As they say in real estate, the three most important things to consider when buying a home is location, location, location. Once you have established what you need and want in a home, you need to decide where to look for a home.

1. School District: There are some important components to location when making this decision. If you have children, one of the big ones is the school district. If your children are already in school, you need to decide if you want to stay in the same school district so they don’t have to change. If they aren’t yet in school, you want to consider what school district you prefer, and specifically what schools in the district you want them to attend. Historically, homes in good school districts appreciate better and hold their value better than equivalent homes with poorer quality schools. This makes school selection not just an important investment in your children, but also an important investment in your home.
2. Work: Another important location factor to consider is proximity to work. Given the uncertainty of the cost of gasoline, commuting costs are definitely worth factoring in. It’s also important to factor in the amount of time your commute takes. If you live an hour away from where you work, not only are the gas costs going to be enormous, but that means two hours per day of driving, which is a lot of extra time away from home.
3. Lifestyle: Amenities are also important when deciding on location. How close do you want to be to the grocery store, your favorite restaurants and your favorite entertainment locations? Long travel times to get to these locations is not just inconvenient, but adds to gas costs too. In some cases, if you are trying to cut down on dining out to save money, you might want to move just a bit farther away from your favorite restaurants so you are less likely to frequent them.
4. Safety: The last location factor to take into account is crime. For the sake of the safety of you and your family, the lower the crime rates, the better. It will also affect the long-term value of your home. If you live in a high crime area, appreciation rates will be slower and in a down market, your home will decline in value faster. Larger cities tend to have higher crime rates than small towns, so you can’t compare the crime rate in San Francisco, California to Cheboygan, Michigan. However, many cities have good and bad neighborhoods. As a general rule, the better the neighborhood, the better off you are.

In summary, you want a house that is in the best school district, a five minute or less commute to work, close to all of the best amenities and in a zero crime neighborhood. If you find one, let me know because I’m not sure they really exist. Obviously, when you add all of these factors together, selecting the location for your home is a series of compromises. You want good schools, but you don’t want that to put you an hour away from work. You want to be close to amenities that are important to you, but not too close if it means you have to settle for a high crime neighborhood, and so on.

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How to Get Sellers to Call You and Offer you Their Home for a Rent-to-Own

Now that we’ve discussed ways to find rent-to-own homes, what would you say to having rent-to-own sellers call you and offer you their home? That’s right. You can just sit by the phone and wait for sellers to call you and tell you about their rent-to-own home.

Many of these sellers will not have their homes listed with a real estate agent, so if you are working with an agent, this may not be for you.

The advantage of having the seller call you is that you already know he is willing to consider rent-to-own. You just need to figure out if his home and terms will work for you.

“Alright Wendy! So how do I do this?”

Posting ads is a way to get sellers to come to you.

Posting Ads

The first way is by posting ads about yourself and rent-to-own. Here is one example:

This is a sample ad of what you would put in the newspaper where space is an issue – the more space you use the more it costs you. These ads though are just enough to get the attention of a home seller who has started to think about what choices he must make if he doesn’t sell soon.

You can also post an ad on FREE sites like Craigslist, Yahoo! groups and Google groups. I also recommend posting some flyers on community bulletin boards as well as posting flyers using these FREE Internet sites. These methods are much cheaper than the newspaper classified ads and may be all you need.

The whole purpose of these ads is to filter out the home sellers who don’t want tenants and to get the ones that would consider tenants to call you.

Here are some questions you can ask sellers once they call you:

• Where is your home located?
• Can you tell me what price you are looking to get for your home?
• How many bedrooms and baths does it have?
• Do you know what the rental rates are in your area? About how much were you thinking for monthly rent?

Not only will these questions help you gain more information about the sellers, it will also help you build rapport with the seller as well.  Check out my book Rent-to-Buy to learn more about other ways to get sellers to call you.

Rent to Buy is your hands-on guide to buying your next home as a rent to own.  You can get your next home NOW without having to qualify for a mortgage until later.  To Learn more about Option Agreements purchase your copy of Rent-to-Buy today.

Feel free to comment and let me know of other ways you  have sellers calling you!