Hello, this is Marcie Billen with Keller Williams Mulinix and Rüya Team Realty here in Norman, Oklahoma. We like to share with you what Oklahoma has to offer in terms of real estate, restaurants, and adventure!
Here I’m going to go over the six steps to purchasing a home in Oklahoma.
Does the thought of purchasing a home have you feeling overwhelmed and exhausted? Keep reading to learn more about the home buying steps in Oklahoma to help you come up with a game plan that makes you feel energized about this process!
Step #1: You need to be financially prepared for this big decision. It’s so important that you begin to speak with a lender if you’re needing a loan long before you decide to actually purchase a house. You need to see what your options are, you need to see what your credit score is, and if you even need to improve it. That way you can get the most out of this purchase. This is by far, the most important of the home buying steps to put you on the path toward purchasing your dream home. You’ll need to see what you need to have saved – like your down payment, your closing costs, your prepaid costs; things like earnest money, and also your appraisal. And if you’re paying cash, that is great – some of your costs are actually going to be less and it makes the process just a little bit smoother.
Step #2: The next step is finding a real estate agent that you really feel comfortable with to represent you through the home buying process. Ask your Realtor really good questions like: “What’s your strategy for putting in an offer if we agree that the listing price is too high”? And, “For my price range, should I anticipate paying asking price?” “What about closing costs – do you think the seller may pay for those?” Or, “Do you have a list of contractors that you call upon for things like inspections and also repairs?” These are great questions to get a feel for your realtor’s plans and preparations as they’re helping you out.
Step #3: Finding the right property. Of course, this can be time-consuming or maybe not at all, but your Realtor should set up a search for you with your parameters like the size of house that you’re looking for, the price range, and of course, the location. And another thing you can do is download my app, and you can set up your search on that as well according to your parameters. You can also add anyone else into those searches to share those searches with them, if they’re helping you with this decision, like a spouse, or maybe a friend, or even parents, or kids. And one of the best things that you can actually do as you’re searching for homes is to drive the neighborhoods that you’re really interested in. You want to be able to see what those neighborhoods are like and it’s really hard to get that from a photo.
Step #4: After finding the perfect home, you’re gonna need to submit an offer. In Oklahoma, there are two things that you’ve got to do before you submit that offer. The first is to look at and sign the disclosure page. This is the disclosures on the house themselves. Sometimes houses don’t have disclosures and those cases are gonna have either a disclaimer form, or an exemption form. Your realtor is going to show you any one of those three,depending on the property that you are looking at to put in an offer on. The next thing that you’re gonna look at is the buyer cost sheet, or a buyer estimate sheet. This is gonna let you know how much it’s gonna cost you in terms of closing costs, down payment, everything like that in order to get into this house – and it is going to be an estimate. And you’ll get those periodically through the transaction. Alright the next thing your agent will do is run the numbers for you on the property to see if it’s priced correctly.
And what we mean by that is, we’re gonna look at the different comparables for the neighborhood and for area to see if the home is actually priced at market value and what we should offer as we go through writing an offer on the house. Then your agent’s gonna write the terms in on the contract. Then they should go through the contract with you. The contract and the offer are the same, as I’m talking about them. You’re gonna look at the contract with your agent so that you understand exactly what you’re signing and your agent should be explaining that to you as you go through that together. Once the offer is accepted, then your earnest money is gonna be due. And that earnest money is gonna be held in a trust account, and then will be put towards your down payment at the closing table.
Step #5: Once your offer is signed by the seller; both buyer and seller have signed. This could take a day this could take a week – it totally depends on negotiations for the particular house that you’re interested in. Then you’re gonna have a period of investigations. This period is typically 10 to 15 days, depending on your specific contract and can include different inspections like the termite inspection, a home inspection, well and septic – there are several others that you can do as well. It’s totally up to you, as the buyer, what you want to order, pay for, and have a looked at on the house. So if any defects or malfunctions are discovered, which typically there are a few, then you can negotiate those out during the treatments, repairs, and replacements portion of the contract.
This TRR (treatments, repairs, replacements) portion, or the repair list, lasts for seven days during the contract. And this is the time where you can negotiate with the seller in order to have repairs done. This last part is very important – I get this question all the time whenever I’m helping people purchase a home. As a buyer, in Oklahoma, you CAN very easily get out of your contract to purchase a home before a repair list is agreed upon by both buyer and seller. After there is an agreed-upon repair list, it’s a lot harder to get out of that contract. But you have that inspection period to basically decide whether or not you want to purchase that house.
Step #6: So once you make it through all of that, closing is typically a breeze. About three days before closing, you’ll get final numbers so that you can understand how much you need to bring and why it came to that amount. And then the week before closing you’re you’re gonna perform a final walk through on the house to make sure that repairs have been done, that nothing happened while the sellers are moving out, and the house is in exactly the condition that you thought it was gonna be in as you purchased it. And closings in Oklahoma typically happen at a title company and you’ll just sit down with the title representative and they’ll take you all the way through all the documents to purchase your home. All you need to bring to closing is two forms of ID, and of course, your closing funds in the form of a cashier’s check or wire.
Whew! That was a lot of info that I took you through. I have a downloadable version of our six home buying steps for you here, and if you have more questions, I would be happy to answer them for you – feel free to reach out or check out some of our other videos on our YouTube channel!
