First Time Home Buyers - Step 6

Well you have made it a long way. You have learned a lot about the beginning steps to buying a home. Now it is time to dive a lot deeper.

The first part of Step 6 is to find a realtor that works well for you. There are a lot of different things to consider when finding a realtor. The easiest way to find a successfully one is to drive around and look at all the different listings signs in your local area. The agents with the most signs have the most clients....BUT sometimes that isn't the best person for you.

My husband and I found a realtor through Windermere by the name of Tonya Callies. I sort of stumbled across her. Her husband had come into the bank I was working at during that time and I opened a checking account for him and his wife. Through conversing I found out that she was a realtor and that we had a lot of the same interests. A year later, I called her up and told her I wanted to buy a home.

The process of finding the right home can sometimes take as much time as the process of saving up your money for a down payment....it can take a while to find the perfect home!
Tonya worked with us for 5 months, sending us listings of properties in our price range, taking us around to walk through homes, and talking to us almost every night about our plans. She really held our hand through the entire way! This is what was important to us. We were First Time Home Buyers and we knew nothing about buying! (of course I knew how to do the loans for customers, but I had never been on the purchasing side)

Now some of you might like a realtor that is more blunt, they send you a listing say here is the price tell me if you want to see it....call me when you want to make an offer. They tell you to make the moves, instead of helping you make them. This type of realtor is perfectly fine too! They are actually great Realtors as well because they tend to get things done quick for you.

For a list of Realtors in the Tri-City Washington Area leave a comment I have about 8 top Realtors I work with regularly and after I talk with you a bit I can make a determination which one is best for you!

Once you have found the realtor that you want to use I recommend that you show them your work sheet that we completed in Step 1 and your results from steps 2, 3, and 4. This will help them determine what types of home to look for for you.

Now you might be asking yourself.....Do I really need to use a realtor? YES!
You are a first time home buyer, or even if your not, why would you want to do everything on your own? Realtors do so much more then just "find" you the home of your dreams, they also help you make the offer and make sure that the price is correct. Plus here is the BONUS, if you buy a home that has been listed by any real estate agent, it doesn't have to be with the agent you are using, then the SELLER will have to pay for the realtor service not you! That is right, the seller will pay for all the work that your realtor puts in for you. The reason: Automatically when a listing agent puts a house on the market there is a 6% realtor fee that gets charged when the home sells. If the listing agent is the agent for both the sellers and the buyers then they pocket the 6% fee, if the listing agent is not the agent representing the buyer then the 6% gets split between the two agents. The only time that you would have to pay for a realtor is if you bought a home, while using a realtor, that was for sale by owner or in other words was not put on the market by a real estate company.

So what else does the Realtor do for you? Well once your real estate agents finds you a home they are going to sit down and talk to you about all the details of that home. How much the sale price is, what the estimated appraisal value is, what the property taxes are, and what the neighborhood are like, where the local schools are, and what types of activities are close by. If they do not have the local crime reports I would recommend contacting your local police department and giving them the address to do a crime search, they can also check for sex offenders.

When it's time to make an offer:
Your realtor will write up an offer with you with all the nitty gritty details that are needed, most of which won't make any sense (I know they didn't to me). Once you sign the offer you will also have to come up with an Earnest Money Deposit. This is a deposit that will go towards your final closing amount (down payment + closing costs) but if you choose to walk out of the deal once it has been excepted then the sellers get to keep this money. Call it a good faith deposit, it makes the sellers know you are serious about buying their home. After the money has been collected your realtor will present the offer to the listing agent and the sellers. They will then sit down and decide to do one of three things, accept, decline, or counter. Counter offers are very common. When we made an offer on our home we asked for the seller to pay our closing costs (I'll talk about that in a later step). Because we requested for the closing costs to be included in our payment the sellers decided to give us a counter offer of a higher asking price, they basically increased the offer by 2,000 and said they would pay our closing. We accepted this offer and our final price was 127,160.

Once your offer has been accepted you are on your way to a new home. You need to give your Purchase And Sale Agreement (the document that states the offer and is signed by you and the seller stating that all terms were agreed upon) to your bank and they will start the work.....BUT WAIT!

WE ARE MISSING ONE HUGE STEP!!!!! Your pre-approval! The offer above would never have been accepted without first getting a pre-approval. So....read on to step 7 to find out about the pre-approval.

Congratulations on completing step 6!!!

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