Finding Your Dream Home- Step Two

Having successfully navigated Step One, the interview process and found the best way to meet your needs and your personality, you are now ready to move forward. In this step, I will write about some of the best practices when working with your agent. The first advice I can give is to keep an open line of communication with your agent.

From your interview process you have made it clear that you are looking for an agent who will take your calls and be quick to return messages. This is a two way street. There is no measure that I can give to articulate how much difference it makes for a real estate agent to know what he buys thinking.

Prequalifying

This is one of the most important and time-saving step in the process. Here is a hypothetical example of why: I had a client named Jane. Jane and I met to discuss her search criteria and one of the questions I asked her when setting up her search is "what is your price range." Jane told me that $ 250,000 was her max. I put her on an electronic search, we identified a few homes that she was interested in, and went out to look at them. It took a couple of weeks, but eventually Jane and I took her Dream Home and we put in an offer. Prospectus agent asked me for a prequalification letter, and I asked Jane if she had talked to a lender yet. She told me no, but soon went into his bank to be prequalified. Shortly after I received a phone call from a very distraught Jane, who informed me that she is only entitled to a $ 150,000 loan. Let me stop the example here and explain what you have probably figured out by now. Firstly, Jane could not afford her Dream Home. Secondly, as her agent, I have covered this up front and have now wasted a month of my time, but most importantly of all, I've wasted a month of her time. To make matters worse, after adjusting its search and view properties $ 100,000 less, what do you think Jane's reactions to these properties will be? You guessed it, none of them compare her Dream Home in a much higher price category, all this because a simple step was missed initially. Fortunately, this scenario is made up, but it could be very real. This situation can work in reverse also. Jane could have been looking at the $ 150,000 home because it sounded like a good number. When they go out to see if she was not impressed with any of the lists she saw, and soon become discouraged. After months of searching, refers to a person to Jane that she should get prequalified for a loan, just to see if she could squeeze a little more into her perceived budget. The loan officer tells her that she could comfortably afford a $ 350,000 home! The bad part is Jane has wasted months of time, which is something this simple step could have helped avoid. Hopefully these examples hit home

Find a Loan Officer

Prequalifying's free and your agent should have a couple of references of loan officers that have worked well with in the past. If you do not already have a loan officer that you work with, I highly recommend using one of your agent's references. The reason is because your agent does this for a living and loan officers that she or he recommends the most likely people that they have been through, no doubt, countless bad experiences with loan officers who do not get the job done in a satisfactory manner . Like a good buyer's agent is very important to find a loan officer who understands the time sensitive nature of Real Estate and can meet this requirement. By choosing a loan officer accidentally taking a shot in the dark, this person will be integral part of the largest purchases of your life, there is actually someone who will be quick and precise. Your agent recognizes the importance of loan officers who meet these criteria and should have a couple of people that you can choose from.

Find Listings

It is now time to take some steps to get you on track to streamline the process of finding your dream home. According to studies the vast majority of home buyers use the Internet to make your search, contact an agent and many other tasks associated with the process. No doubt you have visited one or more locations that provide access to home listings. Many, if not all reputable sites draw their information from a centralized, agent-only database called the Multiple Listing Service or MLS. These sites are good start, but once you have started working with an agent, they should not be used anymore, unless it is for quick reference and here's why: These sites are "cached" information. This means that these sites all pull their information from the MLS and then save it to a computer that enables it to provide that information to re-format it and re-present it to users, often in a more beautiful visually stimulating than the true MLS listings. One problem with cached web pages is that they are not updated frequently enough to keep the exact status of properties. Real Estate is a very time-sensitive affair, and as such it is vital that you work with information that is updated in real time. The only way to do this is to have direct access to MLS. As a licensed Real Estate agent you will have access to this system and more importantly can give you access to this system. By now, your agent should have asked you several questions related to your needs. These include but are not limited to: price range, the area you want to find a home, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and more specific things like parking, etc. With this information, your agent will set you up with one or more automated queries on MLS, which will initially send you any available listing that meets your needs and then daily (or at an interval of your choice) will send you new listings that pop into the system to meet your needs. These queries will email you automatically and allows you to log into a custom website that allows you to view all available listings in real time. This will help you avoid falling in love with a list that has been sold to a week or a year, can happen with cached sites. When you log into this system you will be given the opportunity to see a list sheet very close to what your agent looks. If a property previously was above your price range experiences a price drop, and is now in your area, you will be informed about it the next time your search is running. Therefore, I recommend the daily updates to all my clients. By the same token, if a property you are considering going under the contract, it will immediately remove from your search results. Each MLS is slightly different, so these examples will be for one I use here in the Chicago market. When you log in to view the lists that your agent has sent you, will not only be presented with information about dealers, you will also have the opportunity to brand them "interested", "might" or "not interested." There is also a "notes" section for each property. These are very important to your agent's ability to zero in on your needs. You must select "interested", etc. for each property and more notes you leave about what you like or dislike about a property, the better your agent will be to formulate an understanding of your true dreams. Ideally you should have sent more than 100 or so listings. If you send more than this, I would recommend to add more criteria to narrow your query. For example: If you are looking for an apartment and initially laundry in-unit was a "plus" but not a must for your search, you might consider changing to a "must" if your search comes back with too many listings. With the addition of more criteria for your search this will help resolve the properties may have less appeal when you go to sell down the road. Other value-added things to look for are: Garage parking, a bathroom in the master bedroom, etc. Talk with your agent to find out the additional criteria that makes sense for you if your search comes back with too many dealers.

Viewing Possible dreams

This is one of the most fun stage for many of my clients, and for me as an agent as well. I recommend viewing no more than five or six retailers at a time. At this point you should have narrowed your search results down to a top ten or fifteen, so you could see them all in a couple of trips out. Often it can be hard to keep things straight so here are some tips I've developed that has great success for my clients: 1.Your agent must give you a summary sheet for each property you are looking at. Organizing these listing sheets in the order you view the home. 2. Take lots of notes. Not dependent on images, because if you look occupied houses current residents may not be familiar with you to take pictures of their possessions (and in the coming states, I think this could be a liability should be robbed at home etc. ). 3. Establish a clear winner for each day out. In other words, when you find a home that you really like a lot of doing to your home Top Choice of the Day. From then on, you only have to keep two properties in mind, your "Top Choice of the Day" and the one you see at the moment. If you're looking at is not as good as your Top Choice so forget it and move on to the next. If you're looking at is much nicer than your Top Choice, making it your new best choice, and forget about the other. It's okay to have a Top Choice and a runner-up for the day, but trying really hard to decide which one or two homes out of every trip is the best. Do this every time you go out until you've seen all the potential candidates. After this, ask your agent to do what I refer to as a Greatest Hits Tour. This is a day you go out and look at all the best choices from previous trips and see them a second time, back-to-back. From here you have to come back a third time for the top choice or two and then it's time to make an offer!