Buying a Home

Home inspections are a critical piece of due diligence when buying a home. Looking for deferred maintenance or repair items on a “used” home can protect you from unwanted surprises. What about new construction? Should you get a brand-new home inspected? The short answer is yes. Always plan to inspect a new construction home. Here’s [...]

Buying (or selling) a home can introduce many new legal concepts and uncertainties for a consumer. Often it can be wise to consult an attorney for legal advice in the process. However, a lot of advice we see from lawyers is counter-productive, often because the lawyers chosen have little or no experience with actual real [...]

You’ve been shopping for a home and find two that you like. You don’t want to let them get away, but you’d like to see which one gets you the better deal. Can you bid on both of them at the same time? This is a very common home buyer question, with a somewhat complex [...]

Is a seller required to respond to your offer to buy their house? Is it illegal or unethical for them to simply not respond? Many buyers ask these questions when they make an offer that gets no response from the seller.

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 [...]