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Roanoke Real Estate - Tools for Buyers

How to Buy a Home in the City of Roanoke, Virginia

Of all the cities I've examined from a real estate standpoint, I was especially eager to create this guide to Roanoke. After all, I was born in Roanoke Memorial Hospital and spent the first 20 years of my life living in the Star City of the South. So to create a guide to buying real estate in Roanoke, Virginia is a treat for me.

In this article, I'm not going to tell you why you should buy a home in the Roanoke area. That's up to you to decide. The purpose of this guide (and this website in general) is not to tell you why to buy real estate in a particular city, but rather how to go about buying it.

So with that mission in mind, here are some of the most important steps to take when buying real estate in the Roanoke area.

Basic Steps to Buying a Home

This tutorial combines two things. First, it is a home buyer's "blueprint" to buying real estate in Roanoke, Virginia, in that it covers all of the important steps. Secondly (and even more helpful to you), it provides a variety of home-buying tools you can use right now to simplify your real estate process — tools such as property listings, mortgage quotes, credit-request forms and more.

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1. Order Your Credit Report

This is an important step to take when buying real estate in the Roanoke area (or anywhere else for that matter), and you should to it early on in the process. In fact, requesting and reviewing your credit report should be part of a larger self-assessment that includes your finances in general.

Credit is critical when buying a home, especially in the wake of the mortgage crisis that started in 2007. Mortgage lenders have always reviewed credit history when approving borrowers for a mortgage loan. But now, as a result of tougher legislation on the lending industry, most lenders have tighter standards with regard to credit scores and other factors.

So your Roanoke, Virginia real estate process should begin with a financial self-assessment — and that assessment should begin with you ordering your credit reports and scores. The key is to take advantage of the free credit report you are entitled to receive each year, and also to use a trustworthy website that will safeguard your personal information.

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2. Find a Roanoke Real Estate Agent

If you are new to the process of buying real estate, then it really is a good idea to have professional help. By this, I mean hiring a Roanoke real estate agent to guide you through the process.

Do you really need to hire a Roanoke agent? That depends on how comfortable you are in your knowledge of the Roanoke real estate process. But if you are a first-time home buyer, I can respond with a resounding YES ... you should hire an agent to help you navigate the process. After all, there's a lot of money at stake when buying a new home!

You can locate a Roanoke agent in several ways (referrals from friends or family, magazine ads, local billboards, etc.). You can also find an agent by searching for agent blogs in the area, such as this Roanoke real estate blog.

But if you want to take the convenient route, you should use the Internet. Through the link below, for example, you can have instant access to Realtors in the Roanoke area, and you can request information from multiple Realtors at once. Best of all, the service is free and anonymous (the agents won't receive your contact information until you give it to them). Now that's helpful.

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3. Find a Home in Roanoke

Now we get to the fun part of buying real estate in Roanoke. It's time for some house hunting! Obviously, this is where you will venture out in search of your Roanoke dream home, or the closest thing to it inside your price range.

This is another part of the Roanoke home-buying process where the Internet comes in handy. Do you see a pattern here? House hunting online first, before visiting the properties in person, will have you a lot of time and energy. If you look at a home online and find that it's not within your price range (or if it's too far away, too small, or flat out ugly), you will know it without making a trip to see it. Time saved, and gas money saved!

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4. Get Mortgage Quotes

When shopping for a new car, you wouldn't buy the first one you saw and pay full sticker price without asking any questions. At least I hope you wouldn't. You would shop around first, and you should do the same when looking for a mortgage loan. In fact, it's even more important to shop around for mortgage terms and rates, because there's much more money on the line.

As you might have guessed, I am once more going to recommend the Internet for the sake of convenience. Think about the time-saving aspects of the online mortgage quote process. You can go online and visit a mortgage website like LendingTree (see link below) and request quotes from several lenders at once.

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5. Consider Buying Roanoke Foreclosures

If you've read the Roanoke Times lately, or watched the local or national news, you'll realize that there are a lot of foreclosure homes in Roanoke and all across the country. While these foreclosures represent the misfortune of some (the former owner), they also represent an investment opportunity for others (the potential buyer).

By purchasing a foreclosed home in the area, you could potentially pay less than market value for the property. Here's why. When a bank is forced to foreclose on a home because the owner cannot make the payments anymore, they will want to sell the home as quickly as possible. After all, banks loan money ... they are not in the business of managing real estate properties.

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Conclusion and Summary

I hope this guide to buying Roanoke, Virginia real estate has helped you understand the various steps involved, and I hope you find the tools helpful as well. Remember ... education, research and planning are the keys to a successful home purchase. So don't think of this tutorial as the end of your learning process — but as the beginning of it. I wish you luck with your Roanoke real estate experience!