
During this period of time–typically about a month long–it is imperative that you do not do anything to change your credit information. The lender will check your credit again just before closing and, if you have purchased a car or financed new furniture for your new home, your credit picture will have changed–and not for the better! Your lender could actually decide not to give you a loan after all.
What most people don’t know is that it is during the escrow process that brokers spend the most time on any transaction. For example, we coordinate inspections and repairs, and resolve any issues as they arise.
I will keep you fully informed during this period of time and work to ensure that any issues that arise are quickly resolved and, more importantly, I will work to ensure that NO issues arise!