June 3rd, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

Having been through both buying a new home and trying to sell our old home in the California real estate market of 2007, here are some tips to help you as you begin your home buying or home selling journey:

CALIFORNIA REAL ESTATE - SELLING A HOME

• Find a reliable realtor you can work with who understands what you want when selling your home.
• Make sure your realtor has pricing for all similar homes in your area then price your home competitively. Do not over price your home to get back what you added to it, be reasonable and listen to your realtor when it comes to price. Whenever possible price your home lower in comparison to your competitors.
• Have a home inspection completed prior to putting your home on the market. This shows you mean business when selling your home. Have copies of the home inspection available for potential home buyers. The home inspection report will show you the cost of repairs you need to complete prior to selling your home to a buyer. You also will have this step out of the way when a buyer is eager to buy your home.
• If you have moved out of the area provide your realtor with contact information for the contractors making repairs prior to putting your home on the market. It is in the best interest of the realtor to have the repairs completed before showing the home.
• If you are selling your home and have already moved out of the area, ask your realtor to take digital photos to email to you showing the progress of the contractor repairs.
• If you are selling your home and have already moved out of the area, have a phone meeting set once a week with the main contractor to touch base on the status of home repairs.
• Use one contractor as your main person who coordinates repairs for the home, this way they will know what has and has not been completed.
• If you are still living in the home while showing it make sure to pack up as many items as possible and store them offsite. Think in terms of a buyer; personal photos and excess knicknacks divert the eye of the buyer. Make sure the paint colors inside and out are neutral. Always give the buyer the opportunity to see themselves living in your home.
• Paint the home inside and out. A fresh coat of paint always makes the home look better. You want to give the impression of clean and tidy. Make sure your home is spotless when showing.
• Stage your home prior to putting it on the market. This is especially helpful if you have moved out of the home already. Some basic staging will help buyers see the potential of the empty spaces in your home.
• If you are selling your home then buying a new home, renting may be a way to cope with the current market. If the home market looks bleak consider renting out your home for a year or two. Hire a property management service to oversee the rental of your home, the pricing is generally reasonable and it will take the stress out of renting your home. Some money to pay the mortgage on your home is better than no money while your home sits on the market. Waiting for the market to upswing may give you the opportunity to make the amount of money you deserve when selling your home.

CALIFORNIA REAL ESTATE - BUYING A HOME

• Find a reliable realtor you can work with who understands what you want in a new home.
• Make a list of items you want in your home before looking at new homes. Realize there may be a few items you have to compromise on; you may or may not find everything you want within the budget you have for a new home.
• Do not set your heart on one home during home tours; always have three to four homes at the top of your list you can choose from. Often there are problems either with escrow, realtors communicating, pricing, etc.
• Be aware of the negotiation involved with buying a new home and the possible problems that may arise from a home inspection. Some home inspection report findings can be a deal breaker when it comes to the final sale.
• If your realtor is having problems stemming from the home seller’s realtor, start looking at your other home options. Letting the other realtor know you are actively looking at other homes may help to solve these types of problems.
• If you are in escrow and realtor problems arise as above, home inspection problems are always a reason to choose to leave escrow. Ask your realtor about this and do not put yourself through the ringer. Buying a home is hard enough to do without extra problems from the home sellers. This is a buyers market and you should be able to obtain good opportunities from home sellers.
• Find reliable contractors to complete home repairs needed to be completed from the home inspection report.
• Make sure you go through the home you want to buy at least two or three times. Once in escrow, take a measuring tape with you to see if specific items will fit in your new home.
• Take a tour of the home without the home seller present since they will talk too much and distract you from your purpose. Bring a digital camera with you on your second tour to photograph areas of the home so you can revisit it later on.

May 27th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

After the second fiasco of trying to buy a home and problems arising again we went to our second choice home. We were lucky that the homeowner decided to bring the price of the home down $10k at the time we went into escrow on the Queen Anne home in Eureka. The owner of the Eastlake Victorian knew we chose the other home because the price was lower and his was out of our range. I don’t know if that had much to do with the situation but it was a good thing he did because we could then afford the Eastlake Victorian after we decided not to buy the Queen Anne Victorian.

Contrary to what happened with our other two offers this offer went about as smoothly as it could possibly happen. There were a few glitches here and there but they ironed themselves out quickly. In contrast to the bad home inspection report we received on the Queen Anne Home the Eastlake Victorian was minimal in home inspection report problems. Escrow wrapped up in three weeks and we set our moving date to Eureka!

Along the way we had a number of problems with contractors in Eureka, seemed like everyone decided to work whenever they felt like it. Very strange but there is something about home contractors that makes the process so much harder to deal with. We had to have a few items fixed at the Eastlake home and it took about three contractors before we finally found one who would show up for work and complete the project.

Our Eastlake Victorian is full of original wood molding around the doorways and has many of the original windows from when it was built. The garden area is everything I was looking for and even more. Of all the homes we saw on our home tours this Victorian was the fanciest, really a show stopper. The Eastlake had a newer roof, newer real foundation (no posts and piers here), newer electrical and plumbing too. A hot tub came with the deal, its old but it still works. The decking for the back yard is already in place. No garage but the other two homes did not have garages so at some point we will build one. The attic area can be built out some day, which means we can add another bedroom area to the two bedroom, two bath Victorian. One bathroom sports a huge jaccuzi tub with a wall of old growth redwood surrounding it. The house is carpeted in thick burgundy and green carpeting, hopefully when this wears out we will find wood floors from the original house underneath. Best of all I now have my larger sized kitchen with southern yellow pine floor, high end appliances already in place including a Jenn-Air range and grill with an additional three burner Wok station nearby.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to know this is real. Our Eastlake Victorian is on the local historic registry, having been built in 1892. The outside is as beautiful as the inside. We’ve been here for over a year now and love it. We both agree we made the best decision in moving into the Eastlake Victorian home.

Next post, a list of helpful tips for home buyers and home sellers.

May 19th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

After the first rejection of our offer on a Victorian home, we made a trip up again the next month to go on our second hunt for homes with our realtor, who gave us some good alternate choices. One was a second look at a Victorian home on the west side of Eureka we had seen with the second realtor we used here in Eureka. This was a home I had found online. The first time we went through it I thought it was an impressive home, more ornate than any home we’d seen previously. The home was an Eastlake Victorian that had been beautifully restored. There were plenty of pluses about this house but it was a good $23k above our price range at $323k. We knew we might have to go as high as $310k to get what we wanted, so we kept this house in mind. The other house that stood out to us was one that my husband found online. He immediately fell in love with the Queen Anne style Victorian, much the same as I had fallen in love with the first Victorian we put an offer on. The home had dark old wood redwood floors and some built in tall cabinets in the living room. The kitchen needed some work but it had possibilities, having a bigger kitchen was on my list of must haves. I loved how the house looked on the inside and outside but wasn’t too fond of the garden area, or lack of a garden I should say. It was a strange U shape surrounding the back of the house and looked like it would take some major work to make it look better. The price of the home was great compared to what we had looked at previously, which was a plus; we knew the roof needed repair and we would need to invest in a real foundation instead of the posts and piers that were in place. We decided to make an offer on the home.

I have to say I made a mistake in this whole process but in actuality its a good thing I did. While talking to the homeowners who we met at the end of our home tour they offered to leave us the houseplants since they were moving to another state and made the point that they weren’t going to take all their belongings with them. I asked our realtor to see if there were any other items they didn’t want to take but might sell to us like furniture or some cool looking antique items they had. In fact one of the home owners said sure, you can buy our antique desk and two couches but the other antiques were family heirlooms. That was my mistake, taking it a bit further and asking about antiques. Even though the woman homeowner said sure you can buy our antique desk apparently she was bugged that I inquired about happened to be expensive family antiques which were not available, although nobody ever said anything about this. Honestly, a no would have been just fine. At that point believe me I was sorry I had asked.

Somewhere after that point the owners and the realtor both got very testy with us when we made our house offer. Suddenly the price they quoted on the desk and couches got higher in the contingencies part of the contract and the realtor requested that the home would be sold “as is”, in other words no help with repairs, etc. no matter what information the home inspection report provided. It was all pretty weird and definitely came off as some kind of a power play by the other realtor.

Now this young couple had two small kids and needed to move soon because of a job situation to another state. Arguing about the cost of two used couches (which were not antiques) and the desk for a couple hundred dollars as some sort of deal breaker when you can sell your home after a short period of time on the market for the full asking price (which is what we offered) seemed strange to say the least.

The other weird part was that once again the other realtor would not discuss what was going on with our realtor. I mean, it was another case of I’m going to ignore you and not talk about this or work out the details. It had nothing to do with our realtor (who was totally perplexed by the situation) and everything to do with their realtor. In the meantime we are in escrow for this home and my husband’s working a FT job and a PT job at night and on the weekends with his new web editor job, so he’s holding off giving his notice until we are sure we have our new home to move into.

Plenty of stress for us I can tell you. I started to see some major red flags on this deal and shared that with my husband. We finally received a copy of the home inspection which was not good. There was a particular photo of the house’s foundation showing the house a good inch or more off the post and piers! If you know anything about Victorian’s and their original foundations this is not a good thing! My husband about had a heart attack when he saw the photo and said ok, that’s it, we’re backing out of this deal. Remember the home was an “as is” sale, which meant that the homeowners would not offer to fix anything from the inspection and we would be responsible for all repairs. Most of the time homeowners pay for some portion or all of the fixes needed from a home inspection when selling their home.

Of course once our realtor told the other realtor we were backing out and why suddenly the homeowners wanted to talk to us about it. We decided no thanks, we’d been jerked around long enough (a good three weeks or more) and the foundation was a deal breaker for us. We realized the other Victorian (our second choice) had everything done already (roof, foundation and more) and the cost to fix up this home was a good 10k more than the price of our second choice home.

As it turned out the Queen Anne home stayed on the market another year or so, finally selling. I really don’t understand why someone would haggle so much over such a small item and make it difficult for buyers when it is a buyers market, not a sellers market. The housing downturn was not even as bad as it is now, but Eureka home sales took more time to turn over than in the Petaluma area. I knew this because I’d seen the same Eureka homes on the market for six months or a year in the year prior to us moving to Eureka.

Since we moved here we found out that the Queen Anne home was located in a bad area of Eureka known for drug activity. A number of bad situations have happened in that area since we moved to Eureka so we feel very lucky we didn’t end up buying the Queen Anne home.

Right after we went into escrow on the Queen Anne home, the Eastlake home took a $10k price reduction. After dropping our offer on the Queen Anne Victorian it was perfect timing, the price was right and we decided to then make an offer on the Eastlake Victorian.

May 12th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

It may seem strange that you would encounter a home seller who won’t sell to you. Yet that is exactly what happened to us when we placed our first offer on a Victorian home.

We realized early on in the home buying process we could not afford the Victorians in Ferndale, the town we wanted to live in. Roger our realtor had shown us a Victorian in a small town outside of Eureka on our first meeting with him. We both fell in love with this home, we had hoped to live in a smaller town out in the country. The home wasn’t ideal since there was no garage, the kitchen was small and the garden was small, but there was so much about it we liked we decided to make an offer on the home. This was in fact the Victorian we had problems getting into with our second realtor who cancelled on us on the second day of viewing homes; the same home Roger was able to get us into the same day we first met with him.

The Victorian was owned by a realtor who worked with our realtor in the same real estate office. You’d think it would be an easy sell as we were willing to pay full price for the home. No, this realtor wanted to sell it to us directly so he would not have to pay out a realtor fee to our realtor.

Frankly we didn’t trust this guy, we both had the gut instinct this was not a trustworthy realtor. We weren’t about to enter into a written agreement without a realtor on our side of the table. We made our offer through our realtor and the realtor who owned the Victorian home would not respond! He had another offer on the house with a contingency that she sell her home first before buying his home. The other offer was not going to happen, it was clear since the woman had only a few weeks to sell her home. The home selling market in Humboldt county was much slower than in Petaluma, houses were not selling fast and it was apparent that the other offer was going to fall through. You’d think since the other offer was going to fall through he would be interested in talking with us. Basically the home owner blew us off because we wouldn’t work with him directly in the buying process.

I had an especially hard time with this situation as I’d fallen in love with the home. It was disappointing to say the least and made it difficult to shift gears and look for something else.

So instead of taking a full price offer from us the realtor home owner ignored our realtor and would not accept our offer or even talk to us. The other offer fell through and still it didn’t matter to him, he’d rather hold onto his home and make the extra commission for himself instead of selling his home right then.

Well the end of this part of the story is that it took the realtor another year or more to sell that Victorian since soon after we bought the housing market took a nosedive.

It doesn’t make much sense to us still. I have to say we are pleased with the home we did end up buying and compared to the architecture of the home our current home far outshines the other one, with a better kitchen, a better garden area and bigger plot of land.

You never know what situation may arise out of the home buying process. My advice? Don’t fall in love with one home, fall in love with three or four so when one doesn’t work out there are others to choose from.

May 5th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

Our first venture into home buying came early in July 2006. I spent a great deal of time looking at real estate websites for the Humboldt county area and finding homes for sale on the local MLS. We had set up a scheduled meeting with a broker at a local real estate office. We found out that many of the realtors we encountered really weren’t interested in you unless you were ready to buy in the next month’s time. I found this out by contacting a number of realtors via email or through real estate websites. Literally no one was interested in talking to me. Ok, realtors sell homes, right? No one showed much more interest than putting us on their automated real estate list. I guess we didn’t have big money for a home either. The median price at that time for a home in Eureka was about $300k. We looked at pricing between $250k and $300k so we weren’t that far out of range. During our time looking for homes we found that most of the realtors didn’t want to work very hard to make a sale with us.

Since we started looking and my husband was still at that time searching for a job in the Humboldt area we thought we might be able to move in a year or two year’s time at the most. The first realtor seemed pretty uninterested in us or or our search for a home. I tried to get some local information from her and the most I received was a few handouts of local businesses she approved of. The realtor had scheduled a few home visits and supposedly was going to show us a home I had found online and we were interested in seeing. I had made it clear we wanted to see at least six to eight homes each day of the two available days we were able to see homes. We had to make the most of our time since it was at minimum a four hour trip for us to get to the Eureka area from Petaluma. We ended up looking at the most four homes the first day. The second day the realtor said she couldn’t get us into the one home I had asked, had a few homes she thought we could see and maybe we could see the home I mentioned we were interested in on Sunday. I had made it very clear in a previous email long before the visit and the phone conversation the realtor wanted to have before we came up for the visit that Sunday was our wedding anniversary and we were not available to view homes. It seemed like she just didn’t listen to me at all. The other winning factor with the realtor was that she brought her small dog along for the home visits. I am a big animal lover as is my husband but nothing quite prepared us for her little dog who was extremely smelly, nervous and jumping around the car while we were trying to talk business. She was also dressed like she was going to the theater, not showing houses. It was a strange experience to say the least, and so it seemed was our first realtor. So in the end, most of the first visit was a wasted trip.

Our second experience with a Humboldt county realtor was in October. This was a broker from the same real estate office whose website I found while searching for another realtor. He seemed to be a little more engaging and we had higher hopes with this session of home shopping. I sent a list of possible homes we were interested in and he had a few lined up for us. Luckily one of the two homes I found and was most interested in seeing was on the list. Again we ended up seeing maybe six to eight homes that Saturday, with another home shopping session set up for Sunday. The Sunday session included, supposedly, the Victorian home I was most interested in seeing, located in a little town right outside of Eureka.

We got a call from the realtor on Sunday morning saying he was unable to get us into the Victorian home we wanted to see because the owner, a realtor, was out of town, and he really had nothing else he could show us that day. Basically he blew us off, apparently because he was interested in seeing a football game that day. No, he didn’t tell us that but made it pretty clear he only had so much time on Sunday because he wanted to see the game.

Considering both of these brokers ran their own businesses from the same office, had been realtors for many years and didn’t have to answer to a big company for their time you’d think one of them would be more motivated but that was not the case.

After the phone call we griped about how yet again this may be another wasted trip. My husband remembered he had a referral number for a realtor in the same company who was recommended by our realtor in Petaluma. Roger Endert had called us once in Petaluma but we really didn’t have much more than a short phone call with him because we had already promised to work with the second realtor by then. My husband gave Roger a call, taking a chance that we could at least meet him for an hour and set up time to see houses on the next visit.

Roger was off work that day; he said he needed a half an hour then would meet us at the real estate office. Not only did Roger meet us at the office within half an hour but he had a list of at least twelve properties he could show us that same day. I had mentioned the specific Victorian home in our conversation and he managed to show us that home because he knew the realtor who was selling it who happened to work in the same office (it was a realtor’s home) and he found out that there was a lock box with a key available.

Roger must have shown us ten or twelve homes that afternoon including the home I was so hoping to see. We stayed late into the evening and drove home to Petaluma, getting home around midnight that night. Needless to say we were thoroughly impressed with Roger. Getting ahead of my continuing story for a moment, Roger Endert went out of his way to help us in any way he could and was an outstanding real estate agent for us. As you can guess, he won our business and the home sale.

After our visit with Roger and viewing the home in the small town outside of Eureka, fortune shown on us. My husband received a job offer shortly after our trip to Eureka. The fact that my husband had now obtained a web job from home meant that we could move even sooner. In fact we decided to make an offer on that very Victorian home Roger was able to show us and that we so wanted to see. The other brokers lost out because they couldn’t be bothered with putting in the work for a sale down the road. Who knew that we would be able to move in three months instead of one year’s time? Roger was smart enough to see the possibility of a sale down the road. There is more to that story upcoming. We found that home buying is never easy. My advice: don’t fall in love with a home, fall in love with many homes so when it doesn’t work out you still have other homes to be interested in.

April 28th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

When we first started talking about buying our new home we’d already decided on the area (Humboldt county, CA) and the type of home we wanted. My husband had always wanted to own a Victorian home. I lived in a Victorian flat in San Francisco for awhile. Pretty amazing. I longed for a Victorian as well. We also decided we would look at Craftsman homes in the area. We both have an affinity for old, historic homes.

Since we lived in Petaluma it was a good four hour trip up to Ferndale. We first encountered Ferndale on a camping trip with our kids years ago. This was supposed to be a first time camping trip away from the usual Bodega Dunes camping we did every year. The whole trip up north was a fiasco, nothing worked right, the KOA we stayed at was right next to the freeway, our teenager was being, well, a teenager and our youngest just wanted to be at the ocean.

We were unfamiliar with the area and could not find a nearby ocean beach for our youngest. On the way home from Arcata KOA we saw a sign for a beach at Ferndale and took the exit. We drove through the green pasture area and into the Victorian town of Ferndale and were mesmerized. It was beautiful, quiet and small, too perfect. The Victorian homes were gorgeous lined up in a row going through town. We found the beach outside of Ferndale, spent a little time then drove back into town. A deer was grazing on someone’s lawn and the pine trees on the hills surrounded the small community. I really wanted to stop and look around at the Victorian shops but our teenager was desperate to go home, so we drove on and out of Ferndale, back on the main road. I remembered Ferndale the next year when it came time for our wedding anniversary and suggested to my husband that we go there for a three day weekend. We stayed and fell in love with the town, continuing to visit yearly for many years to come.

From visiting this little town we decided we wanted to live in Humboldt county. We both love the ocean and the forests. Petaluma’s hot summers were too warm for us. The ocean air, forests and small town feel in Humboldt county were perfect for our idea of relocation. An early retirement of sorts, and hopefully working from our home office.

Our youngest left for college and our thoughts were on the eventual move out of the Sonoma county area. Once we decided we were moving to the area then it was a matter of my husband locating a job. I was already running our business from home and ideally wanted my husband to be able to do the same. I was searching for jobs for him on craigslist and found something perfect, a web editor’s job he could do from home. He applied, three weeks went by and no response. Suddenly the website owner emailed, an interview was set up and my husband was employed.

Considering we thought we would need to wait a year or more to move this was wonderful and frightening at the same time. My husband was holding down a FT and a PT job, I was running our company and we needed to look for a new home…soon! Oh yes, and we had to sell our Petaluma home too? We’d never sold a home before.

So began our many trips in winter to Humboldt county searching for an old home we could grow old in.

April 23rd, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

When in doubt, stage your home when it is for sale on the market. I’m really not sure why we didn’t think of staging our house sooner when trying to sell it. The thought had crossed our minds. We had moved out, the home was freshly painted inside and out and was looking better than it had in years. Between our realtor and ourselves we finally came to the conclusion that staging would help. Now we didn’t sell the house, with the market downturn and so many other homes around us, but I do believe staging is a great way to showcase your home. We really needed to make our tract home stand out at the time, and with at least ten similar homes for sale within a few blocks of us including across the street and next door we needed every advantage we could get.

Its pretty hard to make your home sparkle in a tract home section where every home looks so much the same. We fixed the driveway, placed a new lawn with automatic sprinklers, had a landscaping company adding flowers for the season and upkeeping the look for us monthly. The curb appeal worked well, lots of good comments from the visiting realtors but still it wasn’t enough.

Our realtor suggested a staging expert to add some basic furnishings to the home. From what I understand the idea of staging is giving the potential buyer an idea of what it would be like to live in our home. You want the buyer to imagine they could live in your home. The staging made a big difference in comments from realtors and buyers.

If you do choose to stage your home listen to what the expert suggests. Pack away your knicknacks, don’t distract the buyers from seeing the space in your home and seeing the possibilities of their belongings in your home. The less you have of yourself in your home when you sell it, the better.

Think like a home buyer, not a home owner. If things look tidy, uncluttered and clean, you can see past what is in the home and see yourself living there. Adding some classic furniture elements in staging can really make a difference when it comes to selling your home. Hey, you have to pack it up anyway, why not start early and make your home staging shine.

April 18th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

When we began our long trek into selling our three bedroom, two bath home we knew we needed to fix it up. school and college tuition was more important than fixing our home while we were living in it. The reality of providing for the kids first meant our tract home was in need of a much needed facelift. The roof was fine and would last a good five or ten years more. Our back bathroom was a disaster. The original bathroom was done by the previous owners. Tiny individual tiles that had since come loose were a mess in the shower. It really needed to be redone, so we decided to go forward with this and some other updates.

There is one thing we learned in both buying and selling a home. You can’t depend on the contractor’s schedule. We had a contractor fixing up our Petaluma home while contractors worked on our Eureka home to fix the few small items in the home inspection report. It was bad on both ends. Originally the Petaluma contractor was supposed to start in March and ended up starting weeks later. Granted it was someone we knew and we were getting a deal in the price but still it was a pretty miserable experience. We finally got the house painted inside and out but there was doubt this would even happen. Suddenly the workers he had scheduled to come in didn’t show here and there, the contractor had other jobs and fit us into his schedule. It took two months longer than the original agreement. This with a portion of the payment up front for supplies and labor. Our realtor just about lost her mind and so did we. When the house finally got on the market the housing market was taking a major turndown. It would have been better if the house was ready early on but what can you do? I’m sure many of you have been at the mercy of a contractor’s schedule before. I don’t know what it is that makes everything so difficult but every contractor we dealt with at both house locations had problems with keeping to a schedule, and they were all very experienced in what they did. I do have to say our carpet guy was outstanding, on time and it looked perfect. Our landscaping guy was pretty terrific too, great price on the new lawn and sprinkler system. We were lucky to have these guys working for us.

If you are new at this and are facing a renovation in order to sell your home, here’s some advice:

*Hire a reputable contractor with experience and references. Do not try to renovate on your own without some professional help.
*Expect additional weeks added to your renovation schedule before placing the house on the market

*Expect additional costs to the bottom line of labor and supplies and budget accordingly.

*Get everything in writing from the contractors, you want detailed information on every step of the process.

*Call the contractor or go on site periodically during the renovation process. We were already living in Eureka during our Petaluma renovation, which made it much more difficult to keep tabs on what was going on. The plan was for our contractor to call us weekly which didn’t happen most of the time unless we called him.

*If you are already living out of the area while trying to sell your home, ask your realtor to take digital photos and email them to you to show the progress of the home renovation work. This is very helpful when you are not locally situated during the renovation process.

* Provide your realtor with all contractor contact information, they will need to be in touch and sometimes the realtor may provide the contractor some extra incentive to get things done.

* Take a deep breath and keep calm. You have no control over the process other than payment to the contractors so build in extra time to make sure you hit your renovation deadline.

April 15th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

When the housing market started to fall in 2007 it was pretty scary. Here we were ready to move to Humboldt county. Plenty of homes to buy but selling a home was another situation. Our Petaluma realtor tried for many months to help us sell our home, going out of her way to do everything possible to sell the home. We went from updating the home to staging the home to finally after nine months deciding to rent the house for a year and maybe even longer until the market got better. In the end with the way the market was headed our realtor and mortgage broker both told us it was the safest way to go in order to get a reasonable price for our home. We learned a lot along the way, some good tips and ideas for those of you who have never sold a home. Sometimes you just get lucky and sometimes you have to look at reality and do the best you can.

April 9th, 2008 by Petaluma Homeowner

Our youngest kid was off to college. We had wanted to live in the Humboldt county area for a number of years, having vacationed in Ferndale for many years. We started looking at homes online and checking pricing. We were living in a tract home and had always wanted to live in an older home, specifically a Victorian or Craftsman home. The one thing that was holding us back was my husband’s job. He needed to find something steady to supplement our marketing business that I ran from home. I was searching in craigslist one day and spotted a web editor job. My husband was online every day and pretty comfortable with websites with his current job. He sent off an email for the web editor job, didn’t hear anything for three weeks and suddenly…a response. We drove up to Ferndale so my husband could meet for a bit with the website owner. Lots of websites and lots of work for him to do. The job came through and we had to get on the ball to find a home in the coming months!

After a few bad realtor experiences in Eureka we found a great realtor in Roger Endert. He worked tirelessly to help us find the right fit. The price range we were looking for was $300k. It took a few months and we came across four homes we really liked. More on this in another post.

Once our offer was accepted we had hoped to sell our Petaluma home in short order, pricing it lower to sell fast. It was during that time we started dealing with the California home marketing crisis.