How To Save Money When Buying a House- Part 1

Posted by admin on September 26, 2007 in Real Estate

Welcome to Real Estate Wednesday! For the next three Wednesdays, I have the privilege of a guest blogger who we named “New Home Buyer” for privacy reasons who will post of their experience in buying a new house. This post reminds me of something Wayne Gretzky once said: “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” If you are a regular reader to this blog, you have probably noticed that a lot of my recent real estate blogs are guest posts- this is an attempt to share different experiences with the blogging world and put the personal into personal finance. Without further ado, here is New Home Buyer sharing his tips on how to save money when buying a home:

How to Save Money when Buying a House – Part 1 of 3

My fiancé and I recently bought a new townhouse and were asked to share some of the tips we learned about how to make the biggest expense of your life cost a little less.

Negotiate with the Developer

Many people assume that when you buy a new house you have no room to negotiate with the developer. They have a reputation for not budging on the price and can be hard to deal with. Instead of trying to change the price, we asked for more money to spend on upgrades.

Developers are much more likely to give you additional features for the house instead of dropping the price because it doesn’t cost them that much extra money but it can have a meaningful impact on the value of your home. We ended up getting an extra $25,000 in upgrades which we used to upgrade our kitchen, bathrooms, hardwood floors, and countless other features. Almost every room in the house has received a facelift as a result.

When we went in to speak with the real estate agent who represented the developer we told them that we had a much more modern taste than what they were offering in the model home. To make the house meet our standards we would have to make changes which we thought would total $25,000.

The real estate agent said that it was high and nobody had asked for that much but we insisted on it being put in. What was the worst that could happen? They say no and come back with a counter offer. We were excited when the developer accepted our offer without any additional conditions.

We were surprised at how many of the people who bought on our block never thought to even ask for additional upgrade money. Some of them bought at full price and did not ask for anything additional. What a wasted opportunity!

A good rule of thumb is to try to negotiate everything. If they won’t budge on the price, find other issues that you care about where you can negotiate a better deal.

I will complete this three part series in future posts and discuss the importance of locking in early and putting at least 25% down.

New Home Buyer

1 Comment on How To Save Money When Buying a House- Part 1

By Save Money! » How To Save Money When Buying a House- Part 1 on October 14, 2007 at 10:49 pm

[...] zuffren wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWithout further ado, here is New Home Buyer sharing his tips on how to save money when buying a home:. How to Save Money when Buying a House – Part 1 of 3. My fiancé and I recently bought a new townhouse and were asked to share some of … [...]