Timing Your San Antonio Home Search

When the time comes to house hunt, planning your lead time is very important.

Let's address buying a resale home first.

Give yourself at least 3 to 5 days to visit listings and at least 30 additional days to bring your purchase to the closing table. For example, if you want to be in your newly purchased home on 1 June, we recommend you be in San Antonio for your on-site home search no later than the 3d week in April.

What can you expect when you start visiting homes for sale.

Most buyers find they can't speed shop comfortably. They need time to develop a personal comfort level with the home search process. The comfort level will usually gel after the first or second day of visiting listings.

Keep this in mind. For the average home buyer, there's an inherent disadvantage in seeing too many listings over a short time period. Simply stated - visiting listings is a physically and mentally tiring experience. After seeing too many homes too quickly, there's a risk of developing a type of mental fuzziness whereby the details of homes you've seen start to meld and morph.

To keep from becoming confused, be prepared to take the time to make notes, maybe take pictures or videos, and, before leaving a listing, to discuss and record its pros of cons.

We recommend not trying to see more than 8 listings per day.

The next phase involves analyzing competing prospective properties, selecting your target property, and preparing and submitting the offer. That should take approximately 3 to 4 hours in an office setting. It's your realty agent's job to lead you through this phase and make it as clearly logical and comfortable as possible.

After the contract documents are prepared and submitted to the seller's realty agent, it's not necessary to stay in town. As long as you have telephone and Internet and/or Fax access, subsequent steps, to include actually closing your purchase, can be managed remotely.

What about buying a newly constructed production home?

Since the available home builder inventory is more concentrated in new subdivisions, it's somewhat easier to shop for a new construction home vs. going from point-to-point looking at resale homes. Consequently, if you are willing to rule out buying a resale home, you can cut your home shopping time to as little as 3 days by exclusive looking for a new construction product. We don't recommend that tactic, however, because you should at least peruse the resale market so you'll have a basis for comparing the value of buying a new home versus purchasing a resale home.  

Finally, what about buying a lot and building a custom home?

That's a very attractive alternative for a buyer with the time and resources needed to produce a home that's highly customized to meet all of his or her home ownership wants and needs. It's also a very tedious and complicated process not to the liking or capability of the average home buyer.

Keep these factors in mind. In San Antonio, unimproved residential lots and acreage tend to be very expensive. Ask your realty agent to set up a MLS search for residential lot listings for you if you are interested in learning about lot features and costs.

After acquiring your lot, the process of dealing with the builder, the architect, selecting features, going to show rooms to select floor covering, fixtures, etc., might take weeks instead of days. The average time to acquire a lot and produce a customized home from ground up can require 9 months or more for an elaborate home.

Although you don't have to be on-site from beginning to end, it's unquestionably better to be around while the home is being built. Otherwise, it's highly recommended that you keep in touch by designating a third party to monitor the process for you.

If you don't know the ins-and-outs of Texas real estate, we recommend using an experienced realty buyer's agent to represent you irrespective of whether you intend buy a resale home, a brand new production built home, or even if contract to have your home built by a custom home builder. Real estate deals are complicated and quirky and a good buyer's agent knows when and how to advise you about unseen risks and to lead you around the home buying pitfalls no matter how you eventually acquire your San Antonio home.

You'll find that an experienced realty buyer's agent is indispensable when the time comes to scout out the San Antonio area for your best home buy.  Keep this in mind. San Antonio is a very large city - the 7th largest metropolitan area in the United States. The area is highly diverse in terms of neighborhood demographics, geographic features and climate, quality of subdivisions and prices and styles of homes therein. Having a least a basic knowledge of where you might want to live in the San Antonio will help focus your search on the best neighborhoods, with the best conditions and prices meeting your home ownership wants and needs. 

We will be honored to help.  We're Stephanie and Randy Kelley and Missy McBee, Realtors® at Keller Williams Legacy, San Antonio, Texas. If you have questions, need San Antonio realty or mortgage loan advice or assistance, or just want to chat a bit about the wonderful Alamo City, please call us at (210) 863-2661 (Randy) or (210) 867-8743 (Stephanie), or (210) 288-9810 or email us at swkrealtor@aol.com or kelleybus@aol.com or missymcbee@kw.com. Our SanAntonioHomeQuest.com Realty Solutions Team is always ready to help you with your home buying or selling needs and will gladly give you the best advice regarding timing your San Antonio home search.