5 Things EVERYONE Should Know Before Buying a House!

What's up you guys, it's Graham here. So, these are the top 5 things you should know before buying your first property. Now, I've been in real estate for about 10 years now, and over this 10 years, I've sold about 100 homes, including 5 homes that I bought for myself. These are the most common occurrences I see for first-time homebuyers or people who are relatively new to real estate. So, with that said, let's get right into it.

Number one is not to worry about minor cosmetic issues the house will most likely have. Now, what I mean by cosmetic issues? I'm talking about when you walk up to a home and think to yourself, "Why the hell did the seller paint this home pink?" Or walking into a bedroom and thinking, "I hate these red walls," or going into a kitchen and hitting the counters, or maybe the backsplash is just super ugly. There are way too many buyers out there who can't seem to overlook these things and otherwise pass up the perfect property for something that could probably be changed out in a weekend.

So, anytime you're going and looking at property, you need to look at three things. The first one, and also the most important, is the property's location. This is something you're stuck with; you cannot change, no matter how much money you have. Do you live on a busy street? Do you live next to a freeway? Do you live next to teen 10? It used to be a really nice quiet street, and now we're just this like war zone. These are things that you are stuck with that you need to take into consideration because otherwise, these could be deal-breakers.

Because let's face it, if the location is subpar, there's really not much you can do about it. And if you can't deal with that, your best just to move on. Now, the second thing to consider when you're looking at property is the floor plan. Now, this is something you can change, just depending on how much money you have. Every time at a certain price, things just don't make sense. Like if you're buying a property for maybe $200,000 under market value, maybe it makes sense to change the floor plan.

But if you're buying something at retail level and just hate the way the kitchen is laid out, or you want the bedroom on the other side of the house, at that point it might be best just to move on, especially if you're going to be into the property way more than it's worth. Now, the third thing, like I had mentioned, are cosmetic issues. These are things that you can change pretty easily with very minimal effort. For instance, do you hate the kitchen? Well, a brand new one might be ten to twenty thousand dollars to make it absolutely perfect.

Do you hate the flooring? Well, brand new flooring throughout your home might be anywhere from four thousand to fifteen thousand dollars for brand new floors. Do you hate the paint color? Well, brand new paint might only cost you about a thousand dollars and a weekend's worth of your time. This is why it's so important not to get caught up with very minor cosmetic issues. Just about every single property I have ever looked at for both myself and a buyer has had some sort of cosmetic issues.

Even the perfect home won't be 100% perfect; just understand that it's not the end of the world. It doesn't need to be expensive, and just about every single property will have something that you will want to change out. Especially as an agent myself, I have seen it all. I've seen people cancel otherwise perfect properties just because they couldn't envision themselves changing a thirty thousand dollar kitchen on a three million dollar house that would have otherwise been 100% perfect.

And then what usually happens is that after they see other properties and realize that nothing out there is perfect, they end up compromising and realizing that they could have just done the work from the beginning, been into it for much less than they would be spending, and that's going to be the ideal scenario. So, when it comes to number three, just understand that you can easily overlook the flooring, the paint, little minor cosmetic things that you can easily change.

Now, the second thing you should know is that usually when you see a property, you only see it during a certain time of day. Maybe it's after work, maybe it's on a weekend or Sunday afternoon; you've only seen it during a specific time period. But it's very important to see the home at different times throughout the day and the night because what could otherwise be a pretty quiet residential street could be a gridlock of traffic if Waze decides, "Hey, there's a good shortcut through here, let's direct all of the traffic on this really busy street through this quiet area."

And I see this happen all the time throughout LA. I'll be on a really busy street, and Waze decides, "Hey, make a right on Bristol Court," and we take this all the way up, and it's a quiet street, and meanwhile, there are like hundreds of cars pouring through. This is definitely something to consider. And I've also seen it on less busy streets too. For instance, here in LA, we have Benedict and Coldwater Canyon, which are usually during the afternoon completely open.

But as everyone gets off work between 4:00 and 7:00 p.m., it becomes a gridlock of traffic as people use these streets to avoid the freeways. So, this is why it's so important that you see the streets at different times of the day, just to know what you're getting into. Now, I have a good story about this from an older buyer from about a year ago who opened escrow on a home near the beach with another real estate agent.

Now, the buyer made the decision to drive around the area several times throughout the day just to see what the area was like at different times. She ended up driving by the area on a Thursday evening and found all of a sudden the entire street was filled with cars, and there was valet running up and down the street trying to park the cars. Apparently, one of the cars was blocking a neighbor's driveway, and the neighbor came out of the home and was yelling at the valet to move the car because he was late for a dinner.

Well, what ended up happening was that my buyer pulled over and talked to the neighbor of the house she was about to buy and asked, "What's going on? How often does this happen?" She found out that there is a country club down the street that ended up using that street twice a week every time they had events at the Country Club, and that this was a regular occurrence. She wouldn't have known about this unless she was driving around the area during different times.

And because of this, she determined that that was a deal breaker for her; she didn't want to have to deal with that twice a week, and she cancelled the escrow. Then, she ended up using me a few months later to buy something at 2.4 million dollars. But the moral of the story here is to drive around the area you're considering buying just to see if there are any hidden issues you might not be initially noticing.

Now, the third thing to know anytime you buy a property is to consider the neighbor noise. But as neighbors living with this every day, we're sped up shortly after we arrived. Look who came out to greet us. No, just trust me on this one. Know that even though neighbors come and go, and chances are they're not going to be noisy forever, at least just understand what you're getting yourself into.

Yeah, it's terrible; it's a bad situation. No, I feel bad for them for sure. Deb, sometimes you might find that you have a neighbor who just loves to party 24/7 or plays really loud music, or maybe a neighbor that likes to play the drums, or maybe you have a neighbor that gets into really loud shouting matches every single night with the family. It's just really important just to understand what you're up against.

So just go at different times, especially at night or on weekends, and just listen and see if there's anything you might not be able to live with. The mattress isn't actually on fire. The fourth thing to consider are commute times. So even though this doesn't matter for an investment property, if you're buying something for yourself, it's really important to understand the flow of traffic and how long it's actually going to take you to get to work and back.

For instance, here in Los Angeles, you can see something that's 15 minutes away from your work on a Sunday, but if you see that same place Friday afternoon, it'll take you over an hour to get there. So when you're determining traffic times, it's usually pretty easy. It's as simple as usually checking a map and seeing the estimated driving times, but sometimes you just have to drive it yourself to see what it's actually like firsthand.

It could be a really easy straight 35-minute drive, for instance, or it could be a 35-minute drive from Hell where it wants you to make a left through seven lanes of traffic where you risk your life every time you do that. How do I know? Because Waze sends you through these just awful, awful routes, and 35 minutes doing that might actually be more like 50 minutes if you take the straight shot. So learn all of these things ahead of time; it could easily save you a lot of headache if you discover that this is not something you can live with.

The fifth thing you should know anytime you buy a property is to always get it inspected. Now, this is a common-sense one. I have never not seen a home not be inspected, but I can't stress the importance of this enough. Always get the home inspected and do as many inspections as you think you'll need, even if it isn't to try to renegotiate the deal in escrow. Try to get a seller credit; it's just important to know what you're getting yourself into.

I found that almost anything that comes up in a home inspection report is pretty well manageable to some degree or another, and you don't even need to do all of the things that might come up, or you could just do it over time. But anticipating these issues could be huge in terms of budgeting for what needs to be repaired or replaced. For instance, if the roof is 15 years old and has a 20-year lifespan, you know that you're going to probably need to replace the roof in about five years, and that's an expense to consider.

Or maybe the water heater is like 30 years old, and it's ancient, but it works perfectly fine and might continue working for another 10 years. At least in the back of your mind, you know at some point you're going to need to replace it. I personally do as many inspections as I can just to get to know what the condition is at the time I buy it. I rarely ever fix all the issues at once, and usually, I'll fix what's needed and maybe the rest I fix over time, but at least I can budget appropriately given the information and I know what to expect.

Now finally, a sixth bonus tip for all the MVPs who actually watched all the way to the end: my sixth tip is not to buy anything expensive or open up any new lines of credit six months before you actually apply for a mortgage or buy a property. The worst thing you can do before getting a loan is to get in debt or give the bank any reason not to give you the full amount that's promised.

For instance, if the bank says you could afford a three thousand dollar a month payment, then right before you get your loan, you lease a $600 a month car. The bank will see that as a liability and a reason to give you less money, and then when they give you less money, this means the purchase price of the home you wanted to buy ends up going down. So don't do that; always get the loan first, and then anything else you decide to do after you get the loan is on you.

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