I was 18 years old the first time I ever bought a home. I remember going around different neighborhoods looking for houses. I wanted to buy a house at first, so I could make the payments on it. I rented an apartment close to home for two years, until I saved enough money for a down payment. Then I put down 20% and bought a house. It took me 3 months to get a solid job, which helped me pay off my first home. I remember breaking down and crying after I bought the house. I felt so blessed that I owned a home.
Fast forward 20 years and I have experienced almost every type of buying process. I had 2 escrow requests, one due to my apartment where my roommate was being evicted, the second due to a medical emergency. Every seller, in every real estate transaction, has motivation and I had no motivation to work the transaction through. I always remember this: When you walk out of any closing with no closing cost, zero down and zero mortgage, you have done a bulk of the work. That gets us to tip #3.
How do you get paid if there are no closing costs, zero down, and no mortgage? I cannot answer this question, but I have learned many valuable lessons along the way. If I had done no closing, a seller would have taken any offer or I could have sold my apartment for about $9,000 more than my purchase price, and my first time home buyer could have bought a home for $150,000 less. So, you can see, your guess is as good as your house. Find a seller that wants to give up a few dollars or at least give you a closing cost credit.
Scenario #2: You purchase a home at a tax sale for taxes owed. As you can guess it is out of your reach for a first time buyer because of the lack of financing. Also, if you wanted to buy a home way back in the year 2000, the only way you could would be to buy one off of the tax sale list which had extremely low and low prices.
The best way to get access to the tax list of pre-foreclosures was to sign up for mail lists of foreclosures. Then you would get into these lists and contact a person in charge of the sale for the areas where you wanted to buy. This really helped my business because I ended up buying way more homes than I could ever afford to buy. I also ended up getting a lot of seller calls where a lot of other investors were bidding on the same properties.
You have to have patience when dealing with these type of sales. It really took me 3 years to buy my first home through this system. Even after I had been a real estate investor for about 10 years, I was always working on my business, building it on a bigger and bigger level.
If you are a first time home buyer, it really is possible for you to achieve your goals, but it is going to take some patience and educating yourself so that you can make the correct real estate decisions. The next tip I have for you is the most simple and the most important for any first time homebuyer.
Tip #3: When you go out looking for homes for sale sit down and plan in your mind exactly what you are looking for a home. By sitting down you are actually Breaking Bad half way because it will cause you to feel “rushed”. It is important to take a lot of time and really figure out just what you want. Write this on a paper and when you do get home and have a second free hour or two sit and write down what ever it is that you feel you want in a home.
I had a list that I sat with and wrote down what I was looking for. Here is part of what I was looking for and the reason why I had this list. The reason is because I knew that the list would be there if I ever wanted to buy a single family home. It turned out that I was going to have a lot of choices possible for me when it came to buying a home and that meant that I could buy any home I wanted.
It also means that I can buy a home now that is in a lot of different neighborhoods, better schools, a lot closer to work etc. Here is the reason why I could buy any home I wanted, now it was just a matter of how well I had it planned out. But I will say this, trust your instincts. If you feel like something is not right with the home you are viewing, go back and look at the home again in a different light, as if it was not the right home at all. I recently saw a home that I felt odd about after I had looked at it 4 times.
