In November, I became a first time home owner and co-purchased a bigger home with my Mom. My family had been looking for a long time, but we could never agree on the right house until now. Fortunately, we found a newer home in a great community.
However, the process of buying my first home was super stressful and complicated. Since it had been so long since my parents had bought a home (we lived in ours for 15+ years), they forgot most of the details and I wound up having to figure out most of the details by myself 😮💨
All of this happened while I was transitioning into a new job and figuring out the details of moving to the U.S. as a Canadian expat. So let’s just say that the past couple months have been hectic!
In this 3-Part series, I am sharing what my first time home buying experience was like and some of the hard lessons that I learned along the way. Make sure to read Part 1 – Due Diligence and Part 2 – Financials. In this Part 3, I will focus on the Offer.
#8 – Ask for it in the offer 📝
In hindsight, there were a lot of things that we should have tried asking for when putting down the offer. Originally, we started off $20K below the asking price and ultimately ended up at $10K. Since the home was in such well kept condition by the original owner, we didn’t have too many asks. However, this is a list of things that I would consider asking for in the future:
- Professional floor and carpet cleaning (some Sellers may already plan to do this but ask anyways)
- Furnace and duct cleaning (very important and should be done regularly anyways)
- Gutter cleaning (this one is more of a nice to have)
- Painting or touch up of the walls (the walls will likely have lots of holes after the decorations are removed)
- Seller to pay the rest of the community fees for the year (we didn’t even know about this lol)
- Seller to pay the rest of the property taxes for the year (try negotiating this if the seller isn’t willing to come down on price)
#9 – Set a later condition date 🗓
In our purchase offer, our realtor pre-filled out most of the details and we went along with the condition and possession dates that she proposed thinking it would be okay. However, we felt that 1 month was actually too rushed, especially because we weren’t pre-approved for a mortgage at the time. This meant that we needed to go through the process of collecting and providing all of our banking and tax information (mentioned in Part 2) which took a while and nearly made us miss our condition date!
It also would have been better if we had more time to research and find a good home inspector. Instead, we were rushed to go with a company that our realtor suggested, which had great Google reviews, but seemed to do the bare minimum and was unprofessional (see Part 1 for details).
#10 – Put your conditions in writing ✍🏼
Once you submit a purchase offer and it gets accepted, you have until the Condition Date to meet and fulfil the conditions (e.g. selling your home, obtain financing, complete home inspection).
For our home, there were a couple asks that we brought up through our realtor who then brought it up to the Seller’s realtor. They agreed to a few of them and we proceeded to waive the conditions.
However, our realtor failed to add these asks to the conditions waiver and we unfortunately didn’t know better at the time of signing. When it came to the Possession Date, we found that the Seller didn’t complete one of the asks and left some cash behind for us to fix the issue. When we called around town for quotes, the issue ended up costing more than the cash that was left behind. After talking to the Seller’s agent, we found that they were unwilling to pay extra (even though this was originally their responsibility).
We didn’t have a lawyer until it was time to finalize everything, but he mentioned that this should have been written down instead of being agreed upon through the respective agents. Fortunately we found a discount and ended up paying only a bit more, but it would have been nice if our agent was experienced enough to inform us of this detail. When we mentioned this to our realtor, her response was again along the lines of “oh, I guess we could have done that but who would have known!” (sigh 😪)
Now, you’re more informed for your home purchase!
The purpose of this mini series was to share some tips and learnings for one of the most important purchasing decisions that you will make in your life. These are all things that I wish I had known in advance so hopefully you learned a few things from what I’ve shared of my experience. I will be writing more about this topic, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading and be sure to like, share, or leave a comment!
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