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    The inside scoop . . .for when you want more than the official line No matter what your budget and taste, finding the perfect home is a daunting task. How do you even know where to start? Here you'll find the inside scoop on every step of the homebuying process-from calculating your budget to negotiating the deal and handling the closing. The Unofficial Guide to Buying a Home, Second Edition gives savvy consumers like you a foolproof appraisal of which homebuying strategies work and which don't. This updated edition is perfect for first-time homebuyers and includes new information on using the Internet to find your home, buying condos, and utilizing government funding programs. It walks you through the entire homebuying process: from searching for a home, to making an offer, through the inspection, and on to the closing, you can be confident that your investment is sound. The guide also offers expanded coverage of the monetary issues involved in purchasing a home, including new means of determining creditworthiness and new types of available loans, as well as helping you decide how much home you can-and should-purchase. Vital Information that other sources can't or won't reveal-from what really motivates sellers, brokers, loan officers, and other key players in the homebuying game, to how to work most effectively with your agent. Insider Secrets on how to make real estate law work in your favor. Money-Saving Techniques that show you how to take advantage of tax breaks and how to time your search to exploit seasonal variations in the market. Time-Saving Tips on streamlining the homebuying process so you find the home you want as quickly as possible. The Latest Trends in homebuying, including up-to-date tips on using the Internet to find your home, a realtor, or a mortgage. Handy Checklists and Charts to help you determine your budget and stick to it.
The Unofficial Guide to Buying a HomeBy Alan Perlis Beth Bradley John Wiley & SonsISBN: 0-7645-4248-6Chapter OneGET THE SCOOP ON ... The pleasures of surfing the Internet * Getting the information you need * What you can and can't say on e-mail * Avoiding irrelevant information
Home Shopping on the Internet
In chapters 8 and 9 we look at what real estate agents do for a living, how they conduct their business, and how they shouldn't conduct their business. More specifically, we explore how buyer brokerage gives you unprecedented power and influence in the home-buying process, and how you can use this to your best advantage when you're buying a home. When you look for a home with your agent, you should expect her to demonstrate loyalty to your financial interests and sensitivity to your needs. If this were a book on the home-selling industry, however, we would talk about real estate agents in a very different way. Another dimension to agency is marketing homes effectively so that other agents will sell them. As a result of their marketing efforts, agents may develop such a wide customer base that they're able to sell the homes to their own clients. These agents have established a working relationship with sellers by mutual agreement. Sellers contract with them for a certain period of time to represent their homes exclusively: to market them and to sell them for a fee. This process is called listing, and for most residential real estate agents, listings are the bread and butter of their businesses. As it happens, the listing side of the real estate business is ferociously competitive. That's because most agents compete to get those prime listings-houses that ooze style and are in what's generally considered to be a great location-in other words, houses that will sell fast. So most agents are looking for that leg up on the competition-something they have that gives them an advantage.
A marketing tool for the agent and a resource for you In today's real estate world, the leg up is the Internet. Many an agent visits her prospective sellers with laptop in tow, ready to show off a personal or company Web page and to demonstrate the many features of a particular home that can be put on a Web site. "Sign on with me," these agents say, "and you'll get the widest possible exposure to your home." And, they're right! The Internet has become the first important new marketing tool for the real estate industry to appear in years. The great news is that you can tap into all these listings logged into the Internet from the convenience of your personal computer. If you're on-line, you can find a terrific sample of houses in all price ranges in almost every community in the United States. In fact, you might discover agents' Web sites with three-dimensional photographic mock ups of homes. If you feel at all comfortable with computers, we recommend that you, as a home buyer, take full advantage of a marketing tool designed to help agents and agencies appeal to sellers. In fact, many good agents promote their Web sites to sellers but actually use them to attract buyers. If they use the Internet resourcefully, you can learn a tremendous amount about available housing in the community where you intend to live, as well as about the quality of schools, the cultural life, or even the tastes and interests of the listing agent. In this chapter, we'll briefly explore how to tap into the Internet and then turn our attention to using the Internet as a critical aspect of your home search.
What? Me surf? For many of you, the Internet is a way of life. It's how you access the greatest amount of information on every imaginable subject with the greatest speed. For those of you who have a personal computer but have not yet gone on-line, however, we hope this chapter will give you just the excuse you need to get there. If you're already online and have the most basic level of computer literacy, you may wish to skip the next several paragraphs. Getting on-line is a relatively simple and inexpensive process. All you need to do is add a modem and a telephone jack for the modem to your computer hardware and then choose an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Today, a number of well-known multipurpose commercial providers (MSN, Earthlink, and America Online are the best known) who take you from the gated communities of electronic newspapers, chat rooms, stock prices, and the like, to the diverse world of the Internet, typically for about $20-25 per month for dial-up service. All these commercial services provide guidance in how to tap into the hundreds of thousands of Web sites available to all browsers by helping you locate and click on your particular area(s) of interest.
What is the Internet? If you already know, you can skip this section. If you don't, here's a quick summary. Think of the Internet as you would the international telephone system. Telephone service extends all over the world. When you pick up the receiver on your phone and dial another phone, your phone company, which is analogous to an ISP, automatically routes your call through the available phone lines until the phone on the other end rings. If the phone you are calling is connected to a phone system, you can reach it, even if the phone you are calling is serviced by a different provider than the one you use, which is why, for example, people on Prodigy can communicate with people on Mindspring. You can talk to anyone who is there to answer the phone. Instead of a phone, however, imagine a computer at each end. That's what the Internet is. It's millions of computers, all over the world, serviced by different ISPs, connected in a way that lets other computers call them up and access whatever information has been made available for public viewing. In most cases, the computer uses the same lines the phone system uses, so connections get routed through available lines automatically. That's why you need to at least have a modem and a telephone jack to be on-line, or even better, cable Internet access, which is much faster. If your computer is connected through a modem and a telephone jack to the Internet, you can reach any other computer connected to the Internet-sometimes several at one time, like the old party lines of an earlier telephone era. You can view, retrieve, and, if you have a printer, print any information made available for public viewing on any computer or Web site that someone has made available to the Internet. Even without a printer, you can retrieve the information and save it to a word-processing document. If you have an Internet connection, you have access to virtually every publicly accessible computer on the Net. You can create your own Web site to convey information about yourself or about some service you provide to the immense cyberspace of the Internet. Indeed, locating a particular kind or piece of information on the Internet is not much more difficult than dialing a phone number correctly. Your initial entry onto the Internet accesses a relatively small number of broad topics. When you click your mouse to open one of them (a hyperlink), you get a narrower subset of topics within the broader one, and so on, until you discover the particular topic you were looking for followed by a link, such as "homes in Memphis ... Memphishomes.com."
Okay ... I'm in Memphis. Now what? After you arrive at a real estate agency's or real estate salesperson's Web site, what can you expect to see and how can you communicate with the person whose listing or listings appeal to you the most? When you sign up with an ISP, you make up an e-mail address and are given a telephone access number for getting on-line and using e-mail. Although most real estate agents' Web sites provide voice-mail numbers, office numbers, or home phone numbers, these numbers tend to work best for the casual buyer who has plenty of time to shop around, wants to compare Web sites, or wants to compare a number of different agents to evaluate the services that each provides. However, if you're eager to know all the particulars about one or two houses that you see on a Web site, e-mail is the best way to get instant feedback. Most truly assiduous agent Web users have their own e-mail addresses and have their computer turned on at all times, anxious to see how many hits or visits they're getting to their Web site; such agents will e-mail you (usually with alacrity) with any information you request. Remember that although these agents are marketing their listings for sellers, they are equally attuned to ways to solicit your business as a buyer. Their credentials will probably appear on their Web site, but what will win you over to them as a customer is their rapid response to your requests for information. You should also know what e-mail enables your prospective real estate agent to do for you. Through e-mail, your agent can keep you informed of new listings without concern for time of day or whether she is at work or at home. She can even e-mail photos of properties along with extensive descriptions. Also, an agent with a sophisticated Web site can establish hundreds, even thousands, of links, which feed information on a daily basis directly to her Web site. For example, many agents now belong to the Internet Real Estate Directory (IRED). Besides other services that we'll examine later, IRED News feeds agents and consumers interest rate quotes from hundreds of lenders on a daily basis. As interest rates change or as new loan products appear on the scene (both tend to be an almost daily occurrence), this information is downloaded into your would-be agent's Web site and is instantly retrievable by you via e-mail. Although it's extremely handy to have a hard-working, high-tech real estate agent shopping the market for you on a daily basis, you might not want to rely exclusively on her services to meet all your home-buying needs. In this age of heavy, high-speed traffic on the Information Superhighway, your would-be agent is trying desperately to keep up with the flow by adding more and more links to her Web site so that you don't go to another source for information. One of the reasons she has had to enter the arena of fierce competition for listings is that homeowners themselves have become more adept either at using computers to market their own property or at finding an Internet marketing company who will market it for them at a cost significantly lower than the average agent's commission. Although it's clear that the good real estate agent is by far the best resource for accessing the highest quality of information about the housing market in a particular area, it's also clear that many For Sale By Owners have learned to use the Internet to go directly to you, the homebuyer. For Sale by Owner magazine, for example, is actually a Web location where owners can post their own ads, buyers can view listings, and agents themselves can work to transform that FSBO market into a For Sale by Agent market.
Have I found the right agent on the Internet? Here's what to look for The most important aspect of an agent's, agency's, or community's Web site is clarity. You should see an e-mail address prominently displayed, so that if you need help in navigating through an entire Web site, you can e-mail an agent, company, or city directory to get instructions or clarifications. Directly above or below the e-mail address should be an agent's picture, a company logo, or a municipality's name. The most ambitious and successful agents will have their own Web sites; however, so if you came first to a company or municipality Web site, type in more specific instructions and, unless you're planning on moving to a very small town with just a few agents, you'll eventually come to the following: * A series of photographs of particular agents * A catalog of their listings * Color pictures of their listings * One catch phrase or a series of catch phrases meant to capture your attention and encapsulate what best embodies the agent's intentions ("we respect the value of your time"; "market knowledge and real estate expertise"; "warm, personal service"; "thoroughness and attention to detail"; and "I succeed where other agents have failed" seem to be the most popular).
After you're snagged by a catch phrase and are deeply lodged in a particular Web site, here are the most important additional elements you'll probably find: * Areas of specialization. An agent's personal Web site will indicate the price range of houses she specializes in selling and the particular area of a community where she sells the most. If an agent advertises herself as your "all-purpose agent," watch out! In fact, watch out for any claim you see on a Web page; it's all advertising, and there's no guarantee that you will receive the service promised. The real estate sales industry has become increasingly specialized, and most agents have developed a greater and greater degree of knowledge of a smaller and smaller area of the business. * Credentials. Give the agent whose Web site you've selected room to brag. Their record in sales and their advanced degrees in real estate do make a difference in the person you ultimately select to represent you. Chances are that if you're using the Internet to select a home or an agent in the first place, you're moving from one community to another, and you'll want to have confidence in your agent's knowledge of the marketplace and her skills in conveying that knowledge. * Links. A really thorough Web site will give you avenues for additional information that will ultimately become a crucial part of your home search. These avenues are the links we discussed earlier: additional Web pages that carry current interest rates, the names of lenders with unique loan packages, the means to access credit bureaus, lists of customs and conventions for closing homes in various communities, lists of the best places to shop for home designs, home repair equipment and supplies, home furnishings, and so on.
Okay, I want to know more
After you've found a Web site that presents an agent whose credentials
and attitudes you like and whose links seem so comprehensive
that you feel no need to shop elsewhere, it's your
turn to activate a relationship. For many of you, writing to an
e-mail address simply won't work. No matter how hard you try,
typing in requests for information or making personal introductions
on a computer screen will always seem impersonal or
awkward. This has nothing to do with your writing skills or your
overall ability as a Web surfer.
ALAN PERLIS is a Broker Associate with Oxford Realty Company in Birmingham, Alabama. BETH BRADLEY is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, former teacher, and poet. Bradley and Perlis are married and the parents of three children. |
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