Are you thinking about buying a house in Salt Lake City? Salt Lake City housing market is HOT right now! It’s been a seller’s market in Utah for a number of years but with more buyers in the market and historically low interest rates, it’s making it especially tough for home buyers under $500,000.
If you’re a home buyer in the Salt Lake City area, you need to be prepared to move swiftly when you find the “one” you want to make an offer on. There are some steps you’ll want to take before looking at homes to give you a more solid offer to sellers and position yourself well. But, when it comes time to make the offer it may take some creativity and strategy to have your offer accepted.
Check out my video about steps to buying a house in Salt Lake City.
Whether you’re looking to buy or sell, I’d love to connect with you. Feel free to reach out to me by phone or send me a message to see how I can best help you with your real estate goals!
Video Transcription
Buying a house in Salt Lake City, then you need to watch this video and I’m going to give you the steps that you need to take in order to buy a home in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Hi, this is Melissa Ballman and I am a real estate agent with Utah Homes by Melissa and Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices. If you’re thinking about buying a home in the Salt Lake City area or moving to the Salt Lake City area, I’d love to connect with you. Make sure you reach out to me. You can shoot me a message, give me a call or shoot me a text as well.
Number one, you need to know what your finances are. You don’t want to just jump into the home loan process. So, what you’ll want to do is make sure you have your debt squared away and you have a good grasp of your debt to income ratio, but also what you’re comfortable with a monthly payment on a home loan. So, there’s things that you may need to do, like fix your credit in order to buy a house, save for a down payment, there’s lots of different things, but you can be creative with your finances. So, that is where having a good partnership with an agent and a trusted lender can go a long way for your home buying process. You want to be creative if you have to. I actually, when I bought my first townhouse, took out a 401k loan in order to have the down payment. Now, I’m not saying that, that’s the right move for you or that’s what you should do, but it is an option. I just recently had a first time home buyer that sold some stock options in order to have the down payment. So, be creative, but know your finances.
Step number two, contact me. I’d love to help you navigate the process of home buying in the Salt Lake City area. There’s a lot of steps involved in home buying and you want to make sure that you’re working with an agent that has your interest at heart and understands the process of buying homes and can be creative with you, and that person is me. If you don’t live in the area, or let’s say you’re away, there’s been many times that I’ve done video tours of homes, so you could see them. Because let’s face it, Utah is a very hot market and oftentimes things are gone in a couple of hours after being listed, so you can’t drag your feet or have an agent that drags your feet, so contact me.
Next, you need to know what you qualify for. So, I can share with you some trusted lenders that I use all the time and get you in contact with them, or if you have a lender that you want to talk to as well, but we need to know what you qualify for. Now, a lot of times people just go through the pre-qualification process. I personally recommend that you go a step further, especially with this hot buyer’s market where it’s so competitive and do your pre-approval. And, that is where your lender is going to get financial information from you, run your credit, etc. So, it’s a little bit better of an option for you to have a pre-approval versus a pre-qualification when it comes time to purchasing the home and making an offer.
Next, let’s start looking for houses. So, the first part of that is obviously understanding what you qualify for, but then I can set it up, so you get listing alerts when new homes are listed in the criteria that you have set for me to look in. So, and that’s going to be extremely important in this hot sellers market, where buyers are competing for homes at this point. So, you want to make sure that you’re really on top of the listing, so you don’t miss out, because it literally can be a matter of hours or a day of not knowing that a house is on the market and you miss out. Next, I think it’s important to understand the pros and cons of living in an HOA, especially if you’re a first time home buyer in Utah, then you may need to get into an HOA community such as a condo or a townhouse, but there’s also single family homes that are in HOA’s. So, you really want to understand if that is going to be a good fit for you, because that’s very important in the day-to-day life in that community. But, it will also impact your sales price that you can qualify for, because you’re adding an HOA fee each month.
And next, once you find the house that you want, you’re going to want to make an offer. As I keep saying, it’s an extremely competitive market for buyers, so you want to make sure that you have a great strategy that can compete with multiple offers; and I will walk you through that, so that you have the best shot at getting the house of your dreams.
There’s a lot of things that happen after you get an offer accepted. And, I’m not going to go into that today, because I’ve done videos on those. Feel free to watch those here on my YouTube channel, about once you get under contract and the steps that, that takes. But, I am here to help you every step of the way through the home buying process from start to finish and beyond finish. Because once I hand you the keys to your new home, my relationship with you doesn’t end there. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions or you want to talk about the home buying process, feel free to reach out to me. If you’d liked this video, subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell, so you’re alerted every week when I drop a new video. Make it a great day.