home building pro tips
All my pro tips from my posts on the home building process in one convenient location!
If at all possible, visit model homes of your liking at least a few times to get an overall feel of how it might fit into your lifestyle.
Take a look at all of the models that are available at the community, either through a model home or looking at the virtual tour and floor plans online. This gives you an idea of what you can or cannot live without, but also allow you to compare floor plans if you are trying to decide between a home.
Ask every single question you have. Ask as many people as you can. You might get different opinions or even insight on things you wouldn’t have originally thought about.
Ask if there are any additional discounts or upgrades you can receive. We weren’t able to get any free upgrades, but we were able to get a discount for having someone refer us to the community. It never hurts to ask!
If you’re not particular about the homesite lot, use the time before you reserve a lot to do a lot of research and make sure you’ll be happy with the floor plan, that you’ve exhausted all potential options that you’ll want, and think about wishlist options you might like to have.
Make sure you’re ready for The Blitz! Not only will you be taking some time off of work for these meetings, you’ll also want to come into these meetings with a rough idea of what will happen during each upcoming appointment. This will help you plan and give you and your partner talking points about where your heads are at with options, colors, etc.
Look over your needs and wants list to make sure you have everything that you wanted in your home included in the Master Selection Sheet. There’s a lot of options to go through! It’s easy to miss non-standard requests and even requests that are standard since there are so many rows.
Take a few more days looking at the list of things you wanted in the home. Consider:
Is it something that can be easily changed after your home is fully built?
Is it something you can afford to do now?
How much money would you save by including the option in your home now versus doing it later?
If you can, ask about typical non-standard options other customers have requested, as that might give you some more ideas of what you might want to consider adding.
Come prepared with all the requested documentation, whether it is uploaded online through their portal, or with paper copies when meeting with your loan officer. For us, we printed our documents to provide to our loan officer and also saved a PDF version in a folder for future reference in case it was needed again.
If you can, pull your credit history to prepare yourself with the questions your loan officer will ask to make sure your history is as you expect. You can get a free annual credit report from annualcreditreport.com! Due to the pandemic, the three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion are now offering free weekly online reports through April 2021!
Have your loan officer help you work through different financial scenarios. For example, what happens if you are able to put down an extra 5% at closing? What does paying down your PMI look like in the grand scheme of things? This could help with your budgeting before you close! You can also use NVR’s loan payment calculator to see what your monthly payments could look like if you play around with the loan amount, the interest rate, and your loan term.
Utilize your design consultant as best as you can! They’ll be able to guide you towards a decision if you’re indecisive or give you a general idea of what other clients tend to choose given a similar color scheme.
Ask questions to compare the differences between flooring upgrades to see if it is worth the time and money.
Take all of the time you need when picking your interior selections! Lay out all of your choices together and switch them out with one another until you’re satisfied.