Buying a home can be both an exciting and stressful experience. Whether or not you go with realtors or not, there are some things you can do when you are looking for homes for sale. Here are some tips to help you with your home buying experience.
- Spend time in the neighborhood that you are interested in. It is not enough to visit it once or twice. You need to see what it is like at night and on the weekend. A neighborhood may look really nice during the day and then become sketchy at night or on the weekend. Are there a lot of homes for sale in the neighborhood? Is there a good school nearby? You may not have kids so that would not be something you would need but a great school in the area speaks volumes to how nice the area is. Make sure you drive around and find the services you need like the grocery store. Look into what your commute to work would be like.
- Do not make any big purchases. Before you start looking at houses for sale, you should not go out and buy a new car. For the three to six months before you go out and start looking for homes for sale, you should refrain from spending a lot of money or doing anything to hurt your credit rating. You want the financial institutions to see you as being very reliable and dependable. Opening new credit or taking on a lot of debt just before you tru to get a mortgage will hurt your chances of getting the mortgage that you want.
- Try to get a pre-approval. One thing people do not realize is that they will be in a much better position if you are able to get pre-approved for a mortgage. When you have a pre-approval, it means that a bank or other financial institution has looked at your credit rating, at your assets and liabilities and then decided that they will give you a mortgage. Taking this step will make a big difference when you start looking at homes for sale. Having this pre-approval in hand will also save you some time. You will not waste your time looking at homes for sale that are out of your range.
- Get a survey of the property. They say that “good fences make good neighbors” and knowing where the boundaries of the properties is will help a lot. You also need to know what you are getting exactly when you purchase a property. This will also prevent you from having any problems with your new neighbors when everyone is clear on the boundaries of each property. Have a surveyor check out the land and give you an official assessment of the property.
- The biggest house may not be the best house. When you set out to look at homes for sale, you should not be only on the lookout for the biggest house on the street. If you need to sell, you may have a harder time doing that if you have a bigger home. You also may not have the appreciation on that home that you think you will. Now if you find a home for sale and it is your dream home, you can afford it and it happens to be the biggest on the block, well you should buy it. That just should not be your criteria when you are finding houses for sale.
- Make sure you have the home inspected. You need to do your due diligence when you are looking to buy a home. You may balk at the cost of hiring a professional home inspector but you will ultimately save yourself some money and give yourself more peace of mind when you hire a professional home inspector to look over the house that you want to buy. This is the best way to find any problems with the house that you may not notice when you walk through and tour it. Even realtors may miss problems with a house for sale so you need a home inspector.
Buying a home does not need to be too stressful if you follow these tips.
