There’s much more to buying a first home than ‘location, location, location.’ Our readers share their experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly. : Tales from the Trenches

Editor’s Note:

A few weeks ago we invited first-time home buyers to share their “Tales From the Trenches” in the hope that their advice might make the often-perplexing passage easier for first-timers behind them. Your letters were terrific: educational, insightful, humorous. Today we begin a two-part series based on those letters. Thanks to all who wrote.

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After looking for nearly a year and making nine offers, we finally bought a house in Silver Lake. Here are some things that we learned:

* Pick your neighborhood first. Although a real estate agent might try to convince you that the constant whirring of police choppers overhead sounds “just like the ocean,” you might want to opt for a place that offers a slightly more tranquil atmosphere. Make a list of the things you’re looking for in a neighborhood and check with police, schools, insurance companies; they all can provide you with statistics.

* Ask your friends to recommend a real estate agent. If you’re going to be splitting croissants with someone every Saturday morning for six months, you’d better like that person. Ask around. We were lucky enough to find Grace Gaerlan with the Jon Douglas Los Feliz office.

* Take it one step at a time. At each phase of the process, I managed to live deep in denial. I’m just looking; no obligation to buy. I’m just making an offer; they may not accept. I’m just faxing every document ever printed with my name on it to a perfect stranger; we may not clear escrow. I’m just taking possession of the house keys; they may not fit.

* Be picky. You’re going to live there a long time; you’d better like it. I think our agent began to get a little suspicious after we backed out of the seventh or eighth house. She thought maybe we were just lonely and needed to have someone drive us around every Saturday so we could go into strangers’ homes and peer at their family photos.

* Make your offer contingent on a house inspection. Once the plunge has been taken and you find the house, it’s time for the home inspection. Here’s how it works: A guy puts on a jumpsuit, which my wife nicknamed the “Crawly Suit.” Then he climbs under the house to look at the pipes and wires. Our inspector looked at so many houses for us that he was like one of the family.

* Don’t let the bank rattle you. It’s not like you don’t already have paper bag lunches dancing through your head. But then the bank will try to scare you with the language they use. First you “lock in” the rates. Then they tell you there is a “severe penalty” for late payment. The loan has a “30-year term.” But, you might be able to get out earlier on good behavior. Where are we moving--to Attica?

* Do look into your loan options. We opted for the adjustable rate loan because we are delusional and figured that our incomes are going to escalate so much faster than these payments. Of course, the rate could go down.

Then again, we could win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

Steve Tatham and Mary Manofsky

Silver Lake

Pinpoint Priorities

The saying “buyer beware” is never more applicable than during the purchase of a first home. Here are some things we learned:

* First, apply for a mortgage. This will show you how big a down payment you will need and how much house you can afford.

* Ask yourself how long you intend to live in your first home. Remember that extraneous factors may impede on your plan. Acts of God, the economy or losing your job may force you to stay in this home longer than you want, so make sure you are happy with your purchase.

* What are your priorities? Is it the number of bedrooms, the neighborhood, school district, proximity to work, the backyard? This list will help you choose neighborhoods you want and can afford.

* Research the extraneous costs for the area you have chosen. These are such things as flood, fire and earthquake insurance, car insurance, private schools. It is amazing how much these figures will change depending on the ZIP code.

* Visit the local schools and call the fire and police departments. This will tell you a lot about what kind of a community you will be living in.

* Once you find the neighborhood, finding a home you like will be relatively easy. But before you make an offer, talk to the neighbors. Find out how well the sellers maintained their property, how much traffic is on the street, is there a Neighborhood Watch program, are there a lot of barking dogs, kids who play drums?

* Hire a real estate agent, a mortgage lender, a home inspector you can trust. References are extremely important. Ask a lot of questions until you understand the answers. Remember, these people deal with these issues everyday and you don’t. It is their job to help you make intelligent choices.

* Read everything carefully. The most valuable lesson I learned was that I had to become a expert at everything from making the offer and filling out the paperwork to knowing what to hold the seller responsible for.

* Water is your worst enemy. Make sure the house has been kept dry. Check the roof for leaks and the bathroom tile for proper grout seals and cracks. Retaining walls should have weep holes that allow water to drain properly; rain water should have proper ducts that guide the water away from the house. Under the house, your soil should be dry even after it rains. Bubbles and cracks in walls inside and out are indications of water damage.

Elizabeth Dumont

Manhattan Beach

Wow! What an Offer

Here are a couple pointers that I wish someone had shared with me before we set out on our home search:

* Choose a real estate agent you trust and are comfortable with. Preferably, have a friend or family member recommend one.

* Offer to put 25% down. This is a good tactic if you really want a home, feel it’s worth what it is listed for and you are in a bidding war. We did this and beat three other people. The owner thought this showed financial stability and lowered his anxiety about the house falling out of escrow. The best part is that it was not necessary to put 25% down; we put 20%.

* Don’t tease yourself. Do not look at homes or neighborhoods that you know you cannot afford “just because you are curious.” This is just setting yourself up for disappointment.

* Don’t look for the most expensive home a lender says you can afford. If you decide to buy a home at or near this upper limit, you may be able to pay your mortgage but you may not be able to do anything else.

* Don’t sign the guest book. If you put down your name, address and phone number in every home you look at on your own (for example, at open houses), you’ll get many annoying phone calls for listing agents.

Sheryl and Steve Cardiff

Westchester

Pay Attention

Pay close attention to the results of your home inspection. My husband, our real estate agent, the seller’s agent and I were all present during the inspection. The seller’s agent consistently “dismissed” the inspector’s concerns.

Finally, the inspector pulled us aside and warned us about various issues, the most serious of which was regarding the roof. We mentioned this to our agent, who looked out of the second-floor window, noted some loose shake tiles and spoke to the seller’s agent, who assured us that nothing was wrong.

It rained outside and inside our house the day we moved in. I wrote our agent, who called the seller’s agent, who had her son patch the problem. That patch lasted one season. With each subsequent rainy season, we find additional or growing water spots on our ceiling.

Because it took so much money to move in, we have been able to afford only patching each spot as it shows up.

* Listen to your inspector and be sure your agent does too.

Jackie McCoy

South Pasadena

Go Buy the Book

I recently got married and bought a first home in Westchester. Here are few helpful hints that made my life easier:

* Get pre-approved first. We put an offer on a house when a much nicer house across the street was reduced in one day by $30,000, putting it into a range we could afford. We withdrew our first offer and, because we were pre-approved and already familiar with the area, we were able to put in an offer on our dream home before other interested buyers had the chance.

* Read “How to Buy a House in California” (Nolo Press, $24.95 at bookstores, or [800] 992-6656) before you do anything. This book is a comprehensive guide geared to first-time home buyers and saved me time and money.

Stephanie Crane Miyakoshi

Los Angeles

Picture Your House

We bought our first home only four months ago, and we learned a hard lesson: Whatever you do in life after the age of 18, like not pay bills on time, follows you forever.

Here’s some advice for first-time buyers:

* Start house-hunting months before you’re ready to move. You don’t want to be in a hurry to find something.

* Call more than one real estate agent and describe your housing needs: the bedrooms, baths, the general area where you’re willing to live, how your family lives (hobbies, etc.). Tell each that you’ve contacted other agents.

* Tell each of them the amount that you can pay. Don’t get talked into seeing anything that’s out of your price range, because once you see a beautiful house that’s not in your budget, nothing will look good in your price range.

* Look at neighborhoods and houses on your own. If you see something, write down the address, tell one of the agents and, if the house is empty, take a look around.

* You may look at so many houses that they all begin to look alike. You can take a Polaroid camera with you, take a picture of the front and, attaching the picture into a little notebook, write a few notes down about the house.

* Narrow the field to five houses. Take another look at them by yourselves, with no kids, no agent and, most of all, no emotions.

* Be critical about every aspect of the house and neighborhood. Don’t look at a house for what it could be if you were to change this or that or if you got new furnishings.

* Play detective. Go through the neighborhood at different times of the day and week. Talk to residents.

* Ask about any homeowners association and covenants, conditions and rules. Read them closely and ask yourselves if you can live by the rules and if you can afford the monthly charges that you’ll have to pay on top of your mortgage payment, insurance and taxes.

* Hang in there. Your heads will spin, your stomachs will turn and you’ll feel it’s just not worth all the turmoil. Don’t despair; you’ll survive. When everything is done, you’ll feel like a million bucks, even if you don’t have any bucks left.

Terry and Rick Gobert

Lake Elsinore

Think Big

* Buy the largest house you can afford. Our first home was really tiny, and when our son was born about a year after we bought it, we didn’t have enough room. Think three to five years down the road.

* Don’t buy in a hurry just to get out of an apartment. You may end up in a house that you don’t really like or that doesn’t suit your needs.

* Make a list of what you want in a home. You can’t get everything you’ll be looking for, but you can eliminate some houses right off the bat and concentrate on the ones that look promising.

* Broaden your horizons. Consider not only the house but the street, the neighborhood, the community and the city around it. It doesn’t make sense to buy a house you love in a neighborhood where you aren’t comfortable or in a community that doesn’t suit your needs.

* Day and night. Check out a potential neighborhood at different times of the day and night for noise level, activity, traffic.

* Take your time. Don’t buy because your agent is pressuring you or because he or she feels you’ve already seen enough houses and you should make up your mind. We had a pair of agents who had this attitude; we felt intimidated and bought a townhome in an area we weren’t crazy about (right near a freeway). If your agent isn’t helping you find what you want, get a new agent.

Cathy and Randall Hake

Canyon Country

Inspect, Inspect

We just moved into our new home in the Lakewood Village area of Long Beach. It’s a two-bedroom townhouse with about 1,200 square feet and an attached garage.

We could have opted for a single-family house, but with our limited budget and my wife’s insistence that we least have two bathrooms, the townhouse seemed like a great deal. We paid $97,500.

I’ve heard so many horror stories about first-time buyers, and we had some frustrating times during the process, but our agent, Pam Weston of Remax Real Estate Specialists helped make the process smoother than I expected.

* I would recommend that every buyer use a home inspector. We were able to pinpoint the things that didn’t work and let the seller know and have them fixed.

Ray Martinez and

Theresa del Rosario

Long Beach

There’s No Small Job

My wife, Patty, and I learned some valuable things while buying our first home:

* Be thorough and self-protective when inspecting the home. We used a home inspector recommended by our real estate agent. We have since learned that the inspector failed either to notice or to mention several major problems: The gas vent from the central heater was installed improperly and was potentially dangerous. Some wiring and gas lines under the house were grossly out of code.

* Check for permits. The previous owner had done quite a lot of work on the home, most without building permits. I’m sure this is common practice, but in failing to get permits and in taking numerous shortcuts, he left us with more problems than we had imagined.

* Hire your own inspector. Or hire specialists--plumbers and electrical contractors in particular--who have no interest in a real estate agent’s closing a deal.

* The smallest job is likely a big chore. Having owned our home for nearly two years, we’ve been so daunted by the “small jobs” that we’ve not tackled the larger “cosmetic” jobs, like the re-tiling of bathrooms.

* Fudge factor. Assume that everything is going to take much more time and much more money than you imagine--by a factor of two to five.

Michael Diehl

Glendale

Stretch Yourself

Now that I have lived in my home for almost two years, I wonder how I ever harbored the misconception that owning a speck of dirt with a two-bedroom Craftsman would be heaven on earth. It has been expensive, frustrating and all-consuming. It has put me into debt, made my back ache and conjured up thoughts of arson.

However, having just completed my tax return, I realize that it was probably the smartest financial decision I could have made. My do’s and don’ts:

* Educate yourself. Don’t expect your real estate agent to tell you the whole truth. After all, his or her job is to promote home ownership, not discourage it.

* Write it down. If you ask for repairs or upgrades during escrow, be specific and put everything in writing.

* Be financially prepared. Or rather, be prepared to be financially stretched to the breaking point.

* If you’re single, think twice about buying a fixer-upper. A condominium or a smaller, newer home may be a better deal from a practical standpoint. I found that just keeping the yard mowed was almost impossible by myself, let alone making any improvements.

Marilyn Miller

Oak View

Show Date to the Gate

I purchased my first home, a townhouse in Marina del Rey, in 1993. The townhouse was shown to me by the seller’s daughter, a real estate agent who had the listing.

After a second viewing, I agreed to make an offer. One of the contingencies--verbal--was that the seller’s daughter go on a date with me within three days of acceptance of the offer. We dated for a few weeks and then stopped.

The closing took about 90 days because of difficulties in arranging financing, even with the large down payment.

However, when I needed assistance from the seller’s agent (his daughter), it wasn’t there.

* My advice: Don’t date the seller’s daughter or the seller’s real estate agent, or both, until after the closing of escrow.

Stewart Kahn

Los Angeles

Next Sunday: Part II of Tales From the Trenches: Tips on how to be a smart buyer of a newly built home, some hints on dealing with mortgage brokers and a broker with a few suggestions of her own.