Product Description

This new edition of America's # 1 best-selling real estate book takes the pain out of choosing, negotiating for, and buying a home. Helping home buyers save time and money, personal finance guru Eric Tyson and real estate maven Ray Brown deliver the up-to-date information people need, showing them how to:

• Research neighborhoods and home values
• Select the best mortgage-including the latest developments
• Understand the pros and cons of buying different types of housing
• Assemble the right team for putting the deal together
• Negotiate the best price and terms

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #279385 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
This may be the best comprehensive guide for home buyers. Home Buying for Dummies is coauthored by Eric Tyson, author of several other books in the For Dummies series, and Ray Brown, a long-time real estate professional. Like other books in the series, this one is an easy and even entertaining read. But it does not gloss over details in pursuit of simplicity. Home Buying for Dummies covers all the bases, providing clear explanations and reasonable judgments on how to select a mortgage, hire a real estate agent, find the right house, and negotiate a good deal. The book goes further than most in providing helpful, specific information. For example, in discussing ways to save money for a future down payment, Home Buying for Dummies even includes the phone numbers for various mutual funds appropriate to different investment time frames. --Barry Mitzman

From the Back Cover

"If you are considering buying a home, don't fail to read this excellent new book."
—Robert Bruss, real estate columnist, about Home Buying For Dummies, 1st Edition

In the market for a home, but don't know where to start? Not to worry! From financing, mortgages, and credit scores to closing the deal, bestselling real estate authors Eric Tyson and Ray Brown walk you step by step through the entire home-buying process.

Discover how to

• Harness the Internet to help in your search
• Determine how much home you can afford
• Select the right type of mortgage
• Work with agents, brokers, lenders, and lawyers
• Research neighborhoods and home values

About the Author
Eric Tyson is a syndicated personal financial writer, lecturer, and counselor. He is dedicated to teaching people to manage their personal finances better. Eric is a former management consultant to Fortune 500 financial service firms. Over the past two decades, he has successfully invested in securities as well as in real estate and has started and managed several businesses. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics at Yale and an M.B.A. at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
An accomplished freelance personal finance writer, Eric is the author of five other national best-sellers in the...For Dummies series: Home Buying (co-author), Personal Finance, Investing, Mutual Funds, and Taxes (co-author). His work has been featured and praised in hundreds of national and local publications, including Newsweek, Kiplinger's, The Wall Street Journal, Money, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and on NBC's Today Show, PBS's Nightly Business Report, CNN, The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC, CNBC, Bloomberg Business Radio, CBS National Radio, and National Public Radio.
Eric has counseled thousands of clients on a variety of personal finance, investment, real estate, and mortgage quandaries and questions. In addition to maintaining a financial counseling practice, he is a popular speaker on important personal finance topics.

Ray Brown, co-author of the national best-seller Home Buying For Dummies, is a veteran real estate broker with more than two decades of hands-on experience. A former vice president and manager for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage Company and McGuire Real Estate, and founder of his own real estate firm, the Raymond Brown Company, Ray is currently a writer, radio talk show host, and public speaker on residential real estate topics.
Ray believes that most people are pretty darn smart. When they have problems, it's usually because they don't know the right questions to ask to get the information they need to make good decisions. This book completes Ray's residential real estate trilogy and fulfills his dream of helping folks find their way through the often mystifying process of buying, financing, and selling their homes.
On his way to becoming a real estate guru, Ray worked as the real estate analyst for KGO-TV (ABC's affiliate in San Francisco), a syndicated real estate columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, and he hosts a weekly radio program, Ray Brown on Real Estate, for KNBR. In addition to his work for ABC, Ray has appeared as a real estate expert on CNN, NBC, CBS, and in The Wall Street Journal and Time.

Customer Reviews

This is the book I used most often
I just successfully bought my first house. I shopped Amazon.com and bought half-a-dozen "how to" books for buying a house before I started my search. I was buying this house on my own, and had no one to rely on for hand-holding or expert advice. I also had a lot of qualms about the whole process. Out of all the books I bought, this was the one I kept going back to. It's typical of a "Dummies" book in that it doesn't give you too much unusable knowledge, but--coversely--it also doesn't drill down to the nth degree on any one topic. This is okay, though. With the usual high-quality editing that goes into most "Dummies" books, this one is very easy to read. It talks about who to hire (e.g., real estate agent, mortgage broker, etc.), how to go about hiring them, how to go about getting a mortgage, what are the ins-and-outs of mortgages, how to get a down-payment together, and--I thought--most importantly; how to budget yourself in preparation for homeownership. This part on figuring out what you spend as a renter and what you think you'll spend as a homeowner helps you decide how much of a house you can afford, and, in my experience, this is one of the big mysteries of buying your first house. Overall, the book is comforting, reliable [now that I'm in a house, I can see that the advice was good], and well organized. If you don't know much about how to buy a house, this is a fine start and a trustworthy source of information.

A must for new buyers
This book is amazing. I never considered buying a "for Dummies" series book because I thought they would be overly simplisitic, but this book proved me wrong. The authors do an awesome job of presenting just enough detail on every aspect of buying a home- I kept catching myself having a questions, then reading on to the net chapter and finding the answer. You may be tempted to skip around from chapter to chapter, but I've found that reading this book from the beginning is almost necessary since things like understanding which mortgage to get and how much of a house you want are all dependant on answers you arrive at in early chapters. I've just finished the book and feel well prepared and educated to tackle the house-hunting task now. A definite read.

Pleasantly Suprised
I had purchased this book as well as The Idiots Guide for Buying a Home and was pretty impressed with Home Buying for Dummies. It was well organized, very readable and had very useful information that my parents wouldn't have told me. Some notworthy examples of how practical this book was include:
1. consider a tax free money market account to invest your down payment while you save depending on your tax bracket. Names of possible accounts were included.
2. Roth IRAs allow you to borrow against them tax free for the down payment as a first time home buyer.
3. What to consider for watching a housing market....
To name a few.

The Idiots Guide was an absolute waste of money. One of the reviewers here posted that Dummies was patronizing -- the Idiots guide was truely insulting. It actually seemed like a bad rippoff of the Dummies book, not to mention the font was twice as big and double spaced. I would have returned it if my spouse hadn't written in it. If you want it, look in the used books section...

I have to agree with another reviewer that some of the content is covered in other Dummies books like Personal Finances for Dummies -- but having the salient points repeated in the context of home buying was helpful. I dont have the other Dummies books mentioned so for me, the redundency between books was minimal.

Go with the Dummies book. Its an excellent intro to buying a home!