Are thinking about buying right now? So many of our clients are renting right now. Their leases are up sometime in the spring and they are getting kind of antsy about starting to look for houses…and I get that. Once you get that bug, it’s hard to shut that off, isn’t it?

Let’s say your lease is up in April. Well, if you really do want to see your lease through to it’s end, then you need to be very seriously looking towards the end of February, certainly by March so that you have about 30 days to find a house and 30 days to get it closed with a loan. You kind of start working backwards on that. But here’s another thing, have you talked to your landlord or to the apartment complex to find out what would it take to break your lease?

Is it just one month payment? Is it more than that? Now, I’m not saying that that’s a small thing to come up with by any means, but do you even know what it would take to break your lease? Maybe that’s the first step, is let’s figure out what would it take to break your lease? Because what if you found the house of your dreams today? Would you even be able to buy it? If not, then let’s don’t start looking. There’s no reason to be so frustrated to find that perfect house that meets everything you ever thought you wanted and not be able to pull the trigger on it because you have to finish your lease.

I can’t think of many sellers right now that will wait through basically February, March, April, three months before they’re going to close on a house. The probability of that is not great right now, especially in certain price ranges, because there’s so little on the market that the seller doesn’t have to do that, right? They can find someone who wants to put a contract on a house today, and say, close in 30, 45 days, 60 at most. And so they don’t have to do that.

I don’t want to set you up for failure to say, hey, let’s start looking today, when in fact you don’t want to buy a house and close until say the end of April or the end of May. We just need to work it backwards a little bit so that you’re looking about maybe 60 days out, so that you start looking for a house pretty seriously on it, and then give yourself about 30 days to get a loan.

If you want to make things go a lot more smoothly, than start your loan process early, which you should be doing anyway, you need to find out exactly what it is you can afford. What you can afford and what you want to afford may be two different things. The lender may tell you that you can afford this much house, when in you really don’t want your payments more than this. We need to figure out where that is for you. Where’s that sweet spot that gets your payments where they want to be, and you can talk to our lenders and go, “Hey, I want my payment to be $2,000 a month.” And they can turn that into a loan. They can work forwards, they can work backwards. So it’s not like, because for most of us, I don’t even understand what $300,000 is. It’s a number that has no… doesn’t equate to anything, right? Just tell me what my payments are going to be.

Just know that we can work forwards and backwards with you to figure out where you need to be. And then we don’t want to be looking any more than that for you. It’s real important that we get kind of all our ducks in a row so that when you are ready to start the process, that you know what you can afford, where you want to live and how we pull all that together for you.

There are lots of ways that we can make things happen for you. There’s one other flip side to this is a lot of our sellers don’t know where they’re going. You become a really great buyer if you can go ahead and close on the loan, say March 1st and give them 60 days to move out. It gives them time to go find a house and close on it. You have given a seller, a lot of peace of mind, which a lot of these sellers really need right now.

They’re all in the same boat you are. It’s like, wow, if I sell my house, where am I going to go? They are not putting their house on the market for fear that they don’t know where they’re going to go. Well, you become a really great buyer for them. They are a lot of variances here and a lot of flexibility and a lot of negotiation that can take place that make you a really great buyer, even though you really don’t want to move until end of April, May, whatever.

Let’s talk. Really, let’s set up a program, let’s set up a whole way that we’re going to make this happen. And let’s see what we can do for you. You can reach us at 214-365-6500. You can always email me at mbh@dallasnative.com, or you can go to our website, which we have a bunch of information on there for you at dallasnative.com. But the main thing is, is we’re here to help, and we’re here to see you through the process.

Give us a call and let us know what we can do to help you.