Home Buying Links

Friends have asked me for links and advice on house buying. So here are some of the ones I found most useful, from my bookmarks list:

1. Decide how much you can afford. Using your own budgeting methods. This will be based of how much money you have left over at the end of the month after paying all your other expenses, and then putting an additional cushion of say 30-40% on that to calculate the highest mortgage you can afford. This is probably one of the most important steps in the home buying process, and I recommend doing this early.
2. Bankrate is a great resource for knowing current interests. Typically the interest rate you will get will be around what this site tells you. . .maybe 0.25-0.5% lower if you have excellent credit and are lucky. The price of the home you can afford will be determined by the current interest rate, and how much you can afford to spend per month. As rates go up, the price of the home you can afford goes down and vice verca.
3. Mortgage Professor is a great resource to REALLY understand mortgages. If you have time. It also has a bunch of calculators that will tell you e.g. whether it is better to rent or own, how much your payments will be, etc.
4. Zillow is a great resource to get a ballpark figure of what your house maybe worth. You can also try http://www.realestateabc.com/home-values/ When you make an offer, you can use this and the realtors assessment to come up with your figure.
5. For us, the walkability of the neighbourhood was important.
6. If you don't want to pay for cable and want to find out whether you will get TV reception (and what kind of antenna you need), this site is pretty cool.
7. You can research schools and crime stats of your neighbourhood.
8. To find the houses themselves our realestate agent would send us MLS listings which were great. We also liked Google Base for location based narrowing down of houses, Realtor wasn't bad, and there were a couple of others.

And if you dear reader are looking to buy in the Montgomery County, or suburbs of Washington DC, we highly recommend our real estate agent, Mr. Danny Sadoun. Contact me if you want a reference. But yeah, he was really helpful and knowledgeable and good to work with.

Ok, hope that was helpful.