Things to know when buying a home

Home buyers come in all shapes and sizes. More specifically, home buyers come with all different levels of knowledge and experience for navigating the process of buying a home.

I love being able to take the time to get to know my clients. It is important to me to understand where they are knowledge-wise, and to create a comfortable relationship so that they are able to ask me any questions they have as we prepare to apply for their mortgage financing.

No two clients are ever the same, and every once in a while I am surprised by a line of questioning that pops up.

Last week, I met with one young couple who, after two years of actively trying to buy, a home finally has an accepted offer on their first house. We were all excited as it has been a long, emotionally-draining haul to get them to this point.

I booked the meeting to go over their mortgage commitment and go over any questions they had about their lender. They surprised me. They clearly understood the mortgage documents they were signing but had multiple questions around next steps and timing.

They wanted to know when exactly they had to meet with their legal representative.

They wanted to know how they got their down payment to the sellers. Although we had talked about this in general terms, I realized with so much going on it would be helpful for them to have a checklist to follow for these key steps.

Some of the questions got into the nitty-gritty of moving. They’ve always rented so have never had to worry about arranging utilities. Again, a solid moving checklist would be helpful.

I was really pleased that they had a spreadsheet put together of all of their new expenses. We went through their budget line by line and there were a few things they weren’t aware of, like the quarterly bills for city services (water, garbage, etc).

I was really pleased that they had included a figure for monthly contributions to their emergency fund.

As a result of this conversation I am now developing a handout that covers what to expect as you move through the process of buying a home. There are lots of resources available that talk about getting to the point of obtaining an approval, but I couldn’t find much (that I found helpful) about timing and next steps as you head to the finish line aka closing day.

If you’ve been through the process recently and there are things you wish you’d known ahead of time I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at [email protected] . I’m hoping to have my information ready to go over the next two weeks and want to make sure I capture all of the important steps in the journey.

Once it is ready to go, I will let you know.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.