Hey all!
We’re in an incredibly competitive market (SF Bay Area)
A potential opportunity for our first home stumbled across our lap. We know the current owners, and they haven’t listed the place. We think we can come in early and save some cash by sparing them the headache of remodeling/staging, and saving everyone costs of agent commissions.
We have family who’ve previously bought real-estate in the Bay Area so we’re not totally lost, but we still wanna make sure we understand the normal list of things to do.
If this particular house falls through, we’ll probably continue to rent while saving up for a bigger down payment, so we’d like to avoid a buyer’s agent.
For this hypothetical situation, does anyone have any resources/checklists/guides for what we should be doing, given that we don’t have an agent on the buyers or seller’s sides?
Additional stuff:
Condition of the home: We’re expecting a lot of cosmetic touchups, and probably a couple bigger safety/code-related changes and are budgeting for those costs too.
We’re having an inspector come into make sure we understand the state of the foundation, deck, plumbing, furnace, water heating, electric, etc so we can get an idea of if the expected big-ticket changes. If it’s too much for us to handle, we’ll walk.
Paperwork: I have access to RocketLawyer which can generate legal documents related to buying or selling real estate, or property title transfers. Is that good enough?
Mortgage: Working on getting a pre-approval from a few places: simplist, a local mortgage broker that was recommended to us, and the banks we already use. Will they be able to help us in any way with this?