What Are You Looking For?

Your first consultation with your buyer agent is an important step in setting the right course for the rest of your home buying experience. It’s a great opportunity to share with the agent your hopes, wants, and desires about the process, and to ensure that your agent knows exactly how to best service your needs. In order to have the best possible first consultation, we encourage you to prepare for the meeting by thinking about what you want from your home buying process.

We want to give you some information about what you can do before your initial consultation with your buyer’s agent. This will ensure a more productive meeting, consistent with our overall advice to be actively engaged throughout your buying process.

At your initial consultation, your agent will ask you questions about your familiarity with the buying process, your preferences in the type of home you want, your geographic needs, and your purchasing power. We will also be asking about any particular concerns or needs you have about buying a home.

You will have a more productive meeting if you think about those questions in advance. You have no obligation to prepare ahead , but you’ll find that you’ll get more out of the meeting if you think about these issues before you’re sitting down with your agent. Moreover, this exercise will also help you get into the right frame of mind about your home search process, and help get you into the practice of being more proactive about the entire process.

Here are some of the questions you should consider before sitting down with your agent for the first time.

Why Are You Moving?

People move for all sorts of reasons, and it’s helpful for your agent to know about your particular motivations so that he or she can help prepare to get your process moving at the pace you desire.

•What’s the reason for your move?

•What’s the time frame of when you want to be in your new home?

•Have you already started looking on your own? What have you found that interests you?

Remember that buying a home can take a long time. Most of our clients spend months in just the home search process, and once you find the home that you want to purchase, you’ll likely spend three to four months more completing all the transactional work that is required to execute a contract, secure financing, and finishing all the other tasks required to get your purchase closed.

How Well Do You Know the Home Buying Process?

You should be prepared to discuss with your agent your comfort level and familiarity with the buying and financing process. This will help your agent in gauging the amount and type of information you should be getting throughout the process.

•Have you done this before, or are you otherwise familiar with the process of buying a home?

•What are your biggest concerns about buying a home?

•Are you familiar with the current state of the regional housing market?

•How comfortable are you using technology to search for a home, like on randrealty.com?

All our clients are different. Some have purchased homes recently, and know exactly what to expect. Others are first­ time home buyers apprehensive about what they should expect from the process. Whatever your situation, you want to make sure your agent knows what you need from us to help you fully understand the process.

What Do You Want From Your Agent?

You should think about what you’re looking for from your Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty agent to ensure that your agent knows how to best service your needs.

•What are you looking for in an agent?

•What’s the most important quality you look for in service professionals?

•How do you want to communicate with your agent: phone, email, text, or only in-person?

•How often do you want to hear from your agent : daily, regularly, or only when new properties come onto the market?

•How often do you want to go look at properties, and are you already looking on your own?

Our goal at Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty is to ensure that you have an outstanding home buying experience. The first step for making that happen is to know exactly how you want to be serviced, so make sure you explain to your agent what it is you want from him or her.

How Familiar Are You With the Financing Process?

You should feel comfortable discussing your financial situation with your real estate agent, since all our agents are licensed professionals who are qualified to help determine your purchasing power. You should absolutely have a good sense of your purchasing power before you spend time looking at houses that might be above or below your proper price range.

•What price range do you think you qualify for, based on your income and your savings?

•How much are you comfortable spending for your monthly mortgage payment, insurance, and property taxes?

•How comfortable are you with your understanding of the financing process, which has become more complicated in the past few years?

•Have you been pre-qualified for a mortgage amount by a local mortgage consultant, or do you need to talk with a Hudson United Mortgage representative?

If you would be more comfortable discussing finances with a mortgage consultant, have your agent contact one of our Hudson United Mortgage representatives to discuss financing with you.

What Are You Looking For in Your New Home?

Finally, and most importantly, you should take some time to think through what you’ll looking for in your new home. Now, you might have a general idea of the kind of home you like, but you’ll be amazed at the myriad choices that you’ll have once you start looking at the properties that are available.

The list of questions below are designed to prompt you to think about all the various considerations that might go into your home purchase. Some of these questions will address issues that are unimportant to you, but some might spark you to realize that you have particularly needs and desires that you’regoing to want to satisfy in your new home. So think about each of these questions, and if they prompt some ideas then be sure to share them with your agent.

Ultimately, though, even as you go through the exercise of thinking about the kind of home you want, it’s important to keep an open mind. What a lot of home buyers find is that they end up purchasing a home that is very different from the types of homes they initially started looking for when they began the process. They start out looking in a particular town for a specific home style, but once they begin looking at what’s available they fall in love with a totally differently-styled home that is completely outside their original market area. That’s a very normal part of the process, so don’t be alarmed as your tastes evolve.

Conclusion

Your initial consultation with your Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty agent is just the first step of your home purchasing process, but it’s an important step. It’s your first opportunity to really think through what you want from your agent, what you’re concerned about with the process, and what kind of home you’re looking for. So please take some to think about these issues before you meet with your agent, to ensure that you have the best possible first meeting and get things started on the right foot.