If you're making a move here to the city of Murrieta of California, and if you are making a move from another state or even just another part of California, this is definitely going to be a video that you're going to want to watch. I'm going to go over six steps to help make your move as nice and easy and as smooth as possible. I've helped dozens and dozens of clients relocate from other parts of the country and these are the things that I've found that help make that move go as easy as possible. So let's go ahead and get into it.

Hey guys. Hey again, my name is Justin Short. I'm a realtor and team leader with the short real estate team here at Keller Williams and the city of Temecula, California and Murrieta of California. And this video is all about the six steps to help make your relocation here to Murrieta as easy as possible. So I'm going to go over what I found helps make that easy and smooth process for people. I know most of you guys, when you're watching these videos, you're probably not local here in the area. You're making these big cross country moves or even from Northern California or other parts of the state. And really when it's you and your family and you have all these logistics, you got to line up. You want to make that move as easy as possible. So I'm going to go over some things that I have found that help make that the case and give you some recommendations that I've found with all my other clients that are relocating.

So before I get into that though, if you are like videos like this, do me a favor, please hit like please hit subscribe. Obviously it helps me, it helps my channel. Obviously we're trying to continue to grow it and we have a bunch of videos that we posted over the past couple of years, so we have hundreds of videos that are up. You're welcome to check those out or have new ones that we put out each and every week. So we have videos about best parts of town, worst parts of town, best schools, worst schools, recommended neighborhoods, neighborhood walkthroughs, market updates that we've had out each month, and so all types of stuff that we do. And then if you guys have any real estate questions, of course I would love to hear from you so you can feel free. You're going to see my information either down below or at the end of the video.

You can feel free, you can call, you can text, you can email me. I have people that reach out all the time. So I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, point you in the right direction or of course if you would like any help with your real estate search, myself and my team would love to help you out with that as well. So you can reach out anytime and hopefully talk to you soon. Cool. But we'll go ahead, we'll get into our list here. Alright, so number one, and so like I mentioned, the vast majority of you guys that are watching these YouTube videos and you guys that contact me, I would say probably over 90% of you guys are relocating from other areas. So you probably don't currently live local in the Murrieta area. That's probably why you feel like the videos are helpful, give you a better sense of what it's like to actually live here.

So whether you're coming from other parts of California or other states, when you are making these big moves, you want to make sure that you line everything up properly to make everything as smooth as possible, especially if you're like myself, if you have a family, if you have a spouse, if you have kids, it can be complicated and you want to make sure it all goes as great as possible. So the first thing to know is we are in Southern California, depending what part of the country you are in, you may have a similar real estate market to what we have. But here in Southern California right now, it is definitely still considered a seller's market. It is not super crazy. It was a couple years ago during Covid, right? We're not seeing a lot of these super crazy bidding wars or anything like that.

However, most homes are selling relatively quickly, the average home is selling less than 30 days. We found that a nice home that's priced well is probably going to sell within a week or two. Sometimes they'll get 1, 2, 3 offers that type of deal. And if it's a super hot property, it might get five or six. So it's still somewhat competitive. You got to stay up on top of listings as they come and they're going to go quickly. But the reason I'm explaining all that is it's important to know that when you are, when you are trying to buy a home in a seller's market, which this still is, that you as a buyer need to be prepared to move things forward as quickly and make it a smooth process with your offer. So what that means is if you are relocating here to the area, and if in order to make that relocation, if you're going to purchase a home and if you need to sell your home in order to purchase out here, you're going to have to move things forward with the sale of your home in your current state.

So basically when you have your home, you have your home in your other state. If you want to buy here, you would need to put your home up on the market, you would need to find a buyer for your home, and then you would need to accept an offer on your home and open escrow. So you got to shake hands with your buyer, open escrow, come to terms, and then you're in your escrow period on the home that you're selling. Okay? At that point, you would now be in a position where you can ride an offer here in Marietta in order to get your offer accepted. If you try to run an offer before that, your offer is not strong enough to be accepted in the current market that we have here. So it's important to know if you need to sell your home to buy, you need to put your home on the market, you need to find a buyer, you need to open escrow, and then you would have an ability to get your offer accepted out here.

So that's a big thing when you're making that relocation. Alright, and so number two, and this is about the pre-approval. So when you are making these big moves from another state, these big relocations, I know most of you guys are probably not going to have any issues qualifying for a loan, et cetera. You've probably purchased homes in the past or that you're going to be well qualified, you're going to have a good income or a good down payment and all these different types of things, which is great. However, I always, always, always want to recommend to you that when you are making a big relocation like this, especially when you're coming from another state, you're going to sell your home or just get on a plane. You're going to put all your stuff in storage or hire these expensive movers to ship everything across the country you want.

Make sure that before you start lining up all those details that you get in touch with a lender, ideally a local lender that can take care of a pre-approval for you to make sure and just check that box, make sure you can accomplish all the things that you want to do, right? Make sure you can get approved for the price point that you want to get approved for out here. Make sure there's not any snags that popped up on your credit, anything like that, right? I'm sure for most people it's going to be not an issue, but you want to make sure you check that box, especially before you start aligning all these other things up, movers and details and putting your home on the market, et cetera. You want to make sure you take care of that and check the box here so you know can buy the type of home that you're hoping for here in the Murrieta area.

So if that is something that you want to do, I do have a great lender here, local in the Murrieta Temecula area, I can get you in touch with them if you need recommendation, most of my clients do end up using them. Or if you have your own lender that you prefer that you've used in the past, you're comfortable with whatever, you're welcome to use them as well. You can use any lender that you'd like to, but if you'd like a referral to a great local lender, happy to get in touch with somebody. You can do your application on the phone or you can do it online. They have a nice portal, you can upload everything and it's a pretty nice system, so you want to make sure you check that box before you get all these other wheels rolling and make sure everything's lined up properly.

Alright Step number three, and that's the preliminary trip. One of the things that I highly, highly recommend that you guys do, if you are making a move here to the Murrieta area, especially if you've never been here before, even if it's been, it's been a couple years, it's been a long time since you've been here, I would highly, highly recommend that you, ideally you and your family, or at least you and your spouse if you're married, make a preliminary trip here to the Myta area to make sure that this is the area that you like and that you are happy with. So you want to be able to fly to town, drive or fly to town, come in for hopefully a couple days. I have some PDFs that I can send you as far as some things that I recommend for you to do while you're here.

Some different things you can check out, some restaurants, some neighborhoods you can drive by, all that type of stuff. I have a few I can send you. We have some free downloads you're going to see in the description below, or you can contact me, I can send 'em to you. It's no problem. But you want to do that. You want to be able to come to town, you want to drive around, you want to get a feel for the area, you probably want to drive around the surrounding areas, drive around Menifee, drive around Temecula, drive around will DeMar drive around other parts of Southern California and just get a feel for this area and make sure it's a good fit for you and your family and you feel like you're liking what you're seeing. Okay? Not only that, but specifically if you decide Murrieta is the place you want to be you can drive around the city and check out some different neighborhoods.

You want to be able to drive through the west side of Murrieta. You want to drive through the central part of Marietta, you want to drive through the east side of Murrieta. You want to get, ideally narrow it down to sometime between somewhere between one to four different neighborhoods that really draw your eye in areas that you are really attracted to. Or at the very least, you want to narrow it down to a section, whether it's the west side central or East Murrieta to decide, hey, this is the area that we really want to focus our attention on. I have had clients in the past buy homes without ever making a trip here to California. To me that makes me super, super nervous, especially if I'm going to be the one helping you.

I would love to have a happy client. I want all my clients to be very happy. And if you've never been here, it can feel a little bit dicey if you haven't actually made the trip. So because you're just relying on my recommendations and what I might not necessarily be what you like. So I would highly, highly recommend that you make that preliminary trip to town, be able to drive around, get a feel for the area, and make sure the area's a good fit for you and your family and what you are looking for, especially for a lot of people. That might be your only trip to California to make this big move, right? We will talk later. I do recommend everyone comes out at least once during escrow talk about what, but for a lot of people they only make this one trip and so you want to make sure you come town, drive around a little bit, get a feel for the area.

I am happy to meet with you on your preliminary trip. I do that all the time for clients. So happy to get together with you, shake your hand and just meet you and maybe give some recommendations or if we have some criteria narrowed down, happy to pop in a few houses, do some showings with you, kind of make sure you are seeing the right types of homes that fit for you and your family so you can feel free to reach out. The only thing with that, if you would like me to meet with you, happy to do that. Please try and contact me as early as possible in your planning stages. So the more time that I have to make sure you're on my schedule, you're only in town for a few days, I want to make sure I time block some time for you, then we can get together, go check out some houses, et cetera.

So would love to do that. But make sure that you plan on doing a preliminary trip. Alright, so number four is when you are looking at homes and you really start digging into your real estate search. So ideally you've been pre approved, you put your home up on the market, you have in the process of finding a buyer, right? You've come out for your preliminary trip, you've narrowed it down, Hey, I want to be in West Murrieta. That's the place I want to be. Awesome, cool. Once you do that, you also really, really want to pay attention to what the specific tax rates and HOA fees are going to be on the houses that you like and the criteria that you like in the neighborhoods that you like. So if you haven't seen some of our other videos or other information online, the tax rates here in Murrieta and really the surrounding cities can vary greatly from one neighborhood to another.

So that can be very difficult for you as a potential homeowner. Someone's browsing online to be able to see it is a lot easier for me to see. I have access to tax records of super, super easily just with my realtor systems and whatnot. But a general rule of thumb, the newer houses tend to have the higher taxes. The older houses tend to have the lower taxes. You can see ranges anywhere from 1.2%, which would be a low tax home all the way up to 2.2%, which is like a high tax home. But let's say if we're looking at an 800,000 home, the difference between 1.2 and 2.2 is 1%, 1% tax difference on the 800,000 home, that is $8,000 per year. So it's a lot of money, it's significant. That's 550 bucks a month, 600 bucks a month, whatever, a little over 600 bucks a month.

So it's significant depending on what neighborhood you're looking at, that can make a big difference in your affordability. So those are things that they're not common in many other areas. So not all areas have different tax rates and different special assessments and all that type of stuff. So as you really start digging into the search, you really need to pay attention to what is the tax rate on the homes that I'm liking and the neighborhoods that I'm liking. Make sure it's going to be affordable for you and make sure you take that into account before we make this move. Alright, so number five, and this is for showings. So now we're into the search, right? You've either sold your home or if you needed to do that or we're ready to write offers, right? So we've narrowed down the criteria. We have checked on tax rate, make sure it's going to be affordable.

We have a handful of different neighborhoods, or at least a section of town that we're really drawn to. You and I are talking regularly about homes that are popping up on the market. So we're in conversations about that and as you are seeing homes that fit your criteria in something that you're interested in, we can do a couple things. So if you are local, if you're some other parts of Southern California, if you're in San Diego, la, orange County and you can make a trip out here and make a drive so we can do some showings in person, that's awesome. That's going to be the best thing to happen. But like I mentioned, a lot of you guys are in other states, Europe and San Francisco, Northern California or your other areas where you can't realistically drive here very easily. If you have a family member that you trust that's able to drive and be here for showings, great, we can definitely do that.

Or if not, I am happy to do some virtual showings for you. So that's something that's very, very common. We can set up a time I can stop by, I can either do a live stream, I can do a Google Meet live stream. So you can check everything out that way or I can just do a walkthrough video and do a recording, send you a copy with the Google Drive link and then you can check out a full recording. So that's always going to be important, especially when you're looking at these pictures from the MLS or Zillow or Redfin or any of these different websites. You're going to see they've been doctored up, they're photoshopped, they're using wide angle lenses, nothing shows quite the same in person as it will in the photos. So happy to do that for you guys. Happy to be a resource and really it, it's part of my job to make sure we do that for you, especially when you are relocating from out of state.

Want to make sure I can get you some boots on the ground action and show you what it's like when you are actually at the house. Alright? So tip number six, and really the last thing I'm going to talk about today and the last thing that I recommend, I guess I recommend all these things, but something you definitely want to make sure you do is you want to plan to make an additional trip out back here to California during your escrow period. So you've kind of gone through the process, right? You've pre-approved, sold your house in your home state if that is what you needed to do, you have narrowed down criteria. We've went out, we've done showings, we've found homes, we came out in your preliminary trip, all that type of stuff. You wrote an offer, your offer has been accepted and now you have opened escrow, right?

Awesome. Hopefully you're excited, right? Hopefully you're glad about making this big move and relocating here to Murrieta. Awesome. In California, 99% of the time, and if this doesn't apply, we will have a discussion about this, but 99% of the time your purchase in California is going to be contingent upon you as a buyer doing your due diligence to make sure the house is really what you want. So what that means is during the first part of your escrow period, you're going to have a due diligence period. So where you can do all your due diligence on the property to make sure the house is really what you want. So you're going to do a home inspection, termite report, you're going to do an appraisal if you need to do, if anything else is appropriate, we will do that If we need to do accept inspection, whatever it may be, and you're going to make sure this house is acceptable to you and make sure this is house is what you want.

If something pops up during that due diligence period, and if you decide to cancel your purchase, hey, the property doesn't actually work for you, then you can cancel and you're going to get your deposit back, okay? After your due diligence comes and goes, if you were to cancel and not complete your purchase, you're probably going to lose your deposit. So that's a very, very important period here where basically for most any reason that you find out something you're not okay with, you can cancel your purchase, you're get your deposit back. So that's important during your due diligence period. You as a buyer, you definitely want to plan to make a trip back to California and be present at minimum for the home inspection. So this is probably going to be your last time to be in the property, unless you're here for a final walkthrough, which is going to be tough based on logistics, right?

Especially if you're out of state. But it's probably going to be your last time to be inside the house. It might be your first time to be inside the house if we only did a virtual tour before. So you want to plan to come out here, we can work it around your schedule as long as it's within our due diligence period. The home inspection is going to take anywhere from probably two and a half to three and a half hours, depending on the size of the house. But the inspector's going to test everything for you. He'll test all the plumbing, test all the electrical, look at the roof, get up in the attic, they'll fly up the drone, they'll test everything to make sure it's all working properly, which is great and that's important as part of your due diligence. However, especially if you've never been here, that's your time.

You can be in the house for a couple hours. You can sit around, you can look at the space, you can take your tape measure and make sure your furniture's going to fit, okay? You can take an in-person, look at the neighborhood, drive around the neighborhood, just make sure this house is really what you want. It's going to fit for you and your family. So it is not a must that you come out here, you don't have to, but I highly, highly, highly recommend it. So you definitely want to plan to make two trips. One is a preliminary second as your in escrow trip during your home inspection, come out for that. If you'd stay for a couple of days, even better, it just gives you more time to check out the area, drive around at night, see how the neighborhood feels, and make sure it's a good fit for you and your family. So those are the six things I've helped a lot of people relocate here to the area from other parts of the state, other parts of California. Hopefully those are some good information for you guys. If you have any questions, you can feel free to reach out, you can call, you can text, you can email me, and hopefully I'll talk to you soon. Thanks.