Buying a home is often an exhaustive process. From touring endless homes looking for just the right one to the mountains of paperwork and inspections, it can be quite time-consuming.
Once you’ve found your perfect home, however, it’s important that you learn everything you can about it to ensure you’re making the right decision. Below, we take you through several questions you should ask the home seller that will help you decide if it’s the right home for you.
People move for many reasons: wanting a bigger/smaller home, a birth, a death, divorce, job. While you may not get an honest answer to this question, it can help you negotiate a lower price if the seller is desperate to sell.
The longer a house sits on the market for sale, the less likely it is to sell because buyers think something must be wrong with it. The reality is, most homes sit on the market for a long time because they are priced too high, to begin with.
If the house you’re looking at has been for sale for a long time, the seller might be motivated to lower the price to finally get out from under it.
Knowing how much the sellers paid for the home when they bought it tells you whether the market has gone up or down. It also lets you know whether the sellers might be more open to negotiation. If they bought it for cheap, they might be more willing to take a lower price for it since they will still make a profit. If they are asking close to what they paid for it, however, they probably won’t want to negotiate.
Typically, anything that’s permanently attached to the property is included in the sale. Other things such as window treatments, play equipment in the yard, and appliances fall into a gray area that needs to be spelled out in writing. Be sure your purchase agreement includes everything that’s staying in the home or on the property and double-check that the sellers left these things behind as agreed.
When you move into a new home, you also move into a new neighborhood. While the home may be perfect, the surrounding neighborhood could be anything but. Ask the sellers about things like problem neighbors, speeding traffic, etc. to get an idea of what the neighborhood is like before making the commitment to move into it.
This might seem a tad personal, but if the seller answers the question, you may learn something positive about the home that you didn’t know before like the tight-knit community around it, how the sun shines through the windows in the morning, or how lovely the wildflowers on the hill are in the summer.
