When it comes to buying a home, there’s a lot of advice out there. People suggest different ideas on how to cope with stress management and others offer ideas about how to know what you’re looking for. The fact remains that there are a lot of things that you do need to finish up before you either go house hunting or before you made the final deal on the house that you like. To give you a hand in sorting through all of the commonly suggested ideas, here are the most suggested by real-estate agents that you need to do before buying your home.

1. Look Over Your Credit Score

Most often, to buy a home you’ll need to have a decently fair credit score. It might not be something that you think about as often, but having a good credit score is key if you want to buy a home with a reasonable loan. Banks look heavily at your score to determine the interest rate, the amount of money that they’ll give you, and everything else. That means that the very first thing that you should do before buying your home is fix your credit score. You should start this process months before your own house goes up for sale and a year or more before you think that you’ll move. Credit scores take time to fix so make sure that you give yourself that time. If you’re having trouble, there are a lot of credit repair companies that can help you to fix your credit score faster and more efficiently.

2. Know What You’re Looking For

The second most talked about advice from real estate agents is that you need to know what you’re looking for before going to look at homes. It’s even better if you have a general idea of what you want before hiring the real estate agent. This helps that process to go faster and smoother and will help to reduce the stress for both sides of the party. So, before hiring your real estate agent, sit down with your spouse and talk about what type of a home you’re looking for. Talk about the deal breakers of a home and what you absolutely need. You should decide on a general location that you would want the home to be in since the thing that you won’t be able to change about the house is the location.

Also, discuss the layouts that you like best, the amount of space, storage, color, paneling type, and everything else, so you have a general idea of your preferences. Remember that you might not get everything on your list. It helps to rate the things that are most important to you in the new house. For example, the color should be one of the lowest on the list since that can be easily changed. However, the number of rooms and bathrooms in the house should be placed higher on your list of preferences since it’s harder to add an entire room onto the house.

3. Look Over the House Before Buying

One of the most talked-about tips from agents is that they want you to look over the house before you buy it. The ultimate goal of a real estate agent is that they want you to be 100% satisfied with the house that you choose and they will do everything within their power to make sure that you are in love with the house. However, since they’re looking at several different houses and weighing the pros and the cons for you, there are occasional things that they might miss about the house. Because of that, make sure to do a once over of the house before you buy it. Make sure the roof is in good repair and that the plumbing is relatively new. Make sure the heater and coolers work and that the water heater isn’t about to give out. Just make sure that the house isn’t a brightly colored fixer-upper before you buy it.

Give yourself the time that you need to buy a house. This means that the preparation should start months (sometimes even years) before you even start looking.