Buying Well; Tips for First-time Home Buyers

It's a buyer's market, but first-time home buyers can fall prey to big pitfalls.

ByABC News
July 5, 2007, 4:53 PM

July 6, 2007 Special to ABCNEWS.com — -- There is more to buying a home than collecting curtain swatches and making sure you've got enough moving boxes.

Other, just-as-important details include calculating the cost of renting versus owning, the quality of the local school district, legal fees, local preservation laws and signs of value in the neighborhood in which you are looking.

Consider house hunters in San Diego. There, the single-family home market is experiencing a significant price correction. In 2006, the market dropped 4.5 percent. Renters pay 38 percent of the cost of an owner's mortgage payment, according to data from Torto Wheaton Research, a research firm owned by CB Richard Ellis. That's compared with 79 percent nationwide.

The situation illustrates a key point. Owning a home fulfills a central element of the American dream, but if you don't do the math, it can quickly turn into a nightmare.

Check out the top tips for first-time home buyers.

Take mortgage payments. During a market slide, they have high opportunity costs, since home investments for the most part aren't appreciating well. Prices across the country continued to drop last month. During May, year-over-year prices fell for the 10th consecutive month and existing home sales dipped 0.3 percent. If you've locked into a mortgage, you're paying a rate that may no longer represent your home's value.

Still, there is a silver lining. In markets with excess inventory, first-time home buyers are a prized commodity, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. They help stabilize a market in flux.

How so? National vacancy rates are at a 15-year high of 2.8 percent. For a seller, a first-time home buyer is ideal as the sale won't be contingent on the buyer selling his or her present home, an arduous task.

Having the upper hand is great, but how to play it best? Do your homework.

Broad pricing data won't tell you how the micro-market is performing on the corner of Elm and Main Streets. Instead, when touring prospective neighborhoods, look for signs of whether each will hold its value.

Walk a five-block radius and count the "For Sale" signs to get a sense of whether there is a glut of available housing. Have your agent look up how much time other neighborhood houses have been on the market and how different the current asking price is from what it was at first listed.