How to Buy a House -- A guide for first-time home buyers

HouseBuyingTips.com is a useful FREE consumer advocate site giving you tips on buying new or used homes. You'll find tips on financing, real estate agents, negotiating, builders, scams & more.

We reveal the scams that other sites gloss over or ignore altogether because they don't want to alienate their advertisers. We don't care who we upset in our quest to bring you the truth, because we only care about you. You'll see this repeated all over this site:

HouseBuyingTips.com Law of Home Buying
The only person looking out for you is you!

When buying a home you'll meet lots brokers, agents, representatives, customer service account executives, VP of this, VP of that, the list goes on. But keep in mind that every one of these titles should be renamed "salesperson". Every one of these people makes their living selling you something, so tread carefully. Anything you say will be used against you.

We are not trying to scare you, we just want to educate you and prevent you from falling victim to the scams that cost people thousands of dollars every day. After reading this site, you'll be ready to buy a house with a calm and confident attitude, not paranoid and confrontational. We'll teach you how to negotiate with the best of them. If you were successful after using our other site CarBuyingTips.com, you'll do well here too.

Buying a house is 90% logistics and 10% negotiations. Whether you are buying a new house or a used house, you must keep in mind that everything is negotiable in life, and you should be negotiating at every single step of the way, because you'll find on closing day just how many people have their hands in your pocket. Don't ever feel guilty or foolish for asking for a discount from anyone of these people, they have no problem asking for money from you. Most important of all, do not buy a house without having an inspection performed.

Web sites To Help You Find A Real Estate Agent
Try HomeGain. Their free site with over 1.7 million consumers and 42,000 real estate agents registered, matches informed, confident homeowners and buyers like you and I with the most productive, highly qualified real estate agents in your area. You remain anonymous as agents submit detailed marketing proposals online. You can compare real estate agent qualifications and marketing plans before choosing the agent you want to work with. Other features give you the facts on prospective agents' backgrounds, experience, local sales, commission rates and more. You can use these reports to find agents who will list your house at a lower rate. Be sure to use their "What's My Home Worth?" feature. Whether you are buying or selling your home, everyone should at least start on HomeGain.

Tip For Buyers Of New Construction Homes
We have found a great resource to help avoid getting scammed by a new home builder. It is a downloadable book written by industry insiders called Home Building Pitfalls. It's not free but it contains an incredible amount of detail about what goes on in the home building industry and how to avoid getting screwed. Click here to learn more about the Home Building Pitfalls downloadable book.