Mark Wozniak: In other segments we’ve talked about the importance of getting pre-approved with a lender and hiring your buyer agent before getting started with the home search and at that point, there is really one more very important step to do before actually going out visiting homes. And that’s selecting which homes you are going to visit. So let’s talk about that and why that’s important to do before just going out and visiting first.
Leigh Anne Monk: You know there’s nothing more exciting than getting in the car and going to that first home to see if it is going to be your dream home. What we find is if you don’t take this step first you can often be disappointed because the picture may not show all the details or you may only have partial information.
So the first thing we like to recommend is that you know your buying criteria really well. So you’ve already made the decision that you would like a three bedroom house versus a five bedroom house and that you need to have at least an extra hallway bathroom in the upstairs and into the master bath. Some of those details will be really helpful in honing down your search.
Now there are a couple of ways you can actually do searches. You can ask your agent to take all that buying criteria and setup a series of saved searches on your behalf and then they get sent to you automatically by the various systems that agents have access to. I have clients that prefer that method. They give us the criteria, we key that in and one of the things I like about the systems that we use is that not only do we give them the initial list of houses, but as new houses come on the market that meet that criteria an automatic email goes off to the buyer client letting them know a new house is available.
We’ve often found that the houses that go the quickest are some of the nicest ones out there so it’s really helpful to know exactly when that new home comes on the market.
Mark Wozniak: Right, and as agents it’s also important to know that we have some access to some pretty detailed things that we can do searches on. So, for example, if you’re looking for townhomes and only want to search on end units or only search on townhomes that have three levels versus two or four, we, as working on your behalf, can put that very detailed criteria and then those are the only things that you are going to see come to you.
Leigh Anne Monk: Exactly, exactly. Now a lot of things as you know, Mark, a lot of our clients today like to do, they prefer to do their own searches online themselves and we here at the Equity Rise team have a fantastic buyer search engine tool right on our website Equityrise.com that allows you to set up searches that are customized to you. Now when you use that search tool you simply have to fill out a form to establish that free custom search area but go ahead and get it done. It’s really not that big a deal and allows you to get those customs searches to your email box in a regular basis.
Mark Wozniak: Right and that information is just coming to us.
Leigh Anne Monk: Oh exactly, exactly. And the nice part about that is once you establish an account you can go back there as many times as you want to and look. I can’t tell you how many times people look at midnight or two in the morning when they can’t contact me. Thank you very much for not contacting me then! But you can continue to search and look online.
So you can have your agent do your search for you or you can search yourself. Most likely what happens these days is a combination. I’ll find a couple and they’ll find a couple and we will match the two lists together to see which houses to actually go visit.
Mark Wozniak: And we actually appreciate and enjoy it when you’ve come up with some homes that you want to go see that maybe we hadn’t, maybe you tried a different search online and came up with some different things. That’s fine. We always appreciate it when you’ve taken the time to say, "Hey here’s a home I think I really like and let’s go see it even it is wasn’t in my other initial criteria."
Leigh Anne Monk: Exactly. Now the third area we like to mention in this segment is that the fact that not every single home for sale is online or is on what we would call the standard search engine tools. They're not always on the multiple listing service.
For example, there are some homeowners that elect sell the home by themselves. Those are called a FSBO or a For Sale By Owner and in some cases those are in the multiple listing service but there are other websites that you can look to find and uncover those homes as well.
In addition, as professional agents that work with agents all the time we often hear about other houses that are getting prepared for sale, but are not quite on the market yet from my fellow agents. We love hearing about those and we always keep our ears tuned to folks that have houses coming on the market that might meet a current buyer’s criteria and matching those two things together.
And then, thirdly, we here at the Equity Rise Team work with a couple of investors that do a lot of large term buying of multiple properties, and do rehabs on them. They might have been distressed in the past and they might not have been well maintained. The rehab occurs and then they go on the market. We have access to those houses as well and sometimes before they go on the market which is really an awesome opportunity for you as the buyer to get the heads up on the house that no one even knows about.
Mark Wozniak: Right. So sometimes it’s beneficial to be working with agents who can help find some of those homes that aren’t out there on MLS, as we’re happy to do, but again we really encourage you to visit our website to try your online searches with our tool. It’s a fantastic tool, you can do map searches and you can search on the names of communities or subdivisions and you can even search for homes that have recent price reductions of a certain percentage. So we encourage you to do that, but always remember before going out and visiting homes, it’s so important to take the proper steps beforehand to select those homes.