My wife and I started our quest for a new home in San Jose with a realtor that our mortgage broker recommended, but after three weeks of unresponsiveness started working with Heather after a mutual friend introduced us. What a difference it made: Within a day of speaking with Heather, she cleared out time on her calendar to meet with us, expanded the initial list of homes we were interested into a full itinerary for a Saturday outing, and printed out an itinerary with details on each home we would visit. And this was before we were ready or able to make an offer!
Two weeks later, after taking us on another outing, attentively listening to what we were interested in, understanding our price range, regularly sending us recommendations of places to look at, and coaching us on strategies so we would be ready to be competitive, Heather once again took us on a Saturday outing. This time, we were ready to make offers, we found a house we loved, and we started preparing to write an offer early the following week.
Here's where the story of Heather as an expert negotiator begins. Before we saw this house, she spoke with the listing agent, just in case we might make an offer on it, to get him to agree to call her if someone made a pre-emptive offer. And that's exactly what happened. The next day, we learned that a cash offer came in, and Heather jumped right in to help us take a strong competitive position. She worked with the listing agent. She worked with our mortgage broker. She even pulled in the agent that helped us sell our condo a week before to assure the listing agent that our financial position was strong and that we were the kind of family his sellers would want to have purchase their home. And our offer—the first offer we made in our home search in a very hot market—was accepted. Unbelievable.
In the next stage of our journey, the appraisal came in under the offer price that we made, so Heather sprang into action again to suggest other comparable homes in the area for the appraiser to use, and the appraisal came back very close to our offer price. She even stayed on top of all of the details, like transferring the solar power contract from the former owners to us, so we could keep everything on schedule. Amazing—and now we're a day away from signing and closing on our new gem in San Jose.
Heather is a great combination of empathic and tenacious, collaborative, and competitive, fun and serious—and we couldn't have succeeded in our quest without her.
The Wolf Family ~ Buyers