When you start looking at houses for sale, how much importance do you bestow on brand new homes? If you would prefer buying a new home over a pre-existing one, you aren’t alone. One survey on home buyers counted two in every five participants favored a freshly built home instead of an older one.
Although every major purchase in your life should be undertaken with thoughtful care, when it comes to looking at houses for sale it is especially important to know what to look for in a new home. Potential home buyers all too often fall in love with a house that is problematic. While it can be fun to imagine how life might be different in a new home, staying pragmatic is the key to making a successful decision.
The National Association of Home Builders, NAHB for short, offers a few pointers when working with a home builder. The basic advice is to narrow down possible candidates, check their work, ask plenty of relevant questions, and trust your gut instincts. This can be summed up as such: do your research. For example, ask potential candidates if their homes have a NHBC Buildmark warranty. This is a sort of insurance holding builders to the NHBC quality standard, which protects against problems such as defects in the structure or drainage that lasts eight years.
Researching candidates will tie in nicely with another vital component when looking at houses for sale. This piece of the pie is location, which as the saying goes, is fairly crucial. A home is not an island; there are many contributing factors that can make a home more appealing.
Looking at houses online can be beneficial to help homebuyers get an idea of where in a city they would like to live. A closeness to parks, nature trails, easy access to highway entrances, and shopping centers can make life easier. Conversely, living a good distance away from these conveniences can make one’s life more difficult, or at the very least, cause you to spend more time in the car commuting.
Many homebuyers are considering master planned communities for these very perks. A planned community is just as it sounds, with the roadways, variety of home design, shopping, parks, and nature trails are planned to provide maximum convenience and appeal to homeowners. The price of a home matters a great deal, but the surrounding areas play into the final price as well.
The average houses for sale are built with some consideration for the overall neighborhood of surrounding houses. There is probably no Home Owner’s Association keeping tabs on homeowners to ensure they keep the outside of their homes in good condition, which may be appealing to most people until it comes time to sell. A poorly maintained home can devalue the other homes in the area.
A planned community will have an HOA, which many homebuyers are not fond of because they do not like to be told what to do. But an HOA is in place specifically for the homeowners in the community, and is made up of other homeowners. It is a system that recognizes that each home is a reflection of the community as a whole. If each and every home is carefully maintained, the image projected is that of a lovely community of homes.
Looking for a new home is a stressful, abet at times fun, endeavor. Here’s some advice to make the process a little less problematic. Start looking early, and do plenty of research into the area you want to live in, the builder whose homes you admire, and of course, check for warranties. It never hurts to get guarantees in writing.