The saga continues — we’re in Austin, Texas area, and we’re looking for a home. Based on the steady appreciation of home values, it’s a no-brainer to see all reasons to buy a home in this area. People are still moving in, the economy is strong, and the entire area is practically unfazed by either the national real estate decline or the subprime market crash.

As we’re looking for a home, we’re starting to realize that there are a few pointers we wish somebody shared with us BEFORE we started looking for a home. Here’s they are, folks, little pieces of advice based on our firsthand experiences:

• You can either look for a house on your own, or solicit help of a real estate agent. If you’re going to quarterback this thing, use the hell out of the Internet — should be a no-brainer at this point. If you want those listings served up for you through an Internet “gateway”, find a realtor you like and see if he/she can be your “buyer’s agent”.
• You can totally find a perfect house on your own. You don’t necessarily need a “buyer’s agent”. All they do is perform the same exact Internet searches that you can be doing. When you find a home you want to write an offer on, having a buyer’s agent can actually be a bad thing — because the buyer’s agent get paid out of the sellers’ agent’s commission, the seller’s agent can (probably will be) reluctant to negotiate on the sale price — hello, the seller’s agent wants to get paid, and here waltzes in the buyer’s agent and undercuts the commission!
• Don’t use friends or relatives. Buying a home is a huge deal. You’re committing hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life to this thing. Your life will be altered in a way you never thought was possible. While it may seem great to involve your weekend-warrior realtor aunt Jan into this, it’s a shitty idea, trust me. When things go right, everybody wins. But if your aunt Jan is not as professional or talented as you thought and you decide to walk away and work with another realtor, she might not forgive you the loss of the commission — we’re not talking peanuts, we’re talking 5-10 grand. Besides, relatives and money don’t mix.
• When you are about to do house or pest inspections, don’t use the realtor-recommended people/companies. Every realtor out there knows at least a couple house inspectors and pest inspectors. They will always recommend the people they know, citing how great/thorough they are. However, this does not help create “independence in appearance” — it’s the same reason auditors cannot accept even the smallest gifts from clients while on engagement because they need to not only BE, but also APPEAR TO BE totally independent. How hard do you think it is for a realtor to ask an inspector buddy to “go easy” on the inspection to help guarantee a smooth and fast closing?
• Take lots of pictures. Start each batch of pictures with a close-up of the flyer for reference. Use Google Picasa + Google Earth to geotarget the pictures — you’ll be glad you did. In literally two days your head will swell with confusing images of dozens of homes you saw, and this is an awesome way to organize them all. Now you can not only zoom in on the house, but also see all the pics you took at the same time.
• Pick 2-3 things that are important to you, and once you find a house with those things, BUY IT. If you need a big kitchen to entertain, a good location to go out, and little or no remodeling, why pass up a house that has all of those features, but a small yard? If you want location, yard, and price, why do you care about school districts? Of course, if you prioritize 12 things you want, good freaking luck, buddy.
• Financing people are always sleazy. I made a mistake of applying for a mortgage through LendingTree, and got inundated with phone calls for weeks. They lure you in with the best features of the deal, and forget to tell you shit like “the column that says ‘EXPENSES PAID BY SELLER’ actually means ‘YOU PAY FOR IT IF SELLER DOES NOT WANT TO PAY FOR THEM’. Of course he’s not going to want to pay for it, you have to SPECIFICALLY ask for those to be paid by the seller in the offer — then why call it “seller paid expenses“? Whatever, assholes. I went with a local bank instead because I got tired of playing the “games of omission” with a person in St. Louis I’ve never met, representing a bank that has no physical presence in this world.
• Plan remodels upfront. It’s not so hard — with 3D modeling software readily available from Google and IKEA, you can knock out a model of a fung shui homestead in a coupla hours, complete with prices and quotes. Roll those remodels and updates with the house price for an immediate effect, then spread them out over a couple of months.
• Weather-proof your home. Those electric bills you’re getting in your apartment are chump change in comparison with the A/C-driven electric bills you’re gonna get when you move in. So take your little $200 a month for water, garbage, and electricity, and quintuple it. That’s right, it’ll cost you a grand a month. Plan accordingly by spending $100 on weather strips, adhesive weather tape, and string caulk; then methodically plug every hole in the house. Oh, and you have God’s permission to pimp-slap your family members if they dare to turn the thermostat above 78.
• Location is everything. I don’t know about other states, but here in Texas there’s plenty of room to grow. This means that every year, batches of brand new homes are dumped onto the market, each newer and bigger than the previous. All of these new homes are built .. duh .. in Suburbia, because the prime real estate within the city limits has been over-developed in the 80′s. Therefore, if you want to treat your house as an investment that it is, buy closer to town. It will resell better because “they don’t make any more land” in town, but they make all kinds of land in the burbs.

More coming soon!