Buying a house for the first time is a little like online dating.
You’ll look at a few pictures, go on a few dates (tours), and really get to know the home intimately before proposing (making an offer and going under contract).
If you’ve never bought a house before, the entire ordeal can feel overwhelming. In only a few weeks, you could find and purchase a home—and pick up a mortgage in the process! You don’t want anything to go wrong.
To combat that, we keep a simple mantra:
No regrets.
We want you to feel fully empowered to make a confident, well-informed decision that’s right for you, your family, and your goals for the future—so you don’t commit any of the most common homebuying mistakes.
Instead, keep learning to see what you should expect:
Table of Contents
Your First-Time Homebuying Process
1. Be Strategic In How You Start
2. Start Your Search Online
3. Start Your House Tours: Orientation Phase
4. Keep Looking
5. Make An Offer
6. Go Under Contract
Start Your Homebuying Journey
Your First-Time Homebuying Process
Here’s the general strategy we recommend—and the workarounds for the potential roadblocks that will appear along the way to buying your first home:
1. Be Strategic In How You Start
Buying a home is a complex process, and a successful journey starts with a strategic beginning. A few tips before you start looking at homes:
1. Partner with a great agent. Your agent will be your guide through the entire journey, so it’s essential that you find someone who is:
Organized
Knowledgeable about the market
Knowledgeable about transactions
Easy to get along with
Great at communicating
2. Figure out what you want—but be open to new ideas. Make a list of everything you want in a home. This “wishlist” will become helpful to your agent as you start picking out houses to see in person.
While this list is a helpful starting point, don’t view this as a list of all-or-nothing requirements. We often see priorities shift during the homebuying process, so it’s critical to keep an open mind.
3. Get preapproved. Getting preapproved is more important than ever, especially in competitive markets. Talk to a mortgage lender or broker to discuss the types of mortgages available to you and how much money you may be able to borrow.
Your lender can give you an idea of how much house you can afford, and that will help you maintain realistic expectations once you start touring houses around Pittsburgh.
2. Start Your Search Online
In today’s market, you can start your search completely online—and it doesn’t have to stay inside Zillow, Redfin, or one of the other major players.
Instead, we have our own, easy-to-use system within the Compass platform that allows you to sift through inventory, identify the homes you want to explore, check out different Pittsburgh neighborhoods, and leave messages with us.
This step is critical. Here, you can sort through homes based on price, size, location, and more, and then sift through the photos to see which homes you’d like to “date” by taking a tour.
But be careful with photos! Photos might help you decide to take a tour, but they don’t tell the full story. Instead, pay attention to the “full picture.”
There are two scenarios we often run into:
Great photos—but the house has been on the market for a long time. If a house looks great online but it hasn’t sold in a few months, that could be a red flag. What this often means is people have already checked it out, but something that didn’t show up in the photos turned out to be too big a headache to move any further.
Bad photos—but everything else seems reasonable. Don’t let bad photography completely turn you off from a home, especially if you’re open to a budget-friendly option. Houses with bad photography regularly get overlooked by buyers, so these homes could turn into hidden gems where the owner is willing to negotiate.
3. Start Your House Tours: Orientation Phase
Once you’ve gotten comfortable looking at houses online, it’s time to start looking at homes in person. We call this stage the Orientation Phase.
For the first time you go to visit houses with your agent, we recommend looking at 3–4 homes over a few hours.
The goal here is not to find your dream home. Instead, the priority here is to simply practice looking at home. Together, we’ll discuss topics like:
What does inventory look like?
How do a home’s mechanicals work?
How should we visually evaluate foundations?
What are the unique features of Pittsburgh's housing stock that we should watch for?
Your only responsibility here is to learn how to look at homes. Don’t become discouraged if you feel overwhelmed or upset that you don’t find a house you love right away!
Keep Looking
As we mentioned earlier, you likely won’t find the perfect home during your first few tours.
And you probably won’t find it during the second batch of tours, either.
Sure, clients occasionally fall in love with one of the first few homes they see (even after touring a dozen others), but it’s perfectly normal to take a few trips before you really hone in on a house that’s right for you.
You might even decide to revisit certain homes once or twice just so you feel really confident about your decision.
If You’re Struggling to Find A Home You Love…
If you’ve looked at 10–15 houses and you still can’t find anything that seems right for you, it’s totally natural to feel frustrated. Instead of pressing on, we recommend pausing.
At this stage, we suggest sitting down in our office or at a coffee shop to have a heart-to-heart. We’ll evaluate:
How have your priorities shifted since the orientation stage?
Where is there room to be flexible in your requirements?
How can we become more creative in the homes we explore?
What are the pros and cons of renting instead of buying a home?
With an honest conversation, we can recalibrate and continue moving on a path that makes sense for you and your goals—even if that means pausing your homebuying journey and simply watching the market until conditions become more favorable.
5.Make An Offer
Once you find a house you really love and you can envision a future together, it’s time to get more serious. Instead of simply dating, you might start thinking about making your relationship exclusive—and that’s putting in an offer.
Together, we’ll discuss:
Estimated costs
Closing timelines
Making an offer does not mean you have to go all the way. Yes, you’ll make a few investments here (like paying for an inspection), but you can still back out if you discover something that’s a total deal-breaker.
Our goal during this stage is to remove the pressure and urgency out of the transaction. By now, you should feel well-educated and well-informed about the house and the process, so this shouldn’t feel like a high-pressure fire drill.
6. Go Under Contract
This is where things really get serious. Going under contract is like getting engaged. You’ve sent your deposit to the “wedding venue,” and although you can break things off, you’re not getting your deposit back.
Start Your Homebuying Journey
No matter what happens, the most important thing is that you land in a home that meets your needs.
We can help.
If you’re ready to start your homebuying journey in Pittsburgh, contact us.
We’d love to help you find the home that’s right for you, your family, and your vision for the future!
Cheers,
J&T