North Atlana and North Georgia Real Estate

In this series, we are going to take a look at the steps involved in buying a home. Because it is important to take a look at each step involved, we will cover multiple steps on some posts and one specific step and on others. This information is meant to give you an overview of the home buying process and to get you to start thinking about what you need to do.

.The first thing you need to do is take a look at your credit report. You can get a free copy once a year (in Georgia you are allowed to get this twice per year) from all 3 credit bureaus by going to www.annualcreditreport.com You need to look for errors and mistakes. When getting your free copy, you can purchase your credit score on the same sight, or purchase it from the individual credit bureaus. I highly recommend getting your scores. If your scores are above 620, you should be able to obtain a mortgage. While your mortgage is not based solely on this number, it important to remember that the higher your score is, the lower your interest rate will be. The higher your score, the better your interest rate.

If your score is low, you need to work on raising that score back-up. There will be a lot of information on the credit bureau sites that will help you figure out what to do. Please remember that there are a lot of scams out there that promise to raise your credit score for a fee. They do not work! Time and effort are the best ways to improve your score. Paying down credit card debt will have a dramatic effect.

Once you have your credit score, then you need to asses your employment stability. Have you been at the same job, or at least in the same line of work, for the last 2 years? A mortgage company is investing a lot of money in you when they give you a loan and they want to feel that you have a stable employment history.

After that you need to take a look at your budget. You need to know and understand where your money goes on a monthly basis. Most mortgage companies want your housing expenses to be around 50% of your monthly income at a maximum level. Housing expenses include the mortgage payment, homeowner’s insurance, property taxes and HOA fee’s.

When you are looking at, or building, your budget take a look at your savings that you have not dedicated to buying a home. You’ll want to have at least a couple of month’s worth of expenses saved up. Then you need to look at what you have saved in order to buy a home. You need to have at least 3.5% of the purchase price. Personally, I love when a client comes to me and tells me they have saved up enough to put 10% to 20% down on a house. Anything less than 20% will require you to pay additional fees called mortgage insurance.

After you go through these steps, if everything is looking good, the next thing you need to do is get pre-approved for a mortgage. It is very important to do this before you begin looking for a home. The pre-qualification process will allow the mortgage company to look at you and tell you how much they will give you for a loan. Once we have that number, we can use online mortgage calculators to figure out what your monthly expenses will be for different prices. Just because the mortgage company says they will loan you $275,000, doesn’t mean you have to buy a $275,000 home. If the monthly payment is more than you are comfortable with, then we need to look in a price range you are comfortable with.

On our next post in this series, we will take a look at how you decide on what type of home you want to look for and the process of shopping for a home.

In part 2 of this series we are going to look at what factors you need to take into consideration when you start looking for a home to buy.

If you have been a renter and you are thinking of buying your first home, you need to sit back and take a look at your future and what you see yourself doing. If you have previously owned a home before, then you have more than likely gone through these steps but it is still important to go through them again.

“Where do you see yourself in the next 3-5 years?” I hated that question back in my college days, and to some extent I still hate it. However, when you are thinking about buying a home, it is a question that you need to ask yourself and answer it honestly.

Do you see yourself staying in the same area for that period of time? If you already have a dream of moving somewhere else and you see that you might be able to do that in the near future, it might not be a smart move to buy a home today. If you are happy in the area you live in and don’t see a reason to change, then we are in good shape so far.

Do you see your lifestyle changing? Maybe you see your family expanding, or even shrinking. This will effect what you want to look for. If you see marriage and kids in the not too distant future, you want to have space for that. Or maybe you’ve already raised your family and they are about to be on their own and you don’t need all the space you have now.

After you answer those questions, then you need to look at the basics of what you want out of your home:

Do you want a home with a huge yard that you can play in or turn into the garden of the year?

Are you always on the go and don’t have time to be bothered with yard work?

Do you like to be active in the community with things like tennis, swimming, golf, hiking, etc?

How much space do you need inside your home?

How many bedrooms do you need?

Do you want a big open kitchen?

Are you looking for that cozy neighborhood with the sidewalks and white picket fence?

These are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself before you even begin to look around at homes. If I am your agent, this is where you will complete my home buyer survey that is designed to find you what you are looking for without having to sift through all of the homes that don’t have what you want.

The next part in this series will cover what is involved in looking at the homes that match with what you want and what to do from there.

The real estate and mortgage markets are in state of constant change. Since I’m not a professional “Blogger” I didn’t want to keep information out there that was stale and could be confusing. I am a REALTOR® and I want to make sure that the advice and opinions I give you are current.

With that in mind, I have taken the unusual step and removed my old posts. I will repost some of the ones that are still valid and some of the longer ones will either be edited to fit the shorter format I am using moving forward or will be turned into articles to be posted on a separate page.

My goal is to make sure you have the best information available and to give you my honest opinion on what you should do when it comes to buying, selling or renting in today’s market.