The house-buying process is a significant decision of your life. Though it involves several key choices, one of the very first decisions you’ll need to make is whether you should build a house or buy an existing one. Irrespective of the location of your prospective house, which could be in Bergen County’s Allendale, Bergenfield, Alpine, or Bogota, you’ll have to consider the pros and cons of each option before choosing one.

If you decide to buy an existing house, you can speed up the process by choosing a company that says ‘we buy houses in NJ for cash and sell it fast’. Not sure if building or buying would suit you? We lay down both sides of the coin here to help you decide.

Building a house

Pros

The biggest advantage of building a home from the ground up is the ability to customize it the way you want to, provided it fits your budget. Be it creating the house’s layout, selecting the type of flooring, customizing features like a wheelchair-accessible shower or a 36-inch doorway, you can do them all to build your dream home.

Some other advantages are:

• Building a house would also give you a good feeling of being the first owner and having created your own abode just the way you had envisioned it.
• A newer house would be more energy-efficient, designed to meet the present building codes, and boast of updated features.
• As everything is new, you can forget about the headache of replacements and repairs anytime soon.
• You can ensure your home is environment-friendly and isn’t made using toxic materials like lead paint or asbestos.
• You won’t need to compete with other home buyers.

Cons

Building a house from scratch and customizing its features could take about seven months from start to finish. The duration could be longer if there’s a natural disaster, work gets stalled by bad weather, or a human error has occurred that needs to be fixed before proceeding ahead. All these could make your wait to move into your new house much longer than if you were buying an existing one.

Some other disadvantages of building a house are:

• You could incur price increase and unexpected costs if you aren’t careful.
• You may feel overwhelmed while taking a lot of decisions such as plotting out the land, finalizing a floor plan, selecting the building materials as well as colors of the interiors and their finishes, etc.
• You won’t have the chance to negotiate a lower price, unlike when buying an existing home from a seller.

Buying a house

Pros

The biggest advantage of buying an existing house is not getting stressed over purchasing the land, finding a reliable builder, and deciding about all the layout, design, finishes, etc. while trying not to overshoot your budget.

Some additional advantages include:

• Your move into your home would be sooner than if you were building one.
• You won’t need to worry about landscaping, especially if you don’t have a green thumb, since your house is most likely to have it.
• You can negotiate a better (and lower) sale price.
• You can make gradual renovations or upgrades as and when you have the money and time needed for them rather than trying to get it all done simultaneously.

Cons

The biggest disadvantage of buying an existing house is the compromise you’ll have to make with your desires and preferences as you won’t get all the things featured on your wish list.

Some other cons are:

• You’ll incur additional expenses while trying to repair, replace, or maintain older pipes, appliances, and electrical systems.
• You could be up against tough competition from other buyers, especially if it’s a seller’s market where sellers are looking to ‘sell my house in NJ fast’. It would be difficult even when you’re buying in a sought-after neighborhood, say in Bergen County’s Allendale, Bergenfield, Alpine, or Bogota.
• You could suffer from buyer’s remorse if you compromise on a lot of things.
• Due to older and less efficient heating and cooling system, your energy costs would remain steep throughout the year.

Whether you’re building a house or buying one from a company that promises ‘we buy houses in NJ and sell them at fair rates fast’, you should consider the above pointers to make an informed decision.