Good advice on buying an Orange County home…from a recent buyer

It was great running into you at John & Jane’s housewarming — I wanted to share my experience with you as far as getting the place of my dreams!  It has to do with 3 things: the right Realtor, the right Broker, and total commitment within yourself to constantly be looking & educating yourself.  By pure luck, I found my realtor, Angie Weeks through the internet as I had already been looking online for a place and googled condos in south county and her website came up….we met for coffee and just clicked.  She’s really eager, she’s completely available, knowlegeable and doesn’t take no for an answer when needed (toward the Listing Agents etc.).  So if you haven’t settled in on a realtor yet, please give her a try — a quick meeting or email or whatever.  She lives in MV and specializes in South County can tell you HOA costs for several communities and the kind of neighborhoods they are (everywhere has a crappy area or 2).  I just took her lead when it came down to which broker or Banking person to use because its important she have a good relationship with them as well cuz when you are in a 30 day close, everything is hyped up and needs to get done on time or you loose escrow and your down payment.  Ok, Ok, I so totally may be telling you so much you already know but it was important to me that I pick what was right for me and I didn’t want some hoity-toity agent to be all arogant or worse, unresponsive….Okie dokie so after looking at TONS of places I put in offers to at least 15 I can recall due to the short sale aspect (its a dime toss and also pure timing to end up being accepted).  I ended up with the 2nd place I put an offer in and it went perfectly…started looking at the end of July, Put offer (unseen!-only photos on website) end of Aug, offer accepted end of Sept and I closed end of OCtober….So many hands are at play to make all this work!  For me, I wanted a condo with large outdoor space either patio or back yard area, one level and not a huge community…for you it can be very different but if you are interested in lookin at my place you can look it up.  I know for a fact there are at least 3-5 properties either in foreclosure or short selling currently.

The Best websites I found the most information on were Redfin.com & ziprealty.com.  If you go to redfin you can put in any address and it will show up – you click on details you can see the pics that the seller had up at the time as well as scrolling down to see ‘other nearby properties for sale’ and next to that ‘recent nearby properties that sold’….gives you perspective on where the market is etc.

Sorry for the book here —- I just had such a great experience that I want to share it!!  I love my place, love the neighbors even!!