Realtor.ca recently featured a step-by-step guide to buying your first home in one year.

They’ve got searching for a realtor at the six month point. I could add that once you know what you can afford we can help you get familiar with an area and aware of what your money can buy. What we can do is set up an auto-search of an area or a price range and get you familiar with the marketplace. Remember also that with the current market in Ottawa. An adjustment may need to be done to your price range search to allow for multiple offer competitiveness. So many houses are going over asking, lets say $50,000. That needs to be taken into account in your calculations.