Finding Your Dream Home- Step Two: Working Efficiently with Your Buyer's Agent by:Spencer Mason

Having successfully navigated the Step One, the Interview Process and found the best

agent to meet your needs and your personality you are now ready to move forward. In this step I will be writing a bit about some best practices when working with your agent. The first advice I can give is, keep an open line of communication with your agent.

From your interview process you have made it clear that you are looking for an agent who will take your calls and be prompt about returning messages. This is a two way street. There is no measure I can give to articulate how much of a difference it makes for a Realtor to know what his buyer is thinking.

Prequalifying

This is one of the most important and time saving steps in the entire process. Here is a hypothetical example of why: I had a client named Jane. Jane and I met to discuss her search criteria and one of the questions that I asked her when setting up her search is, "what is your price range." Jane told me that $250,000 was her max. I set her up on an automated search, we identified some homes that she was interested in and went out looking at them. It took a few weeks, but eventually Jane and I found her Dream Home and we put in an offer. The listing agent asked me for a prequalification letter and I asked Jane if she had spoken to a lender yet. She told me no, but soon went into her bank to get prequalified. Shortly after that I received a phone call from a very distraught Jane who informed me that she only qualified for a $150,000 loan. Let me stop the example here and explain what you have most likely figured out by now. First, Jane could not afford her Dream Home. Second as her agent, I should have covered this up front and have now wasted a month of my time, but most importantly, I've wasted a month of her time. To make matters worse, after adjusting her search and looking at properties $100,000 less, what do you think Jane's reactions to those properties will be? You guessed it, none of them compare to her Dream Home in a much higher price range; all this because a simple step was missed in the beginning. Thankfully this scenario is made up but it could be very real. This situation can work in reverse as well. Jane could have been looking at $150,000 homes because it sounded like a good number. When going out to look she was not impressed with any of the listings she saw and soon becomes discouraged. After months of searching, someone mentions to Jane that she should get prequalified for a loan just to see if she could squeeze a little bit more into her perceived budget. The loan officer tells her she could comfortably afford a $350,000 home! The bad part is Jane has wasted months of time which is something this simple step could have helped avoid. Hopefully these examples hit home

Finding a Loan Officer

Prequalifying is free and your agent should have a few referrals of loan officers that they have worked well with in the past. If you do not already have a loan officer that you are working with, I highly recommend using one of your agent's referrals. The reason is because your agent does this for a living and the loan officers that she or he recommends most likely people that they have found through, no doubt, countless bad experiences with loan officers that did not get the job done in a satisfactory way. Just like a good buyer's agent it is very important to find a loan officer that understands the time sensitive nature of Real Estate and can deliver on that requirement. By choosing a loan officer randomly you are taking a shot in the dark that this person, who will be integral part in the largest purchase of your life, is in fact someone who will be prompt and accurate. Your agent recognizes the importance of a loan officer that meets these criteria and should have a few people for you to choose from.

Finding Listings

It is now time to take some steps to get yourself on the right path to streamline the process of finding your Dream Home. According to studies a vast majority of home buyers use the internet to do searching, contact an agent and many other tasks related to the process. No doubt you have visited one or more sites that give access to home listings. Many if not all of the reputable sites draw their information from a centralized, agent-only database called the Multiple Listing Service or MLS. These sites are great for start but once you have begun working with an agent they should not be used any more unless it is for quick reference and here is why: These sites have "cached" information. What this means is that these sites draw all of their information from the MLS and then save it on a computer that allows the company that provides that information to re-format it and re-present it to users often in a pretty more visually stimulating way than the true MLS listings. One problem with cached websites is that they are not updated often enough to keep the status of properties accurate. Real Estate is a very time sensitive affair and as such it is paramount that you are working with information that is updated in real time. The only way to do this is to have direct access to the MLS. As a licensed Realtor your agent will have access to this system and more importantly can provide you with access to this system. By now your agent should have asked you a series of questions related to your needs. These will include but are not limited to: Price range, the area you wish to find a home, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and more specific things like parking etc. With that information your agent will set you up with one or more automated searches on the MLS that will initially send you every available listing that meets your needs and then daily (or at an interval you desire) will send you any new listings that pop into the system that meet your needs. These searches will email you automatically and provide you with the ability to log into a customized website that will allow you to view all available listings in real time. This will help you avoid falling in love with a listing that has been sold for a week or a year, as can happen with cached sites. When you log into this system you will be given the ability to view a listing sheet very similar to what your agent sees. If a property that was previously above your price range experiences a price drop and is now in your range you will be notified of it the next time your search runs. This is why I recommend daily updates to all of my clients. By the same token if a property you were considering goes under contract it will be immediately removed from your search results. Each MLS is a little different so these examples will be for the one I use here in the Chicago market. When you log on to view the listings that your agent has sent you will not only be presented with the information about the listings, you will also be given the option to mark them "interested," "maybe," or "not interested." There is also a "notes" section for each property. These are VERY important to your agent's ability to zero in on your needs. You should mark "interested," etc. for every property and the more notes you leave about what you like or dislike about a property the better your agent will become at formulating an understanding of your true Dream Home. Ideally you should be sent no more than 100 or so listings. If you are sent more than this I would recommend adding more criteria to narrow your search. For example: If you are looking for a condo and originally laundry in-unit was a "plus" but not a "must" for your search you may want to consider changing that to a "must" if your search comes back with too many listings. With the addition of more criteria to your search this will help sort out the properties that may have less appeal when you go to resell down the road. Other value-added things to look for are: Garage parking, a master bathroom in the master bedroom, etc. Talk to your agent to find out which additional criteria make sense for your situation if your search is coming back with too many listings.

Viewing Possible Dream Homes

This is one of the most fun steps for many of my clients and for me as an agent as well. I recommend viewing no more than five or six listings at a time. At this point you should have narrowed your search results down to a top ten or fifteen so you will be able to see them all in a few trips out. Often times it can be difficult to keep things straight so here are some pointers I have developed that have great success for my clients: 1.Your agent should provide you with a listing sheet for each property you look at. Organize these listing sheets in the order that you view the homes. 2. Take lots of notes. Do not depend on photos because if you are viewing occupied homes the current residents may not be comfortable with you taking pictures of their belongings (and in come states I believe this could be a liability should that home be robbed etc.). 3. Establish a clear winner for each day out. In other words, when you find a home that you really like a lot make that home your Top Choice of the Day. From then on, you only have to keep two properties in mind, your "Top Choice of the Day" and the one you are currently viewing. If the one you are viewing is not as good as your Top Choice then forget about it and move on to the next one. If the one you are viewing is much nicer than your Top Choice, make it your new top choice and forget about the other one. It is okay to have a Top Choice and a runner-up for the day, but try hard to really decide which one or two homes out of each tour is the best. Do this each time you go out until you have viewed all of the potential candidates. After that, you should ask your agent to do what I refer to as, a Greatest Hits Tour. This is a day that you go out and look at all of the top choices from previous tours and view them for a second time, back-to-back. From there you may need to come back a third time for the top choice or two and then, it's time to make an offer!

Check Back for Step 3: Making An Offer

About the author

Spencer Mason writes about Chicago Condos, Living In Chicago, and Chicago Real Estate, for Dream Town.

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