Your property search checklist

The critical property checklist

What are you looking for in your first home? Having a clear idea from the start will save the amount of time you spend searching on the net and staring in real estate agency windows.

Here are some things to tick off on your mental checklist:

Location

• How far are you willing to travel to get to work?
• How good are the local schools, shopping centres and other public facilities like parks and sporting grounds?
• How convenient is public transport?
• If you're prepared to renovate, think about that other real estate cliché that's stood the test of time: "Pick the worst house in the best street".

Make a list

• What do you like about where you currently live?
• What don't you like about where you currently live?
• How many bedrooms and bathrooms do you want—or really need?
• What are the essentials: balcony, laundry, garage, views etc

Do your homework

Check out recent home sale prices and auctions in your preferred areas. Look at market trends, houses for sale and suburb statistics.

Get home loan pre-approval

It can be heartbreaking to find the perfect place only to learn that you can't afford it. Even worse is losing your deposit because you won at an auction but couldn't secure finance for the balance of the purchase price. Don't risk it.

Take notes and use checklists

Turn your priorities into a personalised home-shopping checklist and use it to track the features of each home. Here's a checklist you can download to compare properties with: Aussie Property Checklist

The questions to ask when you've found a property

If you know the vendor's reason for selling a property you're interested in, it can help you in your negotiations. Estate agents often advise their clients not to give a reason for selling, or to simply say 'relocation'. But there is no harm in asking, either directly or indirectly.

Sometimes an estate agent will let slip that the vendor has already bought elsewhere, or needs to move for their job. Reasons such as these suggest that the vendor will be looking for a quick sale—something that you can factor into your negotiations.

Other questions that will help first home buyers are:

• When does the vendor need to move out of the property?
• How long has the property been on the market?
• How many offers have been made on the property?
• Has the property been passed in auction (and if so, what was the highest bid?)
• Is the vendor open to offers before Auction?
• How long have they owned the property?

The answers you get to these questions will obviously give you an insight into how 'negotiable' the price is.

Some other questions for apartment hunters:

• Is the property Foxtel enabled?
• Does the apartment above have floor boards?
• Does the body corporate allow BBQ's on the balcony?
• Is there much noise in the building?
• What % are tenants vs. owner occupiers?
• Is there visitor parking?

How old is that building?

It's tempting to view properties as commodities: when you're looking at lists of recent sales, you're correlating location with price and facilities—such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms—and perhaps the floor area, and size of the land.

The quality of a property is harder to assess, and it needs to be taken into account. If it's an older property the construction quality will be critical, from weathersealing on the roof to the condition of the external walls and whether or not any structural faults (such as cracks) have developed.

An older property is not necessarily a bad thing: many older buildings have higher levels of craftsmanship, and if they're built using brick or stone, are inherently strong.

The key with these properties is to ensure that they have been maintained well over the years: the last thing you want after taking out a mortgage is to find that you're going to be hit with expensive repair work.

That's why it's a good idea to get a building and pest report commissioned before you start negotiating on price. If there are no faults, that's good news. If faults do appear, you can use the reports to reduce the price you're prepared to offer.

The minutes and budget forecasts in the property strata report can also be a useful source for uncovering potential building problems.

Building and pest inspections mean you can buy with confidence

Continue to information about costly mistakes to avoid.