Finding a Realtor

After a lot of talking and debate, we decided to get a realtor to help us with the search. We are doing the looking ourselves and can do the negotiations, but are finding that realtors only talk to realtors and won’t talk to buyers. It’s like this big no fly zone unless you have a local license. Getting a license for the area wouldn't be extremely hard, but we talked about it and decided to find a realtor that has more experience with our target area than we do. This gives us the freedom to do more of the fun stuff and less of the paperwork and arguing. Figured it would be kind of like a dentist doing his own dental work, they can, but why.  Plus it wouldn’t hurt to have some outside insight. 

But we need someone who was more than just a realtor; we need someone who is also a property manager. We have to find someone that understands not just real estate as in purchasing a house, but also someone that understands the whole world of rental and investment property. So we have been looking high and low. Reading every real estate agents blog, looked at every ad, every website, anything and everything we can find. And after all this searching, and researching, it looks like we may have found someone. They seem to have the least amount of negative reviews in the area. (I know, it sounds scary. And quite honestly it is. Realtors don’t seem to be getting a good rap where we are looking. Hope it doesn’t prove to be a symptom of another issue that may rear its ugly head later on.) They have two offices, one of which is in the target area and the other is several hundred miles from the first main office. Their background checks seem to be ok. They are answering all of our questions appropriately. So as of right now we seem to have found our realtor that will hopefully become our property manager as well. 

As for the house hunting, we are still looking. We look at every morning and every evening to see if anything comes up. Checking every real estate site like Zillow, Trulia, ZipRealty , and Hot Pads. Looking at every online newspapers we can find for the area. We are even going to try the seven day free trials for Foreclosure.com and RealtyTrac. Will let you know how that goes. Quick random thought, might even look at Home Exchange and HomeAway to see if anyone wants to get rid of their vacation rental. You never know. So far we have found a few almost homes that get close to meeting our criteria, but nothing yet. In the mean time, we still have to get pre-approved for our loan.