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My Florida Buyer’s Agent.com |
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Empowering Florida Home Buyers |
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Consumer Report |
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CONSUMER REPORTS: BUYING A HOME Copyright Consumers Union of U.S., Inc., May, 1996 Transmitted Via Internet: 07/02/2011 2:38 PM
A good real-estate agent can help you settle on the right price, but buyers should keep in mind that brokers traditionally work for the seller. If you confide in the seller's agent what you are willing to spend on a given house, the agent is obliged to pass that information on to the seller. The local board of realtors in our area may be able to refer you to a so-called "buyer broker," who will work exclusively with you to find the right house, negotiate the deal and keep any information you share confidential. But be aware that the buyer-broker's interests may not be identical to yours. Typically, these brokers are compensated by a cut they take of the commission that the seller pays to his or her own agent.
There are other ways to pare expenses when buying a home. The transaction's closing costs, which include fees for drawing up a purchase agreement, searching the title records and filing a new deed, can be cut in states that allow buyers to hire paralegals at a fraction of what attorneys charge. You should also shop around for the title insurance most mortgage issuers require instead of simply going with the first company that your lender or real-estate agent suggests.
The rewards of today's housing market are unlike those of the recent past. You may no longer be able to claim, as you once could, that your home is now worth two or three times what you originally paid for it. But if you've done your homework, you'll be able to feel good about the home you can afford to live in. For more information, you may also want to consult "How to Buy a House, Condo, or Co-op" (Second edition, $16.95), which you can order from Consumer Reports Books, at 515-237-4903.
-How Your Neighborhood Shapes You. Looking at a house? Before you commit yourself, take a minute to step back from it and consider its surroundings. The lay of the land is likely to have a significant effect on your life: how much time you spend at stoplights, where you shop and even your sense of community. The difference is most noticeable when you compare life at opposite ends of the scale, in neighborhoods built at opposite ends of the century.
Though neotraditional design is cropping up in some new neighborhoods, the overwhelming majority of homebuyers still have to choose between an old house in a pre-World War II neighborhood or a newer house in a postwar-style one. To find out the consequences of choosing one over the other, Consumer Reports visited people living in both kinds of neighborhood in two fast-growing Sunbelt cities, Sacramento, Calif., and Orlando, Fla., and asked them how they felt about their neighborhood and how they handled the daily routines of their lives.
Consumer Reports also consulted the academic and professional literature on the relationship between urban form and travel patterns. What we learned can be summarized as several questions worth considering no matter where you're planning to buy a house.
What's the traffic? The standard street pattern in postwar suburbs assures that every single car has no choice but to get on the main drag, the arterial, at some point, for a trip of any length. And as new malls, subdivisions and offices sprout along arterials, traffic inevitably builds from year to year. We didn't find any residents who actually admitted to liking strip-mall development, but many were willing to tolerate it in exchange for a newer house. Also, many appreciated the flip side of heavy arterial traffic: almost no traffic on neighborhood streets, where, as one suburban father told us, "there are more kids' vehicles than cars." By contrast, people who live in an older neighborhood with a connected grid of streets get a steadier but relatively light flow of traffic past their homes. Meanwhile, these communities' "main" commercial streets never acquire the intense congestion of arterials, something inhabitants of old-fashioned neighborhoods especially prize. "I really like going downtown, because you can take the back roads instead of those big, congested roads," says James Glazebrook, who lives in Winter Park, a traditional community just north of Orlando.
Homebuyer's tip: Before signing that sales contract, drive or walk to the nearest grocery store, drugstore, and dry cleaner and see how you like the trip because you'll be making it regularly for years to come.
What is my neighborhood? Consumer Reports found a subtle difference in people's "mental map" of their neighborhoods, depending on what kind they lived in. In modern subdivisions, where land uses are deliberately kept well separated, people think of their neighborhood as, basically, the streets within the subdivision walls. There, they form strong social bonds with neighbors. To describe the world outside the development walls, subdivision-dwellers tend to use purely utilitarian terms, not sentimental ones. Asked where they shop for groceries or prescriptions, they answer with a description of how many minutes or miles it takes to get to the nearest neighborhood strip mall. In contrast, people who have chosen a traditional neighborhood consider the entire neighborhood, not just their block, as a distinctive, cohesive community.
Homebuyer's tip: Think hard about your expectations for your neighborhood. If you are community-minded, you might have trouble making all the connections you want in a subdivision on the outskirts of town. If you want lots of privacy, though, a traditional neighborhood might feel too "public."
Who needs to walk, and why? Whether the neighborhood you choose is conducive to travel on foot depends somewhat on whether you want to walk, or need to walk. People stroll for pleasure and exercise no matter what kind of neighborhood they live in, according to surveys done in California and Texas by Susan Handy, a planning expert at the University of Texas. When Consumer Reports asked residents in Orlando and Sacramento to keep a brief log of car and walking trips, we found exactly the same thing. A neighborhood where your walk takes you to an actual destination is harder to find. First, it must have schools, stores and parks within a quarter-mile or less.
To entice people out of their cars, the walk itself should be along narrow streets that have slow-moving, light-to-moderate traffic, and a variety of appealing things to look at, preferably all shaded by mature trees. It also helps if there's a sidewalk. These elements can be found more readily in traditional neighborhoods than in modern suburban ones.
Walkability is most important for people who don't have the option of driving, older children and some senior citizens. In upscale Winter Park, retirees living in expensive apartments flock to nearby downtown shops and restaurants. And Margaret Sanders, a mother of four, says the family chose the community having previously lived in a spread-out suburb near Milwaukee. "Here the kids can ride their bikes to the library or to get an ice-cream cone downtown."
Homebuyer's tip: If you like or need to walk, get out of the car and take a stroll around the neighborhoods you're considering. You can't assess walkability through the windshield of a moving car.
Will things stay the same here? When Meg and Jay Clark moved into their new suburban Orlando ranch house in 1984, "we liked it because it was rural," Meg recalls. Just beyond the back yard was a quiet orange grove. The street outside the subdivision walls was a sleepy two-lane road. Today, a forest of houses has replaced the orange grove, and that quiet country road has become an ever-busier six-lane arterial. Development has brought some advantages, a larger selection of stores nearby, but no one would mistake the Clarks' neighborhood for "rural" any more. In contrast, traditional neighborhoods, having long since been fully "built out," usually don't offer scenic rural vistas. On the other hand, the best ones do have strategically placed parks. In any case, what you see is likely to be what you'll get for years to come.
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Sarasota / Venice |
