Advice and tips for first time home buyers

In My Humble Opinion
21

Oh definitely. I think we looked at the house we’re in now 4 times over about a 6 week period. It wasn’t officially on the market, so we didn’t have to worry about someone swooping in under us and making an offer, but even if it was my advice would be to take your time. If you’re not sure on a house, THINK about it. If someone else makes an offer and you “lose” that house, there will be others. Don’t let anyone make you think there’s a time limit or that you have to be in a hurry. Losing a house you might be interested in is WAY worse than buying a house that turns out to be not quite right.

Absolutely. I highy recommend getting a real estate lawyer to look over all contracts. It’s fairly inexpensive - I think we paid about $150 altogether - and it’s good to have someone who’s only on your side and doesn’t stand to gain anything from the sale or lack of sale of the house.

I was once screwed by signing a standard contract when my real estate agent made a mistake and the sellers of the house decided to sell to someone else AND keep our earnest money. We ended up getting a lawyer to get our money back, and from then on vowed to never go into another real estate deal without a lawyer. The little bit of money involved is well worth it.

22

I second this recommendation. That book was very helpful when I bought my first house ten years ago. It was still useful when I bought my second house three years ago.

Another suggestion: always budget more than you think you need for unexpected home repairs. Our boiler broke last year. It cost us more than 5K to buy a new one and have it installed. Ouch.

23

I think you meant way better. And I agree with the don’t hurry. And don’t get emotionally attached until after closing.

One more thing I forgot to mention. We decided not to do escrow with the lender. We are buying our own insurance and paying our own taxes. We’ve seen lenders screw this up before, costing two of our daughters a lot of money, including penalties and interest. If the lender screws up escrow, it’s your problem, not theirs.

24

Never plant a willow or a locust tree within forty feet of your sewer line. They have very aggressive roots, and they’ll clog the line to get to the water and the rich organic fertilizer inside.

When setting up the loan, make sure you have the right to make more-than-standard payments to the principal. After you get the loan, do just that. Paying extra on the principal will save you gobs of money on interest. If you pay just $25 on your first payment of a 20-year loan, it will save you thousands by the end of the loan.

Step on the floor all around the toilet. If there is any flex in the floor, a toilet leak has rotted the floor. That’s extremely costly to fix. If no leak, pay a plumber to pull the toilet and replace the wax seal at the floor. Do it again every ten years.

25

If you’re thinking about buying, start going to open houses and reading the Real Estate News and classifieds - basically educating yourself, so you know what the real estate market is like in your neighbourhood. You don’t need a real estate agent to do these things.

What you’re talking about, taxi78cab, is called being “house-poor”. You bought a house, great, now every dollar you earn goes into the mortgage, repairs, taxes, etc. etc. etc. This is not a good living situation.

Don’t be afraid of “lipstick and rouge renovations”. Things like replacing windows, floors, moving walls, re-doing bathrooms and kitchens are mucho expensive. Things like painting, fixing holes in walls, and changing light fixtures are pretty easy and inexpensive. If you can handle easy renos, get a qualified fixer-upper and save yourself lots of money.

In the same vein, buying a place someone else has just “renovated” can be a crapshoot. My idea of a renovation and someone else’s idea can be two completely different things. If a place was newly renovated, make sure the inspector can check all the work they’ve done. I would prefer a non-renovated house to one that was poorly renovated, and I’ll have to do it all over again, anyway. And probably over-priced, to boot.

26

We really got lucky on that one. What we bought was an old farm house built in 1910 and renovated completely within the last five years (including a new green metal roof last year). It is, in a word, spectacular. The workmanship is impeccable. Fully restored are the old beadboard walls and ceilings, and the black gum hardwood floors. All new double-pane windows, insulation, plumbing, electrical, and so forth. Wired for cable, phones, and networking in every room. Full heated and cooled basement with garage. Not one drop of basement leakage. Separate heat pumps for upstairs and downstairs. Beautiful fixtures, chandeliers, and ceiling fans. Top-line gas logs look incredibly real. Addition of berber carpeted great room with large stone fireplace. Large master suite with whirlpool tub, shower, and a toilet that flushes like a Dyson vaccum cleaner. The kitchen is breathtaking. Twelve foot ceiling with walnut cabinetry. Large, hardwood floor space with plenty of room for table and chairs. Bay window looking out over back yard trees. Adjoining formal dining room with fireplace. Parlor with seven coats of deep red paint above chair rail and gray beneath. (We put our piano and fancy stuff in there.) Large deck. Old, untouched tobacco barn in back with old treasures to explore and find. Lots of big old oak trees on 1-1/2 acres. Dogwoods. Azaleas. Lebanon cedars. Assorted landscaping with something that blooms almost all year round. Big front porch with swing and rockers where you can hear rain on the metal roof.

It is so beautiful that when we did our first walk-through, my wife cried. Literally. The appraiser wrote that the renovations are so well done and so recent that for purposes of evaluation, the home shall be considered new. We feel truly blessed.

27

Now that’s a good renovation. I’m thinking of the kind of renovations like the ones in our basement, where there is virtually no corner with a 90° angle (it looks kinda like a Dr. Seuss drawing) - and some of the wiring left ungrounded.

28

When you get around to improvements, think about which ones will add to the value of your house, at its eventual sale. Landscaping gives the best return on investment. Redoing kitchens and bathrooms are close behind. On the other end of the scale, some projects actually subtract from value. Swimming pools are probably the worst of those.

After our massive ice storm/power outage, let me remind you. Don’t ever plant a tree near a powerline if it will grow as high as the wires.

29

Your house inspector is the single most important investment you make before closing. He works only for you, and you sign his check, so he should be straight with you. Therefore, get names from other people you know who’ve had their homes inspected, either recommendations or warnings. My buyer’s agent recommended someone that two of my friends said was horrible, and picked the guy that all the realtors hate because he’s so tough. I now know exactly what my house needs and can get to them in order of importance after the house is mine, and what constitutes a defect that the seller should fix.

30

I notice nobody said the glaringly obvious…

Take a tape measure, and a graph notepad - use it to take measurements and make a rough floorplan of the IMPORTANT rooms - your bedroom and your living room.

Make sure that you can actually fit your furniture into the rooms…

We have a living room that is 18 feet long, and 12 feet wide…byt a wood stove and 3 doorways clutter up one end, and the other end is essentially a kitchen sort of area, so we can put the couch along one wall, and the chair sort of sticks out into the normal walking space, and there is ONE way to arrange all the furniture in the room, and it is not convenient.

Make sure you have adequate space, including closet space

We have all of 1 closet in the entire house, in what was the kids room [it is 3 meters x 3 meters / 9’x9’. We wouldnt have normally bought the house, except the price was killer [$80K for 2.75 acres, a house and a 20x30 barn with 3 storeys in eastern connecticut. The property is evaluated at twice that cost.]

What is the heat source.

We have water baseboard heaters. In our stupidly laid out house, every one is blocked by furniture because there is no where else to put the furniture that exposes the radiators. We tend to heat with the woodstove :rolleyes:

Try to look at the house fully furnished - it will show you what spots the flow through ergonomics crash and burn at.

With window treatments our house is a little dark, sort of like living in a cave. We saw the house on a bright sunny day, with no furniture and nothing blocking the windows light transmission…

I would love a torch and some gasoline, but then the insurance company would get upset :frowning:

31

Buy less house than the bank says you can afford.

32

Good advice, but a lot of lenders won’t go for it, and absolutely insist that you pay into an escrow account for taxes and insurance. They do it for two reasons. First, to protect their investment - they don’t have to rely on you to make sure those fees are paid. Second, they get the use of the money while it’s building up in the escrow account. While they do incur some costs in managing the escrow, and the payments made from it, I’ll wager those costs are more than offset by the income generated by the cash.

If the lender will let you take care of taxes and insurance yourself, they might well demand proof of payment, so hang on to those receipts and canceled checks.

If a lender screws up your tax payments, resulting in penalties and interest, it’s up to the lender to pay the freight, not you. If they refuse to do so, a strongly-worded letter is in order, followed by referrals to your state’s attorney general, etc., etc. When they set up an escrow account for these things, they are assuming the duty to make sure the taxes get paid on time.

33

Hell yes. We were lucky in that our house came with insurance for problems - damn lucky when the dishwasher died weeks after moving in.

Also budget time, since there will be a million little things to fix. And know where the nearest hardware store is - you’ll be well known to them before you’re through.

34

I think they sell tools to make this job easier now. Another reason to do this is for the move. Whether you pay someone, or get friends to help, it is really handy to know where all the furniture goes before it gets into a room.

35

Well…

We had a slight problem with the realtors not showing us houses they thought we couldn’t afford. This was moving to the Bay Area from New Jersey in 1996, before the latest boom really got started. We came from an expensive neighborhood, so there was sticker shock, but not that much. Though we’re happy with what we got, if we had it to do over again I would have wanted to look at a bit more expensive properties.

As for escrow, (combining posts for the sake of the hamsters) there was a certain percentage of equity over which you didn’t have to use the lender. We’re way above that, and do the payments ourselves. I’d much rather have the money earning interest than to pay it every month. For our first house, though, I think we were contractually obligated to do the escrow route.