Checklist Before Buying Your Home

Buying a Home? Here's Your Checklist

Buying a home can be so exciting that you might not be able to contain yourself. While the process can be extremely rewarding, it can also be fraught with some serious issues if you’re not a smart homebuyer.

If you’re new to shopping for a home though, you might not know what to look for. That’s not your fault, but it won’t make the process of buying any easier. Keep reading to learn more about what you need to look for when buying a home so you don’t get the short end of the stick.

Get an Inspection

Most sellers looking to get their house off the market quickly will handle the home inspection for you. While that’s a good start, you really need to hire your own people for a proper home inspection. If you don’t, it could come back to bite you down the road.

Believe it or not, sometimes home inspectors take money to look the other way on certain things. Obviously these are the bad apples of the business, but it only takes one to spoil the cart, so to speak.

Get your own home inspector so you can figure out if you need to hire a company with residential radon mitigation systems or somebody that can handle problematic materials like asbestos.

Check the Area

Before you actually buy a house, you need to see what homes in the area are selling for. There are a lot of potential problems with buying a home that simply doesn’t fit the area that you’re buying in.

For example, a home that’s selling for $250,000 more than the others in the neighborhood might have great amenities, but what it doesn’t have is very good resale value. That’s a serious concern when you’re buying a home, even if you plan to stay there for many years.

You also don’t want to buy a home that isn’t worth as much as others in the area. By doing that, you’ll be getting a property that needs renovations, even if everything in the home is working just fine.

It might sound like a case of keeping up with the Jones’, but you can’t have a home with fewer amenities than your neighbors if you want to retain the maximum value. Buy a home that’s in the middle of the spectrum in the neighborhood you’re looking at.