How to Create PDF House-buying Checklists.
Purchasing a new home or property is a little like sitting in front of an empty canvas. It’s something that you can truly make your own. But with that opportunity comes financial responsibilities — and risks, too. As the home buyer, it’s up to you to make sure everything about the house meets what you want, can afford, and expect before you make an offer, hand over your cash, commit to a mortgage, and then move in.
Creating PDF checklists for house buying is a great way to ensure you tick off everything that should be covered.
What you’ll learn.
- Why using PDFs for house-buying checklists makes sense
- What to include in house buying checklists
- How to manage different types of checklists
Using PDF checklists for home buying.
Buying a house can be a fun, exciting and emotional time all wrapped into one — whether you’re buying your first home or looking for something bigger, smaller, or just in a different location.
Home buying is a big financial commitment and investment, so it’s important to think through every aspect of the property buying process. You’ve got your finances and budget to take into consideration, the property type and location you want to live in, and what should be checked and inspected before your property purchase.
It makes sense to create a home buyer checklist PDF for such a major purchase. But why PDFs?
- PDFs are portable — Adobe invented the portable document format (PDF) to be portable, just as the name says. PDFs can easily be shared between different systems and devices such as laptops, computers and phones and accessed and edited with our free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
You can access a copy of your house-buying checklist on your mobile phone while you’re viewing properties. You can also easily share them, if you wish, with other interested parties such as lenders, real estate agents, and building inspectors.
- PDFs are dynamic and versatile — There’s a lot you can do with a PDF aside from a straight list of text with tick boxes.
Insert other interactive and visual features such as images of properties, links to websites, and more, to make your home-buying checklists something to create that home-buying dream a reality.
- PDFs are editable and convertible — It’s easy to edit a PDF. You can edit a PDF within any of the Acrobat apps, or just drag and drop and edit a PDF online.
PDFs are easily converted to and from other formats. For example, if you prefer to create a house-buying checklist in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, just convert it to PDF whenever you want.
What to include in house buying checklists.
Three main types of checklists are helpful to create when you’re looking to buy a house. Plan and itemise everything in a house-buying checklist PDF around your finances, what you’re looking for, and then what to check when you’ve found a property you like.
Items to include in three types of house-buying checklists to get you started are —
Financial checklist for buying a house.
It is wise to start with your finances before you begin looking at properties. Knowing what you can afford to buy, maintain, and what property value lenders will give you a mortgage for saves time in the house hunt and prevents any disappointment from finding a home and then finding it’s out of reach.
Along with knowing your monthly budget and what you can afford to pay in house payments, other amounts to include in house-buying financial checklists are:
- Deposit needed
- Amount you can borrow
- Mortgage application fees
- Building and property inspections and surveys
- Property valuation fees
- Lawyer, solicitor, and/or conveyancer fees
- Ongoing expenses such as insurance, rates, repairs, and maintenance
- Moving costs and lock replacements
Checklist for your preferred location and property type.
Your checklist for preferred location and property type should take into consideration your lifestyle. This type of property buying checklist might include both must-have and nice-to-have items such as —
Location
- Nearness to work and/or schools
- Shopping and supermarkets
- Healthcare
- Neighbours, neighbourhood, and suburb
- Leisure activities such as parks and restaurants
- Transportation and roading networks
Property type
- House, townhouse, unit, flat or apartment
- Type of title — such as freehold, leasehold, strata
- Number of bedrooms
- Number of stories
- Parking and garaging
- Size of outdoor space
Checklist for viewing and inspecting homes.
The amount of time you have inside a home when you view before you buy is very small considering the investment you are putting in. Inspect the property thoroughly. Don’t rely just on the marketing materials online, or your quick walkthrough in an open time. Take the time to check different things throughout the property, if not on your first viewing, then definitely on your next viewing and any final pre-settlement inspection.
In a home inspection checklist for buyers, you should include things like —
- Built-in appliances — turn them on and make sure all the knobs work.
- Light and electrical fittings — flip all switches on and off.
- Cabinets and drawers — open and close to ensure they fit correctly
- Plumbing — run the shower and taps and flush toilets to check for pressure and leaks
- Windows and doors — open and close to check the fit
- Window and door handles — check window and door handles are secure
- Glass and windows — check for cracks and weather tightness of seals
- Flooring — check the condition of carpets and hard flooring and signs of damage
- Smoke alarms — check smoke alarm installations meet state regulations
- Pests — look for signs of pest infestation such as droppings
- Chattels — check the condition of any non-fixed items to be sold with the house such as curtains.
- Outside areas — check the outside of the house, garden, and paved areas for any signs of cracks, water pooling or other damage.
A professional pre-settlement building inspection by a registered builder should also be obtained. Many lending institutions will ask for a builder’s report, and/or inspections by professionals. Building inspections look at structural soundness, safety, and anything that may need repair.
Managing multiple house-hunting checklists.
Creating checklists that you can interact with while you are viewing properties helps keep track of what you’ve seen — especially if you’re viewing multiple properties. Create something that you can edit or quickly add notes or comments to while you are on your mobile phone while you are at the house or in the car before you drive away to remember what you’ve seen and your first impressions.
Whether you create one long checklist and multipage PDF document of everything involved in buying a property or separate pages covering the various stages of a property purchase is up to you. Either way, you can have the power with PDFs to alter the content as and when you need to. It’s simple to work with your checklists and do things in an Acrobat app or via the Acrobat web-based online services such as —
Related content.
A few other articles to check out on using PDFs that may be useful when buying a house include —
- Using PDFs for real estate: Managing property documents and transactions
- PDFs for better family budgeting and financial planning
- Cloud PDF storage and file sharing — access documents anywhere, anytime
