Make Your Home Purchase More Efficient With These 3 Tips

Ideally, buying a home should be a fun, efficient experience, and here are three quick tips that will help your home purchase check both of these boxes:

1. Get pre-qualified. This will help narrow your search to the homes you can afford and give insight as to what your closing costs will be. Shopping for homes without a pre-approval is like going to the mall without a credit card—you might find something you want to buy only to find out that you can’t afford it. If you’d like to get pre-qualified, we’d be happy to connect you with one of our great lenders.

2. Create a ranking system for the homes you view. For example, I use a 1-7 point system with my clients. A home that scores anywhere from 1-3 means we don’t like the house—we throw it out of contention and never talk about it again. A home that scores a 4 is average, but those homes don’t count either because we’re shooting for “we like it” or “we don’t like it.” Homes that score a 5 or 6 are homes you like, but they’re still missing something. A home that scores a 7 is one we like so much that we’re ready to make an offer for it.

3. Avoid going to homes that have few or no pictures at all in their online listing profile. This is a sure sign that something is wrong. I had a client once insist on viewing a home that didn’t have any listing photos. Once we got there, we found out that it had a giant hole in the roof—we could tell before we even saw it because it was snowing inside the house.

If you’d like more home buying tips, you’re thinking of selling a home, or you have any questions about our Philadelphia market, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to help you.