What you should look for first in purchasing your first home is: whether or not to buy it! There are advantages to owning your own home, such as building equity in the home, and the many tax benefits such as the mortgage interest deduction and property tax deduction. Sometimes a changing lifestyle may give the potential homeowner no choice, for once you have a growing family, it is difficult to find rental space with two, three and even four bedrooms.
But don’t be blind to the disadvantages of home ownership, and make sure you are willing and are able to deal with them. You have to be reminded that when you rented and something went wrong, you just had to call the landlord. In your own home, these are your problems. There is no way around it, owning a house is a lot more demanding than renting.
But if the good outweighs the bad in your case, get ready to undertake this big step. The most important thing is to know how much home you can afford. There are many first time home buyer programs that may make it easier for you to qualify.
Checking into loan programs will also let you to learn how much down payment you will need and how much in monthly payments you can afford, based on your income.
The location you choose will usually be determined by purely practical matters, such as how far you are willing to commute, the quality of the school system if you have children and the nearness of family and friends.
The internet makes it simple to find homes that will meet your requirements. Any of the sites of major real estate agencies will allow you to choose a number of towns, or a given county that you have targeted as the ideal locale.
You may also decide to check out the school systems either by word of mouth, or by looking up internet surveys that rate schools; magazines frequently do such surveys as well.
You can even locate a service that ranks schools and then links you to a real estate agent in that area.
On a real estate site, you can now pick the town or area you are interested in from a drop down menu, then use their search features to hand pick your perfect home based on number of rooms, type of home and price.
This is the fun part of your search, and you can get a very good idea of your future home without even leaving your desk. But there is one visit you should have before you go see the real estate agent, and that is a mortgage broker to begin your mortgage application process.
You will find it so much easier and advantageous to shop for a house once you have a mortgage commitment in hand. First of all, it will place you as a serious buyer, and not just a “tire kicker”. This will also give you quite a bargaining chip, since the sale will move quickly if it doesn’t need to be slowed down in the mortgage application process.
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