The real estate market fluctuates often, making it tough to predict whether the market will favor buyers or sellers when it’s your turn to buy. Especially if you’re shopping for real estate in San Francisco, CA, or another market that currently favors sellers, you need to know some tricks of the trade to help ensure you don’t make any mistakes. Buyers in a seller’s market can get what they want, but they need to bring their “A” game — buying a house in a hot market isn’t for the indecisive. Here are six common mistakes many buyers make — mistakes that you can learn to avoid — when shopping in a seller’s market. 

1.Not making your best offer:
The drive to buy what we want for as little money as possible is practically in our DNA. So when most people…

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Shopping for a mortgage became easier in early October when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began mandating that lenders provide a new, simplified disclosure form to help consumers compare home loans. This disclosure (see below) is most useful after you've found the home you want and need a solid estimate of borrowing costs from a variety of lenders. But before you get to that stage, you'll need to prove to a seller that a bank will lend you what you need to close on the deal. To avoid miscommunication snarls, you have to understand the difference among lender guarantees.

The Prequalification

A prequalification is really just to get you started, so you have a ballpark idea of how big a mortgage you can afford. When a bank prequalifies you,…

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