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This answer pertains to buying in the United States and is the story of my first purchase. Hope it helps.IntroAs professionals in the art and design field, we have lived frugally for years. Our first jobs brought us to very expensive cities like San Francisco and Boston where owning a home was financially out of reach. A 20% down payment needed to get into a modest home in Boston was $120,000. We focused on saving as much as possible while living in apartments above and below all sorts of characters. Once our children were born, the creativity required to make apartments work went into overdrive. With our first child, Mom and the baby slept in the 1 bedroom while hubs slept on a mattress in the hall next to the front door. When our second child was born, we moved to a bigger apartment. This worked well until Mom got her first two children’s book illustration deals and needed a room with a door to keep children from the paints and expensive scanner. This time Hubs had to sleep in the living room while Mom and new baby got the bedroom and toddler baby got the second bedroom. As they grew to sleep through the night, Hubs moved back into the bedroom but one of the babies had to move their pack-and-play into the bathroom at night. Add to these constraints the lack of yard and long commutes and suddenly moving for a new job in a more family friendly location seemed like a good idea.We decided to take a position in Money's #1 best place to live in 2018, Frisco TX, USA, a suburb of Dallas (Frisco, Texas Is No. 1 on MONEY's Best Places to Live list). The state is experiencing the fastest growth in the US for the last 20 years with jobs projected to grow by nearly 15% over the next four years, according to Moody’s Analytics. But growth alone is not what makes Frisco the best place to live in America. Rather, it’s the way the city has translated its growth into a higher quality of life. For example: Frisco’s outstanding public schools have the highest graduation rate of all the cities and towns MONEY evaluated this year. The average commute and home prices are each half of what we experienced in Boston.8 months after arriving, we purchased our first home. Despite our best efforts to research, inspect, and read every document in the home buying process, we were deeply disappointed to find out essential information had been withheld from us until after we signed. Here is how to avoid making the same mistake.Top 10 listFind out about “fracking.”See where oil companies are drilling around you: https://www.drillingmaps.com/map.htmlLearn the concept of “split estate” and how homebuilders retain mineral rights with minimal disclosure https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport/special-report-u-s-builders-hoard-mineral-rights-under-new-homes-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009 .Know that most title companies, realtors, and inspectors aren’t required to tell you if a property is a split estate and won’t because it may reduce willingness to buy. Only “Landmen” search these. Consider talking to one before you start home searching.Estimate the effect of fracking on your property value: http://www.resource-media.org/drilling-vs-the-american-dream-fracking-impacts-on-property-rights-and-home-values/Understand the health risks: https://www.denverpost.com/2012/03/19/cu-denver-study-links-fracking-to-higher-concentration-of-air-pollutants/ , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409103920.htmKnow if the state will force you to allow fracking through “forced pooling.” http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx.Fracking in urban areas is a growing issue. See notes below for more of our story and a guide to help you.Get the mortgage first: Mortgage companies will only give you a good rate if you already have a lower offer from another provider. Each of these quotes takes over 1 hour of your time to fill out paperwork, and that doesn’t include the time the mortgage company needs to make a decision. If you want to make multiple companies compete on price for your business, plan to spend 10 hours filling out forms online and taking their phone calls. Do this before you search for your dream house. You really don’t have time to do this during the tight deadlines of closing unless you make it a part time job. Mortgage companies want to limit your ability to rate shop. Start early to make sure you get a competitive rate. An effective strategy is to get a low quote from an online-only lender and then bring it to a more established bank and ask them to beat the price. Remember, most banks only compete with written offers.Know the good school districts. Tools like Zillow are great for finding homes but often produce misleading information. At the time of this writing, Zillow and other tools like it allow you to search for homes by the quality of schools, except they don’t know what school your homes are assigned. Zillow takes the closest schools to your home and assumes they are the ones your children will go to in that home. This may not be correct. That is why Zillow school listings have an (unassigned) next to them. Go to https://www.greatschools.org to get the real answer.Tell your mortgage broker, and realtor up front that you will not attend a closing unless you get all the paperwork 48 hours in advance. At closing they will expect you to sign ~ 200 pages. We asked our folks to get us the paperwork a day before closing and they sent 10% of it. We reviewed it and everything looked fine. Unaware that the entire packet was much larger and contained a lot of complex info like leans on the property, clauses in the mortgage, and disclaimers about frakers depreciating the value of your home, we showed up. Once you are in the room, there is a lot of pressure to get everything signed. We asked for 2 hours to read the documents but the realtor, mortgage agent, and title agent sat at the table tapping their pens waiting for us to finish reading. Thinking this would only take 20 minutes, we scheduled work meeting for later in the day. Not the best environment to have important conversations about the deal. This is where most people find out about huge issues like “split estates” (see #1). The industry pros know buyers will feel too far down the road to figure out what that means and just sign the deal. Don’t let it happen to you. Set expectations up front.Inspectors. As soon as you make an offer on a house and it is accepted, you are on a short clock to do all your diligence. Inspectors are people you pay to make sure issues are found. We needed several but didn’t know it. Get names ahead of time so you can have them ready. We ended up needing all of our inspectors on 12 hrs notice because of a holiday. You end up working with people who are available, not necessarily who’s the best.General inspector who reviews the entire house. Make sure they take good photos of everything that is an issue. Our home owner had a large squirrel problem in her attic for years and didn’t believe us that it would take thousands of dollars to repair until she saw the inspection photos of the chewed wiring, insulation, hole in roof and poop everywhere. Be there in person for the inspection. When they are done, they will generate a list of issues that is often over 100 lines long. You won’t know what is actually important and what isn’t. Before they leave the house, ask them to highlight the things that are big issues that should really be fixed. It will make prioritizing your repairs a lot easier.Pests and termites.Heating, electrical, and air conditioning. The home we were buying was 25 years old with all equipment original. The HVAC tech was able to estimate the expected life span of each piece. This helped us negotiate with the seller and prioritize a repair budget.Foundation. In Texas, the soil is clay and shifts a lot. This breaks the foundation of homes with regularity. A “foundation engineer” did measurements to help us know if a big repair was in our future. Luckily, it wasn’t.Homeowners agreement (HOA). If you are moving into a developer community, they likely have an HOA. In Texas these associations have the ability to take your house if they want to. So you have to make them happy. When we asked for a copy of the HOA document, nobody had one. Not the seller, not our friends in the neighborhood, not the HOA rep on the architecture board. Make sure you have an HOA document review as one of your contingencies. Finally someone produced the digital document. It was over 200 pages and completely unreadable with legalize. Worse yet, the PDF wasn’t searchable. It was just a scan of the original paper documents. A large section of the paperwork was scanned twice making the document even harder to read. The best way to deal with this seemed to be to open it in Adobe Acrobat, and then try to turn on character recognition making a searchable PDF. Buying an apartment in a big building is different than buying a single home in a community. We wanted to know if they would let us rent the property, use AirBnb, change the lawn, move our fence. Some of these HOAs are very restrictive. Ours recently updated their policy to include 16 colors we could paint our front door. Also, the city of Frisco required that 80% of our lawn be grass. We were thinking of putting in a waterless desert garden but I guess that’s out.Homeowners association. You need to know if the homeowner association has any problems with the existing house they will want you as a new owner to fix. One of our friends bought a house, and then the HOA told them they didn’t like the shingles and required them to replace the entire roof. This was about $5,000. The Title company should have caught this but didn’t. Make sure to check.“Landmen.” These are the people who search records to determine if you own mineral rights to the property. That is what allows oil companies to frack under you (see “forced pooling” in #1). If this is important to you, seek them out before you find a house to understand what is true in your area. None of the people we paid including our real estate agent, inspectors, mortgage agents and title company ever disclosed we might not own our mineral rights. Even after closing, we still don’t know.Now you are ready to search for a house. The steps above should let you know what area is best for you to look for homes. Hopefully away from fracking, in good schools, with a mortgage APR that you can use to estimate how much you can afford. We found Zillow/Realtor.com to be the best for searching options. Our practice was to look through everything online, make a short list, and then tour with agents. We asked the agents to search homes for us but didn’t find they spent enough time to actually find what we were looking for. They missed obvious stuff like a big backyard and good schools. However, they were great at spotting potential issues with a home during tour like a bulging foundation, water damage was that covered up, re-sellability etc…Offer. Know the amount of repair costs you can deduct from the initial offer. Our strategy was to search during the off season where there would be less options but seller might be willing to offer better prices. We started in Oct and closed in November. In determining our offer price, our real estate agent made a detailed report of similar homes in the neighborhood to determine what was fair. The seller’s agent did something similar but included homes that were not similar to ours and cost more because they backed onto a lucious golf course. Watch out for this. We offered near asking because the price was fair, but a little less because we knew it would need repairs. The seller waited a week to have another open house hoping to get more offers before accepting ours. We didn’t negotiate much at that time because the weather had been bad for the two open houses the seller had, likely keeping potential buyers away. We felt that if we negotiated hard at that point, the seller would just hold a third open house and find someone else to start a bidding war. What we didn’t know was that this isn’t the real offer. You have to get inspections and then negotiate price again. What is important to know is that certain states have a rule that the price negotiated after inspection has to be within a certain range of the original price. In Texas we were later told the maximum drop in price could be 6%. As with many big things in the home buying process, no one told us about this beforehand. Because our house was fairly well kept up, the repairs we needed fell inside this 6% window. If the home had needed something larger like a new roof, heater, air conditioners… we would have been in trouble. You can also put in conditions of the deal. If they aren’t met, the deal doesn’t go through. We made contingencies out of getting the HOA documents, foundation repair warranty, and satellite dishes were taken down from the roof and HOA association good standing.Inspections. As discussed above, knowing the inspections you want, including Landmen and having them scheduled ahead of time will make a big difference. it is possible to have everyone there at the same time. General, HVAC, Pest, Foundation folks can all come at 9am and be done by noon. Make sure to speak with each before leaving to make a short list of the big issues they found. It makes prioritizing your repairs much easier.Closing. As stated above, there are two big things to know. 1) The title company does the closing and it is their job to make sure nobody else has a right to the land. However, they are probably only looking above the grass. Our title company made no effort to assess mineral rights and didn’t tell us that was not part of their service. The bank made us sign a piece of paper saying we understood that a mining company may or may not be able to frack underneath us and that we would be responsible for partial or complete damage to the property as a result. Well, we were not aware and didn’t like the sound of that. 2) the title company will likely have over 200 pages for you to sign. Get this ahead of of the meeting so you can read everything and ask questions. I recommend 48 hours. The signing meeting isn’t a great place to get answers and possibly pull out of the deal. Our title company sent us 20 pages ahead of time and we thought that was the complete package. it wasn’t. There was not mortgage information, survey reports, title documents etc… Make sure they know you won’t come unless you have it all ahead of time. There is a high probability they will tell you the documents will arrive ahead of time and then not deliver. Plan to have a push-back signing date. At closing, ask the title agent to introduce buyer and seller by email so you can ask any questions and return any security deposits you might hold from their lease back.Move-in/out. In this area, it is common for seller to rent the home back to buyers for a certain number of days to move back. They pay your mortgage prorated by days. You also commonly hold onto a security deposit. Make sure to get the title company to introduce buyer and seller by email so you can make arrangements to return the money.More details worth knowing about “fracking” when you buy a new home.As first time home buyers, we assumed that buying a home meant buying the rights to use it above and below the ground. If we didn’t have those rights, we assumed someone would be required to tell us. We selected our location with the safety of our children in mind. At no time in the buying process did anyone tell us that it is now common for homes to be sold as “split estates” where regular people like us own the rights above the grass, and someone else owns the “mineral rights” below the grass. Not owning mineral rights means someone else can set up an oil well and “frack” under your property at any time without telling you. We assumed that this wasn’t a concern in urban areas like Frisco anyway because so many people lived there. Not true. “Fracking” in urban areas is the new trend. Urban cities like Denver Colorado, Naples Florida, Las Angeles California and Dallas Texas are experiencing a boom in “fracking” within a baseball’s throw to homes and schools. Home builders across America including D.R. Horton, Ryland Group Inc, Beazer Homes USA Inc and PulteGroup Inc have been hoarding mineral rights under new homes as the US. Reuters reviewed county property records in 25 states. The story caused two Attorney Generals in Florida and North Carolina to investigate deceptive sales practices resulting in D.R. Horton, the largest home builder in the US to give rights back to many of its customers. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fracking-rights-specialreport/special-report-u-s-builders-hoard-mineral-rights-under-new-homes-idUSBRE9980AZ20131009 Look at this map https://www.drillingmaps.com/map.html. Although there are no wells currently in Frisco, Denton, the neighboring country has over 5,000 drilled wells pumping out 2,000 barrels of oil a month. There are over 280 wells within city limits including one next to the local college football stadium http://www.texas-drilling.com/denton-county.Think the government will never let this happen in your area? The residents of Denton decided they didn’t want any more fracking and passed a law restricting it. Within a year the state governor passed House Bill 40 making it illegal for homeowners to ristrict frackers https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33140732, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/22/denton-texas-banned-fracking-. Here is a great example of how the process works. Former Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm is in a lawsuit between jilted gas driller Trinity East and the City of Dallas over “Special Use Permits” for gas drilling in prohibited areas in return for $19 million in upfront leasing payments. The citizens of Dallas had formed a committee who had already voted “no” on allowing the permits. Yet those votes were overturned during a surprise re-vote in another meeting. https://www.downwindersatrisk.org/2016/01/witness-for-the-defense-wherein-we-go-to-bat-for-mary-suhm/Think the Federal Government has regulatory oversight of fracking to ensure public safety? In 2005, Congress passed a law prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from safeguarding drinking water that might be harmed by fracking. The law also allows oil companies to keep secret the long list of chemicals they pump into the ground as part of the fracking process. This was made possible by a study commissioned by the federal government to assess the dangers of fracking. The study was done by overseen by Cadmus, a research firm in Massachusetts. They had difficulty assessing the impact of fracking on the local water supply because the the oil and gas industry declined to provide information about the fracking fluids they used, asserting that they were trade secrets. There wasn’t enough time or money for Cadmus to begin monitoring groundwater before, during and after fracking jobs to see if the process affected water quality. As a result, they concluded that fracking posed a risk to drinking water and another study with better design was needed to determine how much. The federal government changed the conclusion to say fracking posed no risk to drinking water. The Cadmus scientists who did the research disagreed. Chi Ho Sham, the team’s group manager said “the data and analyses tell us there is risk associated with it, and we were asked to report there is no risk, and we can’t say that.” The Cadmus group had their company's name and their own removed from the final document. Immediately after the report’s publication, Weston Wilson from the EPA’s Denver office filed a formal whistleblower complaint. The EPA’s inspector general launched an investigation into Wilson’s complaint -- but closed it after Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005, codifying the misleading conclusion of the study https://www.dallasnews.com/news/environment/2017/12/05/water-tainted-fracking-scientists-said-safe-now-say-censored. If not for this loophole, the EPA could have developed standards for the entire country. State rules could have been tougher, but not weaker, than the national standards, and if states failed to regulate effectively, citizens could have petitioned the federal government to intervene. Without it, citizens have little recourse in opposing the laws that enhanced fracker’s ability to operate without oversight. Examples include:Resource Conservation and Recovery Act 42 U.S.C. 6921(B)(2) exempts oils and gas companies from proper disposal of the hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste generated during production as identified in the EPA's 1987 report.Clean air act 112(n)(4)-42 U.S.C 7412 (n)(4). Oil and Gas companies are exempt from adhering to limits on hazardous air pollutants like benzene that the US recognizes as dangerous.Clean air act 402(I)(2)-33 U.S.C 1342(I)(2). Oil and Gas companies are exempt from the requirement of planning how they will protect toxic runoff from contaminating surface water, streams and wetlands. https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2017/11/22/special-report-how-the-u-s-government-hid-frackings-risks-to-drinking-water/This all this is a lot of fuss about nothing? Exxon CEO and board chairman Rex Tillerson, head of the world’s largest drilling company is suing to stop construction of a water tower that would supply nearby drilling operations because of the “constant and unbearable nuisance” that would come from having “lights on at all hours of the night …traffic at unreasonable hours … noise from mechanical and electrical equipment” http://www.resource-media.org/drilling-vs-the-american-dream-fracking-impacts-on-property-rights-and-home-values/. Read the full suit here: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/water20140220.pdf.Think all this fracking only happens in Texas? Weld County, a suburban community for Denver commuters is the fourth-fastest growing community in the nation. Like Frisco Texas it’s economy, quality of life is high, and jobs are plentiful. As population in the area is expected to double by 2050, drilling applications in the state have risen 70 percent in just a year. Oil rigs are going in near high priced homes and schools, causing health issues and large drops in realestate prices https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/colorado-fracking-debates.html. Residents fought back with a ban on fracking near their homes and schools, but like in Texas, they were denied by a ruling at the state level https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/colorado-court-strikes-down-local-bans-on-fracking.html?module=inline. Worse, Colorado has a law that forces homeowners who own their mineral rights but don’t want oil companies to frack near them. This law requires the homeowner to pay a penalty in the form of the full cost of equipment and operating costs for the well as well as a 200% fee based on the costs of oil rig exploration. Lots of other states have similar laws http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/compulsory-pooling-laws-protecting-the-conflicting-rights-of-neighboring-landowners.aspx.Another story in Frederick, Colorado, a suburb 30 minutes from Denver and Boulder illustrates the future of other communities. Home owners in an expensive subdivision left for a weekend trip and came back to find a 142-foot-tall drill rig in the backyard. Notice the photos of the well around the playground. https://grist.org/climate-energy/the-fracking-rig-next-door-photos/. Nearby Red Hawk Elementary School has a well going up 350 feet from where its second-graders play. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/fracking-colorado-school-vexes-residents_n_1575733.html , https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2012/04/03/degette-urges-epa-to-consider-potential-health-threats-from-gas-drilling-operations/ , https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2012/06/04/colorado-kids-to-encana-dont-frack-our-schools/. http://www.dailycamera.com/erie-news/ci_20126684/noaa-study-erie-gas-drilling-moratorium-fracking-propane-butane. A Colorado court has invalidated a local ban on fracking by towns who don’t want it https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/colorado-court-strikes-down-local-bans-on-fracking.html?module=inline .A University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Health study this year showed that people living within a half-mile of oil-and-gas fracking operations were exposed to air pollutants five times above U.S. hazard standards. The cancer risk estimate of 8.3 per 10,000 for populations living within 500 feet of an oil and gas facility exceeded the U.S. EPA's 1 in 10,000 upper threshold, according to study published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/03/19/cu-denver-study-links-fracking-to-higher-concentration-of-air-pollutants/ , https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180409103920.htmWhat about Cary North Carolina, #5 on Money's best places to live list of 2018? Cary is with the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill “triangle” and is home to Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill where Michael Jordan got his start. The economy has been booming for years thanks to a decades long tax plan designed to attract businesses http://time.com/money/collection/2018-best-places-to-live/5361443/cary-north-carolina-2/. Lots of people move their from NY for a better family life. What new residents don’t typically know is that energy companies have been anxious to frack near the most densely populated area of the state. A large band expected to produce profitable energy lays at the top of Wake County, right under the city of Durham https://rafiusa.org/issues/landowner-rights-and-fracking/fracking-map-in-nc/. That means frackers could soon be underneath Cary. Even more alarming, North Carolina has a policy called “forced pooling” which, gives the state the right to compel a homeowner who owns their own mineral rights and does not want oil companies to frack underneath them into allowing oil companies to frack. In most states, this requires that a certain percentage of surrounding land already be leased voluntarily. In North Carolina, current law does not specify the percentage of land that must be voluntarily leased in a given area https://rafiusa.org/issues/landowner-rights-and-fracking/forced-pooling/. North Carolina is still deciding how to work with energy companies. More about its land formations and fracking opportunities can be seen in the map at the bottom of this page: https://files.nc.gov/ncdeq/Energy%20Mineral%20and%20Land%20Resources/Geological%20Survey/Oil%20and%20Gas%20Research/NCGS%20OFR2013-01%20Reid%20and%20Taylor.pdf.DisclaimerHope my experience is helpful to you. This is my first home purchase so there are likely many important things left of this list I do not know or understand. I am not a real estate professional of any kind and do not represent myself, or this post as having correct information. It is simply the story of my first home purchase. Please consult a qualified professional when purchasing a home.