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Assemble Your Buying Team  If you are a first-time homebuyer you can benefit from having a team working on your side. Starting with the real estate agent who can look out for your interests, called a buyer's agent, and including a home inspector, mortgage lender and a real estate attorney, they can take advantage of their experience, skill and advice to save money and time. Until the last decade or so, it was difficult to get all of the service providers working on the side of the buyer. Home Inspector Home inspectors frequently felt uncomfortable trying to serve the needs of their customer, the buyer, without stepping on the toes of the real estate agent who was in a position to refer business to them. Some critics of the process noted the conflict of interest in their working relationships. Buyers who use buyer's agents today can relax knowing that that the home inspector and buyer's agent have a common goal: helping you get the best house for the money. Mortgage Lender Mortgage lenders and real estate attorneys had a similar dilemma. The lender may have been pressured by the real estate agent to reveal the buyer's financial qualifications in their effort to assure the seller that the buyer was qualified to purchase their home. In some cases, when the mortgage company was under the same roof or owned by the real estate agency, it would have been very difficult to protect that information for the buyer. Fortunately today, most mortgage lenders are used to maintaining confidentiality for buyers and in the case of buyers who are working with buyer's agent, they will ask for permission to release the information to their agent. You should note that, with the exception of a few states, mortgage lenders are not required to be advocates for home buyers but many of them realize that their business benefits from working to get buyers good rates and give good service. That picture may change in the future as the mortgage lenders work to improve public perception of their business and as more lenders restructure their practices to work as advocates along the lines endorsed by the National Association of Mortgage Planners (1-800-724-2004, www.namp.org)Buyer's Agent Good buyer agents will take the extra precaution of advising their buyer clients to get a pre-approval letter from the lender for the exact dollar amount needed for the transaction, not the actual "top dollar" amount the buyer can afford. Their reasoning goes like this: suppose the buyers and sellers agree on a price and the sellers ask to see the commitment letter. Then the home inspection turns up a serious problem that the homeowner was not aware of. How motivated will the seller be to assume the total cost of the repair or replacement if they know the buyers have another $10,000 available to them from the lender? It may seem like a minor point but in such a scenario that precaution can save the buyers thousands of dollars. Attorney Real estate attorneys have always had to stand firm in the representation of the buyers because of their legal obligations. Now they can enjoy a cooperative "working on the same team" atmosphere when the buyers use a buyer's agent for their real estate agent.
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