The San Diego Real Estate BLOG
Buying a Home #2:
The Search

Here at the Yarbrough Group, we make the home buying process as easy as possible.

Now that you have taken the time to get acquainted with the pre-approval process and gotten your letter of pre-approval, it is time to begin searching for you San Diego Dream home.

The San Diego area offers MANY wonderful and varied neighborhoods spread out across a WIDE geographic area. With so many wonderful option available, it can be hard to know where to begin when you start your search for a home, but we are here to help.

This week on the San Diego Real Estate BLOG, we present the second in our series of posts on Buying a Home in San Diego: The Search Process.

If you you missed the first few posts in our series on the home buying process, you can catch up here:

Buying A Home #1: Getting Pre-Approved

Photo: SellingPointLoma.com

Step 1:
Hire a Realtor

This no doubt seems like a shameless plug coming from us, but the reality is that having a Real Estate professional will make the entire home buying process go much more quickly, smoothly, and successfully.

As previously mentioned, the San Diego area offers a staggering amount of options when it comes to buying a home, but the reality is that only a very select few of those homes will fit all of your required criteria. A licensed Realtor has the tools and experience to cut through most of that static and get right to the homes that will fit you best.

A Realtor will also make the steps after finding your home much easier. Buying a home requires a veritable mountain of paperwork and specialized expertise. Having an experienced guide will help insure that you complete all the necessarily steps correctly and on time. Without this guidance, you may find yourself locked out of your dream home due to something as minor as missed deadline or improperly completed paperwork.

Realtors also have existing relationships with other Realtors and brokers which helps them in getting the inside track on upcoming properties and getting their clients in to see them first which can make all the difference in the world in an extremely competitive market like San Diego.

Add in the fact that you simply CANNOT trust ANY real estate site to accurately reflect the status, price, or amenities of a given property and you can see that working with a professional is really the only way to avoid wasting and ANY amount of your own personal time, possibly adding months to your search.

And what about the showings themselves? Good luck getting access to a property without a licensed Realtor. Think about it this way: If you were selling YOUR home, would YOU be OK with a bunch of random, unrepresented, and unknown people showing up at and wandering through YOUR home at random times of the day? We didn’t think so.

Photo: LMRBLaw.com

Step 2:
Prioritize Your Search Criteria

There are MANY criteria to consider when buying a home, and those criteria vary greatly from person to person:

How much space and how many rooms do you need?

Is there a specific area you would like to live in?

How are the schools in a given area?

How much are you willing to spend?

Do you need a garage?

The list goes on and on…

Do yourself a favor and take a few mins to sit down with a pen and a pad of paper and come up with the top 5 to 10 things that you need in a home. Once you have that list, we recommend prioritizing two main factors: Location and Cost.

What areas are in an acceptable proximity to your work? What is the quality of schools in a particular area? What types of shopping and dining you would like to have access to?

Once you have established this baseline criteria, you can plug your estimated budget into a given area and then either reassess or begin looking at homes depending on what you find. Once you find an area that is compatible with both you needs and your price range, then you can further refine your search using more specific criteria from your list.

Again, we cannot stress enough how much easier working with a Realtor will make this process since they will be able to offer insight and suggestions based on your own individual criteria and will save you a lot of running around looking at homes that might not even be on the market any longer.

Photo: SellingPointLoma.com

Step 3:
Start Touring Homes

Now the REAL fun can begin: Staring to Tour Homes!!!

Now that you have a realistic set of criteria in had, time to get in the car and see some homes first-hand. Again, a working with a Realtor will make this process must more productive and streamlined.

Yes you loved that 3 bedroom home you saw on Zillow and you were ready to drive over… but I actually went into Escrow 2 days ago and the Listing Agent didn’t get a chance to update it on the Zillow site yet. If you have a Realtor, they already know this, saved you the drive, and have a few alternatives lined up so that your precious Saturday afternoon isn’t shot.

Be sure to tune in next time when we discuss the types of escrows available to you once you have decided to make an offer on a home!!!

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As Always, Be Sure To Contact The Yarbrough Group TODAY for ALL Your San Diego Real Estate Needs!!!