First Home Buying

Getting out there and looking for a home is the first step toward finding out what you have available to you, but if done incorrectly it can be the equivalent of walking barefoot and blindfolded across a room full of mouse traps. That would be fairly unpleasant, unless you were watching, in which case it could be really funny.

Anyway, it’s imperative that you have an idea of how homes are selling in your area - or the area you want to move to - before you go shopping. The last thing you want to do is to start flashing exhorbitant offers or writing up miserly ones. If you don’t have a solid gauge on what the market is doing and how homes are selling in relation to their list price, you’re either going to get ripped off by paying too much, or you’re going to offend someone with a chintzy contract.

You can look on the internet day in and day out, but until you start working with an agent who knows the local market, you may find that you lack the information you need to maintain an accurate picture as the weeks and months go by and the market shifts and changes. In some markets you may find yourself getting caught in bidding wars with other bloodthirsty, ravenous buyers. Not that this describes you, of course. Oh no, not you!

If you’ve ever used eBay, you understand the way people get when they perceive that something they want is also wanted by others: it drives the price of the object in question upwards. So you’ll need to be armed with the tools to know how high to go and when to quit. These tools include common sense, a firm grasp of your finances, and the knowledgeable aid of a qualified real estate agent.

In slower markets you might have the opportunity to receive concessions from the seller. Whenever it’s especially hard to sell a home, or the longer a home has been on the market, you’ve got a better shot at asking for help with closing costs, working out gift funds with the seller, or trying to get money for repairs or updates that need to be done to the property. An agent is like a pair of glasses to replace that blindfold, and your own research is the pair of shoes to put on your bare feet.

Ask questions of your agent, as often as possible. More than likely, she’ll be working with a few clients at a time and will be able to tell you plenty of stories that relate to the consistency and the overall tone of the current market. The agent I worked with when I bought my most recent house was able to print out market data that spanned the previous six months. The data showed an increasingly positive trend in the number of homes sold with a slight reduction in median sales price and available inventory.

I had written three offers up to this point, providing full list price but asking the seller to pay my closing costs. Each of those three offers was outbid, but once I saw the market data my agent provided and realized that the market was heating up, I made sure to go a little higher than the list price on my following offer and I ended up getting the house!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: do your homework! The web is a great place to start, but you need to talk to not only your agent but also friends or relatives who have recently bought or sold a home. Ask them what the experience was like, how the process went and, if you need some specifics, politely ask for details as long as they don’t mind sharing them. You’ll find that most people are fairly forthcoming with information about their experiences, especially if it’s information about a new home they are proud of or a deal done with a previous home sale in which they believe they negotiated a good transaction.