You have spent months house hunting and now you feel like you have finally found the ideal home for you and your family. Before you can make an offer, there are some items on a very important checklist you have to check off to make sure you are making an offer on the right home.
Your closing is going to run into trouble if there are any liens on the property you are trying to buy. Before you make an offer on a home, you need to have your attorney check for liens. If there are liens, you need to either negotiate an arrangement to make satisfying the liens part of the closing, or tell the seller that they have a certain amount of time to satisfy the liens or there will be no offer.
The property you want to buy is beautiful, but what direction is the neighborhood headed? Check local news to see if there are any commercial or industrial development projects being planned for the neighborhood. You should do some research online to check the trend for the crime level in the area. You can also check with your town hall to see if properties in the neighborhood are being sold for a profit or a loss.
Before making an offer, you should have an expert check out the home's essential systems such as its plumbing, electrical wiring, furnace, and air conditioning. If any of the major systems are in need of repair, then your offer should reflect that.
You do not want to make an offer on a home that requires a brand new roof or has problems with its foundation. The best way to check is to hire a home inspector or a licensed contractor to look the home over and make sure the roof and foundation are in good shape. A bad roof or cracked foundation can cost thousands of dollars to repair.
Believe it or not, property line issues are not as difficult to fix as you may think. Older homes will sometimes have issues with property lines because the older surveying was not as precise as it is now. It could turn out that part of the home you are trying to buy could be crossing over the property line by a couple of feet on one side. You can fix this problem with inexpensive title insurance, but it is still an issue you want to look into before you make an offer.
Once you submit your offer, you never know what the seller is going to do to try and make the process more complicated than it needs to be. That is why you should make sure that your offer has an escape clause that allows you to rescind your offer if the seller starts to make unreasonable demands. It is not always easy to get or utilize an escape clause, but it is something to look into before you make your offer.
Your home is one of the most significant investments you will ever make. Before you lock yourself into a property by making an offer, you should take the time to review the details and know exactly what you are getting into.
