First-time buyer blog: What it’s like to find your first home by Emma
June 27, 2011 at 10:41 AM Lawrence Hall 3 comments
This is a legacy post from the findaproperty.com blog which is now maintained as an archive within the Zoopla blog. Links have been preserved.
Hello, my name is Emma and I have officially been branded a First-Time Buyer (FTB). It’s exciting, challenging, daunting, extremely interesting and rather amusing at times. I’m hoping to share the journey with you in this blog. First, as a way of an introduction and a bit of background I’ll tell you a little bit about myself.
I currently live in a rented property with my boyfriend in Reading. It’s more-or-less halfway between our jobs so it was an ideal location. We are now looking to buy our first home together.
The first step was to find a mortgage, and to figure out what we may be able to afford. After many sums, long conversations with Mortgage Advisors at various banks we had a good idea of interest rates, different types of mortgages and the many insurance policies that go along with them. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get this part out of the way. It was overwhelming, actually.
We have been looking at properties for five weeks now. It has been the biggest learning curve, but despite not finding “the one” just yet I would really encourage FTBs to vary their first few weeks of looking. We thought we had an idea about what we were looking for in a house, when infact this does not become clear until you have seen many properties. We have seen brand new, very old, large, small, clean, filthy, crowded, empty, ugly, pretty and down-right uninhabitable properties.
We are still looking, although now being a bit more selective. Armed with a note book, a keen eye and an open mind maybe this weekend will be the winner. In which case this could end up being a very short blog indeed! Until then I’ll keep you all posted and will share some of our experiences to date.
I hope you enjoy the blog, if you would like to keep updated with some classic estate agent lines you can follow me on Twitter @polkadotcherry
Emma
Entry filed under: Diaries, Diary of a first-time buyer. Tags: Berkshire, buying. estate agents, Diary, diary of a first time buyer, Emma, first-time buyer, Home, Reading, renting, what it's like to find a home.
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1.
Ali | July 3, 2011 at 8:30 PM
Good luck with your search – it will all be worth it in the end. There is no better feeling than closing your own front door at the end of the day. I found email updates fron Rightmove.co.uk very helpful. The worst house viewing experience was a lady asking if I minded cats – I said I wasn’t too keen and then as I turned to walk up the stairs there was a cat on each step – scary!
2.
Harold | July 4, 2011 at 12:26 PM
Don’t estimate how important good door frames are. Often they are overlooked but the right frames in the right settings can bring years of joy.
3.
Don Draper | July 11, 2011 at 5:43 PM
Five weeks looking at properties ? WOW That’s a lot of time.