[blparent] Advice: buying a house

[Jaquiss, Robert]

Hello:

     Over the years, I have bought and sold four houses and one mobile home. It is fairly typical for a real estate agent to drive his/her customers to see a property. My advice is to pick out the bus routes that work for you and tell the agent to look for houses near the routes. You might get a friend to drive the bus route and try and spot for sale signs.

     As for the mechanics of buying a house, I would advise having a trusted sighted person look over the property. Hopefully, you have a trustworthy agent, but some agents are more conscientious than others. A very thorough building inspection is very important. My wife and I bought a house and the inspection missed some major flaws resulting in us having to spend thousands of dollars to correct them. Its very wise to get insurance such as American Home Shield. This type of policy can insure against roof leaks, appliance break downs, plumbing problems etc. When my wife and I bought a house in Louisiana, we had AHS and it was a good thing since a heat pump failed a week after we moved in and it had to be replaced. When you make an offer, you can add a clause such as, "The house needs to meet the approval of xxx." This is a good backup in case you miss something and need to back out of an offer. My last piece of advice is to take your time and don't get rushed into a decision.

Regards,

Robert


Robert Jaquiss
Access Technology Specialist
National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute
200 E. Wells Street at Jernigan Place
Baltimore, MD 21230
Phone: (410) 659-9314, Ext.2422
Email: rjaquiss at nfb.org

-----Original Message-----
From: blparent-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:blparent-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of jan wright
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 7:53 AM
To: blparent
Subject: [blparent] Advice: buying a house

Hi All,
First, I want to thank everyone who responded to my questions about bottles and johnny jumper things.
We have a pretty consistent group of parents and child care providers who --- may not always agree, but give wonderful advice for each season of our lives. And, we are as diverse as any other parent group:
 from spiritual to not; from crunchy to progressive (those might not be opposites, but you understand what I mean); from babies to adult children; from stay-at-home parents  to working parents; ... etc.

So, I thought that I might post here about our "house buying" and ask for any tips and advice. I have done research, but, there isn't much from a blind person's prospective. Maybe there doesn't need to be:
because maybe it is not any different from sighted people buying a house. But, I did have a couple of questions:
1. How did you choose your realtor? We have one of these, already, but wonder if we  shouldn't have looked farther. DH's boss said that his realtor would transport him to and from the prospective houses. Is that normal??? We find that this is one of the most difficult things to do because paratransit takes so long, we can only see one house per day.
2. Public transportation is not very good here in Indy. People from other cities have commented on how fragmented it is. And, there aren't many sidewalks in residential areas or down busy streets and ... ... a good shoulder is hard to find. [ARe those words to a country song?????]  (smile) But, we are trying to find a house that is close to a bus stop --- and a bus stop that would take DH to work and us downtown. Sometimes we find a house close to a bus stop, but the wrong bus stops there.

Any other advice????

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