The steps, in the order they come

Nearly everyone does this backwards. They fall for a place first, then go looking for a way to afford it. That’s a painful order, because the house you’ve already pictured your kids in turns out to be a stretch, and every place you see afterwards gets measured against it.

So the first real step has nothing to do with property. Work out what you’ve saved, what a lender will consider lending you, and what you’re comfortable repaying in a year that goes badly. Those are three different numbers, and only the middle one comes from a bank.

Every purchase has its own trouble, but the sequence underneath barely changes. It starts a long way from a house.

1. First

   Get your deposit and your borrowing position clear, and get a lender’s view of it in writing. If the First Home Owner Grant or a duty concession applies to you, this is the week you learn that, because it changes what you can spend.

2. Then

   Look. Go to opens in the suburbs you can genuinely afford, at the times of day you would actually be home. Walk the street, not just the house.

3. When you find it

   Ask for the contract and the vendor statement, the one people call the Section 32, before you make an offer and not after. Send both to a conveyancer or a lawyer. It costs a little and saves a great deal.

4. Once the offer is in

   You negotiate the price, the settlement date and any conditions, in writing. A condition is only real once it’s written into the contract. Finance, the building inspection and anything the seller promised to fix all belong in there.

5. After you sign

   Your lender does its own valuation and turns the pre-approval into a formal approval. Your conveyancer starts the searches and the transfer. You pay the balance of the deposit, and then mostly you wait, which nobody warns you about.

6. On the day

   Settlement happens between the lawyers and the banks, and the agent hands over the keys once it’s confirmed. It’s quieter than you expect.

Victoria has a First Home Owner Grant, and it has duty concessions for first home buyers. Both are real, both come with conditions, and both have changed more than once. The grant goes with new homes, so an established house won’t attract it. The concessions are tied to what you pay, so where that line sits changes what you can look at.

What we’ll say is this. The difference between qualifying and missing out can come down to the price you agree on and whether the home is new. Both are decisions, not accidents, and both are far easier to make before an offer than after one.

We’re the agent, so we’re selling the house. Worth being plain about that. What we also do, because most of the people we work with are buying for the first time, is sit on your side of the paperwork.

• Read the contract and the vendor statement with you, line by line, in the language you think in.
• Tell you what a place is likely to need in its first year, and roughly what that costs, before you decide you love it.
• Point you to a conveyancer and a broker, and stay in the conversation when you talk to them.
• Say so when a home is wrong for you. That happens more often than you’d expect from an agent, and it’s the part of this we’re proudest of.
• Answer the phone after settlement, when the questions don’t stop.

None of that is unusual. It’s just slower than the way this is normally done, and slower is the point.

If you’re at the very start, before a deposit, before a lender, before anything, that’s the best possible time to call. There’s nothing to sell you yet, which makes it an easy conversation.