Your first home buying team – who you need to make your dream a reality.

Buying your first home for many people will be the largest financial event of their lifetime.  Most of the first home owners I work with have no idea of how-to turn their dreams into reality.

In fact, for some its such an overwhelming prospect they never even thing about taking the first step.  Today I’m going to go over the core people you need to use to do the heavy lifting and help you get into your first home.

Use a Mortgage Broker for your First Home

Your life will be massively easier if you start with using a good mortgage broker.  A mortgage broker helps you to get the loan and most brokers will have access to 20 or so different lenders. This means they can find a better loan then what you would doing the shopping around yourself.

They will do all the liaising with the lender so not having to deal with banks one massive thing they help with to take the stress off your shoulders.

Most of the time they’ll do it for free as well as the lender you get the loan through will pay them a commission when the loan is settled.

Full disclosure here, I might be a little bit biased here because I’m a mortgage broker myself but honestly does anyone trust banks with anything these days?

The mortgage broker will also be in contact with all related parties and not just the lender.  For example, if I have a client who has just signed a contract to purchase their first home and the contract is subject to finance approval.  Meaning they can back out of the contract without any penalties if the finance is declined.  I will contact both conveyancer and real estate agent upfront to keep them in the loop.

This is a very important part because I’ve found over my 12 years in finance that these people can actually put added pressure on you and the pressure can actually be quite heavy because with first home owners the process is totally foreign.

This why you use a good mortgage broker, they will help manage that pressure for you.

Using a Conveyancer

With every purchase you will also need a conveyancer.

They help you transfer the title into your name.

Now you might think “why wouldn’t I do that myself?”.  It get’s a little bit more complicated than that as they have to liaise with the relevant legal people and are responsible for lodging the correct paperwork.  If any of this gets delayed then it may delay the either the lender or the vendor’s solicitor being able to settle on time.

If you need a good conveyancer you would ask your mortgage broker to refer you to someone.

A building and pest inspector

A Building & Pest inspector comes in real handy for a couple of different reasons.

They can see structural defects with a building that the average person may not.  This is clearly important because you don’t want a rude shock of having to fork out more cash after you’ve purchased the house.

The other thing first home buyers are unaware of it that if there are termites in the building then insurance does not cover this.

I recently had a client that purchased a property that was riddled with termite damage.  On the outside it just looked like the place needed a bit of work but on the inside, it was crumbling.  With the use of a building and pest inspection clause in the contract he was able to back out of the contract.

If you’re buying somewhere that’s new, say for example you’re buying house and land.  It can also be good to have a building inspector give the place a once over prior to you signing off on it with the builder.

You would be surprised at the amount of errors that can come from a new build.

A Buyer Advocate

Another professional you could engage through the home buying process is a buyer advocate.

A buyer advocate will assist you with the home buying process, there are 3 distinct advantages of using a buyer advocate

1. They save you time. Going out every weekend to look at houses can go from exciting to exhausting pretty fast.
2. They deal with real estate agents on your behalf meaning they search for the right properties and negotiate or bid at auction on your behalf.
3. They may have access to off the market properties. These are properties that real estate agents cannot put on the market.  Probably because the vendor’s may just want a quick sale or they don’t want to make it public they are selling their property.  This sometimes happens when the seller’s been living there for a long time and they don’t want neighbours to know what they sold for, it seems pretty irrelevant people can take a good guess at what somethings worth these days but it happens.

So that’s why you use a buyer’s advocate.  The only other thing I think I should mention is picking the right builder if you decide you want to build.

Picking the right builder

I won’t go into this in great detail because not all of the listeners are going to build.  However, getting involved with the wrong builder can seriously reduce life expectancy.  But I’ll raise 3 quick points.

1. What’s the actual cost. They’ll give you some cheap price just to get you in the door and then try and upsell you into whatever else you need.
2. Are they going to build you a decent house? Many builders can be impossible to contact once you’ve completed.  That fact is that it is a large project that’s had many different hands needed to complete it.  Things can often require work post settlement.  You can somewhat mitigate this risk by using a building inspector.  This will limit you needing to call them to fix something after the build is complete.To give you an example of this I had a builder take a week to respond to a client that had a water leak coming from an on suite and saturating the bedroom carpet.
3. They take their time. I’ve had clients waiting and paying the land loan for a year before the builder starts the builder.

Getting into your first home is a major life event.  It’s big and overwhelming BUT don’t think about it too much.  You need a team to help you buy your first home.  The first step is to find a good mortgage broker. Go.

Will Bell Mortgage Broker is a mortgage and finance broker based in Melbourne specializing in residential home loans.  Will is all about the average Australian understanding just enough of the broader economy to take action on your own personal economy.  He is the host of the My Personal Economy Podcast.

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