Planning to buy your first home in the Greater Moncton Area? How exciting! But hold on a minute. Are you 100% ready to start looking for homes? Do you know all the steps to take to buy a property?
Let us guide you through the buying process.
Step #1: Get pre-approved
Before you start house hunting, it’s important to know how much you can afford to spend on a home. This is called, getting pre-approved. This is the most crucial step to purchasing a home and it should never be skipped. This involves taking a close look at your finances, including your income, debts, and expenses.
Pre-approvals are done with a mortgage specialist or mortgage broker.
If you do not know any mortgage specialist or broker, you can ask your REALTOR® or family and friends for recommendations. You can also check our contact repertory.
By getting pre-approved, you are going to know how much you are able to borrow, what your interest rate will be and much more information that can help your home search. It is also important to know that as a first-time home buyer, you should be eligible for the First Time Home Buyer Benefit Program.
Once completed, you will receive a pre-approval letter from the person you’ve been dealing with. This letter can be used to show proof to seller’s agent that you are eligible and ready to buy a property, especially when in multi-offer situation.
Step #2: Find your REALTOR®
No matter the amount of expertise you have in the domain, you should always have a fellow Realtor to purchase a property. Why? To help you search for homes, help negotiate and fill legal contracts, and mostly guide you through the home buying process while ensuring that your interests are represented at every stage of the transaction. The cherry on top is that buying with a Realtor is totally free! The commission is paid by the listing agent when a property is purchased.
On top of having a great knowledge of the real estate market, your realtor will have a professional network you can highly benefit from.
Step #3: Start house hunting
Once you have found your team of expert to work along your side, you can start making a list of your criteria from highest to lowest priority.
Once your criteria selected, sit down with your REALTOR® to overlook your list, make some adjustments if necessary and start your online search. Your REALTOR® will then send you a client portal through MLS® that will update automatically once new listings go online.
Your portal will have all the homes for sale in your selected criteria, which you can select as favourite, potentials or delete. Your realtor will also have access to your portal and annotations, which is meant to save you time and have your realtor pro-actively helping you.
It is never too early to get you set up on an automatic email portal to keep an eye on the listings that are currently available. By doing so, you will have a better idea of what is available on the market and what you can get within your price range. It really helps to put things in perspective.
Step #4: Make an offer
Found the perfect home? Great! Let’s write an offer. Your REALTOR® will fill and explain to you the purchase and sale agreement and other mandatory forms. Your offer will include a purchase price, closing date and conditions to be fulfilled. Once your offer is sent to the seller’s agent, it’s negotiation time: They will either accept, refuse or counter your offer.
Step #5: Fulfill the conditions
Once your offer is accepted, you will need to work on the conditions that need to be fulfilled before the sale can be completed. Those conditions are put in place in order to protect you and ensure that you are making a good investment and are able to put a mortgage on the property (if financing is a condition).
Conditions have to be met within a certain date that both you and the sellers have agreed on. In New-Brunswick, it is common to allow 10 business days for the buyer to fulfill conditions.
Your REALTOR® will help you navigate through this step and ensure each conditions are done properly and most importantly, done in time!
Conditions can vary depending on the specific details of the sale, but here are some common ones that you may encounter:
- Home inspection
- Financing
- Appraisal
- Security Deposit
- Water test
- Insurance
- Property Disclosure Statement
Step #6: Close on your home
Once all conditions have been met, you can close on the sale and take possession of your new home. You will need to hire a lawyer and finalize the purchase by signing legal documents in person, at their office. This is known as closing.
On the morning closing day, you will do a final walkthrough of the property with your REALTOR® to ensure that any repairs or changes that were agreed upon during negotiations have been completed and that the house is in the same state it was when you last saw it.
Once the walkthrough is done and satisfactory, all of the paperwork has been signed and the payment has been made, the ownership of the property will be transferred to you. A common practice in New Brunswick is that your REALTOR® will drop the house key at your attorney’s office, and you can pick it up once you get a call from your lawyer confirming that the transaction is completed.
By following these steps, you can help ensure a smooth and successful home-buying experience.
If you are looking to purchase a property in the Greater Moncton Area and don’t have a REALTOR® yet, I would love to chat with you! Let’s work together.
– Jenny
