Avoid these Mistakes When Moving to Texas
So you're thinking of moving here to Texas. Maybe you're sick and tired of the traffic the congestion and frankly, the cost of living by living on the west coast. So you are ready to make that move here to Texas. We too moved here to the Dallas, Texas area just over 10 years ago now. And there are a lot of things that we wish we would've paid attention to before making that move. So today we wanna discuss how you can avoid making these mistakes when moving here to Texas.
Not only us, but I also guess I shouldn't just preface it by us making those mistakes. Some of these clients that we have been helping recently, or over the last little while it's amazing what you start to hear from other people and some of these mistakes that they've made, or maybe the questions that they've had when wanting to make that move here and what are some things that perhaps you could avoid before moving. First up, let's talk about where you're getting your information.
Sources of Information
I know most people like to look at all the pretty pictures because it makes it easy by looking on places like Zillow, realtor.com, and Redfin, it's just easy. You can scroll around, play with the homes in the area and pop up and see all these pretty pictures. A lot of times, if you're truly in love with a home, sometimes that information is not very accurate.
We've had multiple clients over the last who knows how long, who would call and say, I wanna go see this house. A lot of times that home has already been off the market, over the last year, if you see this home on the market and you wanna go take a look at it, a lot of times you don't know if maybe it's already gone under contract, because the information on those websites isn't as up to date as the local MLS, that's why we always suggest finding a local realtor to help you in your home search. For us when we are helping clients move here to the area, they may know the specific neighborhood they wanna be in, or whether it's the city or the school district. It's so easy to set somebody up on a home search. You put in their price point, they put in their square footage, even whether or not they want a pool. So many different factors that you could put. Granted a lot of times we recommend keeping your search criteria a little bit broad if you're relocating, it's so easy to set up somebody on an actual, up-to-date, search that way as a home gets listed, you're notified if it goes under contract, you're notified if it's taken off the market, you get notified. So your notifications are kept up to date, especially if you might be interested in making a move very quickly, or you may need to jump on something as soon as possible. So that way you get that information in real-time, as opposed to just scrolling around through Zillow, looking for your next house, because it could already be taken off the market.
And say, you're moving from out of state and you've never even been to Texas. A lot of times maybe you need to do a little bit more research on what it is you're actually looking for. Maybe you want to be able to go out on the lake every week, or love to go hiking or you have multiple kids going to multiple schools and you know what school district you want to be in. But on top of that, maybe you have to have a really long commute for work maybe you've realized that you like living in the north part of Dallas instead of the east part of Dallas. So when you do a little bit more research of what all of these areas have to offer, what you like doing say, you like to go out to eat all the time, or you like to go to sporting events or you wanna live somewhere that actually has put on a lot of local events. You wanna do a lot of research into these areas so that you know exactly if those areas really truly fit your needs. There have been times where we have helped clients and they found the most perfect home until they drove around and they realized the grocery stores are all super far away and maybe you just wanna have that easy access to be able to get in and get out on your way home from work or, frankly, maybe you don't like shopping at all. So do research into a lot of these areas because there are so many different factors that could play a part in where you actually really would prefer to live.
Another thing that we have had to warn a couple of our clients about is shopping for a home on places like Craigslist or Facebook marketplace. Yes. People can go on and advertise. Whether it's a rental or a deal that just might be too good to be true. You need to do a little bit more research on that and not to mention if they're advertising it on Facebook and they're asking for a deposit to be wired don't jump the gun on that. If you haven't been here and you don't have somebody who's willing to go check out the area for you who is willing to vet these properties, maybe it's something that you should avoid. We have heard a few horror stories lately where people knowing that this market was crazy and just having a really hard time, finding a home, took it upon themselves to look through Craigslist and Facebook marketplace, if you're not careful, those people are going to scam you. Anybody who wants to can scam somebody. A lot of times they can be found, trying to do so on places like Craigslist and Facebook. So find yourself a realtor who can check on these properties for you, and that can help you truly make sure that maybe these listings really are what they say they are.
Something else to think about when making that move is just going out and trying to find the most beautiful home in your price point, say, you can afford $500,000 and you look up all of these homes and you can afford that and that one looks like it has the most updated and it looks like the outside is the prettiest, maybe if you haven't checked the neighborhood very well, maybe that is the exact opposite of a type of neighborhood that you're looking to be in. You want to research these areas you want to know where these homes are so that you can actually know if the home you're looking at is truly the one that you wanna buy.
Find a Local Lender
We also always are recommending using a local lender. When you use a local lender, they truly know the local markets really well. They know the laws that go along with the state that you're moving to and here in Texas, there are a lot of people with a lot of great lenders, but when you're working with a local lender, it's somebody who truly wants to help somebody in their community. They go above and beyond, they will answer their phones, and you can get ahold of them, especially if a deal starts to go south. If you are working with one of these big box companies that may be all they do is email you during business hours, Monday through Friday from eight to five, and you suddenly need to have all of this information turned in on Sunday night.
Granted, we try not to bug most of our lenders on the weekends, but if you are really trying to compete in this market and you want to make sure that your offer gets accepted or your offer gets noticed, you can have that foot in the game to have that be able to have that opportunity to win that contract, then find yourself a local lender who's willing to call the listing agent. Willing to talk to them about how strong your buyer is and how ready and able they are to be able to close on this home, especially to be able to close on time, because when you put it in a contract and you say, you want to in 30 days you wanna make sure that somebody isn't gonna drop the ball and that they're not just going to get to it when they have time and it's going to be buried under a pile of paperwork. So we always suggest using a local lender, mainly for the reason that they're so much easier to get a hold of. They're there to talk you up and to help you win those offers as quickly and as smoothly as possible.
Know when to make a strong offer
When you're out looking for a home, you really wanna pay attention to how long a home has been on the market. If a home has only been on the market, say two days And you think everything in the home looks immaculate, the yard looks immaculate it's in the neighborhood you want this definitely in today's market. You don't want to wait around and hope and think maybe if it's around next week, I'll make an offer on it. If it's truly the house that you want, you need to put in a strong offer, you need to do everything that you can to win that home. Obviously, that probably means that there are other people who are wanting to do that in this market but be wary of how long those homes have been on the market and if it looks like it's going to go quickly, it probably will. Right now, we are finally starting to see a little bit more break in the craziness of this market. Some of these homes are being on the market a little bit longer. We're finally starting to see some that might last seven days and come, maybe they've come back on the market because all of a sudden at the end of the day when they go to get their financing in order all of a sudden because the interest rates rose that they suddenly can't qualify for what they were hoping for. We recommend paying attention to how long those homes have been on the market. And even if the homes have been on the market for a little bit longer, it doesn't mean that something was wrong with them, or maybe the buyer that fell through just wasn't willing to deal with the hassle of the repairs that may have come up during an inspection. The main thing is if you really have your heart set on a home and you want to put in an offer, you don't want to wait around and think about it. If you find your ideal home in your ideal area, So we highly recommend getting that offer out there to see if you can get it accepted. And when you work with the right team, that is absolutely what we do here about going above and beyond for our clients. We want our clients to win. And sometimes it gets, it's been a real drag lately about the number of homes that haven't been on the market and how hard it is to truly find what it is you're looking for.
But we really do our best to make sure that when these clients really know where they wanna live and what it is they're looking for, we help them win those offers.
Maybe you're moving to Texas and you think, the interest rates have gone up, and there are not enough homes on the market. There's still too much competition. And you are absolutely certain that you are just gonna move here and you are gonna rent first. Say, that you couldn't afford to buy because you came from another state and you sold your home and you had plenty of money left as a down payment and it doesn't matter you still think you wanna. Maybe be a little bit more flexible in making those choices and it can go the other way around too. Maybe you have your heart set on moving out here and you just can't wait to buy a home, you can't find exactly what you're looking for. So it goes both ways. Don't be totally certain that you have to buy, or you have to rent be open to, you know what I'm gonna try and rent.
If something comes up, I'm gonna go in that direction as. And the same goes for buying you. Come out here, you're ready to buy. And just none of these areas fit. None of these. Seem to be exactly what you're looking for, but all of a sudden you found a rental that you can sign a one-year, lease on and you go for it. A lot of people have said, maybe they're moving to Texas because they've never been here before and they don't know the area. And all they're gonna do is rent. Then they start looking at what the rental prices are and they think, oh my goodness if I'm gonna pay that much per month, just to rent a house, I might as well buy something. Be a little bit flexible, even if, for sure you are going to wanna buy within the next year or two kind of leave that open. Maybe look for rent. Maybe think you're looking for a rental, but don't totally rule out looking for a home to purchase as well, because how our market is starting to shift a little bit you might be pleasantly surprised.
Get Prequalified
So when you move here to Texas and you think I'm just gonna start looking to see what's out there. Most real estate agents, especially in this market, don't have time to help clients that haven't taken the time to get pre-qualified and it doesn't hurt anything. If you think that there's any chance that you would be buying a home when you're moving, get your finances in order and make sure you get pre-qualified that way, especially if the interest rates change and what you thought initially was going to be 500,000.
And now it's suddenly $450,000. At least your lender can give you those numbers you don't want to suddenly just get a pre-qualification out there and not completely go over these numbers with your lender to know exactly what it is you can afford. And then it, the. At the final hour of trying to close on a home and you realize you just can't get your financing in order because some numbers were off, then, it is definitely best to know that upfront.
So we highly recommend you go out and get pre-qualified to know exactly what it is you're looking for, and what you can afford. So that way, when you go to search for a home, you're able to narrow down that home search to find the best deal for you.
Calling on Signs = Waste of Time
Another mistake that we have heard, some people making is thinking that they wanna be in a specific neighborhood and they're just gonna drive around and call on all of the signs. If you know anything about the market right now, the chances of finding a home that has a sign in the yard and is still available and not under contract are very slim. In fact, we had just gotten a home under contract. This was a couple of months ago. And I remember we were there for the home inspection and it was on the most perfect street in the most perfect neighborhood, just one of those great communities, while we were standing outside talking, there were two cars that had come by just while we were standing out, getting ready to go and writing down the number on the sign. And we knew, you know what? This house is already under contract.
And it went under contract two days ago. So they're probably pulling it up. It hadn't been updated on Zillow and they're hoping that they can take a look at that house. Just going around, and looking at some real estate signs does not mean that a home is going to still be for sale. yet another reason why you want a local real estate agent to set you up so that you can look through these homes to see what truly is still active on the market.
Appliances TYPICALLY Convey with Home
One of these crazy things that we heard recently when people were moving here from out of state is they were asking if they needed to buy a stove and a dishwasher. And I thought, why would you do that? It comes in the house, we came from Arizona where, when there's a stove in it was in the house. Unless it was a new build house and you had to go buy your own, here our appliances stay with it. One thing that we have realized, in fact, probably even the same for us, about 50% of the homes that people leave the refrigerator. Yes. It is not standard to leave it. You may want to put an exclusion in there so people know that you are in fact taking the refrigerator or any of these things that can be hauled away. But I was so shocked when somebody asked if they needed to go out and buy a stove because I didn't realize in some of these states, they actually take their appliances with them. Why would you take the stove and the dishwasher? We do not do that here.
Things that are fixed in the home, like your stove, your dishwasher do stay with the house, I am surprised a lot of times people don't wanna move the refrigerator because where they're going, maybe the refrigerator doesn't fit into the new space, or maybe it's older and they're in the mood to buy a new one, or they just don't have the space for it and it just doesn't fit with the décor in the new house. Yes, the refrigerators don't necessarily stay here with the homes here in Texas. But a lot of times, surprisingly, I have seen it in Arizona. Almost nobody left the refrigerator, but here. Surprised that about half of them do and yes, that is not the norm maybe it's just what we have been dealing with but something to think about.
Cash is not ALWAYS King
Even though this market is super crazy and people are coming in with cash offers, it doesn't mean that cash is always going to win. My team and I have won multiple offers over the last year with regular conventional financing. We even got a couple of FHA homes under contract.
So knowing that the relationship that we built with the other agent and truly making sure that our lenders were on top of. To discuss everything that was going on so that the sellers knew that they had a really strong offer. They didn't want to take some of these cash offers. Maybe the cash offer was just an investor who had never seen the home or somebody who just was going to use it as a rental property. We got one of the most beautiful families into a home recently and beat out two different cash offers just because of who my buyers were and because of the communication that I had with that other agent. You don't have to have 100% cash to put down on a house. It would be nice if we all were able to do that, but that is not gonna be a determining factor when purchasing a home here in Texas, even in this hot, crazy market. But with Texas being one of the hottest markets right now in real estate, there have been a lot of investors that have come in and purchased some of these homes. They have come in and flipped these homes completely gutted and remodeled them at the end of the day if it was one of those types of flip situations and they didn't hold that property for a certain amount of time. For some of these properties, you can only purchase for cash or conventional financing. Most of the time, those remarks are private remarks meant for the real estate agent. So they need to check on those for you. If these homes look too good to be true, or maybe in an area and an investor has come in and flipped that property. They're going to make sure that there are certain timeframes that are held to unless you want to come in with sometimes using cash or conventional financing.
Roofing can be an ISSUE
Another big deal here in Texas is we have shingle roofs. Almost all of our homes are shingle roofs. Once in a while, you do see a home with some regular tile roofs, which is crazy that you see that here because of the actual hail that we get, and with hail comes roof damage. Here in Texas, we get wind. We get crazy storms that come through. You're probably going to be hit with hail at some point, whether it does any damage, is a whole other story, but having these types of weather conditions is going to determine how well your roof is holding up. Some of. Insurance companies will not insure a roof if it is too old. Surprisingly, if your home is over 15 years old and it doesn't have any hail damage or any problem with any of the shingles, I'd probably be surprised. But at the same time, most of these insurance companies will not insure it. If the roof is too old and they'll make you put on a whole new roof. And if you haven't lived there before and you're just purchasing a home, that is definitely not an expense that you are going to want to incur. So another inspection that you may wanna run is when you are buying a home in a neighborhood and you realize that the roof is older, you are going to want to get a roof inspection and you might need to have somebody file an insurance claim to get a new roof put on your house.
Swimming Pools
There are a lot of people who move here to Texas and they refuse to buy a home unless it has a swimming pool. Let's just hope that's not going to be a deal-breaker. There are a lot of homes here in Texas that do have pools, but there are a lot of communities that have community swimming pools. Whether you live in the city and you can join this big, great community center with indoor pools and outdoor pools, and fitness centers. Or you live in a local subdivision where they also have those types of community pools. There are so many of those here in the Dallas area. And we absolutely love that when we moved here because we moved from Arizona and there were not very many of those. At the time we did not have a pool and we had little kids it was 120 degrees outside and we are absolutely roasting. When we moved here, we had so many options. That we could go to when we were first renting our home to go and, spend the day at the pool and actually get a little bit of relief from this crazy heat that we have here in Texas.
We also have multiple lakes, and a lot of them really are not that hard to get to with the number of lakes here in Texas. And it's like being in California, I guess you could say, or Florida, and you can go spend the day out on the beach and enjoy the lake. So another great way to enjoy some of these outdoor things here that Texas has to offer.
Wells and Septic
I always said when we moved here to Texas, that it's like living out in the countryside, even if you're living here in some of these communities that are not too far out of the downtown Dallas or Fort Worth areas. It's like living in the country. There are a lot of areas that still do have some land. Even in some of these neighborhoods where they do have acre properties you're going to have these homes that are on Wells and septic systems. Maybe you've never had one of those before because you've always lived in the big city and you don't even know what a well or a septic system is.
That shouldn't be something that is going to make or break your decision on purchasing a home. A lot of times if you have your own well, and you have a reverse osmosis system, you're drinking, it's gonna be so much better than the local city water that you're getting. And on top of that, your septic system, you're not going to have those extra costs incurred from the city by having to use the city utilities. There might be some different types of maintenance that you need to be aware of, but it is a thing here in Texas. If you wanna live on any sort of property septics and Wells can be quite common and it's not something that you should shy away from. It's just something that maybe you need to get a little bit more information on, but some of these communities are so beautiful. And if you just wanna be able to spread out a little bit and not be right on top of somebody in a brand new community all the time, definitely something to look into because some of these areas are truly beautiful.
Basements
One of the other big things that we realized when moving here was nobody in Texas has a basement. When you're coming from somewhere like the north, where you always had basements because it would be so cold and you would need to dig below the freezing line.
Here in Texas, we don't have that problem. We have awful soil. And at some point, you may have some problems with your foundation. So we don't have basements because of that reason, they're very expensive if you were to want them to build, but it's not really something that, that we have here almost, there are pretty much unheard of for the most part, unless you live on some sort of a hill and they can dig out part of it and then maybe on the backside, you have some sort of what looks like a basement, but you do not have a true basement here. But here in Dallas, we really don't have basements or anywhere in Texas for that matter. But what we don't have for basements, we do have for attics a lot of these homes don't have tons and tons of storage, but almost every home we have been in does have some sort of attic space. Here in Texas, it gets pretty dang hot. So it is nice to have that attic space to put things for storage. If you have old books or maybe your Christmas decorations, but because it's so hot here, that means our addicts are extremely hot. So it's not somewhere that you want to obviously save anything very valuable. It is nice having that extra storage for some of those things that you really don't wanna have in your house, or you don't even really have room for. And frankly, you'd prefer not to put in a storage unit, how we have so many storage units around here is beyond me because it seems everybody saves everything.
Neighbors are not Deal Killers
And the last thing we want to remind people of. If you find the most perfect home in the most perfect area and you move down and you realize your next-door neighbor's yard, isn't looking so hot. Maybe they have some weeds growing, or they need to come out and mow the lawn. That doesn't necessarily, always need to be the deciding factor because you don't know who's living there and you don't know how long they're gonna be living for either.
So maybe they're moving next week, or maybe you move in and you realize that maybe they have been sick and they haven't been able to take care of the yard, obviously who lives there can definitely change over time. But if you find the absolutely perfect house, that's for you in the perfect location. sometimes we just need to overlook a few of those weeds because maybe you're the one going to bring up the value of the neighborhood because you take such good care of your yard. Maybe that crazy neighbor who has 12 cars and never mows the lawn. Maybe they just needed somebody to inspire them, to take a little bit better care of what they have.
So we hope that this has helped answer some of those questions about what it's like moving here to Texas. And if you have any questions about where you need to move, what it's like moving there, and where you should consider laying your roots down, don't hesitate to reach out, call us, text us, send us an email and comment down below.
