So you’re moving to Cincinnati. You’ve watched a few of our videos and you’re like, “Hey, that guy’s not a total idiot. I think I want to use that guys as my realtor.” We’re gonna talk about the 9 steps to buying a house in Cincinnati. My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and team Sztanyo.com, where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family. I’ve been wanting to do this for a little bit now, and it was confirmed earlier today when I was on a call with one of you viewers. And they were like, “Hey, you should probably make a video about what do you do if you wanna work with you?” And I thought, you know what you are right. That’s a really good idea. Here are 9 steps to buying a house in Cincinnati!
What does it look like if you’re moving in Cincinnati? You’re trying to buy a house and you wanna work with us, at team Sztanyo. That’s what this is all about. I’ve got 9 steps to buying a house in Cincinnati and what it looks like to work with team Sztanyo and what that process looks like to get you under contract on a home. So we are gonna take you through watching a YouTube video all the way until you get under contract on a house. We’re not gonna talk through getting under contract through closing right now but we will talk about that on my next. And I wanna start it out with this one so you guys know what are the steps to buying a house in Cincinnati.
The 9 Steps To Buying A House With Team Sztanyo
Step number one to working with team Sztanyo and buying your Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky home is watch our YouTube channel.
Step number two. And this is one of the most important steps to buying a house . You have to pay me $5,000 fee before I will do anything for you… I’m just playing y’all. 😂You don’t have to pay me a thing. I got you though there for a second.🤔 Didn’t I?. you’re like “who is this guy?” No, you don’t have to pay me a thing. If you never bought a house before, how it works is the sellers or the builder, they’re gonna be paying all the commission for the listing agent and the buyer’s agent. If you’re coming into town and you’re using me as your buyer’s agent to buy a house, you don’t have to pay me a dime. I’m free for you to use that’s whether you’re buying a resale home or a lot of people don’t realize this. Even if you’re buying new construction, the builder’s the one who pays for my commission and my fee. Typically in the Cincinnati area, that’s gonna be 6% total. 3% for the listing agent, 3% for the buyer’s agent. You as a buyer, don’t have to pay a thing.
Now, if you’re going to sell that house down the road, you have to pay that full 6% that comes out of the sale of your house. But when your buying, it doesn’t cost you a thing. A lot of people don’t realize this on the new construction, which is why I bring it up again. The builders already got that built into their numbers for buyers to have a buyer’s agent on their side. Most builders welcome that because they like having the buyer to have some representation on their side. So if you are looking at new construction in the area, whether it’s Fisher homes, Drees, or MI homes, or a custom home builder, like Zica or Five Daughters construction, something like that, what you wanna do is make sure you’re working with your realtor to make that introduction that way there’s that threshold meeting. Otherwise the builder might try to cut that agent out of the deal and you won’t get the representation.
Step number three to working with us is reach out, give us a call (513) 813-6293, or email me directly at Eric.Sztanyo@kw.com. And either myself or someone on our team will get back to you within 24 hours and we’ll get the process going.
It’s a good chance after that first time you reach out to us, we might email you a buyer questionnaire Google form that we have just to get some simple information and get an idea of some of the basics about your situation and in terms of what you need to do or steps to buying a house here in the Cincinnati area.
Step number four is a fun one. It’s what we call the buyer consultation. Now that’s either gonna happen in person. If you’re in town or you’re here for a visit, or we can do that via phone, or even a zoom call, Google meet something like that. And this is just where we’re getting to know each other a little bit better. You’re still kind of interviewing me and seeing like “Do I trust this guy? Is he competent? Do I wanna work with him?” So you’re under no obligation still at this point. But maybe a little bit more importantly. Well, I don’t know if it’s more important. But it’s important for me to do my job. I am getting to know you. I’m getting to know a little bit more about your story. I’m asking questions about your motivation, getting into the details of what you might be looking for and why that’s best for your family. We say here on the channel that we believe home is where your family grows strong together. We believe that very deeply.
If you don’t know, I have five kids and the rhythms and the practices and what we do in our house matters so much. It’s a huge character in our story and is in any family story. And so every family’s different every family has different needs. And so in this buyer consultation will we’re doing, is we’re finding out those needs. We’re also kind of finding out your needs and wants. And we’re kind of sorting out your criteria, trying to discover what is most important to you as one of the steps to buying a house. So we’re trying to figure out your top criteria and that more than likely is going to change as we go through this process. It might not. But most of the time when I’m working with buyers is we have an idea of what matters the most to you. And then when we get a little bit further on the process, some of that might switch a little bit. You might find that something that you thought was really important is a little less important and something that wasn’t important is a little more important. So that’s totally okay for that to happen. We’re trying to understand what that might be at the beginning of this process. And it’ll solid as we go.
Step number five and six might be interchangeable, but we’re gonna say number five is to connect you with local lender and get pre-approved. Now, if you’re not buying with cash, we need to figure out your financing, how you’re gonna get a loan. You can certainly use your current bank and lender that you’re using. You can use an online service such as, you know, Rocket Station or something like that. I always like to use a local lender and I’ve got a few here that I work with again and again. I don’t get kickbacks with them or anything like. That that’s illegal to do, but I use them again and again because they’ve proven themselves to be good for my clients.
And the other reason that I like local lenders is that, as you get closer to closing, things can happen that slow down the process or there’s problems or hiccups that come along. It’s always nice to be able to text the lender and be like “Hey, we got to get this thing figured out” Be able to walk into their office, see them face to face. They show up at closing someone that’s here that I know that used before. They’re incentivized to get the job done and make sure it works best for your clients and why, because I’m gonna probably send them more clients. So there is a referral relationship there But as opposed to using a bigger bank that might have a bigger service department, if you have a problem and you make a call, you might be speaking to somebody different every time.
You can go that route. I just personally, prefer to use local lenders who I’ve used again and again, and will probably connect you with them at this point in the process. So you’re gonna meet with them. You’re free to talk to multiple lenders that I send you and basically do the same thing that we’re doing here. Interview them and kind of decide not only who has the best rates, but who do you have a good rapport with? And who do you wanna work with and forward for the loan of your house.
If you’re thinking about new construction, oftentimes the builders will give you an incentive if you use their lender. That’s something you might want to consider too. So just one thing to think about there. If you are buying a new construction house in the Cincinnati area, you can talk with the lenders that I send to you, but you can also talk with the lender that the builder uses in-house and kind of compare apples to apples. See which way you might want to go.
Step number six is let’s start looking at houses. So I’m gonna set you up based on the buyer consultation, based on the criteria you gave me of your budget and location and neighborhoods and number of bedrooms, all the stuff we talked about in the buyer consultation. I’m gonna set up different MLS searches for you, which are basically gonna email you new houses every time it hits and matches your criteria.
Now, I typically recommend to buyers not to spend a lot of time online looking at houses until you’ve gotten that preapproval letter from the lender, because it’s still a seller’s market. There’s still low inventory and houses that you’re looking at are probably gonna be gone before you have any chance to put an offer on. If you’re doing it, to try to gain some information about the market and what general prices things are going for and how long things are staying on the market. I think that’s fine. What I want to caution you on is wasting hours upon hours, especially what I wanna caution you on is don’t let your or get involved in any one house that you see online. Remember that real estate photographers are very good at their jobs. And so what you’re seeing online may be different than what you go see in person. But at this point in the process, I’m gonna be sending you houses to look at, if you have searches set up on Zillow or realtor.com or Redfin or some other site like that, feel free to keep those. I always say because the advantage of the MLS and just so you know, there’s both a Cincinnati, Ohio MLS, and a Northern Kentucky MLS or two different states. So there’s two different MLS. So if you’re looking in the entire area, you’ll get emails from two different MLS sites.
So feel free to keep your website and your search portals to find something that might possibly get filtered out from the MLS. I always try to keep the MLS searches fairly broad so that I don’t filter out something that might work for you, just because inventory is so low right now. The biggest advantage of the MLS is it’s the source of the information. So any realtor that is listing a house, it goes to the MLS first that can get to you first. So you may have an advantage of speed before it syndicates out to the other websites of the world, like Zillow and realtor.com, etc. So you’re gonna get that information from the MLS first. And sometimes that might be helpful in beating out another buyer.
Step number seven is to go on in a home tour. Let’s go look at homes! So hopefully you can schedule a visit to the Cincinnati area. If you’re from out of town, or if you’re in town, we’re gonna schedule a tour. We’re gonna go home shopping. And what we wanna do is pick your top five to seven to eight favorites of all the houses you’re looking at. Again, if they’re priced right, and the condition is really nice, they’re gonna get cooped up really fast. They’re gonna be on the market for one or two days. Max probably be in multiple offers still. So whenever you are ready to actually schedule that tour, that’s when we’re gonna look at the houses that are active at that moment in time and create our tour of your favorite homes that we want to go see.
Now this might be me going out and showing you houses. It might be a showing assistant on our team, another agent that is qualified to go and help you get in these houses and kind of give you some information about what you’re seeing in the house. But what I love about this point of the process is I talked about that criteria earlier on that we had in the buyer consultation. Once you actually get out there into the neighborhoods and seeing these houses in person, your criteria starts to solidify even more. This is where you really find out “you know what? I thought we wanted an open floor plan, or I thought we really needed to walk out basement or a third finish bath or whatever the thing is.” And you realize you see what’s out there on the market and you say, no “What we really want is this, like, this is most important to us.” And so I always like this part of the steps to buying a house because a lot of buyers are worried about like “Oh, we don’t wanna waste your time. So seen a lot of houses and I appreciate that.”
But remember this is my job and we wanna make sure we find you the right house. Now, if we’re getting to like 20 houses and you haven’t made an offer yet, I’m gonna be kicking you in the butt a little bit. But if we’re talking like 5, 10, even 15 houses- the right one’s gonna surface. And I like going through that process with our buyers, because it becomes really clear as you’re out there like “oh, this is what I really want, not this,”
Step number eight, you found the right one. You found the house that you wanna make an offer on. So step number eight is we’re gonna make an offer. I’m gonna walk you through this entire strategy on the offer. And it depends on a lot of different factors. It depends on did the house just hit the market and it’s really competitive and we’ve got to beat out other buyers or has the house been on the market for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks?
And that’s a very different kind of strategy when it comes to making the offer. I’m gonna walk you through all those steps when we’re in person, but basically like on this side, you’ve got to be way more competitive and probably aggressive with your offer. But if it’s been out there for a little bit, you can probably be a little bit less aggressive and might even be able to go under asking price and maybe even get a little bit of a discount. So some of the things we are gonna talk about in the offer when it comes to that point is what is our offer price gonna be? How much earnest money are you gonna put down? Earnest money is simply, it goes to a third party -Escrow, If you go under contract and close in the house, it goes towards the money you need to bring to closing. Essentially it goes towards the purchase price.
There are roughly 3 contingencies in the Kentucky and Ohio. You’ve got some protection around your inspection, around your financing and around the appraisal, where if you need to, you can back out of the deal. If you find something you don’t like or something doesn’t work out and get that earnest money back. With the offer price. If we need to get more aggressive, we might consider doing in something like an escalation clause which is essentially like the max bid feature on eBay. If you’ve ever bid on something, it’s like, this is the highest I will go, but you’re not outbidding yourself. You’re only bidding over the highest other offer. So if you’re in a multiple offer situation, we might use something like an escalation clause that says I’ll be any other written offer you have by $1,500 up to X price, and that’s helped my buyers win a lot of different multiple offer situations in the last few years
A few other things we need to determine are, are we gonna ask for closing costs or not? Again, that goes back to, is it a competitive situation or not? And how that positions you as a buyer, really what matters to the seller is in the end is the net price. How much are they actually gonna get? So for example, an offer of $405,000 with $5,000 in closing costs, that’s a net $400. It’s the same as an offer of $400,000 with no closing costs. But to the seller, if they have two buyers who both do that, they might take the no closing cost buyer, because it just positions you as a stronger buyer who doesn’t need that extra $5,000 cash at closing. And so in their minds, they might say “oh, this, this person’s a little bit stronger.” A few other things we need to finalize are just the date of closing and how long are we gonna leave the offer open for them to respond to? Different MLS boards are different in different states and the contracts might be a little bit different than where you live in your state. So wanna make sure that’s clear. If you ever have any questions, just ask.
Step number nine, final step. You’ve made your offer. You maybe had a little bit of negotiations with the seller, but now you get under contract. Woohoo. So you’ve seen all the other houses that have gone pending in a day or two. Now you’re the one who’s gone pending. Congratulations. We did it. We got your house under contract. Now you are pending and not someone else. This home is yours. You’ve locked up your Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky house. You’re ready to go.
That’s the process guys. That’s what it looks like to work with team Sztanyo, from you reaching out and watching these videos all the way to getting a home under contract. Like I said, I’ll probably do a video in the future about what that next phase looks like from getting under contract to closing. But for now, hopefully that was helpful for you on what it might look like to work with us here at team Sztanyo and the process for buying a house.
Buying A Home Remotely
Just one other thing I wanna hit before we close out on this video is what does that look like remotely? What that looks like if you can’t come into town? So we can do a lot of this stuff via email, via phone call via Zoom. You can sign any document remotely via DocuSign is what we use. Let’s say you can’t get in town to see a house, but you want to go see it. What I can do is get on the MLS. I can look at the agent remarks, which are like the secret remarks that only us qualified agents get to see. I can send you the property disclosure so that you can review that and see if there’s any material defects with the home. And either myself, or like I said, one of my showing assistants can go do a virtual tour where we’re on a zoom call or Google meet or whatever. And we’re at the property walking you through the house.
So if you can’t be here, we try to do whatever we can remotely. Let’s say you come in in town, you get something on a contract, but obviously you’re not staying here for the next 30 days until closing. So you’re going back home. I’ll get into this in the other videos, but again, we’re gonna walk you through that process in terms of the inspections. Doing whatever we need to do to help you close the home remotely and make sure you can move to the area. And that process goes smoothly for you.
Help in Finding A House with Team Sztanyo
I hope that this was helpful for you to understand what it looks like to move to the Cincinnati area, work with a realtor remotely and what it looks like to work with myself and Team Sztanyo. We’ve got some assistance to help our transaction coordinators, some showing assistance we’re working to bring on more administrative help and some buyers agents in this next year as we’re ramping up. If this was helpful, please like the video below. Please subscribe to the channel. Thank you guys so much.