Wind Up

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.