Dewayne:
You found the home you want, you made an offer. It’s accepted. Now what?
Welcome back to another episode of our series 60 Lessons That We’ve Learned Over 60 Years in Real Estate. Today we’re going to discuss the lessons that happen after your contract is accepted. After you make an offer, it’s accepted. Now what?
Kirk:
So here’s what you say. We’re under contract. The steps are: You make escrow. You start the loan process, which includes supplying all the lender required information. Typically, you have, what, five days to do that, but you should have had a bunch of stuff already in with the lender to be doing that. You’re going to review association documents. You’re going to make application. If it’s required, you’re going to schedule an interview. If the association requires that, some of them do.
Dewayne:
Read through the docs, read through the minutes of the meeting, make sure that there’s no upcoming assessments or any rules within the association that’s going to give you grief.
Kirk:
Sometimes people are shocked to find out that the agent didn’t say, “Hey, we have a potential assessment coming in. It’s a whopper of an assessment.” They want to know that ahead of time. It helps them renegotiate right up front.
Kirk:
Next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to order inspection. For example, we’re going to do a termite inspection. We’re going to do, if there’s a septic tank, we do a septic tank inspection. If there’s well water, we do a water inspection. We do a roof inspection. A full home inspection. All that stuff’s done before you get too far into the next process.
Dewayne:
When deposit’s not at risk.
Kirk:
Correct. Correct.
Dewayne:
Then if there are any deal-killers on that inspection report, then we try to negotiate those out.
The next is probably going to be, your lender is to order your appraiser to go out and appraise the property. Sometimes there’s an additional deposit that you make after inspection period is over.
Kirk:
Yeah, most of the time. Yeah, most of the time.
Dewayne:
You got to make sure that you order the survey, because you’re going to need that. Then we did a lesson on boundary surveys.
Kirk:
Secure insurance.
Dewayne:
Insurance is important, because your lender’s going to require that.
Kirk:
And you want to do that upfront to find out that there’s no … Because we’ve seen people, like one of our other lessons we talked about, where the insurance they thought was going to be $3,000 a year and it was $8,000 a year. You want to start getting your insurance stuff going as quickly as possible. As hurricane season. We’ll be talking on that. You want to get that done well ahead of time. Insurance is super important.
Dewayne:
Then you’re to the point where it’s, like we have software, all this, where it helps you set up all your utilities and everything else, get those ready to go after it’s closed. You have the walkthrough, and sign the closing docs.
Kirk:
You’re going to want to call the lender. This is real important. You’re going to want to call the lender … Not the lender, the title company for wiring the funds. Just because they send you an email, you’re going to want to call them and verify it, because there’s a lot of fraudulent emails around, or wire fraud, that’s going on now. So definitely call that title company or the attorney before you do that.
Dewayne:
Yeah. We just touched on some basics, but our transaction manager, she uses specific software that goes through every single checklist, so that none of these items are missed. She sends out timelines, so that the deposit, our buyers’ deposits, aren’t at risk. We know when those timelines are expiring. Again, like I mentioned with utilities and everything else, we have additional software that helps our clients with all of that.
Kirk:
Yeah. The timeline’s the most important. Because what we find is people tend to just go past the timeline, say, “Oh, we didn’t know the inspection period lapsed. Here’s our list of repairs.” Your inspection period lapsed last Monday and it’s over. We make sure that everybody that’s doing a transaction with us knows exactly what the timeline is. And when those deadlines are.
Dewayne:
Including loan commitment.
Kirk:
Thank you so much for watching us. You can always comment. We enjoy the comments and questions a lot. Join us next week when we learn another valuable lesson about real estate. See you next week.
Dewayne:
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