Buying a home in North Georgia - step by step
1. Buying decision
Buying a property is a huge personal and emotional decision. Most relevant in the purchase process beside finding the right home, is assessing your personal finances.
2. Find your agent
A good real estate professional puts the client in the first place. A single agent owes to you the following duties:
- Dealing honestly and fairly;
- Loyalty;
- Confidentiality;
- Obedience;
- Full disclosure;
- Counting for all funds;
- Skill, care, and diligence in the transaction;
- Presenting all offers and counteroffers in a timely manner, unless a party has previously directed the licensee otherwise in writing; and
- Disclosing all known facts that materially affect the value of residential real property and are not readily observable.
3. Get pre-approved
One of the most vulnerable part of buying a house is the financing process. Your personal real estate professional takes care that the buying process is without stress as much as it could be.
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4. Looking for your home
You find your personal agent, you have your finances cleared and now you start looking. Be sure that you gave all your criteria of your new home to your agent.
Criteria such as:
- Type of property (Single family home, Condo etc.)
- Age
- Size
- Numbers of bedrooms
- Numbers of bathrooms
- Location
- Amenities (pool, garden etc.)
- Condition (fixer upper?)
- ..
- .
5. Make and offer
YEAH! you found the perfect one. Now you have to determine the offer price. Your agent helps you with that while showing you of comparable home values in the neighbourhood.
6. Due diligence
After your offer is accepted you have your chance to put the property to the acid test. An professional inspector will find every issue the property has. The final property report shows everything even the little issues. Don't get scared of the report size. Your agent will go through the report with you - bit by bit.
There are two scenarios which could happen:
- The inspection report brought up some issues and now you have the option to back out or attempt to renegotiate.
- Inspection is fine and we move towards the appraisal.
If the appraisal comes in at or above the contract price, we move towards closing.
If the appraisal comes in below the contract price, we must renegotiate. Normally either the seller accepts that lower price or the buyer, if they are willing to do so financially, comes up with the difference in cash at closing.
7. Closing
If you are not in town, a closing documents package and the wire instruction for the sell price minus deposit will be send to you for signing with a paid return mail label (typically mailed by FedEx or UPS).
When all the documents are back to the title company; signed by all parties and the title company made the final approval that everything is accurate, the keys will be released. Congrats! The property is now yours, until you hire us to sell it for you when the time comes.
Buying Process
