How To Buy Your First Home (A Basic Survival Guide); Sell It Yourself!; Welcome Home: A Consumer's Guide to Home Buying

Having recently entered the ranks of prospective home buyers (those bleary-eyed souls who are Desperately Seeking Shangri-La), my wife, Anne, and I eagerly popped How to Buy Your First Home into the VCR in hopes of uncovering the secrets to finding, assessing, and buying our dream house. a low-budget production, the video features former realtor Lorraine Vincent offering viewers advice on inspecting a house, choosing a realtor, and "surviving" the loan process. Unfortunately, most of the attention is spent on inspecting the inside of the house, rather than addressing the economic concerns of house buying, and the program just doesn't go into enough depth in 25 minutes to answer the questions most first-time buyers are going to have.Welcome Home: a Consumer's Guide to Home Buying, a much better looking and more informative production, is hosted by real estate expert Sally J. Roberts. Following a couple through the labyrinthine process of buying a house--from the seemingly endless quest to find the right home to the sweaty-palm signing of the paperwork during closing--Roberts offers some good advice and also interviews various professionals (realtor, loan officer, real estate attorney, home inspector, etc.) in the field. The tape's strengths are its wide range of topics; its weaknesses include a too-long segment following a home inspector around the basement of a house and a lack of depth in some areas (viewers are told, for instance, that using a "buyer's broker" has a few drawbacks; but they're not told what those drawbacks might be).Neither of the programs really gets down to the fine print when it comes to explaining the differences between Conventional, FHA, and VA loans, or offers much help in the murky area of haggling over points or closing costs, or even advances such simple tips as advising the viewer to call the local assessor's office to find out a cornucopia of vital statistics about a particular house (assessed price, whether any liens are attached to the property, the on-record acreage and square footage of the property and residence, etc.). Maybe that's because the programs are hosted by realtors rather than home buyers. We didn't really pick up any choice tidbits which would lead the viewer to a better deal. Still, Welcome Home provides enough of the basics to help someone get started.Sell It Yourself! is a feisty little program, armed with many common-sense tips to aid the seller who decides to forgo the safety net of using a realtor, thereby saving the considerable commission cost. The on-camera hosts take viewers through the process of enhancing the curb appeal of the house, preparing the interior for maximum effect, creating an effective yard sign and classified ad to market the house, handling phone inquiries, setting up an open house showing, and getting help from other professionals. Overall, the advice is pretty good (although suggestions for handling negotiations with the buyer could have been more detailed). Better Homes & Gardens: Preparing Your Home to Sell (reviewed in our December 1989 issue) is more comprehensive on actually preparing the home, but it doesn't cover other areas (such as advertising). a packet of worksheets and check lists for $6.95 is pitched at the end of the program, but the "packet" isn't necessary for watching and benefiting from the video.How to Buy Your First Home is not recommended. Welcome Home is recommended, with the reservation that it's more explanation-oriented than tip-oriented. Sell It Yourself! is recommended. (R. Pitman)