Some Observations From Buying a Home Recently

My wife Erin and I recently bought a house. Our extended family is very much a modern one, and in the true spirit of that, we did things a little out of order, we bought the house, then we got married. (not sure if that link will work, maybe someone will let me know. Should take you to our wedding album on Facebook if you give a crap)

Here are some random thoughts about the process.

How We Picked Our Agent:

I could probably name 8-10 agents off the top of my head that do business where we were looking. In that regard, we probably weren't your average homebuyers (or were we?). We chose to do business with Kevin and Fred. Let's see if I can explain why.

They have been two guys that have bent over backwards to help me out (and there are quite a few people like this in the area we chose to buy, so this wasn't the only reason we chose them) no matter what kind of crazy things I might come asking for. I've had a relationship with them for years prior to ever buying a house with them (since like 2009). At no point during our relationship did they ever think they were going to get business from me. We lived in Seattle, and then San Jose. Arizona was never on our radar until it was. We decided to move to Arizona and then had an offer in in about 20 days. And yet for years prior to that, any time I called or texted Fred or Kevin, they would always respond and help any way they could. Never once did they stop to wonder if I would some day buy a house with them. They just freely gave of themselves. And they continue to do this today, even after we've already purchased from them. I've probably called Kevin or texted Fred at least 5 times since we closed in April. And they've helped every time still. Not sure this would have set them apart from many other agents I know in this area, but it was a start to forming our decision. The next part was even more of a reason for us.

They have a team. I know how much goes into running your own business. It never ends. Marketing, transaction management, dealing with clients, showing houses, keeping the transaction on track, and ON....and On....and ON! An agent's job is HARD. Anyone that thinks otherwise just doesn't know. The idea of working with someone that had a team appealed to us. I knew enough to know that someone specific would be assigned to each portion of the adventure. We worked with a buyer's agent on their team. Pete. He was fantastic. He knew the area inside and out, he was available when we needed him to be, and he specialized in working with buyers. He was able to show us houses on pretty short notice and was able to set aside three days to make sure we found a home in our time frame. This is no small feat. We moved fast. From the time we decided where we wanted to buy to the time we made our first offer (which was our only offer) totaled about 20 days. We knew that if Pete wasn't able to assist us on one of those days, someone else on the team would be. They worked around our schedule 100%.

Once we found the house we wanted, made the offer, and it was accepted (which had it's own hoops to jump through, but we had Fred and Kevin as well as Pete there to guide us the whole way), we started working with Stephanie, their transaction coordinator. She handled everything from that point forward and she was good. This is what she is trained to do and it showed. She helped us along the way with everything from the inspection to the financing and lots of stuff in between. Had there been any issues, we could have gone to Kevin and Fred to make sure they were handled, but there weren't any. But that extra layer of accountability was something that appealed to us. 

This division of labor allowed them to take care of us on short notice, gave us comfort that there was always someone to answer for anything that might pop up (Kevin and Fred) and just made the transaction run smooth. We never waited more than 15 minutes to get a call back and we always felt like they were attentive and had the resources to handle our business.

So we picked them because they had always given freely of themselves and they had a business that was set up to handle our unique needs.

But We Didn't Use Their Website, We Used Redfin:

It's just better. It allowed us to look for houses that just had a pool (although not exactly. We could search for the term 'pool' and have our results filtered to only include listings that had the word 'pool' in them. I was shocked how many agents in the Phoenix area market their listings with 'enough room in the backyard for a pool', but I digress). It also let us know which homes we had already looked at and didn't want to see any more. Erin and I could log in to the same account and see what each other had favorited, or leave notes on different homes that appealed to us. Not once during the search did we use Kevin and Fred's website. For all I know, it does all the same stuff we loved about Redfin, we just never looked anywhere else.

Erin started out looking on Trulia and Zillow but I made her stop. I knew Redfin had an IDX feed from the MLS and I knew that the data would be as up to date as the MLS data is. And guess what, Kevin and Fred and Pete never once asked us to do anything different. Maybe it's because they knew we were moving fast and that they weren't going to have to chase us to be clients, we'd already decided to work with them, but they let us search in the way we were most comfortable with. I envision a completely different conversation with them had we kept sending listings to them that were no longer on the market, but we never ran into that issue (since we were looking at a site that was constantly updated and fresh.....with accurate data).

Pete Held Our Hand to Help Us Learn the Area:

After we made the decision to move, we spent about two weeks online learning the area. How? We'd find houses we liked and we'd send them to Pete then call him and ask him about the area the home was in. Erin would have preferred that he just tell us the crime statistics and if there was a good chance our house would get broken into, but Pete would do the REALTOR-y thing and send us off to investigate this stuff on our own. This might have been the most frustrating part. It actuallly left me wondering if 'crime' is a protected class, but I understand why agents don't want to discuss that stuff. Although it left us a tad frustrated that agents can't discuss quality of neighborhood as openly as they should be able to. Lucky for us, we have plenty of friends who we could reach out to and ask about areas and get brutally honest feedback. So that was fine.

But Pete knew that we wanted to be close(ish) to the airport, or that we wanted certain features in the neighborhood or that we needed certain things to be close enough to us that it wasn't a hassle. Between Pete and our friends, we targeted in on a few areas that we liked and focused there for the last few days of online house hunting. No matter how outlandish our questions, he always positioned himself to help. He even had discussions with us about scorpions, bugs, Haboobs (I think that's what they call the dust storms here?) and anything else we weren't familiar with coming from WA via CA. 

Some Agents Hurt Their Sellers Bad:

In the beginning, in order to get to a manageable number of homes to see once we got to Phoenix, we looked at TONS of homes online and we just eliminated anything that didn't look appealing to us over the internet. That included:

Houses with crappy pictures. We might have loved the house had we stepped in, but we could never tell from the pictures. Someone taking blurry pictures for their seller should lose their license!! It's that egregious of violation in today's world. Dark pictures are almost as bad. If your pictures always seem to be dark, just stop and hire professionals. It was that bad and we saw a lot of them like this. The home we ended up buying (and almost every house we picked to go see) clearly had professional photos, or at the very least an agent who excels in taking photos. It was that obvious and it worked!

(Those are a few examples of the pictures of our house in the MLS. And I'm not even sure these are the best ones.....but every photo was great!)

Houses with no pictures. Seriously, WTF??? I get it, your seller wants it on the market today. But guess what, we marked it as 'don't show to us again' on Redfin if it had no pictures when we saw it. For all I know, that house just hit the market today and there would have been pictures tomorrow. Too bad! We didn't have time to come back and look every day in hopes Mr. DA agent would eventually get pictures up. Not to mention, I had an auto alert set up that emailed us when new homes hit the market. Guess when I get that email? Right after you put it in the MLS. So if you don't have pictures when it goes live, I'm never going to see them when you finally put them in the MLS. If you do this, stop immediately. I was shocked how often this happened with new listings that just hit the market that day.

It actually left me a little bit upset. I know that a few of those homes we overlooked were homes we would have wanted to see in person. I don't know which ones, but based on how they were described, they met our criteria but they didn't have photos (or good photos). I'm still left scratching my head about this part of things.

I have a bunch more notes about the experience that I'm sure I'll share at some point. But for now I'm off to enjoy our new(ish) home. Thanks so much Fred and Kevin and Pete and Stephanie. You guys were awesome!