Dearborn Multimedia can help. Their product, The Home Buyer's Kit, guides you through the maze. The Home Buyer's Kit combines a thorough, well-organized, easy-to-read written guide of nearly 200 pages with a well-designed, easy-to-use computer program. Either the book or the program alone would be worth buying, and the combined product is a must have for any potential homebuyer or real estate broker.
Dearborn Multimedia has enlisted the award-winning national real estate columnist and author Edith Lank to put together this product. Edith Lank is a familiar name to millions. She is the author of House Calls a nationally syndicated real estate column and has been heard weekly on National Public Radio for over 20 years. She is a licensed real estate broker and teaches college-level courses in real estate. Her advice is both easy to digest and thorough.
The program is organized into four main sections: Choosing a Broker, What Can You Spend, House Hunting and Closing on Your Home. Each section includes text advice, video, and forms. There are several ways to navigate Home Buyer's Guide. The new user can go through the home buying process sequentially by following the primary menu presented through icons on the screen. The experienced user will appreciate the quick access to videos, forms, advice from Edith Lank, the full text of the book, and a glossary of real estate terms through a standard Windows-style menu.
The program includes two types of forms. There are forms designed to aid the buyer in determining preferences, selecting a broker, and comparing homes. Other forms help calculate how much home the buyer can afford to purchase and to live in. The forms have a set of icons at the bottom of the screen to page up and down, choose the previous or next form, return to the main screen and view an associated video. These forms save hours of tedious calculations and provide a much clearer view of a buyer's financial picture and the different choices available. Results can be saved to disk and printed out.
The program installed without problems, and was very easy to learn and use. It requires a multimedia capable system but ran well on a fairly low-end 486. It does have a hearty appetite for disk requiring approximately 12 megabytes of disk for the program files plus the space for Video for Windows. The savings in time, money and peace of mind make The Homebuyer's Guide well worth the cost.
Rob Rittenhouse is associate professor of computer science at McMurray University in Abilene, Texas. Check out his web page at http://mcm.acu.edu/~rob.
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