Why Work With An Agent?

The quickest and easiest way to find a home is to work with an agent. Nearly 95% of all homes offered for sale at any given time are listed with agents. A professional real estate agent, like me, is the person who is best prepared to help you with your home finding needs.

Buying a home is one of life’s most significant investments. Not only are you choosing the place that you will live and possibly raise a family – but you are most likely investing a large portion of your assets into this venture. The more prepared you are at the outset, the less overwhelming and chaotic the buying process will be.

My goal is to provide you with information to assist you in making an intelligent and informed buying decision while ensuring a smooth stress-free transaction.

We will schedule a meeting to review your overall objectives in searching for a new home (i.e. time frame, desired features, etc.) and discuss the process. We will narrow down neighborhoods and types of properties so we have an efficient search. This is the time to ask ANY questions and determine if buying a home is right for you.

In this market, you MUST have a lender Approval letter to write a contract. Therefore, it makes sense to start this process BEFORE looking at properties. The lender will review your income, asset and credit information to determine the maximum loan amount that you qualify for – but then it’s important for you to determine the amount that you can comfortably afford. This number will guide our home search.

Based on this information, the lender will provide a pre-approval letter, which shows your borrowing power. You can visit as many lenders as you like and get several pre-approvals. We will have each of the lenders present a Good Faith Estimate to you for viewing, and make sure that you are getting the best deal possible. Fortunately, the rules have changed so that you can shop lenders and have them pull multiple credit reports within a 30 day period, without the inquiries affecting your credit score.

A home is more than just a collection of bedrooms and bathrooms. It is important to consider things that are important to you (i.e. a love of cooking, entertaining, or location, etc.) which will help prioritize your house “wish list” (i.e. big kitchen for cooking, deck for entertaining, distance to work, etc.). There will definitely be trade-offs – but our goal is to find a home that meets the majority of your requirements within a comfortable price range.

Once we establish the criteria for your search, I will email you new listings when they become available, that meet the criteria. The listing will be sent from the MLS system which provides property details and photos.

Once we have completed a search and narrowed down the options, we will schedule a block of time to tour homes. Prior to our visit, I will ask you to review the homes I have sent you and drive around the neighborhoods, to determine if some of the properties can be ruled out or solidify them on our “Must see” list. Many properties will be on “lockbox” so we have flexibility visiting them—others may require an appointment, which I will arrange.

As you can see there are many items involved in the process of buying a home. These items listed above are just an overview of the detailed process. At Legacy Realty Group, Inc. our goal is to make your transaction smooth and as stress-free as possible. We have built our company by helping clients make one of the biggest investments of their lives, and we take that seriously.