Seattle Bubble Forum Archive

Are you planning a redfin only buy?

I bought in january, during the storm. Completed an offer STI below the asking price when weeks earlier everything was a bidding war. In any market, some people need to sell fast.

If redfin cost 1.5% and $125 per house visit, I think in a complicated market when you are ready to buy it would make the most sense to try and find a good realtor and negotiate either a fixed price or 2% rate or some such thing I might add a speed clause where if you buy very quickly the rate is much lower. I easily went and looked at 40+ houses in a period of about 18 months after a long redfin watching period, and our realtors after watching our reactions to places and prices we looked at started to find things that matched what we wanted and could afford. Pretty soon they were emailing us properties and setting up routes where we could visit 5 or 6 properties in a couple of hours and go back about our lives.

Redfin was often behind a day or two and full of the low "start a bidding war on your home depot renovation" listings now it looks as though redfin is full of listings priced too high. Somebody has to weed out the crap, I'm glad it was not me.

If you are only using the internet, I found looking at a short timeframe zillow recently sold properties search using bed bath criteria gave me a better feel for where prices actually were than listings. Even in a hot market the listing price was really the "MSRP", should be even more true now.

I think with some patience, you could get what you want for under $600,000.

Thanks, Garth- I am working with an agent (starts with a W), but have been using the redfin searches to monitor averages and get the long view of the market with statistics. My husband asked why I'm not going through redfin since I'm already doing so much research myself, but the fact is I don't want to have to pay each time I want to view a house -- I've already seen about 20 with the agent. They were all **** considering their asking prices; I'm so amazed that $600K in the 98103/05/15/13 zip codes means we're slumming it!