If you are gearing up to buy a house, it may seem a bit overwhelming wading through all the different ways to actually find a house. Of course, there are many different ways to skin this cat, but I have a very opinionated method that has served our home-buying clients well for many years.
You can definitely start the home buying process on your own, before ultimately choosing a Realtor. Here are a few of my recommendations for doing so, just for your preliminary search pre-Realtor:
Check out your local MLS website. For example, the website MLSListings.com is the main MLS for the entire Silicon Valley region for buying a house & it includes every listing that any Realtor has uploaded.
Make yourself a list of your own basic requirements for buying a house (how many bedrooms, baths, price range, etc.)
As you prepare to buy a house, find a property search website that will allow you to save your own home buying search. This is helpful so you don’t have to type in your home buying searches every single time.
Go to open houses so you can start educating yourself about the housing market. The best lists for open houses are on your local MLS website and your local newspaper’s open house section. This will give you an idea about what you like and don’t like in neighborhoods and about the properties themselves.
You will also start to get an idea of how much you can get in our current housing market for what you are planning to spend.
The next step is to choose a Realtor:
Once you have done some personal research leading up to this point, it’s good to hook up with a Realtor who will guide you through the rest of the home buying process. They will have inside information from talking to Realtor colleagues that you may not have. Plus, they will handle the legal details (state requirements, etc.) of the home buying transaction & all of the paperwork so you don’t have to (except for signing the paperwork, of course — that you will have to do).Interview Realtors by going to meet with them for an initial home buying consultation.
If you have a referral from a friend who has used a Realtor in the past, it may even be fine to just choose that Realtor if you meet with them and feel good about it.Have your Realtor set up a search for you on their own system, using the requirements that you discuss. This system should send you electronic alerts of every property that comes on the housing market that fits your criteria. It should also have a function where you are able to communicate with your Realtor to let them know you’d like to view certain properties. And, you should be able to save properties so the Realtor can see your favorites for when they are putting together a property showing list.
Schedule regular weekly times with your Realtor to view properties — usually you can see about 7 or 8 properties before starting to forget features. This will take about 3-4 hours, so allocate time accordingly. Communicate with your Realtor about which open houses you’ve already seen.Keep in mind that there are a lot of properties that don’t have open houses. Some are “appointment only” meaning the Realtor will have to specifically set up a time with the owner to view them. Other properties are vacant and are easier for your agent to schedule a showing.
You may get to a point in your home buying process where you have seen everything current on the housing market that you’re interested in. At that point, it will be easy to meet your Realtor for one property here or one property there over a lunch break or right after work, in order to stay up on what is happening. Each time you go to view a handful of properties, decide on your first, second, and third favorites. Of all your primary favorites, consider whether you may want to put in an offer. If you’re at all interested in offering, ask your Realtor to find out whether there are other offers on the home & what the other homes have been going for in the neighborhood.
When you’re home buying, there is no perfect place. It will always be a process of elimination, not a process of selection. Meaning, of the available homes on the housing market, which ones can you cross off the list? Of the favorites, which is the closest to what you are looking for? If it has all of your non-negotiables, it may be the right one and time to buy a house! And if you can’t sleep at night because you are thinking about it so much, you better put an offer in the next morning before it sells.