Sean’s Blog

This weekend we started the actual looking at houses.  After months of searching the internet to get an idea of what we wanted, we called a realtor and set up some showings.  We told the realtor what area we were looking at and a general amount we would like to spend and he sent us a list of properties.  We then narrowed down the list and sent it back.

On Saturday we  met the realtor at his office and he took us to each of the houses we selected.  We saw about 8.  We found a couple we like.  We also saw an open house for Sunday.  We really liked the house we saw on Sunday although it will need some work so we’ve scheduled a walkthrough with our agent for tonight.

Things I’ve learned from the house hunt:

• Have some sort of reference.  After you finish looking at houses they will all sort of blur together. Having a fact sheet, notes or pictures will help.
• Legally your agent cannot tell you some things (ie bias your opinion).  Be sure to ask about the resale issues to get a little more insight into what they think if you are interested.
• House hunting is exhausting.  Don’t plan to do much after you’ve just spent 3 hours  traipsing around strangers houses.

Here’s part one of my house buying experience.

Before I even get started, let me apply all the standard disclaimers. I am not a lawyer, real estate agent, financial wizard of any type, or even a personal finance blogger. I am providing this information in the hopes that anyone going through the house hunt can benefit in some way, or someone reading this can offer a good piece of advice.

Yesterday kicked off our first official day of on the house hunt. We have been looking for a house for a little while and decided that now was a good time to pull the trigger. The first thing we did was to get an idea what we could afford, what our price range was and scoped out some of the neighborhoods we liked in order to get a feel for them.

Once we had the range we would spend, I though to get the financing out of the way. I’ve had friends that have done this completely the opposite way (find the house, then get the financing) but this just seemed to make the most sense to me. Since I work for a bank, I just wandered up to the floor where some of the mortgage group sat with a name of a lady someone on my floor knew. While the group in our building handled the non-prime loans, and my credit was good enough to qualify for a prime loan, she just started me off by gathering some info and passed it over to another person that handles my type of loan. Being a good consumer, I thought I would get a couple other quotes while while they worked on mine.

Being a child of the internet, I hit up Lending Tree. Lending Tree farmed out the offers and I got a couple of offers the next day which made me happy as now I have something to compare.

Things that I’ve learned so far:

• It’s all credit score.  Make sure you know yours before you start the process.
• While you will get pre-qualified, nobody is gonna give you a definite number until you have a house picked out. This was really surprising to me, as I figured that i could get all the financial stuff out of the way before I even looked at a house, but this seems to not be the case.
• Mortgage Brokers call you at weird times. Maybe it was just when they assumed that it was when I’d be home, but almost all my correspondence (phone and email) has been between 5pm and 8pm). Just though it was a little weird.
• Be very clear about what you want. Most of my mortgage people made some assumptions and ran with it. Even though I said I had a down payment, they all wanted to show me the 0% down loans. It was no problem to stop them and clearly state that this is what you want to do.
• Ask for a breakdown of fees and closing costs at the beginning. These will be estimates, but there are some wide disparities and it is nice to know that upfront.

Stay tuned for more as we take the next step, finding a Realtor.