Buying a Home

Many buyers want to know how to figure out the Fair Market Value (FMV) of a home. Is it the value assigned by the tax assessor? Nope. Is it determined by an appraiser? No again. Maybe you can look it up in on website like Zillow? That’s not it either. The Fair Market Value of [...]

If you don’t qualify to have two mortgages, you are going to be faced with the problem of having to sell your current home before you can purchase your next home. The solution seems simple, which is to make an offer to purchase a home where the closing is contingent on the sale of your [...]

So you’ve been shopping for homes and just can’t seem to find the right one. You want the charm of an older home, but want it to be filled with modern updates and finishes. Every time a nicely-remodeled home comes up, it is just out of your price range or there is just too much [...]

When you are buying a home, one question that comes up for many buyers is what happens to utility bills at closing. Buyers don’t want to be stuck with unpaid utility bills from the seller, and sellers want to make sure that they don’t pay more on utilities than they have to if the buyer [...]

If you’ve been bidding on a house lately in Seattle (and many other cities), buyer competition is alive and well. Inventory of homes for sale is at lows we haven’t seen in over a decade, so the few homes on the market may be subject to fierce competition by buyers. 

Inspecting a home before your purchase is a critical piece of due diligence that you should do as a home buyer. One home system that is often overlooked is the sewer line. Normal home inspectors don’t examine it, since it is buried in the ground and it requires special camera equipment to inspect. The prudent [...]

The vast majority of home buyers are purchasing a house that has been lived in. In many of those transactions, the home is occupied when the offer is accepted, and the sellers don’t move out until the end of the process, which is ~1 month later. As you might guess, many buyers have angst about [...]

New home buyers frequently confuse the home inspection and appraisal. Both are important steps in buying a home, but a home inspection and appraisal are two very different things. An appraisal is designed to protect the interests of the lender, while a home inspection protects the buyer from buying a maintenance headache.

A home’s title report is the record of all items that have been recorded against a particular piece of real estate. Things that appear on title are property taxes, mortgages, liens, judgement, easements, etc. Naturally, it is important to review this information prior to buying a house. Your title insurance company is going to do [...]

Many of our readers and most of our customers are buying and selling homes in King County, Washington. If you own a home built during the last 15 years or are looking to buy one of that age, chances are the home is being charged a sewage treatment capacity charge in addition to the monthly [...]