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The Homebuyer's Guide (software)

by Arnold Kling

February 20, 1995 (Update Dec. 1996. This software may no longer exist. I have been unable to get in touch with the company.)

One of the best "books" that I have seen for homebuyers comes on diskette. It is The Homebuyer's Guide, co-produced by Books that Work and Hearst New Media and Technology. The press release indicates that it should retail for "about $30." It lists kim@BTW.com as a contact, with a main phone number of 415-843-4400.

The Homebuyer's Guide is designed to help you to organize your thinking about buying a home. It divides the process into preparation, the home hunt, financing, offer, and closing. My guess is that many people will choose to go through the entire process at one sitting, in order to simulate a complete home purchase.

The Homebuyer's Guide serves the function of a book in that it explains the terminology and the steps involved in buying a home. With sections like the "Buyer Beware Checklist," it keeps you focused on what's important, so that you are less likely to get burned or to waste your time.

The Homebuyer's Guide goes beyond a book in that its worksheets and checklists are interactive. Thus, when you want to perform the "rent vs. buy" analysis, you just type the assumptions into the worksheet on the screen, and the calculations are done for you. This particular worksheet has little in the way of on-line explanation, and it prompted my one visit to the manual, which helped guide me through the inputs. Even the manual does not explain the underlying logic behind the analysis, so you have to take it on faith that the analysis is correct. It appears to me to be sound.

Other worksheets allow you to calculate how much you can afford, what your closing costs will be, and how different loans compare. The loan comparison is not as crisp as with PC-Loan. For example, when I tried to compare a loan with 9 percent and no points to a loan with 8.75 and 1/2 point, I could not use the output to determine which loan is better. However, it is easy to use and lets you save information on several loans for ready reference.

In my opinion, the outstanding strength of this product is in the design of the software. All of its navigational tools--hypertext, menu bars, and icons, work well. It "feels" a lot like a Web browser. Because of its outstanding design, The Homebuyer's Guide truly is a book that is enhanced by the computer platform.

The Homebuyer's Guide is Windows(tm) software. It does not require a CD-ROM drive.

fbtw