We just bought a house for the first time, and there are a few things I wish I’d known before starting the process:
1. Location is more important than you think. (I know you’ve probably heard “location, location, location,” but so had I, and it’s just now hitting me). Some examples:
One place we looked at had a big farm behind it, which was nice because it felt like we were in the country—quiet, pretty, calm, etc. But our state has sold more acres of farm land to developers this last year than any other state, so that nice view might be a row of ugly new townhouses within a couple of years.
One place was on a major road so it looked like it would be good for my commute, but with the way the driveways are set up there, it would mean BACKING INTO or out of the busy road during rush hours. A nightmare.
Another house was in a flood zone, and with the speed at which climate change is happening, who knows if it’ll be sellable in 10 years, or just a moldy money pit.
Like they say, “location, location, location.” :p
2. If you’re using an agent (and I do recommend this), make sure you also check on Zillow, and not just the links they send you. Zillow is updated a tiny bit more slowly than the service realtors use, BUT it will also show you any houses that are being sold by the owner themself. We found a couple of houses to look at that our agent didn’t, because she wasn’t using Zillow (other apps do the same thing, I’m sure, we just happened to use Zillow)
3. If the price of the house is set below value for the neighborhood, make sure your inspector takes a good look at the foundation. Seriously.
4. . . . And on the topic of inspections, make sure to ask around your area and find the most anal, obsessive inspector/business you can find (if you have an experienced agent, they’ll know exactly who that is—the person they dread when they get them as a selling agent).
5. Check out the subreddit r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer. You can search for any specific questions to see if others have gone through the same things. I also just enjoyed reading people’s stories about different house types and living styles (HOA vs none, townhouse vs lots of land, etc.
6. Make sure your mortgage lender isn’t trying to sell you a lower rate and not telling you they’re charging you “points” for it. If that sounds like gibberish to you: basically, when you’re looking at the interest rate on the mortgage, you can buy “points” to pay down interest in advance. This helps some people, but only really if you know you’ll be in your house for the entire life of the mortgage (30 years, in our case). The original lender we talked to gave us a “low” rate but when he sent us the paperwork, we noticed our closing costs were way higher than we expected, and that’s because he was charging us an interest point without telling us, artificially lowering the rate. We switched lenders immediately to someone who could give us the same rate and promised we wouldn’t be charged any interest points (we ended up going with a bank, because this situation comes up a lot more with 3rd party mortgage lenders, who are only making money off of these points, since they’re going to sell your contract to someone else, anyway). The bank we went with also promised not to sell our mortgage to a third party, which we liked.
7. It’s very helpful to set aside about $10,000 (apart closing costs) (IF POSSIBLE) to make sure you can cover repairs that pop up after the sale. Our AC didn’t work when we tried it for the first time last week, so that’s a fun, unexpected cost we’re just going to have to eat.
Hope this helps! Feel free to leave your suggestions in the notes
