Back to the home-hunting story:
I let a month go by after the Mateo Avenue condo hit the MLS, and finally put in an official request to tour. Once again Matt took care of me; we had gotten to know each other pretty well by this point, to the degree that we started to reminisce about the first property I'd seen way back in the previous year.
Before the tour, I'd spent some time walking around the neighborhood at different times of the day and different days of the week. I was happy with what I had seen - it isn't as fancy as the streets west of Magnolia, but the area was kept up well, there was a good amount of activity on the streets, and overall I got a good vibe off of it. I wandered farther afield, across the tracks, then back again and around the other streets. My favorite aspect was still the access - it's a good walk to the train station, and even shorter to Safeway, Trader Joe's, and the excellent public library - but I dug the spot itself as well.
We learned that a tenant occupied the unit, and waited while she got the kids and headed out, then moved inside. Yup... definitely a tenant and not the owner. Even though the tour had been scheduled for a few days, the place was pretty messy, with half-eaten pizza (at nine in the morning?) and croissant all over the kitchen. Still, by this point I'd gotten pretty good at zeroing in on the important stuff and ignoring the rest. I'd learned to pay good attention to Matt, too, and picked up on some of his observations as well.
Overall, it was nice - not a dream unit, perhaps, but one that definitely fit everything I'd been looking for, and a lot of stuff that I'd been hoping for. It had two bedrooms, which is almost impossible at my budget in Millbrae. It also had two baths - not very useful to me, but the second would be handy if I ever got a roommate or long-term guests. The kitchen was good - it didn't have a spectacular gas oven like the newer condos I'd seen, but it had plenty of cupboards and counter space, which had been fairly recently renovated. It had a nice big balcony - the view is of the back of a big-box store, which isn't great, but on the plus side there's a lot of privacy (no windows facing me), a lot of sky (no other buildings nearby), and if you look up a bit, nice partial views of the Millbrae hills and San Francisco Airport.
I spent more time this go-around than I had on my open house, and Matt and I chatted a bit. We agreed that the unit was overpriced, but otherwise fine - considering that it was 30 years old, it was in quite good shape.
I kept on pondering everything, and eventually decided to go for it. I'd put in a fair offer for what I thought it was worth, and see what happened. At worst, the sellers would just say "no," and at least I'd know to give up on it. If that happened, I was ready to restart my home search or just resign myself to renting for another five years - like I said in a previous post, I'd taken a full inventory of the Millbrae condo market, and seen that there just isn't much out there.
Once again, I submitted the offer wizard on the website. This time Regina got the ticket. As a side note, the wizard is still a bit mysterious to me. From my early reading on the Redfin web site, I had been under the impression that when you start an offer, you can choose which agent will represent you. That never happened with me, though. I'm guessing that if you had someone who you really wanted to use in particular, you could enter that in the notes field and get them. I now think that by default they just hand out the requests to whoever is available.
Regina was also good - as with Sean, she contacted the listing agent to find out the seller's situation and figure out what the timeline would be like. She also sent me a list of comparable properties along with her analysis of the price. She had a higher price in mind than I did, and with some good reason - her comps included recent condo sales near 280, which I had discounted because of how far away they are, but since most people buy into Millbrae for the school district, it seemed valid to include them. I pointed out another sale that she hadn't included - one which was quite a bit bigger, but sold for noticeably less, and was closer to this property than the other comps. She agreed that that was a good comp. I re-ran my numbers taking all the data into account, and settled on a fair price that was about 7% under the seller's listing price.
There were a couple of odd things about this transaction. One early issue was the disclosures; on previous offers, I had received disclosures early on and been encouraged to review them prior to making an offer. This time around, Regina urged me to put together the offer prior to receiving the disclosures. Again, that seemed strange - if there was anything in there that was a turn-off, then I'd be wasting everyone's time by making an offer; and, from the seller's perspective, it seems like they'd want me to know everything I could up front. If I make an offer for $X, based on all the disclosures, and they accept, then I can't come back later and ask them to take off $Y due to issues that they had disclosed. On the other hand, if I make an offer for $X without any disclosures, then even after they accept, I can ask them to take off $Y to deal with things that they already knew about; this makes it harder for the seller to compare offers, since different buyers will grade issues differently, and they run the risk of accepting an offer that the buyer will end up backing out of altogether later on.
In any case, I did end up getting the disclosures just prior to when we were going to put in the offer, so I did get a chance to read them. This should have been a good clue of how the process would continue. Everyone on the selling side was somewhat removed from the transaction - the listing agent was a part-timer who was helpful but not always quickly responsive; the sellers didn't live in the property; and so on. I think that if they had been a bit more organized, I could have gotten the disclosures sooner and moved forward more quickly.
In any case, the disclosures were fine, far less scary than the Palm one. Bay Area disclosures are fairly long, with a good amount of boilerplate, but still well worth reading. The seller fills out a long list of questions, mainly yes/no with space for explaining negative answers. It covers things like structural defects, neighborhood nuisances, odors, and so on. I learned the details about some recent renovations, which was helpful. The disclosures also include observations from the listing agent as part of their walk-through. In my case, there weren't any bombshells here, just a few fairly minor things that we had noticed during my tour - a missing lock on the balcony door, for example. Nothing seemed like it would seriously ding my offer price, so I gave a thumbs-up, submitted the offer, then crossed my fingers and waited.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Freakish Depth
This is probably a good time to sing the praises of Property Shark. I should start by saying that Redfin has one of the best web sites, period - not just the best real estate web site, but best overall. It combines an almost comically broad range of useful information about homes, and somehow manages to present it in an engaging and highly readable manner. It's responsive, fun, informative, and incredibly addictive.
As I previously mentioned, I had attended a Redfin homebuying seminar late last year. It was very informative and helpful, and one of the things that pushed me toward working with Redfin. The presenter included an extremely useful list of helpful web sites, and made particular note of Property Shark, which she cheerfully explained had a lot of data that even Redfin doesn't have.
And, boy, does it ever. Property Shark isn't nearly as pretty as Redfin, but the amount of information it has is amazing, maybe even a little scary. You can search for properties in any supported area, and pull out an incredible amount of information from there. Things like:
As you can see, I'm a fan. I think Property Shark is a harbinger in the same way Redfin is: the real estate model is moving from the traditional closed, secretive, divided world that kept consumers at arms-length from the transaction, and moving towards a more modern Web-ish approach of empowered consumers who drive their own searches and be responsible for their own education. It will be fascinating to see how the real estate world I sell in will be different from the evolving world in which I bought.
As I previously mentioned, I had attended a Redfin homebuying seminar late last year. It was very informative and helpful, and one of the things that pushed me toward working with Redfin. The presenter included an extremely useful list of helpful web sites, and made particular note of Property Shark, which she cheerfully explained had a lot of data that even Redfin doesn't have.
And, boy, does it ever. Property Shark isn't nearly as pretty as Redfin, but the amount of information it has is amazing, maybe even a little scary. You can search for properties in any supported area, and pull out an incredible amount of information from there. Things like:
- The owner's name
- The owner's address (thus providing one of the only ways that you can determine the owner-occupancy ratio of a building or area)
- Complete sales price for the property. You might see that a house sold for $40,000 in 1945, for $120,000 in 1990, for $800,000 in 2006. If you see that it's on the market today for $700,000, you know that the seller is already accepting a major loss on the property.
- The loans on the property. So a house might show, for example, a $417,000 first loan from Wells Fargo, and a second $105,000 loan from Citibank. Again, this is amazing information. You can check to see whether the seller is likely underwater - if they bought in 2006 or 2007, have loans close to the purchase price, and are asking for something close to the last sales price, then they are probably already as low as they can go without negotiating a short sale. Conversely, if a home sold 15 years ago with a sensible loan and the owner is asking twice as much for it now, they may have considerably more flexibility.
- A ton of maps! There's a population density graph, which seems to operate on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, that shows the number of residents per square mile in an area.
- There's a population age map, which shows the median age of each neighborhood. (This is an area where you can really visibly see Millbrae's strong dichotomy between young and old.)
- There's an environmental hazard map, which shows EPA-designated hazardous sites, which range from scary brownfields to innocuous photo development chemicals.
- There's an earthquake hazard map, which shows which areas are vulnerable to liquefaction, sliding, or other problems. (Lots of this in the Bay Area, but Millbrae is surprisingly safe.)
- A flood zone map. This was yet another incredibly useful find; usually, you can't find this out until near the end of closing or with a ton of legwork to track down paper FEMA maps from a government agency. The map breaks down areas in a 100-Year Flood Zone, a 500-Year Flood Zone, or other area of concern. Having access to this let me determine which areas I could feel safe about and which needed concern. Nearly all of Burlingame east of El Camino Real is in a flood zone, and a lot of the western area is as well; Millbrae had a few tendrils of 500-year flood zones, but none ran through the blocks where I was interested. Success!
- The public records for a property. This seems especially invaluable for FSBOs or older transactions; you can find out the official square footage, number of bedrooms, and so on. The Bay Area (and probably much of California) has a pretty significant problem with people performing unpermitted renovations, done without county approval, in an attempt to dodge a property tax increase; you can spot where a seller's statements don't line up with the official word, and be prepared to deal with the extra headaches involved with an illegal property addition.
As you can see, I'm a fan. I think Property Shark is a harbinger in the same way Redfin is: the real estate model is moving from the traditional closed, secretive, divided world that kept consumers at arms-length from the transaction, and moving towards a more modern Web-ish approach of empowered consumers who drive their own searches and be responsible for their own education. It will be fascinating to see how the real estate world I sell in will be different from the evolving world in which I bought.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Searching through the Rough
Around this time, I started to have a crisis of faith. By this point I'd been closely following the Millbrae-area market for about half a year; the more I learned, the more I liked the area, but also the more I realized what a difficult thing I was looking for. There just are not that many condo developments in the area. As a matter of fact, I had a complete list of every one in the whole city.
Burlingame had just a handful of options:
I decided to take a little break - after all, the commute wasn't killing me, and perhaps the situation would change. Along the way, I kept monitoring an interesting property. In addition to my Redfin emails, I also had subscribed to Craigslist RSS feeds that reported on condos advertised in Millbrae and Burlingame. Most of these duplicated information in the MLS, but some were FSBOs, and one in particular caught my eye: a FSBO condo on Mateo Avenue. It seemed overpriced, but otherwise matched what I was looking for. I decided to wait and see what would happen.
The property didn't seem to be advertised too heavily; after that first Craigslist post, nothing else came up, and I never saw it on any of the major FSBO web sites. About a month later, it popped up again, this time with agent representation but without being listed on the MLS. I decided to keep my distance - it still bore the same high price, and without the MLS connection I wouldn't be able to use Redfin. It also had mysteriously lost about 90 square feet between the time it was a FSBO and when an agent took it.
About a month after that, it finally hit the MLS. Still at the same price. I decided to wait for now - I didn't want to play my hand by seeming too eager, and by now I knew the market well enough to feel pretty sure that it wouldn't get snatched up at the current price. I knew from advice and observation that well-priced homes were selling quickly while overpriced homes languished for a month or more, so I figured that waiting for a while would give the seller time to adjust to more realistic expectations.
After a couple of weeks, the seller hosted an open house. I still wasn't ready to officially tour, but decided to drop by. It's kind of funny that I didn't do my first open house until towards the end of my search; I'd been scared off by warnings early on about attending open houses without representation. Listing agents can use them to scout for new clients, and if you aren't already represented by an agent and decide to make an offer after attending an open house, the listing agent becomes your agent, which leads to a conflict of interest. By now, though, I was happily represented by Redfin, and didn't think I'd have a problem.
As it turns out, I needn't have worried. I attended two open houses, and both were very pleasantly low-key, with no pressure to sign a register or do other stuff I was worried about. First I attended a house-house open house: an interesting, very old small house on Magnolia Avenue that had dropped by hundreds of thousands of dollars from its initial listing, and, if it dropped another two hundred thousand, would finally hit my range. It was nothing spectacular, but still intriguing: nice large lot, cute small house, a bathroom that had probably been renovated in the 1940's, an old-fashioned detached garage, very little set-back from the sidewalk. I thanked the agent and moved on to Mateo.
Once again, I had timed my visit to coincide with the arrival of Caltrain. The open house was on a Sunday, so I had a narrower window. The building is on the east side of El Camino Real, about a block from the tracks, but set much farther back than the California Avenue building had been. The agent greeted me when I arrived, then took a call while I wandered around. The train came by while I stood near an open window. It was audible, but infinitely better than the California Avenue one, and without any vibration. With time, I was confident that it would just become background noise, like a passing car; similarly, my current apartment is near a light rail line, and after the first few weeks I no longer noticed the sound.
The unit itself seemed crowded, but mainly because of all the furniture. It was occupied by tenants, and while it had been cleaned up, it didn't show as well as the other condos I'd seen. Still, nothing seemed wrong with it, and it was in better shape than the Palm Avenue unit that I had started making an offer on. I wandered around, checked for mold, looked under the sinks, played with the doors and light switches. Everything seemed in good order.
Still, the fact remained that it was overpriced. This wasn't just a subjective feeling, and wasn't taken from the popular online home estimation tools like Zillow and CyberHomes. I kept crunching possible values based on different methodologies, and kept coming up with a pretty consistent price range that was quite a bit less than the asking price. At the simplest end, I took the price per square foot for similarly sized and aged units in Millbrae/Burlingame that had recently sold, and adjusted it for this unit's size. I also took the most recent sales prices in the complex (which required going back to 2004-2005, during the boom but before the peak of the bubble), and tracked where those prices would go assuming that they followed the same overall price changes of Millbrae as a whole. Doing this quantitative work helped me gain a lot of confidence, and made me more secure in deciding to wait until I could get a better price.
- Park Broadway - Nice, but expensive, and too far away from the station and downtown for me.
- 88 South Broadway - Insanely expensive.
- Belamor - Too expensive, uncertainty around construction status.
- Palm Avenue - Perfect location and nice size, but worrying HOA situation.
- 15 Magnolia - Only 10 units, never available.
- 75 Magnolia - Only 4 units, never available.
- Mateo Avenue - Only 10 units, more on this later.
- 1396 El Camino Real - Too far away from the station and downtown, practically in San Bruno.
- Windwater Mills - On a busy street near the high school, plus some worrying online reports.
Burlingame had just a handful of options:
- California Avenue - Great units, but pricey and too close to the tracks.
- Ogden - In retrospect, I wish I had pursued the one-bedroom from here at the end of last year, but I had been too focused on Belamor. Nothing else entered the market during the spring or summer of my search.
I decided to take a little break - after all, the commute wasn't killing me, and perhaps the situation would change. Along the way, I kept monitoring an interesting property. In addition to my Redfin emails, I also had subscribed to Craigslist RSS feeds that reported on condos advertised in Millbrae and Burlingame. Most of these duplicated information in the MLS, but some were FSBOs, and one in particular caught my eye: a FSBO condo on Mateo Avenue. It seemed overpriced, but otherwise matched what I was looking for. I decided to wait and see what would happen.
The property didn't seem to be advertised too heavily; after that first Craigslist post, nothing else came up, and I never saw it on any of the major FSBO web sites. About a month later, it popped up again, this time with agent representation but without being listed on the MLS. I decided to keep my distance - it still bore the same high price, and without the MLS connection I wouldn't be able to use Redfin. It also had mysteriously lost about 90 square feet between the time it was a FSBO and when an agent took it.
About a month after that, it finally hit the MLS. Still at the same price. I decided to wait for now - I didn't want to play my hand by seeming too eager, and by now I knew the market well enough to feel pretty sure that it wouldn't get snatched up at the current price. I knew from advice and observation that well-priced homes were selling quickly while overpriced homes languished for a month or more, so I figured that waiting for a while would give the seller time to adjust to more realistic expectations.
After a couple of weeks, the seller hosted an open house. I still wasn't ready to officially tour, but decided to drop by. It's kind of funny that I didn't do my first open house until towards the end of my search; I'd been scared off by warnings early on about attending open houses without representation. Listing agents can use them to scout for new clients, and if you aren't already represented by an agent and decide to make an offer after attending an open house, the listing agent becomes your agent, which leads to a conflict of interest. By now, though, I was happily represented by Redfin, and didn't think I'd have a problem.
As it turns out, I needn't have worried. I attended two open houses, and both were very pleasantly low-key, with no pressure to sign a register or do other stuff I was worried about. First I attended a house-house open house: an interesting, very old small house on Magnolia Avenue that had dropped by hundreds of thousands of dollars from its initial listing, and, if it dropped another two hundred thousand, would finally hit my range. It was nothing spectacular, but still intriguing: nice large lot, cute small house, a bathroom that had probably been renovated in the 1940's, an old-fashioned detached garage, very little set-back from the sidewalk. I thanked the agent and moved on to Mateo.
Once again, I had timed my visit to coincide with the arrival of Caltrain. The open house was on a Sunday, so I had a narrower window. The building is on the east side of El Camino Real, about a block from the tracks, but set much farther back than the California Avenue building had been. The agent greeted me when I arrived, then took a call while I wandered around. The train came by while I stood near an open window. It was audible, but infinitely better than the California Avenue one, and without any vibration. With time, I was confident that it would just become background noise, like a passing car; similarly, my current apartment is near a light rail line, and after the first few weeks I no longer noticed the sound.
The unit itself seemed crowded, but mainly because of all the furniture. It was occupied by tenants, and while it had been cleaned up, it didn't show as well as the other condos I'd seen. Still, nothing seemed wrong with it, and it was in better shape than the Palm Avenue unit that I had started making an offer on. I wandered around, checked for mold, looked under the sinks, played with the doors and light switches. Everything seemed in good order.
Still, the fact remained that it was overpriced. This wasn't just a subjective feeling, and wasn't taken from the popular online home estimation tools like Zillow and CyberHomes. I kept crunching possible values based on different methodologies, and kept coming up with a pretty consistent price range that was quite a bit less than the asking price. At the simplest end, I took the price per square foot for similarly sized and aged units in Millbrae/Burlingame that had recently sold, and adjusted it for this unit's size. I also took the most recent sales prices in the complex (which required going back to 2004-2005, during the boom but before the peak of the bubble), and tracked where those prices would go assuming that they followed the same overall price changes of Millbrae as a whole. Doing this quantitative work helped me gain a lot of confidence, and made me more secure in deciding to wait until I could get a better price.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Too Slow, Too Loud
By now I was fully plugged in to the Redfin alert system. Every morning I would receive an email providing an update on the condo market in Millbrae and Burlingame: what properties had hit the market, which had dropped their prices, which had sold and at what price. This was incredibly useful, as it let me get a feel for the overall trends in the market, even beyond the (very) narrow area I was focusing on.
On a Tuesday morning, I saw a fascinating property hit the list: a small 1-bedroom condo at 88 South Broadway. I've been aware of this development for years, but hadn't thought that it had any 1-bedrooms. It was on the smallish size, but extremely well priced. A little too well priced. The only way I could imagine explaining the low price was if it was on the first floor facing directly onto El Camino Real. Still, I was sufficiently intrigued to request a tour.
I put in the tour request on that Tuesday. I got in touch with Matt, but we weren't able to schedule a showing before Saturday. When I showed up on Saturday, I found that it was more or less mobbed, with perhaps five or six parties squeezed into this small one-bedroom space, walking around and chatting. Matt was juggling me and another client. I really liked what I saw. The building is almost brand-new, having finished in 2007, and while this unit is less luxurious than most, it was still in great shape and had a really nice-looking kitchen.
So, why the low price? It was on the ground floor, but was at the back of the complex, facing onto South Broadway. Privacy was slightly limited, since a walkway came right outside the window. Matt had also learned from the listing agent that there were some complications with the unit - it was technically a "caretaker's unit," and theoretically intended for occupation by the property manager. Still, in practice, it could be freely bought and sold; the only restriction was that, if you rented it, you couldn't charge more than a certain amount for rent... I think that the limit was something like $1200 a month, pretty reasonable. So that helped explain the low price, but still, the restrictions didn't bother me, and this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get into the development.
I'd toured the property Saturday. I started the offer wizard on Saturday night. Redfin agents have the weekends off, which I do not begrudge them, so I didn't hear from Sean until mid-Monday. He got in touch with the listing agent. On Tuesday, I learned that they had already accepted an offer and the property was no longer available. The next day, I saw it pop up as "Pending" in my email inbox.
That was probably the low point of my relationship with Redfin, although I don't know that it's necessarily their fault. For this very well-priced property with a lot of interest, getting in a few days earlier would have given me a shot at buying the property. Now, I don't know what price it ended up selling for, and it's totally possible that a bidding war would have pushed it beyond what I would be willing to pay for a small one-bedroom. Also, I don't know that a traditional agent would have been able to get me in to see it earlier, or been able to communicate my interest any more quickly to the sellers. Still, this was a case where Redfin's model seemed to suffer a little.
A little while later I toured a townhouse that was on the Burlingame side. This was the first townhouse I'd seen, and I have to admit to liking it. It had an integrated two-car garage, three stories, plenty of space, a balcony... lots of the stuff that I associate with traditional residential houses, but still at a (relatively) affordable price and in a great area.
The catch? As I had instantly noted on Google Maps, it was next to the train tracks. I went ahead and toured it since I wasn't sure if this particular unit was next to the tracks or farther back in the complex. Nope - it was front and center. I toured it in the morning during commuting hours, and paid attention as two Caltrains rumbled by. Nope... not happening. Even with the windows closed, it was quite loud, and while the floor didn't exactly shake, you could still feel the movement. I gave a sigh, and let that one go.
On a Tuesday morning, I saw a fascinating property hit the list: a small 1-bedroom condo at 88 South Broadway. I've been aware of this development for years, but hadn't thought that it had any 1-bedrooms. It was on the smallish size, but extremely well priced. A little too well priced. The only way I could imagine explaining the low price was if it was on the first floor facing directly onto El Camino Real. Still, I was sufficiently intrigued to request a tour.
I put in the tour request on that Tuesday. I got in touch with Matt, but we weren't able to schedule a showing before Saturday. When I showed up on Saturday, I found that it was more or less mobbed, with perhaps five or six parties squeezed into this small one-bedroom space, walking around and chatting. Matt was juggling me and another client. I really liked what I saw. The building is almost brand-new, having finished in 2007, and while this unit is less luxurious than most, it was still in great shape and had a really nice-looking kitchen.
So, why the low price? It was on the ground floor, but was at the back of the complex, facing onto South Broadway. Privacy was slightly limited, since a walkway came right outside the window. Matt had also learned from the listing agent that there were some complications with the unit - it was technically a "caretaker's unit," and theoretically intended for occupation by the property manager. Still, in practice, it could be freely bought and sold; the only restriction was that, if you rented it, you couldn't charge more than a certain amount for rent... I think that the limit was something like $1200 a month, pretty reasonable. So that helped explain the low price, but still, the restrictions didn't bother me, and this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get into the development.
I'd toured the property Saturday. I started the offer wizard on Saturday night. Redfin agents have the weekends off, which I do not begrudge them, so I didn't hear from Sean until mid-Monday. He got in touch with the listing agent. On Tuesday, I learned that they had already accepted an offer and the property was no longer available. The next day, I saw it pop up as "Pending" in my email inbox.
That was probably the low point of my relationship with Redfin, although I don't know that it's necessarily their fault. For this very well-priced property with a lot of interest, getting in a few days earlier would have given me a shot at buying the property. Now, I don't know what price it ended up selling for, and it's totally possible that a bidding war would have pushed it beyond what I would be willing to pay for a small one-bedroom. Also, I don't know that a traditional agent would have been able to get me in to see it earlier, or been able to communicate my interest any more quickly to the sellers. Still, this was a case where Redfin's model seemed to suffer a little.
A little while later I toured a townhouse that was on the Burlingame side. This was the first townhouse I'd seen, and I have to admit to liking it. It had an integrated two-car garage, three stories, plenty of space, a balcony... lots of the stuff that I associate with traditional residential houses, but still at a (relatively) affordable price and in a great area.
The catch? As I had instantly noted on Google Maps, it was next to the train tracks. I went ahead and toured it since I wasn't sure if this particular unit was next to the tracks or farther back in the complex. Nope - it was front and center. I toured it in the morning during commuting hours, and paid attention as two Caltrains rumbled by. Nope... not happening. Even with the windows closed, it was quite loud, and while the floor didn't exactly shake, you could still feel the movement. I gave a sigh, and let that one go.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Scared Off
Like I said: far too little happened, then far too much.
I'll skip my description of the remaining units at Palm Avenue. I eventually did decide to start an offer on one of them, a short sale. It seemed perfectly situated - top floor, corner unit, views of the hills and the park - and I thought it would be worth the hefty price and HOA fee, despite the fact that it wasn't in great shape. (It wasn't decrepit or anything, but the doors stuck, and was really cluttered.)
I did the Redfin offer wizard thing. This works pretty well. Because this was a short sale, it wouldn't fit into the normal Redfin model - typically they refund up to 50% of their commission, but it's only 15% for short sales. Their web site says that these deals are handled by special affiliated agents, but in my case it was a Redfin team member, Sean Sullivan. He was extremely nice and helpful, like everyone I met at Redfin. He talked me through the process, got the disclosures, and sent them over.
Well.
I'd been cautiously optimistic before, but after reading the disclosures, I was ready to run away screaming. The seller seems to have been barely conscious while filling it out. Not only were many sections indecipherable, but many were just blatantly wrong. I mean, yeah, I can see why a seller might not want to admit certain things, but why on earth would you say "No" to the question "Is this property a condominium?" when, uh, it's a condominium? Are you trying to fool someone, who things that your single-family house happens to be elevated thirty feet in the air and surrounded by other single-family houses?
I chatted with Sean, and we mutually agreed that it wasn't worth pursuing. In addition to the "haphazard" (to use Sean's wonderfully understated phrase) manner in which the seller had filled out the disclosures, the seller's agent's disclosures also listed some serious stuff that I had overlooked, like mold and some encroachment issues. Sean's basic message was, "If you want to move ahead with this, we can, but personally I'd recommend against it." I agreed, and from that moment on felt confident that Redfin was on my side.
I'll skip my description of the remaining units at Palm Avenue. I eventually did decide to start an offer on one of them, a short sale. It seemed perfectly situated - top floor, corner unit, views of the hills and the park - and I thought it would be worth the hefty price and HOA fee, despite the fact that it wasn't in great shape. (It wasn't decrepit or anything, but the doors stuck, and was really cluttered.)
I did the Redfin offer wizard thing. This works pretty well. Because this was a short sale, it wouldn't fit into the normal Redfin model - typically they refund up to 50% of their commission, but it's only 15% for short sales. Their web site says that these deals are handled by special affiliated agents, but in my case it was a Redfin team member, Sean Sullivan. He was extremely nice and helpful, like everyone I met at Redfin. He talked me through the process, got the disclosures, and sent them over.
Well.
I'd been cautiously optimistic before, but after reading the disclosures, I was ready to run away screaming. The seller seems to have been barely conscious while filling it out. Not only were many sections indecipherable, but many were just blatantly wrong. I mean, yeah, I can see why a seller might not want to admit certain things, but why on earth would you say "No" to the question "Is this property a condominium?" when, uh, it's a condominium? Are you trying to fool someone, who things that your single-family house happens to be elevated thirty feet in the air and surrounded by other single-family houses?
I chatted with Sean, and we mutually agreed that it wasn't worth pursuing. In addition to the "haphazard" (to use Sean's wonderfully understated phrase) manner in which the seller had filled out the disclosures, the seller's agent's disclosures also listed some serious stuff that I had overlooked, like mold and some encroachment issues. Sean's basic message was, "If you want to move ahead with this, we can, but personally I'd recommend against it." I agreed, and from that moment on felt confident that Redfin was on my side.
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