When buying a home, it’s easy to get carried away and make snap decisions when you come upon your ideal property. But is it really your ideal home? It’s always best to be as thorough as possible before making that final decision. Here is a list of a few things you can consider.

Location
The location of your home is quite possibly the most important factor when it comes to choosing the right home. Consider the how close the property is to the city, ease of access to public transportation, your place of employment and the way traffic in the area would affect your trip to and from work or your children’s commute to school.

Financial Position
Most homeowners will need a mortgage when buying or building a home. A mortgage is a loan from the bank that will cover the cost of your home. When considering which bank to acquire a loan from, you will be informed of how much each bank is willing to lend you based on your credit score and income. Which gives you an idea of what you can afford when house hunting.

Size & Affordability
Having a spacious home with room to do as you please is great. But is that extra bathroom worth it? Is it in your best interests financially to buy a larger home? Before purchasing a home consider that the size of the property relates to its price, your loan and mortgage, utility bills and taxes.

Wear & Tear
Enquire about the age of the house and survey the property for damage like cracks and damp. If there are renovations to be made, consider the cost effectiveness of the repairing vs. choosing a different property. Seek professional advice about problems that could worsen in the future and get an estimate of how much you would spend on repairs.

Room For Improvement
Not every dream home is what you want it to be at first glance. But buyers who see the potential and have an interest in renovating and improving their property value should consider the space limitations and again, cost effectiveness of adding additional rooms to their property. Think about whether it would be better to buy a home with the space you need rather than building additional quarters.

Getting The Right Help
We’ve already talked about choosing an agent and what to look for, but the importance of having the counsel and assistance of a good real estate agent can’t be stressed enough when it comes to choosing your property. Buying your home is one of the biggest investments in any person’s life and mistakes made during the process can be detrimental.

This month we give a few tips on staging your property for sale. We had first hand experience of the value of staging recently when one of our vendors staged their properties so professionally that we think they created a desire to own it or to live there by almost every potential buyer we showed the property to. The owners ended up selling the property for considerably more, in our opinion, than if they had not done such a great job in presenting the property so well.

The Market

We have found that the market has continued to soften somewhat from the activity we saw in January when it was as though many potential buyers who put off their purchase or moving plans during the latter part of 2009 decided that they could wait no longer and that now was a good time to buy.

We think that the signs from government that things are likely to get tougher (team Barbados), the softening of the pound £, the financial concerns over Greece, Iceland, Spain and Ireland affecting the EU and the varied and wavering good and bad news coming out of the US (a little more bad than good) lead us to believe that we are unlikely to see an improvement in the market for some time to come.

With this in mind, we believe that anyone who is serious about selling now must price their property competitively in order to attract potential purchasers. Having said this, we are still selling properties where the vendors are willing to negotiate and there remains a shortage of good quality private homes between $500,000 and $1.5M.

There are some great private deals for properties that are not officially on the market such as 4 acres in St. Thomas for Bds$450,000 (rough interior land) and a 14,100sqft lot in Welches Terrace with a sea view that is likely to sell for around $22.50per/sq/ft.

We hope you find the above information useful and wish you every success with your property adventures.

See you next month.