Setting Roots

OK, so you’ve looked through MLS Listings, and real estate ads, and gone to the open-houses and have done a thourough search, and you have finally found the home you want to buy. So what happens next?

I’ll tell you how it went with me…

My real estate agent (who was simply fantastic) sat down with me and took notes about everything I was looking for in a home. She insisted that nothing was too trivial, after all, this is one of the most major decisions you will make in your life… That night she e-mailed me MLS listings for about 96 houses available in the area I wanted to look in.

I went through that list and sent her back a much shorter list of homes I was interested in seeing, based solely off of the listings. We then began visiting the homes. At each ones I would take notes on the pros and cons, and I would write down any questions I had so my agent could hunt down the answers. After looking at a lot of houses I finally found my dream home, I knew it was the place I wanted to bid on, that’s when the REAL nitty-gritty of Real Estate begins.

The First thing we did was to go back to her office and look at what they were asking, and discuss what a reasonable offer would be. This would be the amount we deliniated in the bid contract, which in and of itself wound up being nearly 50 pages! Aside from the offer, this contract also specifies how much (if anything) you want the seller to pay towards closing, how much you want them to cover in repairs (if needed), or that you accept the house “as is”. This is also the point at which you pay your “binder fee” (more on that later). Then we sent the bid-contract over to the selling agent. This is when the lengthy negotiation process began.  This seemed to continue for days, tweaking the details here and there. Once both parties had reached an offer we could agree on, we began the closing process.

For me the closing process involved all of the following:

• I received a copy of the selling agent’s home inspection
• I arranged to have my own home inspection done, and my own WDO (Wood Destroying Organism) inspection done. Both of these were completed by the same inspector on the same day. He was VERY thorough.
• My bank arranged to have the home appraisal completed (you will get a copy of the appraisal at or after closing)
• My bank had me sign some final paperwork, lock in my final interest rate and sent my package off to “Underwriting”. Underwriting took longer than anything else in this process.