If you are buying property for the first time you might be rather unpleasantly surprised when you are handed the attorneys invoice at the end of the transaction with no one having mentioned these additional costs involved in purchasing your property.
Once you have found your property or at least know your price range you can ask your bank, attorney, mortgage originator or estate agent to give you estimations on the following costs:
Registration Fees
These are the fees for the attorneys service or registering the property into your name.
Deeds Office Fees
These fees are paid to the Deeds Office for performing searches on the property to ensure that the seller selling it to you is the legitimate owner of the property and that all is well on the "back end" of the sale.
Transfer Fees
These fees are paid to the attorney who is transferring the property out of the sellers name. This is not the same fee as the registration fee. It is often paid to a separate firm of attorneys.
Transfer Duty
These fees are not the same as the transfer fees and the quote your receive should include a separate amount allocated to transfer duty. A purchase price below a certain amount will render your Transfer Duty zero, chat to your mortgage originator about this.
Valuation Fees
The bank will send a valuer out to the property (regardless of what valuation the estate agent gives you, the banks will do it's own assessment to ensure that the sale price is within value of the property) If the bank finds that the sale price is way to high for their estimated value of the property they will not fund the entire purchase price but rather only up to the amount that they see covers the full value of the property. If this happens you will have a chance to go back to the seller and renegotiate the purchase price according to the lower value received by the bank.
The banks will charge a valuation fee.
Fees that you should NOT be charged for:
There should be no charge for the service of the estate agent to the buyer. The seller will be paying the estate agent a percentage of the sale price. It is illegal for the estate agent to charge the buyer as well.
There should be no fees charged to the buyer by the mortgage originator as they make their commission from the banks for completing the home loan application form on the banks behalf.