Can anyone give me a brief overview of the steps to buying a house?

I am still not sure of all the things involved...I am going to get some books but can someone give me a brief synopsis of buying..please

Re: Can anyone give me a brief overview of the steps to buying a house?

I am copying this from an old post cause I am too lazy to retype it

1) Get Preapproval for a mortgage from a bank. This will help when making offers. Many sellers want pre-approvals so they don't 'waste' time agreeing to sell to someone who can't get a mortgage

2) Find a house you love. You can contact a real estate broker to help you, or you can search mlsli.com and open houses and look yourself.

3) Make an offer. If you have a RE Broker, you call them and they will call the other RE Broker. The owners will accept the offer, decline the offer, or counteroffer. If they counteroffer, you can accept the counteroffer or counteroffer again (whew!)

4) Once you and the sellers agree on a price, set up an inspection (home and termite - often separate). At inspection, you may find things that need to be fixed that you will add to your contract.

5) Hire an attorney. Have your attorney and the seller's attorney get in contact with each other. A contract will be made up. The sellers will sign the contract, and you will sign the contract and put down a binder (we put down 5%) that is put into a separate account until Closing. This date will be noted in the contract (they often have 30 days after the date to close)

6) Get a mortgage / Lock in a rate (you can hire a mortgage broker who will tell you what documents they need, go over the options, etc)

7) Get homeowner's insurance set (our mortgage broker set this up for us)

8) Once this is done, a finalized closing date and time can be set.

9) Final walk through. Make sure everything is the same as at time of purchase and that any changes that you asked for in the contract have been made. This is often the day before closing or the morning of.

10) Close! Sign lots of documents and pay lost of money

Hopefully I didn't forget anything!

Re: Can anyone give me a brief overview of the steps to buying a house?

1. Get pre-approved from a banker (with reputation - WAMU, HSBC, CitiBank, any of the Federal Savings Banks in the area).

2. Visit houses/co-ops in your price range. Any house you think you want to place a bid on - visit twice! Learn to ASK lots of questions on the houses you're looking at - it will make you more familiar with everything.

3. When ready to place a bid, contact your R/E agent/listing agent is you're not using your own agent, tell them you're pre-approved and would like to submit a bid.

4. Submit bid and then wait for a counter offer, and then offer another price (if you want to).