Category: Get Educated
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The Mortgage Pre-Approval Process: What You Need To Know
What You, The Buyer, Need To Do: During the mortgage pre-approval process, you need to determine your budget. What can you afford? Get a number in your head for what you are able to pay per month, and nothing more. You need liquid funds for your down payment. Begin taking the steps necessary to make…
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How To Search For Your Happy Home
When my clients and I first meet, I ask a lot of questions about your search: What do you need? What do you want? During this process, I will throw different scenarios your way so that I can really, truly start to understand what you’re looking for. And, most importantly, I listen! I will…
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What It’s Like to Buy a Home with Matt
“My husband and I agree neither of us have even *once* met a harder working individual with greater passion for his/her work. From multi-million dollar deals to the most limited of budgets, ALL clients are given full and equal attention, respect, patience, regard to details, and commitment. Hands down, if you sincerely want the best…
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Are You Being Priced Out of Seattle (Permanently)?
Everyone has that perfect home in mind, but if this is your first or even second home, the perfect home should not be the priority. The appreciation should be, and here is why: Seattle is expensive. If you are buying your first or second home, you might not have the capital required to buy a…
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Ready to Invest in a Seattle Home? These Facts on Seattle Appreciation May Surprise You
Recently, I discovered a new tool that actually allows me to look at a certain neighborhood with the home’s appreciation rates broken down by era home, size home, bedroom counts, etc. Of course, you can do this on the MLS too, but the amount of time it would take to do it for each zip…
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Matt’s Theory On When To Sell Your Home
Here’s my proverbial canary in the coal mine: Keep an eye on the four main factors that drive every market: Demand, supply, affordability, and consumer trends. But don’t just look at it from the obvious perspective. For example: There are many things that drive consumer demand. Most of which are feelings, and often not facts.…
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What’s a View in Seattle Worth?
Figuring out how much a view is worth requires finding comparable homes in every way except view. The easiest way to do this is to look at condos. Homes present more nuanced differences, and it would take longer to isolate the views value alone. For example: In the Newmark Tower in Downtown Seattle, you have…
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Seattle: The NW-Francisco (& Why I’m Calling It That)
I’m asked all the time if I think home prices are going to continue this astonishing rise. Some would-be homebuyers are beginning to think that this is a bubble, and that waiting might to buy might be a good idea. Over the last 5 years, I’ve had many clients act on that impulse to devastating…
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Seattle’s Median Home Price is Deceiving (& Which Neighborhoods Offer Affordable Single-Family Home Options)
The official statistic is that we are somewhere around $530,000. However, that number is a little deceiving. Seattle encompasses a rather large area. Most people think of Queen Anne, Ballard, Capitol Hill, Ravenna, Wedgwood etc. when thinking about where they want to live (at least in my experience). No one says they want to move…
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Statistics Can Be Deceiving… Especially When it Comes to Real Estate
But when you KNOW a neighborhood, you really know what going on, and what the numbers really are. Just a cautionary tale: Do more research into things before you miss out on a potentially awesome location. Let’s take a look at median home prices for condos for all of 2014: The median price suggests that…