Home Buyer Guide - Home Buyer's Start Here

My job is to prepare you for a great outcome.  The more prepared you are going into an important financial transaction, like purchasing a home, the greater are the chances of success and your long term satisfaction.

As my client, it is important that you understand our relationship and my commitment to you and your interests.  As your buyer's agent, I will do the following:

• Care: I will use all my skills to the best of my ability on behalf of you, my client.

• Confidentiality: I will keep confidential any information given to me by you, my client, especially information that could possibly be damaging to you in a negotiation.

• Disclosure: I will disclose to you, my client any information I know or receive that may benefit your position in a negotiation or be important for you to know.

• Loyalty:  As my client, I owe you my undivided loyalty.   I will always put your interests above my own.

• Obedience: I will obey all lawful requests and orders that my clients give me.

• Accounting: My brokerage, @properties will account for all funds entrusted to it and will NEVER commingle (combine) client/customer funds with personal and/or business funds.   If any funds are escrowed or held by @ properties, they will always be held and ultimately disbursed as agreed to by all parties involved in the transaction, or a court of law.

In order for me to best help you, please take the time to do the following:

Print and Fill out the: Home Buyer Questionaire - What do you want in your next home.  Please have each person who will be living in the home fill this out independently (this is not a group project) .  Not just adults, kids too, if able.   Click here to access and download

It is important for each person in home to have their thoughts, wants and wishes known.  Rarely does everyone get everything they want, but this information will streamline, inform and help in the property search, and minimize potential problems.  

It is important for me to know what you all are wanting so I can find the place that is right for everyone, and get any issues or possible areas of conflict addressed and resolved.

Real Estate Contract 7.0

Hold your hats, even though this contract is 13 pages long, it is not that complicated.  

Print out, read, review and ask questions:  Click here to access and download

This is the standard Contract you will likely use to buy your next home.

I will help you understand this contract well before you even go out to look for your next home. Please take the time to print out the purchase contract, read it a few times, and ask me or your real estate attorney any questions you may have.  Finding your dream home and then seeing the real estate contract for the first time can be overwhelming.  Being familiar with the contract before even looking at properties will likely prevent stress and will also give you time to prepare for a successful transaction.

Download and look at this guide to the 7.0 Residential Real Estate contract which was written by a real estate attorney.  It breaks down the 7.0 contract by section and provides a good overview of the contract.

Costs and Budgeting

When purchasing a home there are additional cost beside the selling price of the home.   Closing costs, fees, taxes etc do add to the bottom line.  This document will provide an estimate of closing costs. 

Some towns and villages also require a transfer tax or transfer stamps to be purchased and provided at closing.  These costs and who pays these fees vary by area.  Here is a list of fees charged according to town / area which is provided as a guide and may not be fully updated.  Please contact your city hall directly to make sure you know the current costs for transfer fees / taxes.

Get your Mortgage Documents organized and ready to be submitted.
If you plan on applying for a mortgage, having your docs organized and ready to send out to mortgage brokers can save you time.  Drop box or a similar cloud service can make the process easier.  Open a free drop box account, create a shared folder entitled 'your name and docs' and and then upload your documents into this folder. You can set the privacy settings within the mortgage document folder to allow lenders with the folder link, or an invite from dropbox to access the folder.   Lenders with access to the folder will then be able to view and download all your docs thru this one link. This will save you the hassle of emailing / scanning / faxing the same document multiple times to different lenders.  Open a Free Drop Box account here 
 

If you in need of a mortgage banker or real estate attorney, you will find highly qualified and recommended professionals here.

Set up a time to meet with me. 

Call me at 312.278.3473 or Fill out this form to contact me and reserve a time we can meet and start finding your next home. 

Sincerely,

Tara Lubin