Tips to get the first-time home buyer started
It’s called “buyer’s remorse.”
A homebuyer goes through all the necessary steps: Getting a loan secured, finding an agent, and narrowing the field until that perfect home cries for an offer. Numbers are passed between buyer and seller. A price is agreed upon.
Soon enough, people who have been renting all their adult lives realize they’ve just made the biggest purchase of their lives.
“People will wake up in the middle of the night scared,” said Marlene Gutierrez, a realtor with Lodi’s Katzakian, Williams and Sherman Real Estate. “It can be overwhelming.”Gutierrez has been helping people find homes for 25 years, and still learns something new about the real estate market every day. Buying a home is a complicated process, filled with details, paperwork, inspections and lots of number crunching.
For a first-time homebuyer, it can be as frustrating as it is rewarding. Tips and advice for folks buying their first home is readily available, but the most important factor is being ready to step into ownership, Gutierrez said.
“They need to be confident they’re doing the right thing, and that’s just something they have to feel,” Gutierrez said. “They have to do it only when they’re ready.”Low interest rates, coupled with an increase in programs that allow people to buy without a cash down payment, have made it easier for rookie buyers to become homeowners in recent years, said Nancy Cross, a realtor with SSB/GMAC Real Estate in Lodi. Combined with the tax advantages that come with ownership, more and more people are leaving their apartments for places of their own.
“The interest rates make the payments much more affordable,” Cross said. “Between the (interest rates, zero down programs and tax advantages), it makes a mortgage closer to what somebody would be paying for rent.”Whenever someone is buying a property, be it for the first or the umpteenth time, the first step should always be to get prequalified for a loan, Gutierrez said. Sitting down with a mortgage lender gives the buyer time to clean up any credit history problems that may arise during the approval process.
A prequalification also gives the buyer a leg-up on competitors when multiple bids are placed on a home, Cross said.
“When you have more than one offer on a property, the seller is going to go with the most solid offer,” she said. “It’s important in such a competitive market.”Talking to a mortgage lender also gives the homebuyer an idea of what they can afford. When the buyer meets with a realtor — the next important step in the process — having a price range leads to a more narrow search and a bit less heartbreak, Gutierrez said.
“If they look at something that is $300,000 and they can only afford something for $150,000, they’ll be setting themselves up for disappointment,” she said.
Real estate agents are the first-time homebuyer’s guide through the process. They will take buyers to different homes in their desired price range, style and neighborhood, walk them through mountains of paperwork and inspections, and offer advice whenever needed.
“It’s important to have an agent you trust,” Gutierrez said. “We’re in there to sell the real estate, but we want everyone to feel really good about it.
“We really just take them by the hand.”