The Complete Idiot's Guide to Buying and Selling a Home

by Shelley O'Hara, Nancy D Lewis, Nancy D. Lewis, et al.

Book Overview

Explains how to locate a house to buy, negotiate an offer, get a mortgage, use the Internet to finance and sell one's home, increase resale value, and sell without a real estate agent.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 002863960X
• ISBN13: 9780028639604
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Very Useful Tool

My husband and I were given this book as a gift when we started looking for our first home. We found the information a great resource to help build a foundation of knowledge during the whole process from looking for homes to closing on a home. We used this good as a go-to resource to understand the overall process and the different options. This book though is not to be used as your only resource. It's also very important to have a good team working for you - realtor, mortgage broker, etc. They will help fill in the blanks and give you more specifics like what is the best kind of loan for your situation. Especially in today's changing market it's important to have people who have your back. The papers needed by lenders are changing on a daily basis. I highly recommend this book!

The best book I've read on buying a home

I've read a number of books on home buying before making my first purchase and this was the most informative book of the bunch. I even read it a few times to better remember details of the home buying process.

Very helpful

I'm reading this book so that I can purchase my first home. This book takes you through all the steps and is a no-nonsense guide.

Very Helpful

Though some of the information is general, this book covers about anything you'd need to know about buying or selling a home. And the information in this revised 5th edition is very much up-to-date. You can't beat it for making the world of Real Estate easy to understand. Hence, "Idiot's" Guide, and when it comes to Real Estate, that definitely includes me.

Best home buying primer

I'm currently in the rush to buy a condo in a seller's-market city, and in the last two weeks I read through a dozen home-buying advice books. The Complete Idiot's Guide is by far the best of the bunch, and in case you are comparison-shopping, I think it's much better than the For Dummies title.The biggest reason is the book, now in its fourth edition, is very comprehensive. The bulk of it covers the buying aspects, but there are a few chapters devoted to selling, and this is a great arrangement. As a potential buyer, it's to your advantage to know what it's like to sell, so when you select a property you will instinctly think of the time when you need to or have to sell. In my caes, I plan to live in the condo for about 5 years and then move to a different city, so having a seller's perspective while I shop for a condo is really helpful. For instance, I saw a nice condo yesterday which I would have bought but when I considered the selling perspective, I saw some problems and decided not to pursue it. As a home buyer, especially a first-time home buyer like myself (that's why I bought this book!), you really want to make a well-rounded decision. Sure there's no perfect house out there -- unless your definition of "perfect" is imperfect -- but the last thing you want is spend half a million dollars on something you regret right after you sign the closing docs.Second, compared to many books this one is very well written. Maybe I have a slight bias in favor of female writers, but I find women tend to be better in explaining complicated concepts than men. This book is a perfect example of my stereotype. Every chapter is easy to read and follow, and you see the major points right away. The For Dummies title in particular suffers from information overflow and leaves you wondering what you've just read. Which makes it next to being worthless, especially if you are in a rush to get acquainted with the real estate market. There's a lot of information in this idiot's book but the top-notch organization makes it easy to digest... and remember.(Don't forget, you don't want to carry a home-buying primer around when you shop for a house! If you did you'd simply be taken for an unpleasant ride by greedy sellers and brokers.)Third, like I mentioned before, this book also covers aspects of the selling process, so it's a great book to keep in case you need to sell. In addition, when you do sell, you can review the home-buying chapters to learn what motivates the buyer, so to get your best deal!To be honest at first I didn't like the format of this book; the page is wide and there seem too many words. But because the authors write well and clearly, I eventually found it the best primer on home buying, with bonus coverage on the basic of home selling.Very highly recommended, especially to previously clueless people like yours truly.