What did getting a real estate license actually teach me about buying a home? Some of the most useful lessons came from the chapters I could barely get through.
In this short solo episode of HouseCall SF, I share four lessons from real estate school that helped my family navigate our Bay Area home purchase:
• Questioning a lender’s requirement about our purchase agreement.
• Negotiating for a seller-paid home warranty.
• Exploring seller financing—and why we ultimately didn’t use it.
• Taking ownership of the disclosure checklist instead of assuming someone else had it covered.
You don’t need a real estate license to use these lessons. You just need to know what to ask and when to ask someone to explain why.
Key Takeaways
Ask what’s actually required—and why. When something doesn’t make sense, ask who requires it, what’s missing, and whether an alternative would work.
Consider negotiating a seller-paid home warranty. It may help with covered repairs after moving in, but review exclusions, service fees, and payout limits.
Know that financing can involve more than one option. Seller carryback financing may help bridge a funding gap, but requires lender approval, qualified guidance, and careful attention to repayment terms.
Make sure someone owns the disclosure checklist. Clarify who’s tracking the documents and helping you understand them. Receiving a stack of PDFs isn’t the same as knowing what they reveal about the home.
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Welcome back to House Call SF. I'm Andrew Orr, a Bay Area doctor who got a real estate license to help my family buy a home, and now I'm sharing what I learned with you. This one's a shorter solo episode without our typical guest interview. I'll mix these in from time to time to share things that I think are especially useful for you. Today I want to say more about four things I learned in real estate school that actually came in handy when we bought a home. That's not to say there were only four things. The coursework helped me understand the whole home buying process, and that's hard to quantify. But these four things represent where the rubber met the road during our transaction. And they may surprise you because a few came from sections I assumed I'd never use. And the great part about this is that you can take these lessons with you without having to take the exam. I'll tell you about a form that we questioned, a benefit that's worth asking about in negotiation, a creative financing opportunity, and a note on disclosure paperwork.
1. Questioning Requirements: What the Contract Really Needs
Okay. The first thing that came in handy? The coursework on contracts. Which, believe me, surprised me too. We'd found the house we wanted, we'd agreed on terms with the sellers, we had an attorney prepare our purchase agreement, which by the way is the document that spells out the price, the conditions, what each side is committing to. When you submit an offer, this is generally the form that you submit.
So we sent it off to our lender, excited to take the next step. And the response was, we can't accept this. You need to use the California Association of Realtors form for your purchase agreement. Now we were buying without an agent, but an attorney helped us get this agreement right. And suddenly this document we thought we'd taken care of was holding things up.
Before taking the real estate classes, I probably would have said, okay, they need this specific form, I guess we'll just shell out the extra money to use it. But something about this didn't add up. In real estate classes, I'd spent literally hours learning what makes a contract valid. These were the chapters I had to negotiate with myself to finish. Just get through this section, Andrew, then you can take a break. Honestly, I figured I'd memorize the material, pass the exam, and never think about it again. And here I was thinking about it, because I didn't remember anything saying that a purchase agreement had to come on a form from a local realtor association.
Now those forms are widely used for good reason. They cover a lot of grounds and people in the industry are familiar with them. But an attorney can prepare a purchase agreement too. So we pushed back. Did something need to change in our agreement, or was the issue simply that it wasn't on the form they usually saw? After some back and forth, the lender accepted our original agreement, and we could move forward.
The coursework hadn't taught me some magic phrase that made the lender say yes. They still had to review and accept what we submitted, but it gave me enough understanding to pause before assuming we needed to start over.
And that's the part I want to pass on. When you're buying a home, you're surrounded by people who do this every day. Meanwhile, you're trying to figure it out between work, dinner, and getting your kid to bed. It's easy to hear, oh, this is required, and assume that's the end of the conversation. But you're allowed to ask a follow-up. What's missing? Who requires that? Is this actually required or is this just how you usually do it? You don't have to know more than the expert to ask them to explain something. I thought those contract chapters were just something standing between me and passing the real estate exam. Turns out they helped us get past something standing between us and buying our home.
2. Negotiating a Seller-Paid Home Warranty
Useful item number two, home warranties. Learning about contracts also helped me spot things we could ask the seller to pay for, including a home warranty. Imagine closing on your house, moving in, and while you're still living out of boxes just trying to get settled, you realize the toilet doesn't flush. Welcome to home ownership. That's now your responsibility. And after closing on your house, you may have limited cash on hand to throw at this problem.
A home warranty can help with repair or replacement costs for covered appliances and systems that break down from normal wear and tear. Depending on the plan, that could include plumbing, a dishwasher, water heater, or heating system, major stuff. It's separate from homeowner's insurance.
And here's the useful part. You can ask the seller to pay for the first year as part of your purchase agreement. They don't have to say yes, but it's something you can negotiate. It's something that I remembered learning about at the last minute, and we were able to successfully include as part of our negotiation.
Of course, a warranty won't cover every repair, and you'll want to read what your proposed plan actually covers, including service call fees and payout limits. But if not for the real estate classes, I never would have known that this option existed in the first place. And it's definitely something that you can ask your agent about if they don't mention it.
3. Exploring Seller Carryback Financing
On to useful item number three, something called seller carryback financing. I remember reading the chapters on home financing with a similar glaze over my eyes as when I was reading about contracts. It wasn't until later when the question of how to finance a home became real for us that I realized how relevant it was. One thing the coursework opened my eyes to was that there's more than one way to finance a home, and sometimes the answer is a combination of options.
So as we were trying to figure out how to scrap our finances together to afford a home, I remembered the idea of seller carryback financing. The name makes it sound way more complicated than it is, but the basic idea is that the sellers help the buyers fund the home purchase. Just like with a bank and a traditional mortgage, buyers pay the seller part of the purchase price at closing and then pay them back the rest over time as a loan.
For example, imagine you're $100,000 short of the purchase price after combining your loan and your down payment. A willing seller might agree to finance that $100,000 if your primary lender allows it.
Why might a seller be interested in this? Well, it might help them close the deal at a price they're happy with instead of having to lower the price. And it allows them to earn interest along the way and potentially spread out taxable gains.
Here's where it could come into play for buyers. Maybe you've maxed out an available housing loan through a work program. The loan helps a lot, but even with your down payment, there's still a gap. It might be hard to find a bank willing to make a second loan alongside that program. So perhaps the sellers can cover the difference.
Now, some sellers need every dollar immediately, but others might consider receiving payments with interest. They'd also want to feel comfortable with your ability to repay them over time. I'd say it's relatively uncommon, but it's still a real option. Your main lender would need to approve the arrangement and you'd want qualified help setting that up. And you'd also want to watch out for a balloon payment, which is when a large remaining balance comes due at the end of the loan.
For all these reasons, although we explored it, we didn't end up using seller financing. But for us, the value was knowing there were more options available and helping us feel confident that we were making the right financing decision for our circumstances.
4. Taking Ownership of Disclosures
And finally, the last thing that came in handy was knowing which disclosures to ask for. And this started with an assumption that turned out to be wrong. I figured someone, our loan underwriter, maybe our escrow officer, would hand us a checklist of all the disclosures we should get. Here's the paperwork you need, get everything on this list and you're good to go. That checklist never arrived.
There were plenty of people working on our purchase, but that didn't mean someone was keeping track of every part of it. Our lender was focused on the loan, escrow was coordinating the closing, and we were sitting there thinking, wait, who's making sure we've received the information we need about the actual house?
If you're working with an agent, helping coordinate disclosures is typically part of their job. We were buying without one, so we needed to make sure that responsibility was covered. We had an attorney involved, but this was another moment when I was glad I'd taken those real estate classes.
I knew to ask about the seller's disclosures of the home's condition, natural hazards, lead paints for older homes, earthquake-related paperwork where it applies. That's not a complete checklist, but it meant I wasn't starting with a blank page or just assuming that everything had been taken care of. I used the internet too, Google and AI were helpful, but it was great to double-check their answers against my course notes to verify the information.
Personally, I wouldn't hire an agent solely for the purpose of identifying necessary disclosure form, since you can find this information on your own or with an attorney. But buying without an agent means someone has to take ownership of making sure the work gets done.
And honestly, even if you have an agent, there's a useful question here. Who's keeping track of the disclosures and who's going to walk us through them? Because receiving a stack of PDFs and understanding what they tell you are two very different things.
You don't have to become an expert in every single form, but make sure someone is managing the list, read what you receive, and ask about anything that's missing or unclear. My mistake was assuming someone had the checklist. The coursework helped me realize we needed to ask and take it on ourselves.
Looking back, getting a real estate license certainly helped us with our home purchase, and not always in the ways I expected. I'm still surprised that the chapters I was least excited about on contracts and financing proved to be the most useful for us. And I think you'll never quite know what factors exactly will come into play until you're in the position of writing offers on homes.
The coursework helped me successfully push back on an illogical requirement, negotiate for a home warranty, explore the best option for us to finance a home, and feel good about having all the relevant disclosures. But more broadly, being informed about each step of the process taught me enough to ask questions along the way and gave me some creative ideas to help push us over the finish line. You don't need a real estate license for either of those things.
So my one practical takeaway after this episode would be to trust your gut and start with the simple question when something doesn't make sense. Can you help me understand why that is? And then don't be afraid to push on the walls.
That's why I started House Call SF. I've already done the homework and I want to share the useful parts. If this helped, send it to a friend who's thinking about buying in the Bay Area and follow the show for more. You'll find us at housecallsf.com and on Instagram at @HouseCallSF. See you next time for our next house call.
