Rule for First-Time Buyer: Check Things Firsthand
My boyfriend and I are researchers by profession and temperament. When we decided to buy a house together, we used our investigative skills to learn all we could about the process.
We bought a shelf of books written for first-time buyers, read the real estate section of the newspaper with obsessive zeal, attended a one-day seminar offered through UCLA Extension and interviewed everyone we knew who had ever bought or sold a house.
We pestered our real estate agent with dozens of questions, and we attended scores of open houses, partly to hone our house-evaluation skills and partly to glean what information we could from the salespeople staffing them.
Despite our efforts, we still encountered some surprises. We offer them here for our fellow first-time buyers.
1--Even if an inspector approves agreed-upon repairs, check for yourselves.
During our final walk-through, we crawled under the house and discovered that fully two-thirds of the recommended dry-rot repairs were not completed even though the inspector had signed off on them.
Needless to say, our final walk-through became our next-to-final walk-through. The subcontractors were called back and after some unpleasant bickering, agreed to complete the job at no additional cost to the seller. We didn’t ask the fate of the inspector who had approved the non-existent repairs.
2--Check the square footage of the house yourself. When we asked real estate agents about the square footage of the houses we visited, most emphasized their responses were approximate. We learned that those approximations can be off by a significant margin.
In our case, a previous owner obtained a permit for a garage conversion but never completed it. Nonetheless, the seller’s agent included the garage--over 300 square feet--in her “estimate” of the house size. We did not discover this until we measured the house ourselves.
3--There is not always a “closing ceremony.” Given the magnitude of our purchase, some kind of closing ceremony seemed called for, and I imagined a formal meeting in which the buyers, the sellers, our agents and the escrow company would complete the sale. I kept the entire day on which escrow was to close free in anticipation of this meeting.
Instead, a few days before closing, we went to the escrow office to sign a number of documents. When we completed our final walk through and approved the repairs, we signed one last document and we were all done. There was no closing ceremony and I worked a full day on the official closing date.
4--Sometimes the books are wrong. Some of the most popular guidelines and advice did not apply to our situation. Most troublesome to us was the oft-repeated advice not to close until the seller had vacated the premises. This well-intentioned advice is supposed to help one avoid a lengthy and expensive eviction process.
In our case, however, the seller could not move out until she had received our down payment, which she needed to put down on her condominium in a retirement village. We had no choice but close and hope her good will and good health allowed her to vacate by the end of the closing day.
5--Everything costs at least $1,000. My friend Ellen, an experienced home buyer and fixer-upper, shared this wisdom with us. If you’re not sure what a home repair costs, $1,000 is a good guess. In our house, asbestos removal from the heating pipes was $1,000. The dry-rot repairs were $1,000. An estimate to refinish the hardwood floors was slightly over $1,000. Our washer and dryer cost $1,000. You get the picture.
6--Everything takes longer than expected. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard, “I need you to sign a few documents. It will only take a few minutes.” We soon realized that “a few minutes” started at about 90. When our agent, our mortgage broker or our escrow company asked to meet, we learned to reserve a couple of hours.
7--Not all surprises are bad. Being a natural worrier, the unpleasant surprises are more vivid to me than the pleasant surprises. But in fact, the good surprises probably outnumber the bad ones.
For example: The seller left behind excellent instructions about the house and grounds, including a manual on how to care for her beautiful rose bushes. She also left behind gardening tools and supplies that she no longer needed.
We found we could understand most of the contract language. We discovered that several co-workers live in the neighborhood (and all agreed we found a great deal). The asbestos removal was unexpectedly straightforward. Our loan application was approved in only two days.
Best of all, we were delighted and surprised that we got through escrow without major problems, without severe buyer’s remorse and with a continuing sense of excitement, fun and pleasure.
Jacobi is an institutional researcher at UCLA who has moved to Westchester.
READER IDEAS FOR SPEAKING OUT
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