Inspector Gadget

I'd become mildly addicted to Redfin's forums during my home search.  Redfin lightly moderates them, and tolerates an amazing range of voices.  The Bay Area board contains a few cheerleaders, who tend to obsessively focus on the specialness of particular areas like Palo Alto, but seems generally dominated by skeptics who are convinced that the market has a ways more to fall.  The skeptics range from people who forecast stagnant prices for the next five years to people convinced that we will see a return to 1996 prices.

Anyways, it's always interesting, and often useful.  The best bit of wisdom I've heard on there was something along the lines of, "your negotiations have only begun once your offer is accepted."  That proved to be very true for me, and I was glad that I was mentally and emotionally prepared for the roller-coaster that followed, rather than passively believing that the hard parts were over.

Like I mentioned earlier, we had put together an offer with a fairly aggressive 30-day closing period.  That worked fine for me, but I would have been happy with almost anything - I'm renting month-to-month right now, and while I've been looking forward to shortening my commute, I don't have any particular deadlines to hit.  After learning that the unit was tenant-occupied, I actually wondered whether the sellers wouldn't prefer a longer closing period so they could give the renters adequate notice.  In any case, though, we decided to go ahead with the 30-days.

Most of the closing period focuses on closing contingencies.  My offer had included all the major contingencies - loan approval, appraisal, home inspection, pest inspection, and HOA review.  In retrospect, one annoying aspect of this period was that, perhaps partly due to the shortened timeline, I needed to do all the contingencies that I had to pay for up front, and the contingencies that the seller had to pay for towards the end.  That meant that, for example, I could easily spend a thousand dollars on my loan application and inspections, only to find out later that the HOA was in bad shape and that I wouldn't want it anyways.

Redfin has a very streamlined and efficient closing process, which is both good and bad.  I felt like I couldn't give a lot of input into the process - for example, Regina went ahead and ordered the inspections right away, without asking if I had a particular inspector I wanted to use.  I was planning on going with her guidance anyways, but still, I would have appreciated being asked.  I'm sure that if I had kicked up a fuss I could have gotten my own inspector in there, but whatever.

On the plus side, it's always very clear what you need to do at any stage of the process.  A lot of that involves reading documents, signing them, and then faxing them back by a certain time.  I probably put over a hundred pages through the office fax machine before it was all done - fortunately, Redfin's fax is a local call to us.

We did the property and pest inspections on the same day.  I stopped by on the way in to work, met up with Matt, and waited a few minutes for the inspectors.  They were both friendly and helpful; I tagged along, they voluntarily pointed out the things that they were noting, and answered all my questions.  They re-noted some things that had previously come up in the disclosures - for example, that the sliding balcony door didn't have a lock - and also went into more details; the property inspector suggested that I check with the HOA to see if they had records about the door brand and model, since with that information I could easily find a replacement locking handle that I could install myself.  They also found a host of other issues, nothing critical but plenty that I would want to take care of... some voids in grout, a loose wax seal on the toilet, some holes on the balcony railing.  All the major stuff seemed fine, though... the electrical system was good, no leaks in any plumbing, no mold, all appliances functional.

Matt also did his own walk-through, again noting some of the same things as from the disclosures.  He also observed that some of the issues noted in the initial seller agent's walkthrough were probably actually OK - for example, the disclosures had noted that the cabinets above the sink were missing doors, but we agreed that they were almost certainly designed that way.

I chatted with Regina about the results.  None of the proposed repairs seemed onerous, so I released these contingencies and waited for the next round.