First time home Owner in Collin County (Richardson: appointed, first time home buyer)

[chitty]

I'm a first time home buyer and living in Collin County. Which realtor should I go with?..and do all realtors deal well with first time home buyers?..thanks any info would be great!

[fratermus]

The wife and I did most of research and house-finding ourselves using the various realtor/MLS search sites which can email you new matches. I'd post useful URLs but useful URLs are against the rules and would invoke the wrath of the gods of Olympus. You can google something like collin county mls search for some sites to explore.

We did have a realtor (buyer's agent) but the realtor's main value was in the offer+negotiation+closing part of the whole deal. Also, having a realtor made it easier to get keys/access to the houses we'd already found and researched.

We were first-timers, although reasonably interested and informed ones.

[jenlion]

We bought our first house in Collin County in 2004. Got a couple of good books ahead of time. I liked "100 questions every first time home buyer should ask", and another about mistakes first time home buyers make. They were very helpful. There are a lot of newer homes in Collin County, but many of those are very poorly built at all price ranges. Look carefully and talk to potential neighbors whose homes were built at the same time by the same builder.

Learn as much as you can about the neighborhoods you are interested in. Some are built on top of former landfills, or are on top of leaking oil tanks you would have to have fixed. Others have some oddity about the landscape that gives them all foundation problems -- fixable but potentially expensive.

I'm not sure what the rules are, if fratermus is right this may go away, but for the DFW area I like to use ebby.com. The maps are great searching tools and I think it's easier to use for this area than the national sites.

As far as finding a realtor, ask your friends, coworkers, anyone you know who has bought a home for recommendations. Everybody knows a realtor. You want one that will spend enough time with you to find out what you really need, can spend, and one that KNOWS the area. (We were disappointed with ours because it turned out all she really knew was one tiny corner of Richardson, which turned out to be out of our price range! She had the ability to get us into other houses, but really knew nothing about the ins and outs of sachse v wylie v parts of plano v parts of garland).

Also know that the housing prices never really skyrocketed here like they did in parts of the country, so they really aren't crashing here either. Adjusting ARMs are starting to hit some people in my neighborhood, but prices haven't really dropped from what I am seeing. So, you're not going to get a "steal" compared to a few years ago, unless you run into some of the few that are already hit. (But in two years, several of our neighbors are going to have a BIG problem. Really disappointing to find out how many of them bought much more house they can afford, and scary to think that we could be in a neighborhood of forclosures in 2009!).

Good luck in your search!

[surf2wake]

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