5 Questions to Consider When Exploring a Neighborhood or Subdivision

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5 Questions to Consider When Exploring a Neighborhood or Subdivision Are you looking for the perfect neighborhood to call home? Ask yourself these top five questions to make sure the neighborhood or subdivision you're considering is the right fit for you. From checking out the amenities to analyzing the aesthetic, these factors are sure to help you find a place you can call home! #neighborhoodquestions #communitypool #amenities #safety #localentertainment

What factors should I consider when looking at a neighborhood or a subdivision? I like to call this my top five neighborhood questions.

When I'm looking at a neighborhood, I first start and look at the neighborhood itself. Do you like the look of it? Do you have, does it have the amenities? Are you looking for a community pool? Are you looking for it to be gated, etc.? And then the HOA. The majority of our neighborhoods and subdivisions in Arizona have HOAs. So how strict are the HOA? Maybe you're looking to do an Airbnb. Do they allow Airbnbs? Things like that. Two, the schools. Do you have kiddos that want to go to a certain school? Are they ranked well? Are you going to go to a charter school? Do you need to have a certain time frame for commute to go to that charter school? Things like that. Three, is it close to food and shopping? How close is the grocery store? How close is the hospital? Do you need to be close to doctors? Things like that. Four, your commute. If you work outside the home, you are commuting typically Monday through Friday, every day of the week. And you need to have a certain time frame for commute. Do you want to be stuck in traffic? Do you care? Where, what's the longest commute time that you're looking for? Does that fit? And five, things to do. What do you do on your spare time when you're not working? What do you like to do? Or do you like to go hiking? Do you like to go boating? Believe it or not, in Arizona, we do have boating. I, you know. Things like that. All of that matters. Things like that. All that matters when you're trying to pick the right neighborhood for subdivision.

How do your negotiations work in the homebuying process? Negotiations in Home Buying - Learn How to Be One Step Ahead of the Appraiser

How does negotiations work in the home buying process? If you are the buyer and we represent you, we typically run comps and we always want to be one step ahead of the appraisers. We run comps as we're the appraiser. We make an educated offer based on what comps are on any given house and we start there. Typically go back with the seller, changing particular terms once or twice in most cases. Once we're under contract, you have 10 days to do your home inspection, which is typically a professional home inspector going out to the property and also a termite inspector. In some cases, it's additional inspectors on top of that if we're recommended to do so. Then we go back to the seller and we can ask for certain repairs. If there's large ticket repairs, we typically recommend asking the seller for that. That's another negotiation area. Same goes if the house doesn't appraise after the appraiser goes out there. We have to renegotiate the price and come to terms on what the seller is going to sell it for and what you as a buyer are going to buy it for.

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How do you find a good real estate agent?

How do I find a great real estate agent? This is kind of tricky, but with the internet these days, there's some good ways to go about it. We have a huge presence on our Google My Business page. So if you jump online and you Google us, our names, or real estate agent in Gilbert or what other city that you're looking in a Metro Phoenix, we will typically come up and then look at reviews just like anything else. You go to Amazon, you look at reviews. You rent an Airbnb, you look at reviews. Finding a real estate agent is no different. You take a look at reviews, you take a look at what their clients are saying, and you base it off of that. We have a substantial amount of reviews from our past clients that were happy to report that they're all pretty happy to work with us and we'd love to work with you as well.

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Get Pre-Approved for a Mortgage in Minutes!

How do I get pre-approved for a mortgage? Getting pre-approved for a mortgage these days is super simple. You can even do it from sitting on your couch in a matter of 15 minutes. It's all done online or on an app that the lender provides to you and you're going to enter in simple questions like if you're married, divorced, single, your income that appears on your W-2s or your 1099s, and any type of debts that you're aware that will come up on your credit report. Again, they're going to pull your credit so it doesn't really matter if you have it down to the dollar. It literally should take you no more than 15 minutes to fill out. The lender will then give you a call, go over everything on your credit report line by line, and then kind of go over different scenarios on what monthly payments look like and what those monthly payments equal as a purchase price with today's interest rates.

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Post-Possession Agreements Explained

What is a post-possession? It's not uncommon today to do what we call a post possession. A post possession is an agreement prior to closing that allows the seller to stay in the property for an agreed amount of time and for an agreed amount of money to pack and close or find a new home or there's a multitude of reasons that that's necessary. It's not uncommon to give the seller a couple days or a weekend post possession to allow them to pack and move to their new property.

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What happens after we get our offer accepted?

I got my offer accepted. Great, now what? A couple different things that we typically do here in Arizona. Once you get an offer accepted, we want to schedule your home inspection and we want to deliver the earnest money check to the title company. Both of those things right out of the gate are very, very important. A home inspection has to be done within the first 10 days unless you negotiate in the contract to do less than that. The inspector will go to the home, typically takes three, four hours, and then us as the agent representing the buyer and the buyer typically go to the inspection the last half hour to an hour to review the report and any photos that are taken during the inspection. We typically like to say leave the inspector to do their job and do it well without us following them around for those first couple hours.

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Home Inspector Checklist: What to Look For When Buying A Home

What if the home inspector finds something wrong with the home? We want the home inspector to find something wrong with the home. That's what you're paying them for. But we really only care about the bigger ticket items. The roof, the AC, the appliances. Things of that nature. Is the house going to fall down? Do we have mold? There's always, always, always, even on new construction, a tiny list of what we call handyman items. Maybe a switch doesn't work over here, or a light bulb is out over here. Things like that come up all the time and should be expected in an inspection report. But those are typically not items that we ask the seller to repair. But it's for our own knowledge. Reach out to us if you want a list of a couple great home inspectors that we've been using for years.

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How much should I save up for a downpayment?

How much should I save up for a down payment? This question is subjective because a lot of it depends on what you want your monthly payment to be and what type of loan program we're going to get you qualified for through the mortgage lender. There are current programs out there that require no down payment at all. And then there's some government programs that require 3.5% down. There's some conventional programs that still do 3% down. It just all depends. The mortgage lender is going to run different scenarios for you. So it's really, really important to start your home buying process with a mortgage lender. They're going to give you all the different scenarios, explain what type of loan programs, all your different options for down payment and what that equals in a monthly payment with today's interest rates. And then kind of works backwards and gives us a purchase price based on what you want your payment to be or what you can afford your payment to be. And then we start shopping out there based on what that purchase price ends up being. So it's super, super important to start with a mortgage lender and we can give you a great referral. Just contact us.

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What is an appraisal and why do I need one?

What is an appraisal and why do I have to have it? An appraisal is technically for the benefit of the mortgage lender because they want to make sure that they are lending on an asset that is worth what you're paying for it. What that is, is it's different from a home inspection and a home inspector going out to the property. It is a person that is hired through a third party through the lender. Typically, nobody knows who they are. So there's no conflicts of interest. They go out to the property, they're going to take some photos for the lender, and they're going to take some measurements for the lender, and they're going to pull comps. They're going to come to a valuation in their opinion. I could say that I could line 10 different appraisers up and get 10 different answers on the same exact app. That's just kind of how it works. Certain government loans require the lender to do a couple other things to make sure the home is what we call safe, sound and secure, and that there's no blatant issues. Those are typically with government loans that the appraiser is required to do.

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How long does it take to buy a house?

How long does it take to buy a house? The answer to that is it depends, but I'm going to give you the typical scenario. You start by getting pre-qualified with a mortgage loan officer, which can be as quick as a 24-hour turnaround time. They're going to give us what we call a pre-qualification letter. It's an Arizona specific form that local lenders specifically have. A lot of the big banks do as well. We can give you a referral to a lender if you need to. We start looking at homes. A lot of times you've already been window shopping online. Start with five, six homes. We go take a look at them physically in person. Say you fall in love with one of them right away. We write an offer that afternoon or that evening. We submit it to the seller. It's accepted within 24 hours or there's a day or two, say 24 to 48 hours worth of negotiations back and forth. Then we go into our escrow period. From the time that we go under contract to the time that we close on the house is typically 30 days. In some cases, the seller needs a little bit longer time to maybe pack and move out or find their next house, things of that nature. In the typical sense, it's 30 days from the time you get an offer accepted to the time you close on the loan. I get to hand you keys to your new house.

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