Answer: the purchase price! Why is it the most important? Because it’s the one thing you can’t go back and fix later if you get it wrong!

It may seem simple, but most people overlook this number in favor of other things like interest rate, down payment, and monthly payment. Of course those are important, but they are all things that can be changed after you buy a house.

If you buy a house when interest rates are high, that’s ok — you can always refinance when rates go down (as long as you qualify and the refinance makes sense).

If you think you should have put more down on a house, that’s ok: you can always put more down later! You may even be able to recast your loan so that putting a large chunk of money into the mortgage will result in a lower payment! This is not the same thing as a refinance. In a recast, the rate does not change, only the monthly principal and interest payment changes. As a side note: it is better to put LESS down on a house and then put additional money in later, simply because once you put money into a mortgage, you will never see it again until you sell or get a more expensive home equity loan (which you have to prove enough income and equity to obtain). If you lose your job, it is better to have $50,000 sitting in a checking account than to have a mortgage payment that is $300 lower.

Obviously, your monthly payment is an important number, but that is influenced more by the property taxes of the house you are buying and your interest rate than anything else. What did someone say about death and taxes…

So when you’re buying a house, you should focus more on the purchase price than on any other number. What can you do to get a lower purchase price? Well, one way to do it is to buy when no one else is buying. Like, say, when rates are high! Hmmm… have we ever seen a time when rates were high, but all the experts thought they would go down at some point in the not-too-distant future?

Rates are very high right now, and a lot of people are waiting until rates go down to buy a home. The problem with doing that is THAT’S WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING! If you buy a house when rates are high, you face very little competition as a buyer.

Sellers are funny creatures! When they only have one buyer interested in the house they’re selling, they are relatively easy to negotiate with, especially after their house has been sitting on the market for a few weeks. Once they get one or two more buyers competing, all of the sudden they think they’re the quarterback and the cheer captain all rolled into one amazingly handsome/beautiful specimen. So at that point they are much less likely to negotiate.

What I am trying to say is the most important number is purchase price, and the best time to get that purchase price as low as possible is when no one else is buying.

Like… NOW, for example.