Finding a Realtor

Typical ways to find a realtor are to ask friends, family, and neighbors for recommendations. We're the first of our friends to buy a house, we don't have any family in this area, and all our neighbors live in an apartment. So in finding a realtor, we were on our own.

I think I've mentioned that Mr. EBB is a financial analyst for a bank and I'm a lawyer. To be a bit more specific, he works in commercial real estate lending and I focus on real estate and land use. You'd think that might give us a bit of a head start in buying a home, and you'd be right--in terms of having a vocabulary of "points" and "PMI" and "escrow" and "fee estate." But that's about as far as our degrees and work experience could take us--to navigate the listings, process, and paperwork, we needed a knowledgeable and patient realtor. I say knowledgeable because we had very limited awareness of neighborhoods beyond the ones we had lived in, and patient because we both had lots and lots of questions--Mr. EBB questions everything having to do with price and mortgages, and I question everything having to do with a contract. It's been particularly jarring for me to see how little of what I learned in my law school property and real estate classes actually comes into the real world.

We started browsing open houses pretty soon after we got married in early October. At first it felt awkward to just walk into someone's home and wander through their rooms and open their closets, but we adjusted. It was fun just being in houses with multiple rooms and doors and made returning to our little apartment all the more painful. We never really engaged with the listing agents--they all seemed so overeager and overconfident in the market.

Toward the end of November, we visited a beautiful home in a just-okay neighborhood, and we had the place to ourselves. While I poked around upstairs, Mr. EBB and the agent started chatting. They were still chatting when I came downstairs, and I could tell that they had a good conversation going. Mr. EBB was talking about interest rates and whether the market had reached bottom, and the agent didn't seem to be disabusing him of the notion that prices could still fall and waiting to buy might be wise. She seemed calm, non-effusive, and like she didn't really care if we didn't buy the house if we didn't love it. She was the antithesis of the "look at these spacious rooms!" agents that creeped us out in person and make us giggle on HGTV. We loved her.

I signed up to receive automatic email updates from her twice a week with properties that matched criteria we could enter. I set up a separate email account so as not to clog up my regular account with house emails, and I checked it occasionally. I slowly built up a list of "saved" properties and then just as slowly watched those properties sell. The agent called me once in January and emailed once in April to check in; both times I responded that we were still just browsing--don't call us; we'll call you.

In early May we began looking at the open house pages in the Sunday paper with a bit more interest. We began going to more open houses--six or seven each weekend when we were in town. When we'd see one we liked, we emailed the agent we'd met back in November, and she'd get us more info on the property. If we asked her about a property that she thought wasn't in a safe area or that was overpriced, she told us. Slowly we developed a rapport, and we trusted her. There was never even the slightest hint of artifice, and in all our open houses we never met another agent who made us feel so comfortable.

We've now been through several rounds of negotiations with her at our side, and I'm so glad we met her--totally by chance. I would never have considered buying a house without an agent, and with no one to recommend one to us, I think we did okay!