Buying a home in the USA

Now that we have reached the finish line, and are homeowners, I thought I would look back over the last couple of months at the process of buying a home in the USA (or Virginia, at least).

Home sales here fall into one of the following three categories: regular sales, foreclosures & short sales.

The first is self-explanatory; the second - which has become an infamous word to English-speakers the world over - is where the house has been reclaimed by the bank providing the mortgage, due to non-payment.

This can sometimes mean that the house is in a bad state, either due to the former owner's financial situation or because they ripped out everything in response to losing their home. Equally, however, the bank often pays for renovations, with a view to shifting the house ASAP. They are often well priced, but may not be completely straightforward to purchase, and are often more "fixer uppers".

Then there are Short Sales. This is where the seller is in negative equity, a sadly common occurrence since the housing crisis, and has to obtain agreement from their lender to sell at a loss for them. This complexity means that negotiations can be long and protracted.

Since time was of the essence in our case, with Roman’s birth not too many month away, after considering various options we ended up going for a regular sale.

The two areas we were looking at, Manassas and Woodbridge are each about 30 miles away from our old apartment, along the area's two Interstate highway arteries, and offer house prices within our budget, while still being close enough as to allow access to Washington.

Once you choose a house and decide to make an offer, there are stacks of documents to initial – in our case we were at it for three hours! The key parts are the amount of the offer and the "escalation clause" – this codifies an increment by which the offer will increase automatically, in response to competing offers from other potential buyers, and defines a ceiling value, when you wish to drop out.

Once our offer was accepted, we had to go through a couple of rights of passage, after either of which we had the right to drop out of the purchase.

Firstly, the home inspection is where you look around your house-to-be with an independent expert, to ensure that everything is as it should be, and if necessary to set rectification conditions for the sellers, before the sale can proceed.

Second, the home appraisal is another inspection – this time unaccompanied – by someone representing the mortgage company, to ensure that the price being paid, and hence the sum being loaned, is a fair representation of market value.

Provided that both of these pass off without a hitch, it's time to arrange a date for "closing" – when all the final paperwork on the loan and ownership of the property is completed.

We closed on our new house, a 3 bed, 2.5 bath condo townhouse on the edge of Manassas, on 13th March 2012, and the first 9 months of being homeowners have been great!

Our house is a "condominium", which means that responsibility for outdoor upkeep (roof, walls, communal grounds, refuse collection) falls to a "Condo Board", and is covered by a monthly fee.

So there you have it – a brief master class in homebuying, US-style!