Tag: house hunting series

Home and Decor

House Hunting Part 5: Closing!

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Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

House Hunting Part 5: Closing

Closing is probably the easiest and scariest part of buying a house. You’ve found the house of your dreams, you’ve negotiated and agreed on a price, you’ve gotten approval from the bank, and all the inspections have gone well.  Now it’s time for you to take the step of legally purchasing the home.

A day or two before closing, you’ll be given the opportunity to give the house a final inspection to ensure that the improvements/repairs you asked for after the initial inspection and were agreed to by the owners, are completed. If they aren’t, you can renegotiate a little—our seller’s didn’t get to a particular project they agreed to, so they gave us a gift card to take care of the cost. Once everything looks good and you’re happy, you move on to closing.

On the day of your closing, you will meet with a real-estate attorney of your choice or your realtor may find you one. Sometimes, but not all the time, the previous owners will be there to sign some documents saying they’ve done everything you asked them to do and outlining the amount of money they will receive from the bank.  They will probably give you the keys to the house and the remotes to the garage. If you’re lucky like we were, they’ll let you know anything quirky about the house—like our living room has 12 light switches…and only 3 lights—and they’ll maybe give you their number in case any questions come up.

They’ll leave, and then it’s just you, the lawyer and your realtor. Here’s the scary part where you sign all the documents stating you are who you say you are (easy), that you understand the house is in the condition you agreed to purchase it in (easy), and the documents saying you are responsible for paying back the 30-year loan for an ungodly amount of money (scary). And just when you think your hand is going to fall off, you’ve signed your last document and they tell you the deed to the house will be transferred shortly!

And it’s as simple (or as complicated) as that.

We took the keys to our new home, unlocked the doors and then just kind of roamed around looking at things we hadn’t noticed before and talking about what we were going to do to make the house our own.

For about the first week, it definitely felt like we were staying in a stranger’s house, but once we got our stuff unpacked and we’d decorated some, everything started to feel like home.

I hope this series has been helpful for you as you think about one day buying a home. If you have any specific questions about the home buying process, please let me know and I’d be happy to answer them for you.

–Mrs. Dominico

Remember to like The Unfinished Mrs on Facebook, follow on Twitter and on Bloglovin

House Hunting Part 4
Home and Decor · New Adventures

House Hunting Part 4

rdominico4 Comments

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Part 4: Under Contract

So Josh and I made an offer on THE house on a Friday morning. Around 2pm, Jason called to let us know that the owners had seen the offer, but they wanted to wait a day to respond to it. Apparently, they had another couple look at the house a couple weeks earlier who seemed interested and they wanted to see if THEY would make an offer.

I haven’t mentioned before that the sellers were selling their house on their own, without a realtor. A buyer doesn’t (normally) pay for their agent out of pocket, that money is paid by the seller at closing—the same is true for the seller’s agents, they take their commission from the price paid by the buyer which in turn leaves the seller with less money from the sale of their house. So not using a realtor can make sense for the seller.

We made a very strong offer on their house that, according to Jason, an agent would encourage a seller to respond to. Because our sellers weren’t working with an agent, they were just going off their best judgment and they of course wanted to get the most money out of their house that they could, so they wanted to wait and see if someone else would make an offer.

Josh and I were not interested in getting into a bidding war and we were a little miffed that they didn’t want to consider our strong offer right away, so we gave the sellers an ultimatum—they needed to respond to our offer by 6pm Friday night or it was off the table.  Within 2 minutes they responded with a counteroffer. They only came down 1% off their asking price, which was annoying but if they wanted to play hardball, so could we.

We came back with a new offer which was only 1% higher than our initial offer. While we waited for them to counteroffer again, Josh and I ran the numbers again and came up with our maximum price. We knew the house was worth their asking price, but of course we didn’t want to pay the asking price. This was the price that the sellers HAD to come down to or we were walking.

Guess what their counteroffer was? Yep, they hit the nail on the head with the price we were comfortable with and we conceded to their counteroffer, hoping this would show some good will when and if it came time to renegotiate if the inspection brought up any red flags. Friday at 6pm, they signed the offer and our offer became a contract!

On Monday everything kicked into high gear. We had 4 weeks to get the inspections, survey and appraisal done and get home owners’ insurance and get approved for our mortgage. Jason scheduled our inspections for later in the week and Josh and I started working on our mortgage application.*

*I could write a whole post on the mortgage application process, but it’s pretty tedious and boring. If you have questions or want a post on this topic, let me know and I’ll write it out for you.

The inspections went really well. There were no huge red flags, just some minor repairs that needed to be made, which we asked the buyers to take care of before closing and they agreed. The pest inspection and radon tests came out clean. If the inspections had uncovered something wrong with the house, we were prepared to ask the sellers to make repairs, come down on the selling price or ask them to cover part of our closing costs so we could have more cash on hand at closing to cover the cost of the repairs.

We picked the bank that offered us the lowest interest rate, private mortgage insurance, and closing cost combination and got busy giving the bank all the information they needed to approve us for the loan. The bank is also responsible for completing the appraisal—which is when the bank assesses the value of the home, because they will not give you a mortgage loan for an amount higher than the appraised value.

We had until May 5th at 5pm—the end of our Due Diligence Period—to decide we don’t want to buy the house for any reason. As it stands now, we don’t see any reason not to continue with buying the house, so May 5th will probably just come and go for us. Then all we have to do is wait to be approved for our mortgage loan and wait for May 15th so we can close!

Look out for Part 5: Closing—coming sometime after May 15th!

If you’re in the market for a house, recently bought a home, or want to own a house in the future—leave a comment and tell me about your experience or let me know if you have any questions!

–Mrs. Dominico

Remember to like The Unfinished Mrs on Facebook, follow on Twitter and on Bloglovin

House Hunting Part 2
Home and Decor · New Adventures

House Hunting Part 2

rdominico4 Comments

For other parts in the House Hunting Series–Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Before I jump into today’s post, can I just tell you how tired I am from this weekend? I spent this past weekend running 4 American Girl Fashion Shows as a fundraising event for my job at the Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem. I worked 30 hours this weekend and I am just so exhausted, even 4 days later. Thank God it’s over!

Continuing with my House Hunting Series…

Part 2: Looking at Houses and Working with a Realtor

Last week, I told you that Josh and I had been using websites like Zillow to look at prospective houses online. This is a great resource that can give you a better idea of which houses in the area that you want to visit.  Being able to browse online also gives you the opportunity to house hunt without first hiring a realtor.

Now, when you find a house to look at, if it’s listed through a realtor, you’d normally contact the realtor on the listing to make an appointment to see the home.

You’ll go to the house and the realtor will meet you there to let you in. The house will smell like cookies and there might be soft music playing in the background. The realtor will tell you to take your time looking through the rooms. He or she will give you charming little tidbits about the house and let you know what a great deal the house is! Everything will just seem so peachy and you might love the house! The issue you’ll run into with this method of house hunting is that you’re (probably) dealing with the seller’s agent (the realtor working for the homeowner).

The realtor who is on the listing, made the appointment for you, lit the cookie candle and created the tranquil playlist has a very vested interest in you purchasing that particular house. The first house we looked at was shown to us by the seller’s agent. She was very nice but really didn’t want to talk about possible issues with the house and she beat around the bush when we asked for the seller’s disclosure (a document listing all the known issues with the house and some of the house history).

We got a better idea of what we wanted in our house, so we re-evaluated our search criteria. We also realized that we really wanted our own expert representation, so we asked around and found an agent we wanted to work with—Jason.

Jason opened up a new search site for us—an MLS ListingBook site. We were able to take a look at houses in the areas we wanted, with the search parameters we wanted, in real time as other agents posted them. When we found houses we wanted to see, we’d go through Jason to make our appointments and he would show us the house. He was also an NC State graduate, so we knew he was trustworthy.

Jason would let us go through a house, he would ask us questions about what we liked and didn’t like about the house, and then he would offer his own opinion. He gave us good advice and brought up things we wouldn’t have thought of on our own.

We knew we wanted him to represent us right away, but through all his hard work setting up appoints and finding answers to the questions we had, he never pressured us or even asked us to sign a contract to work with him. That was a complete 180 from when we were talking to other realtors. It was really refreshing.

I definitely recommend working with a realtor during your house hunt, especially when you’re looking for your first house. The best part of having a buyer’s agent is you don’t (normally) pay for their services. Most of the time their commission is paid by the seller during closing. So really, why wouldn’t you work with a professional?

Be on the lookout for the next post in my House Hunting series–Step 3: Finding THE House.

If you’re in the market for a house, recently bought a home, or want to own a house in the future—leave a comment and tell me about your experience or let me know if you have any questions!

–Mrs. Dominico

Remember to like The Unfinished Mrs on Facebook, follow on Twitter and on Bloglovin