The Process

You are unauthorized to view this page.

Buying your first home (or any home) can be daunting. Who are the people involved? What do they do? How does any of this work?

I’m going to give you a rundown on the overall process so you can be clear on how and when things happen.

  1. Save your deposit

Get yourself ready to buy. We have a separate series of videos explaining how to build a budget and put yourself in the best position to buy.

 

  1. Get pre-approved for finance with a mortgage broker or bank

This will help you understand how much you can spend. It will allow you to shop with confidence and make sure you are looking at houses in the right price bracket. There’s nothing worse than shopping at a higher level than you can afford and having to set your expectations lower.

 

  1. Get your team together – Lawyer/Valuer/Building Inspector

Getting your team together early, before you find the house you want is great. You can then use your team proactively rather than reactively.

 

  1. Conditional Offer

Once you put in an offer, this will normally have conditions on it, things such as finance and legal review are common. These will normally be time-bound, often 2 weeks. This means you and your team have two weeks to tick all the boxes.

  • Legal review of contracts / Land Information Memorandum and Property Title
  • Building Inspection – A house might seem fine to you. It might even seem fine to a builder on a cursory inspection. But to be sure that you know what you’re getting into, get a full independent building report. This will include things like moisture levels and structural integrity. (Heard of “leaky homes”? You need a building report to help catch that.)
  • Arranging insurance – if a house can’t be insured, the bank won’t offer finance.
  • Sorting finance – this is where being prepared is much easier as you don’t have to get the bank across all your finances, just the property itself.

 

  1. Confirmation/Finance Date

This is the day you become “unconditional” where all your conditions legal/finance/inspections are cleared as okay. On this day you will have to pay the deposit. The deposit amount is defined in the S&P. Usually it will be 5-10% of the purchase price.

 

  1. Settlement Day – Congratulations!

This is the day that you now own the property and take on your home loan. Between confirmation day and settlement date is where you sort out how to structure your home loan and sign all your loan documentation. On settlement day the lawyers on both sides complete the transaction.

 

Hopefully, you now have a much clearer picture of how the process works.