Buying a Home - Inspections

I tend to think most people walk through a house for sale like I do. Check out the place for about 15 minutes, analyze paint colors, look for obvious cracks, check out the landscaping, look for stains in the carpets, and leave. That's a great way to know if you like the place and whether or not you want to make an offer. And, it's a great start. However, this does not qualify as an "inspection." Here are a couple inspection tips from my trip through buying a home.


The first tip applies before you sign your offer sheet. It is customary to build in time for home inspections. You should ALWAYS include this contingency. Not only is it a way to ensure you are buying a house without major problems; it is also a way to get out of your contract if something else is worrying you about the purchase. We built in 10 days in our offer. However, keep in mind that 10 days are calendar days, not business days. So if you have an offer accepted on Saturday you really only have 6 business days to get all your inspections done. Regardless of how tight your timeline is to get the inspections done make sure the clause is in your contract.

The next tip...get quality inspectors. I cannot recommend this enough. As I mentioned in my previous post one of the things that our realtor really helped us out with is in picking an inspector. She recommended a company that was awesome! The home inspector checked every corner of the house including the slab, the crawl space, the water pressure, polarity in the outlets, etc. And, the best part is that when it was all done he sent a full report with color photos of every defect he found. That's what you want in an inspection. You want a detailed report that not only lets you form a decision whether or not to move forward with the purchase but also gives you an idea of the repairs you need to perform in the future. I recommend getting a termite inspection and if you're area is prone to mold get a mold inspection. The $1000 you'll spend on those three inspections is well worth it when you consider the thousands you could end up spending fixing a foundation, rewiring, replumbing, or fixing one of hundreds of other problems that you could find days, months, or years after closing.

Buying a Home - The Realtor

The first posting on my experience buying my first home deals with using a realtor to assist with the purchase. We decided to use a realtor because, well, we knew nothing about buying a home, the processes, the paperwork, the intricate details. We started out by finding a realtor in the local area, giving her some details about what we were looking for, and having her send us a list of homes that met most of our criteria. We'd go out on random Sundays, tour a bunch of homes, sometimes over 10 at a time, but we weren't in a hurry and didn't want to spend that much time looking around and so that whole process sort of died out.

In the meantime I found a wonderful website, ZipRealty. They don't cover all areas of the nation but lucky for me one of the areas they do cover is Orlando. The beauty of ZipRealty is that they give you all of the details you can find on national sites like realtor.com or local sites such as an individual realty company site, but they also provide additional details that some sites don't want you to know. For example, they list not only the current asking price of the house but also any price changes over time, both increases and decreases. They allow you to search across a wide range of criteria including bringing back only those houses that have had at least one price reduction. They show you how long a house has been on the market. And, my favorite feature of all is that they will sometimes find a house that was listed, deactivated, and relisted (it's not ethical but realtors will do this sometimes to reset the # of days on the market for a house) and they'll show the true number of days that the house has been on the market across all listings.

Once I found and started utilizing ZipRealty's website, the core value of having a realtor disappeared. Now, instead of her finding us homes to look at, I was finding the homes and telling her that we wanted to see them. In fact, the house we ended up buying we found without our realtor, we viewed without our realtor, and our realtor didn't even know about it until we called her because we wanted her to make an offer.

Our realtor assisted with the paperwork for the offer letter and talked with the selling realtor to relay our prices as we negotiated with the owner. However, once the offer was accepted there wasn't much remaining for our realtor to do. Before I sound like our realtor didn't do anything I will give her some credit. She recommended both a home inspector, who turned out to be fabulous, and she recommended an insurance broker, who was able to get us a decent premium on our homeowners policy. Besides that, we talked with her a couple times between the offer acceptance and closing, but she didn't do many other things besides show up at closing and take her commission.

Do I think we needed a realtor for our first time home buying experience? Yes. Would I recommend a realtor to others who are going through this for the first time? Yes. However, will I ever use a full-commission realtor in the future for any of my home purchases? No. I will either get a real estate attorney involved to handle the necessary paperwork or I will find a discount realtor that handles only the paperwork for a reduced commission. For those of you in the market for a home, check out Redfin. They are not in all markets yet but they are a discount online realtor that will handle the paperwork of buying a home and give you a kickback of 1% on the typical 3% buyer's realtor commission.

With new websites, such as ZipRealty, and discount realtors, such as Redfin, traditional realtors are going to have to find new and useful ways to serve the needs of home buyers or they are going to find themselves with less and less business and many will need to find a new career.