Head of Home Loans Digital, Lephoi Mokgatle, provides 4 essential tips for first-time home buyers looking to climb the property ladder.
Buying a home for the first time should be an exciting experience for customers, but I feel a lot of the time, because of the anxiety around not doing enough research, it can be a little bit frustrating. I like to use these four tips to help customers who are buying homes for the first time to navigate that process and help them make it easier to sign on the dotted line.
Tip 1:
The first tip would be to understand where you'd like to live. So which area you want to buy in, whether you're looking for a stand-alone home or an apartment in a sectional title, and then also do enough research about what are the property and area stats in that particular neighbourhood.
Tip 2:
Second tip I would suggest is to understand your financial status. So everyone gets a free credit assessment report annually, and so use this as a guide to understand who you owe and whether you have outstanding creditors that you might not be aware of.
Tip 3:
The third tip would be to also understand the initial and up-front costs that are associated with buying a home. A lot of customers just look at the mortgage or the bond repayment, but there are other costs that are associated. So consider things like attorney fees, transfer duties from SARS, bond registration costs. And even, often, moving into the home, there are costs associated with it, such as your rates and taxes that you'd never have to have catered for before, as well as levies if you're in a sectional title.
Tip 4:
The fourth and final tip would be to use the available online tools. So things like Nedbank's instant bond indicator really help customers give them an indication of how much they qualify for when it comes to a bond. If you need to save for a deposit, see if you have available savings in order to use for that because it also helps with your interest rate when the bank quotes you.