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12 Things to Check Before Buying a Home | Buyer Due Diligence Checklist

[00:00:00] Okay. If you are looking at purchasing property, that's on rural land, acreage, or buying where there's not fencing, you're gonna wanna know where your property lines are, and the best way to do that is, obviously, to have it surveyed, but to do your best to walk the property line. So here, where I am, it's fenced.

My whole lot is fenced. I don't have to worry about where is my lot line. Sorry, my whole yard's being renovated. It's monsoon, so they can't do anything right now. It's kind of a disaster, but it'll look great one more time. But as you can see, there's fencing all along my property line, so I don't have to worry about that.

However, those of you that don't have that, you're gonna either wanna have it surveyed if it's very, very important to you, and you definitely wanna walk your property line if you can. If it's a huge lot, obviously it's gonna be challenging, but you do wanna do [00:01:00] your best to learn, where are my property lines?

Where are my neighbors, and who are my neighbors? So if I wanna do something, who do I have to ask? Another thing about my property is The sun comes up on this side, so all of my w- windows on this side of the house, I have sunscreens all the way around, but I also close the shades, pull the blinds, because it gets very hot.

And those are things you wanna know. Now, there's no bedrooms on this side, so that's good news, but you definitely wanna assess that because that's gonna make a difference when you purchase your home and your heating bill, or, I'm sorry, your AC bill. Next, you want to open and close your windows to make sure that they're not painted shut.

All right, so let's open this window. Oh, it helps to take out the security window rod. [00:02:00] You know, security. All right, window opens. Ooh, that's good. Closes. Lock. And don't forget to put back the security rod. That window works. And you wanna do that on every window in the house. Now, they talked about checking the laundry location, and this is my laundry room, and I'm gonna tell you, the location is fine.

It's right off the garage, inside though. However, I would really want to redo this because it's very tight, and that's something to keep in mind is, is this gonna work for you? You know, we added a little tiny utility sink, 'cause I wanted a utility sink, but honestly, when you get these little laundry rooms, you wanna think about, "How would I remodel this?"

It's gonna be a future [00:03:00] expense, you know. You wanna check and see if there's cell phone service. In every room in your house, and internet, because if you're like me and you work from home, that darn cell phone service is gonna be key. Very important. All right, so we are looking to see are the outlets working.

That one's working. Both of them are working

Are these both working? Let's unplug the kitty water and see if both work. Yep, that one's working. And you wanna do that through the entire home, every single outlet, however many there are. Now yes, your home inspector will do that, but it never hurts for you to double-check, or at [00:04:00] least ask and make sure that your home inspector is going to be checking all of the outlets.

You wanna check that all of the interior locks are working. So I have a deadbolt, and then we have a security door. That's up, that's locked, that's working. And you also wanna make sure that the keypad works if there's a keypad. Sorry. Up there. All right, so that's locking. Okay? So you wanna make sure all those things are working properly throughout the house, and that includes interior bedroom doors, closet doors, bathroom doors, and also make sure you've got a key or a way to unlock every door, every closet.

I accidentally ... I don't know, it wasn't an accident. I intentionally locked the door to my bedroom to test it, [00:05:00] but instead of just locking it and keeping the door open, my cat was in the bedroom. I lo- with no litter box, no water, no anything. I locked the door, pulled the door shut, and now I'm like, "Where's the key?

Where's the key?" I was freaking out a little bit. So I'm just saying, it's kind of a big deal checking the locks for security and to be able to get your children or grandchildren out of the bathroom, out of the bedroom, out of the closet that they just locked themselves into. All right. Now, the next thing is will two cars fit in the garage?

Now, I apologize, my garage is sort of a holding ground right now for a bunch of stuff, but as you can see, there's a lot of room And there's a lot of room. This is an older home, so it has an actual two-car garage. However, many of the newer homes do not, and I've literally had people [00:06:00] drive in one direction and back in the other so that two cars can fit in here.

So the passenger side are really close to each other, and that's how they do it, or one car has to sit outside. So welcome to my messy garage. And I forgot to mention with the garage, please check to make sure if you have a long, like a, an extended cab long bed pickup truck or one that's got l- higher tires, two things: Is it gonna fit in lengthwise, and is it going to get under the garage door?

So those are things that I've learned people need to think about, as well as if you have small little campers, will they fit in the garage? You wanna test the water pressure, that's really good water pressure, at all of your faucets and shower heads Oh, that's looking good. Very nice. Very nice. [00:07:00] Car wash.

Let's turn the shower off and see if we've got good pressure below.

Oh yeah, we're good. Okay, the next thing that I wanna just kind of point out is you've gotta listen to if noise is an issue for you. You want to visit the neighborhood at different times of the day because I live right next to the airport, and I'm gonna be honest, in the morning a lot of times they're doing a lot of flying back and forth, because,

I can't think of the school, but there's a school in Prescott, and they fly back and forth to the Cottonwood Airport as part of their flight school. Thankfully we live in a pretty quiet neighborhood, but dogs barking, traffic, airplanes, you definitely wanna visit at different times of the day. You wanna come by in the evening.

What's it like in the evening? What's it like on the weekends? It could be q- noisier. [00:08:00] Now, I've yet to come into any really noisy neighborhoods here in the community, but my tolerance is very different from many other people's tolerance, so it's definitely a very personal thing to try and figure out what noise level can I handle.

Another thing you wanna look for is grading. Now, this is my front yard, and the grading is very important here because you don't want water when it is monsoon season in particular, and we're finding out some stuff here, because water will find its way. So if you're looking at a property, you want the grading to be going away from the house, sloping away from the house.

So mine is, as you can see, there's a little bit of a hill over here, so it's sloping away from the house. That's the important part, is that it's sloping away. And now, we walked through the backyard and there wasn't any pooling of water- But pooling of water, seeing [00:09:00] trenches, things like that because right now if you're shopping now, it's great 'cause you can really tell because we are now experiencing monsoons.

But as best you can, evaluate the grading in the yard. Another thing that you do need to evaluate is storage. This is not a storage closet . This is actually the primary bedroom, closet, and you have to look. Okay, this is how they set it up, but is this gonna work for you? And again, if it's not, don't write off the house, but just keep in mind what's it gonna cost me to make this space work for me, okay?

So we're gonna look at other... You're gonna wanna look in every room to see what storage there is. And then obviously the, well, we've got that. There's a double vanity and lots of cupboards under there. So seems to be a lot of storage in this bedroom bathroom. Let's go check another. All right. So in [00:10:00] this bedroom there's a closet.

All right. So this closet has some hanging, and then they put shelves in and hanging, and I believe there's some hanging space on the other side. So this has a pretty standard closet By p- with the doors. All right, let's continue our little journey. Okay, we have one hall closet One hall closet. Pretty decent size.

And let's not forget the kitchen pantry. So this is good si- it's very high and it's deep

I think on the bottom So again, keep in mind, storage. Is this going to meet your needs as a homeowner [00:11:00] with multiple children, with, say, a business maybe you're needing to store a product, or you like to shop at Costco and you need a room that's just your Costco room. So storage, keep in mind what is the storage needs.

Okay. So that is your 12 items. You wanna make sure that either you're inspecting for it or your home inspector's inspecting for it. Some of it's very personal, the storage space, the east-west, the layout of the sun, where the sun is, the lot lines, all of that. That's personal. Your home inspector's not gonna evaluate that.

They're not gonna drive in two cars and make sure they fit in the garage. So those are things you wanna take care of and assess during your dual dil- due diligence period. It's not something you can do after the fact. It is now, so you don't have surprises later. Click on the link below and you can get our [00:12:00] PDF listing all of these that you can bring with you on every house, and you can pre-check some of these things that are important to you, and then you can go over them again once you're under contract and they're part of your negotiations.

All right? So please click the link, say, "Surprise," because that's gonna get you the PDF.