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I am talking to friends to get an agent. Hard to find a good one. I had a real estate agent, he pushed me to buy on my first time to check a house.
That's a shame you had to deal with someone like that. A lot of great agents out there, but unfortunately like any other profession there's always the bad seed. Those are the agents that don't get the referrals which most especially in this market is the bread and butter of their practice. Good luck and you're smart to ask friends/family about agents they've used so you know you're getting a good one.
Connect with an experienced agent, pick your towns, and price ranges, and look every day! Searching for a home takes time and committment! A good agent will cut your time and frustration in half!
Agree you got to have an agent and be setup on a listing service. You can find a great agent...not all are good but the majority will be glad to partner with you and get you a nice home. Our company offers a service that puts a little indicator thing on your toolbar that alerts you when a matching properry hits the market. You don't have to keep checking emails. You can also get matches sent to your cell phone as well.
Also...probably most important. Make sure you are ready to submit an offer should the right house come along. If your looking now, you should have already worked with a mortgage person/bank. If not...you need to ASAP. You should have decided or been told what you can afford. You don't want to waste time on homes you can not purchase.
You want to make sure you can move on a house at any moment. That def. means a current pre-approval, and available funds for deposits(earnest money).
Be ready to go and make sure your agent is as well. If you get a notice a home has hit the market you may like...get there!!
Don't just get an agent, find one who agrees to be a BUYERS' agent and get that in writing.
If you're not using MLS with auto alerts, find a site that will do that. Your new agent should be able to do that. If not, get an agent who will/can.
The house we ended up buying only went on the market 24 hours before we bid on it. My buyer's agent was out there doing her camera magic for me within an hour of the sales agreement being signed. Good houses at a good price are going fast.
shopping for homes online has not been reliable for us either, the listings are almost always not up to date but are old and already sold. We have a public MLS site we can look at for the area we're looking at, if the house isn't on there then I know most likely the other listing is old and needs updated and likely new stuff isn't on there yet. MLS is the most reliable list
I have been trying to buy a house. Whenever I see a good house online and go check it out. Often time, I was told that the house been sold. What should I do? Any advice? Do I just need to buy from a builder to save all the troubles. Thank you
It's a website that allows you to have MLS information pulled and sent to you in either a morning report, or you can look each day at, for example, perhaps mid-morning and then again mid-afternoon. It may not be active in your area; if that's the case, an agent can set you up with an MLS scanner if your area offers that service. Agents around here use both this one or the one offered by our MLS. (this one allows the buyer to "tweak" items that are priorities, the MLS one needs the agent to tweak the priorities.) The one in our area is great -- it will send a notice of a new listing within 5-10 minutes of the listing becoming active.
Also, GOOD agents are "in the know" -- these days, a lot of homes in desirable neighborhoods never hit the MLS, because they are snapped up before they can even be listed, so you would NEVER know about them. Agents talk to other agents, these days it's a constant stream of "hey, I've got a buyer looking in XYZ neighborhood, you got anything coming up?" I've got a home right now that are waiting for the owners to come back from a vacation and from an overseas assignment -- as soon as they are back, they are putting their home on the market, and we have agents begging us for a "preliminary showing." We may not even have to bother with photographs.
So -- get an agent who is busy in the neighborhood(s) you're looking for and get them working for you. Buying from a builder has its own set of problems, as anyone who has built a house can tell you -- extended deadlines, shoddy workmanship, uncompleted items, etc., etc. -- it's not any more pain-free than any other real estate transaction.
You gotta be on it. Fast. You dilly dally you are gonna lose. I lost out on a few houses even though I was gonna offer more they went pending and sold. If you're in a hot area you need to be Johnny on the spot. Get a agent and have all your stuff ready to go. Your pre approval letter, your down payment clean anything on your record and don't use CC while in escrow
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