Prospective first time home owners have one major decision to make first: whether they should even buy a home. Owning your own home is everyone’s dream, and there are many advantages, most especially the equity value feature. In addition, you may not have a choice; if your family is getting bigger, there are not many apartments with three or four bedrooms.

But don’t turn a blind eye to the disadvantages of home ownership, and make sure you are willing and are able to deal with them. When you live in a rental property and something goes awry, you merely have to call the landlord or his agent. In your own home, you become the landlord. Face it, a house is a lot more work than an apartment.

If you still feel ready for this big step, take the little steps first for best results. The first thing you should do is be sure you will qualify for a mortgage. There are many first time home buyer programs that can make your qualification easier.

Once you discover how much you need to accumulate for a deposit, and how much your income (or joint income if you are married) will qualify you for, you can start saving up for the deposit and start looking around for houses in your price range.

Next on the list is where you would like your new home to be situated.

You can do a lot of preshopping on the internet to get an idea of the homes in the area you are interested in. The major real estate networks all have sites that allow you to narrow your choice to a certain region or town.

You may also want to rely on word of mouth to find out which is the best school system, and Newsweek magazine and others publish yearly reports of the best systems.

There are even services that can find the best school system and then link you to houses for sale nearby.

After you have chosen the area, searching on line is easy: you just go onto a real estate site and pick the many search features, such as number of bedrooms and baths, style of home, and of course, price range.

This step in the search will give you a good idea of the type and number of homes for sale in the size, style and price range you want. But before you start the physical search with a real estate agent, it is probably a good idea to meet with your mortgage consultant to get the mortgage application in process.

This step will make purchasing a house much simpler and more successful. When you do, both the real estate broker and the sellers realize that you are a serious home shopper. This will also give you a great bargaining chip, since the purchase will move very fast if it doesn’t need to be slowed down in the mortgage application process.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 5:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized.