Looking For A New Home?

Give Yourself a Leg Up When Looking for a New Home


Looking for a home can sometimes be tough. In a seller’s market, it may be quite difficult to find a home that meets your needs within your price range. However, you shouldn’t give up. Here are some strategies and tools that can give you an edge over the competition.

Improve Your Credit Score

Being able to obtain the house you want requires getting approved for a mortgage you can afford. To do that, you are going to need a healthy credit score. Obtain your credit score and then take steps to improve it by changing your spending behavior and bill paying habits.

Make Sure You Have Significant Savings

While the mortgage will be used to space out payments for your home over a period of decades, you will also be required to make a down payment. This down payment can be as high as 20% of the value of the home you purchase. Large down payments may be required for more expensive homes. Begin saving immediately.

Get Preapproved for a Mortgage

Obtaining a preapproval for a mortgage can help ensure that you are able to close on a deal for a house much more quickly than would otherwise. It can also allow you to know what homes are within your price range and which are not.

Deal Directly with Home Builders

You may want to form a relationship with a home builder to either build a home to your specifications or help you find one that has already been constructed that meets your needs.

Limit Your Requests

In a competitive market, home sellers can pick and choose who gets the home. In this kind of situation, it may be advantageous to limit your requests for maintenance to be performed on the home or buy a home before your current home is sold.

Try to Be Flexible

If you have to deal with a lot of competition from other homebuyers, you should try to be more flexible than if it were a buyer’s market. This will help appease the seller and make sure you are chosen over other buyers that are pickier. For example, you could try to be flexible in regards to the timeline the seller prefers. While it may take longer to finish the process, letting the seller choose things like the closing date can produce a lot of good will.

Do Your Research

Buying a home is not something you should leap into head first. Before you even begin looking for homes to buy, you need to do a lot of research. This includes educating yourself on the homebuying process. It also includes research to determine the fair price for a home in the area you want to move to. Educating yourself first can help you avoid any significant mistakes.

Negotiating Repairs After A Home Inspection!

Negotiating Repairs After A Home Inspection

The home inspector’s job is to give you a report of any issues that are identified in the home—both big and small. From there, your realtor will work with you to determine what’s reasonable to negotiate over and how to go about the process. To start, you and your realtor are going to want to choose what fixes are most important to you. You can certainly request minor fixes for things like cracked tiles or broken outlets, but be sure to hone in on what your biggest concerns are before handing over any requests to the seller. Once you have narrowed down your list of requests, your realtor will present them to the seller’s agent. Here are various types of requests you might make in response to a home inspection report: 1. Asking The Seller To Fix An Issue Before Closing It’s usually quite easy to accommodate, at least insofar as the smaller repairs. Keep in mind however that sellers might not be motivated to pay for top quality repairs, so you may be better off going the next route.  2. Asking For Price Compensation A buyer may be better off requesting a reduction in the home’s sale price to accommodate for the cost of repairs. This is another common way to go, though sellers and buyers often have different ideas about what a fair price reduction is for repairs. Do your research.  3. Asking For Alternate Compensation You may choose to barter as a way to negotiate repairs after a home inspection. If you do, make sure to ask for items that represent real value to you, since you’re essentially taking them in lieu of cash.  4. Asking For A Home Warranty... ...to cover your first year of residency, especially if the home has outdated appliances that aren’t quite on the fritz but may be soon. Home warranties include plumbing/electrical/heating/cooling systems. However, they don’t cover things like garages, non-plumbing related roof problems, and septic systems.

AUGUST 2020 MARKET UPDATE!

AUGUST 2020

Included in this blog post is a link to my Real Estate Update Newsletter. Please click on the link below to get the latest Real Estate Update for September! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call or email my office. 

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