Buy your dream house with confidence

So, you want to buy a Luxury home—now what? Buying a Luxury home is an emotional, exciting, and also exhausting experience. You may also be wondering along the way— Are we doing this correctly? This is a common question. Here’s how the Luxury home buying process works from start to finish.

• Do preliminary online searching on the Fine Living website. Check into what Luxury homes are selling for in the areas you’re interested in to give you an idea of what you’re looking for. This will help later on when communicating your wish list with your Fine Living agent.
• Manage your budget well. Use our online mortgage calculator and home valuation software to determine what your monthly mortgage payment would be if you were to purchase one of these homes you’ve found on the Fine Living website. Make some additional estimates for taxes and utilities and see if this fits into your Luxury budget.
• Get pre-approved. To get pre-approved for a mortgage you’ll need to get some paperwork ready: pay stubs, W-2s, bank account statements, tax returns for the past two years, and credit lines, and names and addresses of your landlords for the past two years. Start with your current bank, but make sure you check out competitor banks as well – you might get a better mortgage loan rate by shopping around. Also, consider the amount your lender approves you for as a maximum – this is by no means what you should spend.
• Call Fine Living. Fine Living real estate agents will help you navigate the process every step of the way. Your friends and family will be great sources—see if any of your trusted contacts have someone they recommend.
• Look at homes. Be patient at this stage. At Fine Living, your real estate agent will show you a variety of homes to get your reaction on features they think you’ll like. Give us detailed feedback so we can show you homes that are perfectly suited to you. Sometimes, this process can take months —So be patient. Also, make sure you let friends and family know you’re looking for a new home--you may even find out about an amazing home before it hits the market. If you do, please call your Fine Living agent to negotiate the best price.
• Make an offer. Once you’ve found your dream home, you may want to move quickly. Our agents will guide you on a reasonable first offer to start negotiations based on market conditions. Also, make sure you consider closing costs which could account for 2-5% of the home price.
• Negotiate. Prepare to go back and forth with the seller a few times on price and selling conditions. Your Fine Living agent will be your advocate here and work smart and hard to get you, our client as much as possible for your money while being fair and respectful to the seller and their real estate agent.
• An accepted offer. Pop the champagne! If you reach an agreement, you’ll make a deposit to an escrow account to show good-faith. Escrow is usually 30 days where the seller takes the house off the market with the contractual expectation that you’ll purchase the house - provided you don’t find any serious problems during the inspection.
• Do a home inspection. Even if the home appears to be flawless, there’s no substitute for having a professional inspector review the property for quality, safety, and general condition of your potential home. You don’t want to be surprised with a home that needs a lot of unexpected repairs. If the inspection reveals undisclosed serious defects, you can negotiate further to have the seller make repairs or discount the selling price. You’ll also likely have the option to withdraw your offer and get your deposit money back. Use the Artificer section of our website to find local Inspectors
• Closing. When your negotiations with the seller are successful, and the inspection came back clean, you should be ready to close. At your closing, you’ll spend a little over an hour signing lots of paperwork and then will be handed the keys. Your Fine Living agent will be with you through every step of each process.