How To Find A Home To Buy In 2021

If you are in the market to buy a home, then you've probably found out how difficult it is to actually find a home that is available. Gone are the days that you go out on a weekend to look at four or five homes, now it's more like walking into an auction house filled with other buyers.

Today, I want to talk about what smart buyers are doing, how they are going about the process of finding a home, and what they are doing to ensure they have the best chance possible when working within an inventory-starved housing market.

The first thing they do is bookmark and visit our JUST LISTED page on our website, as it shows only the newest listings to hit the market.

Only The Most-Recent Listings For Sale

The following list of homes includes only those homes listed in the Tallahassee MLS within the past day. If the list is empty, there is nothing new in the past 24 hours. We update our list of homes for sale every 15 minutes, so bookmark this page if you want to know about homes as soon as they are available.

What Timing The Market Means Today

In the "old days" we'd often get people asking about the best time of year to buy a home. Or perhaps the best time of year to sell a home. But today's housing market conditions make those questions irrelevant, and here's why:

There are not enough homes for sale in Tallahassee

That's right, inventory is at record lows. There's literally nothing out there. More than 70% of the active listing are already under contract with buyers, and most homes are selling within days of hitting the market (after getting multiple offers within hours of hitting the market).

So what is a buyer to do?

3 Keys To Finding A Home To Buy

When we help people buy homes in these crazy market conditions, we show them a process that gives them the best chance to find a home and buy it. There are three simple things you can do to optimize your chance for success, and here they are in order:

 GET ORGANIZED - First and foremost is to get organized. The days of casually shopping until you find the right home are both far behind us (and way ahead of us), but the current housing market cycle is one where the buyers far outweigh the sellers, so finding a home is tough.

Getting organized will give you advantages that most other buyers won't have, and it will ensure that you are decisive when the time comes to make a decision on a home.

To be organized, it starts with first hiring the real estate buyer's agent that you want to guide you through the process. This needs to be a local expert who is currently selling a lot of homes (thus showing you he (or she) is successfully navigating the current market conditions).

Work with this agent to organize your entire acquisition plan before you even start looking at homes. The agent will help guide you through the mortgage application process if you are borrowing money to buy the home, and the buyer's agent will help you establish a timeline for when critical events must take place. Finally, this agent needs to be able to show you where ALL the homes are, not just the ones you can find on Zillow or other real estate websites.

COMING SOON - The scariest part about buying a home today is figuring out what to offer on a home. Offer too little, and you'll probably lose the home to another buyer. Offer too much, and the chuckling seller will give you the keys and whistle on his way down the road.

The best way to curtail this fear is through education (yours) and by thinning the competition. The education comes from you paying attention to what's for sale and getting a real feel for the values in the area that you want to move. You can do this by looking at every relevant listing that hits the market and then by tracking how long it takes to sell.

Thinning out the competition comes from you being more decisive. If you find a home and wait to make an offer, you increase the time other people have to discover the home. In a perfect world, you would negotiate one-on-one with the seller, rather than submitting an offer that is just one of many from multiple buyers.

To give yourself a leg up on the competition, visit ComingSoonHomesTallahassee.com several times each day. These are homes that are not yet available but will be hitting the market soon. Try to see if you can preview the home BEFORE it hits the market, and if you like a home, present the offer as soon as the seller will receive it. This will ensure that you have as little competition as possible when it comes to negotiating the price and terms for the home.

JUST LISTED - Finally, you should monitor the "Just Listed" page on our website several times each day. Not all homes are marketed equally, and in fact, most agents do not pre-market their homes. The Just Listed page might be the very first appearance they make in public.

Just as we advise you to monitor the coming soon website in order to thin out the competition, monitoring the just listed page is done for the same reason. Though it's better to find out before a home hits the market, the next best thing is to be highly responsive and jump on a new listing when it hits the just listed page.

And this all circles back around to Tip #1. Be Prepared! You need to be able to make an offer at a moment's notice, and most sellers today are not going to be interested in an offer with financing contingencies. You have to have those worked out as best you can prior to making your offer.

So get yourself organized, hire a top real estate buyer's agent, monitor the coming soon website (and try to get access to the homes early), monitor the just listed page, and then be decisive in order to thin out the competition.

Follow these tips, and you'll be among the happy people buying a home while locking into a low mortgage interest rate in 2021!

When moving to, in, or from Tallahassee, you will fare better if you work with a local expert. We are here to help. If you have further questions on the Tallahassee real estate market, you can leave a comment below, give us a call at (850) 366-8917, or drop us a note and we'll give you the local information needed to ensure a successful, smooth transaction.

As a local born and raised in Tallahassee with a focus on customer service, I promise you'll find great success when working with Joe Manausa Real Estate, just as have our past customers. You can read thousands of their reviews reported on Google, Facebook and Zillow right here: Real Estate Agent Reviews Tallahassee.

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