How Does Buying a Home in Frisco, Texas Work, Step by Step?

Buying a home in Frisco, Texas works in four stages. You get ready by learning what you can afford. You explore your loan choices and meet lenders. After you make an offer, you choose a loan offer. Then you get ready to close and carry the paperwork across the finish line. The first two stages happen before you make an offer, and the last two happen after.

I'm Omega Mejia, a real estate agent with Simply Great Real Estate Group, and I help buyers in Frisco, Texas and across Collin County. If you are a first-time buyer wondering where to even begin, this is the order things happen in, and the one move in each stage that keeps you out of trouble.

You figure out how to get started, how much you can afford, and what to expect. The first tools are plain ones: your credit report and a record of what you spend each month. A buyer who walks into a lender's office with those two things in hand has a much shorter first meeting.

This is also the stage where you decide what matters. I work through it with buyers using my getting pre-approved steps and the CLEAR Real Estate Method, so your wish list and your budget are in the same conversation before you see a single house.

Once you know your priorities and budget, you start home shopping and meet with lenders. Rates and loan types vary, and the point of this stage is to compare more than one offer before you commit to any of them.

The lender's early numbers come in the form of a Loan Estimate. It lays out the loan term, the interest rate and whether it is locked, your estimated total monthly payment, and the costs of the loan. Keep it, because it is the document you will hold your final paperwork against later.

This is the moment you move from planning to a contract. In Texas, the contract is the whole game, because there is no automatic cooling-off period for a home purchase. Your rights to cancel come from the contract, most often through the option period, a negotiated term that gives you the right to terminate for any reason by written notice if you paid the option fee on time.

The deposit that shows you are serious is earnest money, delivered to the escrow agent within the time the contract sets. A missed deadline lets the seller terminate. My post on changing your mind after signing covers those dates in detail, and my making an offer page shows how I build an offer with a buyer.

After you make an offer, you get official loan offers, compare them and choose one. The Loan Estimate is the tool here, and a buyer who kept the earlier one can line the new one up beside it.

Your lender may also need an appraisal of the home. You are entitled to a copy of it, and a low appraisal gives you evidence to negotiate with. My post on what happens if a Frisco home appraises below your offer goes through that moment.

You submit paperwork and track the details step by step. The lender gives you your Closing Disclosure three business days before your scheduled closing, so you have time to compare it to your Loan Estimate and fix problems. The loan term, product and type should match. If the loan amount or the estimated monthly payment moved, you should hear why.

This is also the window when scammers target buyers who are about to move money. My post on how Frisco buyers protect their money from wire fraud at closing covers it, and my closing day page shows what the day looks like.

The Loan Estimate is worth a closer look, because it is the first place the whole loan shows up on one page. It lists the loan term and purpose, the loan amount, the principal and interest, and your estimated total monthly payment, including escrow items.

It also tells you whether the rate is fixed or adjustable and whether it is locked, and whether the loan carries a prepayment penalty, a balloon payment or mortgage insurance. The costs are there too: origination charges, third-party services, points and lender credits. Some of those services are ones you can shop for. The comparison figures, including the APR, let you set two lenders' offers side by side.

Bring your credit report and your spending record. Those are the two tools the first stage is built on, and they turn a vague conversation into a specific one. A lender can talk about a monthly payment you can live with when you can show what you spend now.

Bring your priorities too. Knowing which parts of a home are must-haves and which are nice-to-haves keeps your search inside your budget, and it gives me something real to work from when I set up your home search in Frisco, Texas.

The timeline depends on the dates in your contract, because the contract sets the option period, the earnest money deadline and the closing date. No two buyers have the same calendar, and a buyer who negotiates a longer option period has a different schedule than a buyer who negotiates a shorter one.

A tidy way to picture it: the first half of the process is yours to shape, and the second half is mostly dates. Before the offer, you decide how much house fits your life and which lender fits your loan. After the offer, the contract and the lender's paperwork set the pace, and your job is to meet each date with the right document in hand.

What does not change is the order. Getting ready comes first, then loan choices, then the offer and the loan offer, then closing. If you know which stage you are in, you know what comes next.

You can make the whole process feel smaller by taking it one stage at a time:

• Pull your credit report and track your spending first. They are the two tools that open the first lender conversation.
• Meet with more than one lender. Compare their Loan Estimates side by side.
• Choose your option period on purpose. It is a negotiated term, and it is your main exit after you sign.
• Calendar every date the day you sign. Earnest money, option period and closing.
• Hold your Closing Disclosure against your Loan Estimate. You have three business days to do it.

If you are a first-time buyer in Frisco, Texas and want a plan that fits your own timeline, start with my buying a home page and the buying process. You can read the short answer on my FAQ page. If you want to build your plan with me, contact me.

Source: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, buying a house, Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure guidance; Texas Real Estate Commission consumer information. This is general information, not legal, tax, financial or insurance advice.