The Real Estate Primer

Chapter 1 – Buying a Home.

For most of us, buying a home is the biggest financial undertaking we will ever make, and it is important that we get it right. “The agents I deal with have been absolutely charming,” you say. Exactly, the successful ones always are. This book is all about guiding you through the business of buying or selling a property. I have written this guide because after thirty years as a real estate agent and valuer on the Lower North Shore of Sydney, Australia I find the need for a decent primer even greater now than when I started all those years ago.

Perhaps it is the pace at which we live. We are bombarded with information from all directions and most of it is irrelevant to what we need. Our cell phones can tell us what is happening all over the world. We are pulled one way and then another as pundits tell us what is hot and what is not. We need to withdraw from all this information overload and set a clear goal of what we want to do and then concentrate on achieving it.

For some people, the idea of borrowing such an enormous amount of money and undertaking to pay it back is simply overwhelming. Others set out on the journey in the belief that they don’t think they can have much influence on the outcome. Let me assure you, they can and they should. How many friends have you seen obsess over choosing a refrigerator or the new family car, the value of which will plummet as soon as they leave the showroom? I have often thought that people spend more time researching those purchases than they do on buying their home.

This booklet was written for conditions in Sydney, Australia, but the principles of getting out there and doing your basic research are the same wherever you are. Here the legal obligation is for the agent to operate on the vendor’s behalf. However, they may be specifically employed to act as a buyer’s agent. This basic understanding is very important, so check out how the legal obligations work in the market wherever you intend to buy or sell.

Enough preaching from me,

inspect too many prop

this is what effective agents have to do all day.