The 8 Phases of Stress for Homebuyers
July 14th, 2009
Categories:Home Buyer Education
Recently a buyer reminded me of our initial conversation when I explained to him the three most stressful life experiences.
Top Three Most Stressful Life Experiences
- Death
- Divorce
- Moving
The client had already been through a divorce, so I don’t think he took me very seriously. After all how stressful can buying a home be?
There are eight phases of stress when it comes to home buying.
- Deciding to Move
- Getting Qualified for the Loan
- Finding a Home
- Crossing Your Fingers for Acceptance
- Dreaded Inspection Period
- Loan Docs and Closing
- Moving In
- (gotta reach the bottom of the article)
Phase One: Is Now the Time to Move?
The first phase of stress is deciding to move. At first the idea of becoming a home owner or getting out of the folks’ home sounds exciting. Then little by little the amount of work ahead of you becomes apparent and you begin to realize how little you know about what needs to happen.
The stress is completely normal, after all how many times do you buy a home? To relieve your stress, you find a real estate agent you trust, after all they buy homes everyday.
Phase Two: How Much Will the Bank Loan Me?
The second phase of stress is getting qualified for a loan. Most people cringe at the idea of having someone analyze every dollar they make and spend. Not to mention someone is going to look through your credit history and see if you’ve been good or bad when it comes to making those credit card payments on time.
Then the mysterious four letter acronym gets thrown into the mix, FICO, and you can’t help but feel more anxious. After all the FICO score is generated by three different companies in three different ways, and nobody really knows how to tweak the scoring system in their favor.
Fret not, you’ve found a solid loan officer to help you through the process. The only trick now is to keep all your finances perfect until you close on your new home, which could be six to nine months away.
Phase Three: The Hunt Begins and GPS Won’t Help
Phase three, finding a home. As we have discussed in previous articles, your home criteria have a tendency to drastically change while you are looking for homes. Before you know it, you are considering purchasing a home that looks nothing like the home you initially thought about owning.
Phase Four: Does Crossing Your Fingers Really Work?
Phase four, you begin learning the art of Finger Crossing. After spending months looking for a home, you pick the home you want and you place an offer. Will the seller accept the offer? Will they reject it? Will they counter back with some ridiculous price and condition?
Keep the acceptance periods short but courteous to reduce the stress and time involved with getting an acceptance.
Phase Five: Inspection Periods Worth Their Weight in Gold and Stress
This phase involves getting through the inspection period. You have the house under contract and now its time to inspect it to see if anything is wrong. Maybe you find thousands of dollars in repair work that needs to be done, maybe the house is in good condition.
Any number of issues could come up during the inspections. As a result you need to make sure you hire excellent inspectors and contractors to give you quality reports and estimates on the work that needs to be done.
Phase Six: Who’s Underwriting What and Why Do I Care?
By this time the home has passed inspection and now its time to wait for the loan to be underwritten and the home to be appraised. If any thing’s changed in your credit you could be denied for the loan or the home appraisal might come in to low. If the appraisal is low, then the lender won’t give you the loan and you’ll have to renegotiate the price with the home seller.
Make sure your lender if confident in their appraiser’s ability to do a quality job. Also make sure the loan officer will have plenty of time to get your loan documents through underwriting and over to the title company. A very common snag is the lender’s inability to get the loan documents finished in time.
Phase Seven: You’re In! Its Home! It Broke!
When you finally get to move in you’ll find yourself spending the first month wondering if anything is going to break. If something does break, will the home warranty cover the repair? What will friends and family think of your home? What will it be like to live in a new home?
Make sure you choose an excellent home warranty company. Many of my clients use HWA and their 13 month program, others have used other companies they knew of from past transactions. You just need to be confident about what they will and won’t cover.
Phase Eight: You Realize You Made a Great Move and Never Regret a Thing.
There is no doubt buying or selling a home is a stressful experience. Keeping your expectations in check and realizing the entire process will be filled with stressful moments will help make the end result of becoming a homeowner worth all the headache.
A Realtor who is good at setting expectations and has excellent communication skills will make the transaction a lot smoother. Don’t forget to talk about the stress and let the agent do everything they can to help you through the process.
Every person benefits from different levels and styles of communication, some people feel better with daily e-mails, others prefer only to get an e-mail and think about the transaction when something is happening. If you know what would make the transaction easier on you let your Realtor know.
What’s been your most stressful event when buying a home?
Related posts:
- Top 10 Myths Shared by First Time Homebuyers
- One Step Back, Three Steps Forward for Homebuyers
- What Closing Costs Do You Have to Pay for at the Closing Table?
- The Disappearing Time Table for the Home Buyer Tax Credit
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