Searching for homes can be very confusing and exhausting when buyers are not clear on what they want and how to transact. The home buying process is one of elimination and if you are not clear which ones to eliminate and which ones to shortlist, you will not be successful. Often prices go up if you take too long to zero down to your dream home.

Before starting a home search, these 3 actions will help any buyer immensely:

1. Working out your ideal home. Take into account all the family members’ needs (musts) and wants (desireds) and factor in all the important points like distance to kids’ school, distance to the office, peak hour traffic, parks/ gyms/ cafes, etc nearby, and anything else specific to your family needs. Paint the picture of your ideal home and write it down. This will give you a point to start with and will guide your journey.
   
2. Working out your transaction capacities. I am not saying “budget”. No one ever gets a property in his budget. You need to work out your sources of funds and loan capacities. Get the home loan approved and get the exact maximum figures available to you. You may not want to communicate your full financial capacity to the seller or the real estate agents, but you need to have this very clear in your mind. Factor in expenses like stamp duty, brokerage, renovations, furniture, moving costs, etc. before you come to a final expendable figure.
   
3. Working out practical solutions. Based on 1 and 2 above and also based on what the real estate market is in your area, you may not be able to have the exact ideal home you wanted. It could simply be out of your financial capacity or maybe such homes do not even exist in the localities you are considering. For example, if you are looking for a lawn on a new builder’s floor in South Delhi, you will find out that because of stilts becoming mandatory, lawns do not exist anymore.
   
   Now you may need to tweak your ideal home to a Top Floor and a terrace and have a large garden on the terrace. You could come up with very creative ideas and stick with the original ideal home idea. Like in the picture below, we have a huge space created at the back of the property that gives a terrace area even though it isn’t a top floor. Work out a practical solution and have an ideal home painted in your mind and write it down somewhere to refer to while filtering homes to reach your ideal home.

These are not all the actions (by far) you will need to put in to get your ideal property but these will keep you on track and help guide you and your broker in the right direction.

Until next time

Ashutosh Bhogra – South Delhi’s Top Real Estate Agent (or almost Top)