Finally tired of renting, so we're planning to buy a small two-storey, two-bedroom townhouse. We plan to put this thru in a housing loan thru a bank. If the loanable amount is sufficient and within our budget, we'll push thru with the loan(and hopefully be approved) and are expected to give an 'earnest money' while the loan is being processed.

A bit of complication is that we currently are dealing with a middleman since the owner already migrated abroad.

So how would this suppose to go down? Please advise of the step by step process that we should expect to go thru from filling-up of loan application, appraisal, loan approval, payment of capital gains, transfers of title, etc? Any hints, notes, do's and don'ts, timelines would be very helpful as well.

Specific questions i have in mind are:

- At what point should we give the earnest money? Is this refundable?

- Earnest money should be named to the owner, right? How is this done when owner is abroad?

- Since the owner is abroad, how would we proceed with the sale?

Thanks in advance!