Getting everything ready to begin your hunt for a new house involves a lot of time, effort, and money. To help give you a financial leg up on your next home purchase, here are 5 tips to save you money when buying a house in Flemington.
Do Some Research
As you begin looking through the home listings in the area where you wish to live, it’s a good idea to start making note of the relative asking prices of the properties in your budget.
As you view more listings, you’ll start to get a better idea of what your local market is like and be a better judge of which properties provide the best value to you. Take a look at what the houses surrounding the current for-sale properties sold for in the recent past.
Knowing what you should get for your money is the first step to making sure you don’t overpay when buying a house in Flemington.
Check Your Credit
Before you start up conversations with mortgage lenders, you need to do everything you can to put yourself in a solid financial standing.
A perfect place to start is ordering a credit report from the major credit rating agencies, which you can do for free once a year. Once you have the report, go through every detail to verify everything is correct, and contact the appropriate agency if there are any necessary corrections.
You may discover that you had an outstanding debt that has been negatively impacting your credit rating, and this provides you the opportunity to remedy that.
Look Into Loan Programs
Home loans come in quite a few different flavors, and you should look into the details of them in order to find out if you could qualify for any programs that allow little-to-no down payment, or lower interest rates.
Start this search by contacting your county’s Federal Housing Authority office and letting them know your situation. They may recommend a VA or USDA program, or you may discover that you can get away with a reduced down payment for being a first-time homebuyer.
Build Your Team
One of the worst things you could do while finding your next home is make the decision to go it alone.
To make everything easier from beginning to end, you want to find the right agent and mortgage lender that will work for you. The best way of handling this is meeting with at least three of each and determining which agent and lender can help you most.
You’re looking to hire qualified and experienced professionals who are trustworthy and have your interests in mind.
Be Willing to Walk Away
After you are interested in a property and start the process by putting in a bid, you want to make sure you don’t get too attached to that one property.
You never want to get too emotionally invested in a single home until everything is running smoothly and nearing closing, and this will serve you well through negotiation. There’s always the possibility that you find a great deal on a home and another bidder has the same idea.
Getting caught in a bidding war with that other potential buyer could easily lead to spending way more than is reasonable for the property. Possibly the biggest reason this could be problematic is if the appraisal comes back substantially lower than your offer, your lender pulls their financing due to the high risk of the loan, and the entire deal falls apart.
Be smart in your bidding, and be willing to walk away if things are getting out of hand.
Professional Guidance When Buying a House in Flemington
If you’re looking to save money when buying a house in Flemington, contact us at 908-448-2770!