With many homes currently in foreclosure, buyers may turn to a foreclosure auction as a potential place to find a deal on a house. In Washington state, foreclosed homes are sold through a trustee auction, which is a process that happens outside of the court system. If you plan to buy a home at a [...]

If you are in the market to buy a home, chances are that you are going to come across bank-owned (REO) homes. (In King County, 11% of the listings on the market right now are bank-owned.) Bank-owned homes can come on the market at very attractive prices designed to sell them quickly. Attractive prices means [...]

If you’ve ever sold a property in Washington state, you will remember the seller-paid excise tax. In King County, it is 1.78% of the sale price and is the responsibility of the seller. The tax is heftier than transfer taxes in other states, as Washington doesn’t collect income tax, so they make up for it [...]

The process of closing on a home is not a familiar one to most people, only doing it a few times during their life. One of the questions we get all the time is “when do I get my keys so that I can move in?”

If you live in Western Washington and are looking to buy a home, chances are that it is listed in the Northwest MLS which covers most of the western part of the state. When a home seller accepts a contract from a buyer, that home enters a variety of pending statuses, and it is important [...]

It is not a secret that getting a short sale approved can be a long and uncertain process, often taking 3-5 months after your offer to receive an approval letter. Why do they take so long? Is it simply bureaucracy at big banks? That’s part of the answer, but not the root cause. I recently [...]

Even in today’s market, it is not uncommon to have to compete with another buyer for a home. Nothing can be more unnerving to a home buyer than having to negotiate against these faceless competitors. Can you get proof that these competing offers are legit? In most cases the answer is no. Fair Market Sale [...]

Our friends over at Redfin have finally given up on their aversion to short sales, and now allow you to work with one of their agents on a short sale purchase. For the last year and a half, their agents would take you on tours through short sale houses, and then pass you off to [...]

If there is one piece of advice I can offer to home buyers today, it’s that emotions seem to rule the day for home sellers in today’s market. If you can recognize that there is a human being on the other end of the transaction who may driven by emotion or irrationalities, you will be [...]

I just wrote about what to watch for with short sale negotiation fees, but there is one form of short sale scam that deserved its own special article. Short sale negotiators are hired by listing agents and sellers to take care getting the sale approval through the bureaucratic short sale process with banks. They all [...]