Once you are in the home stretch, you are in the escrow, but what a long stretch it is. The days until you get your new home keys can not go by quickly enough, yet at the same time, you are busy doing everything that needs to happen to close that it feels like there are not sufficient hours in the day. Here is a general overview of what to expect while in this stage.
- Appraisal: The home will be apprise by the lender. You may need to give a check for this up front instead of waiting until closing to pay the fee. Because, appraisal will occur no matter what, but not all the transactions make it to closing table. The appraisal protects lender from lending you more funds than home is worth. If the appraiser gives the value to the home is lower than purchase price, seller will have to accept to adjust price downward or for the difference you will have to pay.
- Secure your financing: The lender may ask for more paperwork to secure financing while you are in escrow, if underwriter requests it. It never hurts to be proactive and ask lender if anything else is required to secure loan. Obviously, yo do not want to release financing contingency until you are 99.9% sure that your loan will fund. Otherwise, you will lose earnest money deposit and subject to other damages.
- Pest inspection: For the bank's benefit pest inspection is required by the bank. This helps in case, you buy a house and later came to know that it is termite ridden, you might just walk away if you can not spend to pay for repairs. If the home has suffered from the termites of significant damage, bank will have trouble finding a new buyer. The pest inspections are inexpensive and protect you from that you do not want to buy a home with active wood destroying insects infestation.
- Home inspection: The home inspection is technically optional, but you should consider. A home inspector examine the readily visible components of the home looking for the problems that your untrained and the first time home buyer's probably would never catch. Home inspection can protect against expensive surprises later on, nasty, and sometimes give some bargaining power to get seller to lower price if anything major needs to be fixed.
- Secondary inspection: In the home inspection reveals any major problems, you may decide to have secondary inspections done. Even though home inspectors are extremely helpful in diagnosing problems, they are only generalists but not specialists, they might have expertise in one area like plumbing and may not electrical. So if they identified a problem, they might recommend to have more specialized professional examine that item before proceeding with transaction.
