As very nervous first time home buyers, we were referred to Rachel and her team by a friend who had an excellent home buying experience with her.
My wife and I found ourselves in quite the lurch this last Spring after my mother in law's second husband passed away. Long story short, we'd been saving for a home for about a decade, and when we realized we were going to need to find a place large enough to house us as well as my mother in law, we were panicked to say the least.
We had lived in Seattle for 15 years. As many already know, the Seattle housing market is bar none, one of the most competitive markets in the known universe right now. Our little 520 square foot rental we'd had for almost 15 years had a buy price on it of $750,000. By sheer grace of good fortune, our landlord had rented the house to us at a terrific price, as he appreciated what great care we took of it and all the years we had stayed.
Realizing we couldn't stay in a 520sq foot house, no matter how great the location was, we immediately started looking at local rents vs mortgage payment costs and it simply made more sense to buy. NO WAY were we going to be able to afford to buy in Seattle though.
Needless to say, we had picked the worst time in the world to start "emergency house hunting" with a budget of $400,000.00 max, ...and that's if we'd planned to be house poor for the next decade.
Enter Rachel and her team at Rare Northwest, which consisted of Jessica Rosen, Dana Haj-Ali and of course, Rachel Adler.
What made this team so exceptional was the tripartite approach/attack they utilized for house hunting.
Example, if we needed to see a place over 4th of July weekend, when literally EVERYONE was out of town or on vacation (including the sellers), ONE of them was almost always on call and available.
This gave us a serious leg up in regard to being competitive and pro active with our offers, and made the communication process a lot easier, versus...had we just been dealing 1 very overloaded agent.
It's this process that helped us land our first home, about 30 miles South of our old place.
When we saw the add, we wanted to jump, ...but it was alas a holiday weekend. Never fear, Rachel simply pinged Dana, (who was still in town) who showed us the house the day after we spotted it. We never thought we were going to land the place, but made our offer that weekend.
Rachel had some great advice during the offer process as well, and in regard to being competitive, but realistic. We ended up feeling pretty solid moving forward with her guidance.
A few days later, we were shocked to discover that not only had our offer been accepted, but no escalation had occurred.
This was very likely due to us having been able to get an offer on the table at a time not a lot of other offers were coming through (holiday). Combine that with motivated sellers, Rachel and her on call team, and we had the perfect storm of events leading to a sale.
There were some other hurdles Rachel helped us with as well.
There were several big discrepancies discovered during inspection. Those included a recalled (during the 70s no less) extremely janky electrical panel, and a very close to shot roof. Additionally, water was discovered in the crawl space, albeit a very minuscule amount.
What did Rachel do? Well, she told us to ask for 2 of the 3 issues to be remediated. The seller ended up agreeing to replace the roof and the panel as part of the deal, and at no additional cost to us. That was another big win for us, in large part, thanks to Rachel and her team.
Additionally, and after hearing our concern over cost of repairs to the crawl space, (we found no one locally who could do a french drain and sump pump system for under 10-15K), Rachel connected us with one of her longtime contacts, Greg Torrontegui, a senior construction contractor and estimator over at Wu Construction.
Greg did a thorough inspect, determined the scope of the job, and right there, on the spot, wrote us a signed estimate for $3300.00 + tax for the ENTIRE job, good for 6 months. He even asked us to monitor the space before deciding to move forward (as he found 0 water related damages to the joists, foundation or structure). Greg's inspect and backup plan was another huge relief/load off our minds.
It's been a whirlwind first 3 months in the new place. We feel truly lucky to be here, ...and the whole process went quite smoothly.
My wife and I would definitely recommend Rachel and her team.
A super special thanks to Dana as well, for making about 16 trips to the new house so we could accommodate the multiple inspections and agreed upon repairs in a timely manner (roof, sewer, electrical, etc) during the sale process. read more