Step 3 to Purchasing a Home

Following the thread of the last 2 entries, I will now expound on step 3 to purchasing a home. Step 3 is where you tell your buyer's agent exactly what you're looking for. We do an assessment of wants and needs. What are your goals for buying a home? Do you want a single family home, condo, townhome? How many beds and baths do you need? Is square footage or lot size important to you? Do you need a garage? How important are the age, style, neighborhood, schools, etc? Refining the search is most important in buyer's market like the one we're in now. There's too much to choose from. You should be able to find exactly what you want. That will change when we move to a seller's market. Buyers will be so accustomed to having so much to choose from, they won't believe it when the agent tells them that there's only 3 homes in their price range to choose from and they can forget about all the other parameters.

Once we know more about you and your family and what you're looking for, we can search the MLS and find a list of homes that match your criteria. Moreover, we can set up an automatic search that will notify us by email as soon as any new listing comes on the market that matches your criteria. This automatic notification is extremely important in a seller's market so that someone else doesn't beat you to the punch. I've started to slip into step 4, so I'll save that for next time.