First-time Home Buyer Mistakes: the Deadly Three

First time home buyers, as hard as it may be, try and stay away from these three cardinal mistakes I see repeated over and over again. These three mistakes are deadly to your home shopping and home buying experience partly because they can make you want to run to the comfort of your (rented) apartment, even if you have fully decided to buy a home this year.

Mistake #1: Looking for the Perfect Home
There is no such thing as the perfect home. Yes, you may quote me on that. In the years of homeownership myself and selling houses to others I have reached this one conclusion that there is no such thing as perfect. When you are searching for houses all you will get is good enough. It is what you make of it that makes it perfect.

Now I know there are some people that will walk into a home and know that it is absolutely the one they want. "It's perfect!" they might even say. But I contend that what these clients see is the home as it will become when they have moved in and had their way with it. No pun intended.

Mistake #2: Having too Wide a Scope
My first client to whom I showed a lot of homes, but didn't sell one because they got frustrated, looked all over Sacramento for houses. They went from Elk Grove to Folsom to midtown Sacramento and liked all the homes equally. Unfortunately, this was also at the time when houses were being snapped up in a day and they didn't get any of them. The problem was they liked all the homes equally - not doing enough research into the neighborhoods involved creates such a situation.

Unfortunately in today's market this problem is magnified. With all this choice and a great many homes to look at, home buyers just seem befuddled. They would like to live in a certain neighborhood they've been watching for a while but what if there's a better one out there? So they search and search and the home search itself becomes the end of their journey. Yes, there really is such a thing as too much choice.

Mistake #3: An offer that is way too low
Say you've skipped over the first two (lucky you!) and found the home you're looking for. Now comes the decision - what do we offer? Beware of mistake #3 - making an offer which will immediately get rejected as frivolous.

This is also a symptom of today's market. With prices falling / having fallen in many areas, the focus seems to be on how big of a discount on the asking price one can get. The focus should be on how much value you are receiving from the purchase. But getting sidetracked has cost many a good home. Once you have offered a low price, you are more likely to justify your offer and less likely to see the house objectively.

So happy hunting! And steer clear of these Deadly Three. If you do, you'll have done the almost impossible: bought a very inexpensive house in a buyer's market.