Since our offer was accepted, we went through a bit of a back and forth with our mortgage. Do we pick mortgage 1 or mortgage 2? One is less expensive, the other probably offers better service. What does "service" mean in the context of a home mortgage? If the lender isn't able to get the loan completed in time, then we don't get the house. Potentially, we lose our earnest money too. If the lender gets it all done in time, but just barely, then everything's ok, but we're under a lot of stress. If the lender gets it all done in plenty of time, then everything's great.

So, we want things to go great. We want a lender that gives good service, is hassle-free, and gives us the best rate on a mortgage. Is that too much to ask? (There's more, read on!)

To be honest, we were incredibly lucky with finding a house so quickly last week. There were only two offers on the house we got, whereas a house that we looked at a few blocks away on a busy street (and not as nice, if I say so myself) got four offers. I'd like to think that our preinspection had something to do with it, and scared a few people away. Of course, perhaps the fact that the sellers and the seller's agent were on the road the whole week and practically unreachable turned off a few people as well. Or perhaps it was the $20k difference in list price (our was listed higher). Of course, with four offers, I doubt that the other house sold for much less than ours.

But that's all beside the point. What's happened since?

The context: We had already received quotes for mortgages from several lenders, including my employer's preferred lender (Lender A), a mortgage broker referred to us by our real estate agent (Lender B), and a third lender we found via Costco and LendingTree (Lender C). There were other lenders as well, but our relationships with them never advanced beyond the first phone call, so they shall un-lettered. Through this whole discussion, I'm going to keep it simple and talk about our back-and-forth on the first mortgage, and not about the second mortgage, closing costs, etc.

Day POA+1¹: At this point, our default lender is Lender A. We had our credit approval letter from them, and had a rate quote (not locked, since we thought that we'd most likely be getting a house much later) for 5.125% for a 5-year ARM. We're more interested in 7-year ARMs. I send an email to Lender A and ask for their current rates. I get a response that the current rate for 5-year ARMs is 5.375%, 7-year ARMs is 5.75%, and 30-year fixed is 5.875%. I'm a little surprised at the changes².

We decide it's time to get in touch with other lenders and check their current rates. I call Lender B, and we talk on the phone for awhile, he quotes us some rates that beat Lender A. Interestingly, he finds that he can give us a 30-year fixed mortgage for the same interest rate as a 7-year ARM, assuming we don't buy down the interest rate. Having a 30-year fixed isn't something that we'd thought about before, but it sounds appealing, especially if we don't have to pay a higher interest rate for it!

As I mentioned earlier, we found Lender C via a Costco partnership with LendingTree. LendingTree is basically a referral service. You give them the basics of your loan application information, and they choose three lenders who might give you a good deal, and the lenders give you quotes. Lender C had given us the best quote from all our LendingTree offers. Now, on the phone, their rates had gone up like everyone else's, but they still beat everyone else handily. Their rate for a 30-year fixed was 5.5% (compare that to Lender A's 7-year ARM!). Their lender fees are slightly higher, but we would break even in about a year. This sounds like a great deal.

Meanwhile, our real estate agent is faxing our contract offer to Lender A and asking them to appraise the property as soon as possible.

Day POA+2:We've decided to switch to lender C. We've looked around, they have good ratings from previous customers on LendingTree. Their Better Business Bureau ratings are reasonable (only 2 complaints in the last 3 years, both resolved according to the BBB). We're feeling pretty comfortable. We call our real estate agent to let him know. We call Lender C to formally apply for the loan, she sets up a phone appointment for the next afternoon. We call lender's A and B to let them know. Lender B is disappointed, and warns us about a trade-off between lower rates and better customer service. Lender A isn't in the office, and we leave her a voicemail, asking her to not appraise the property.

Day POA+3: Our real estate agent calls Lender C, faxes her the purchase contract and property details. We talk to Lender C and giver her our application over the phone. She's going to email us a loan application to sign and fax back the next morning.

Day POA+4: No forms from Lender C this morning. If we understand correctly, we're supposed to have applied for a loan by today in order to meet the conditions of the financial contingency in our offer. We're nervous now and thinking about what Lender B said about customer service and getting things finished on time. We call Lender C mid-morning (note that she's in a different time zone, so she's already in her afternoon by the time we're in our mid-morning) and she says she's preparing the documents, and will get them to us in a few minutes.

Half an hour later, no loan application materials yet. We're even more stressed now. Is this a sign of things to come? What if we lose the house because a lender in another state is overworked? If we don't make a switch today, will it be too late to switch later?

We call Lender B, asking him about his current rates. They've gone up even further. Financially, it's looking like it would be tough to switch at this point.

An hour later, we get the official loan application from Lender C. There are a few numbers on the application that don't match the good faith estimate, as well as a few other mistakes in addresses, etc. We're not feeling great at this point, but resigned to push on through this process and spend the extra energy calling Lender C every day if we have to to make sure things get done right and on time over the next 30 days.

We're going over to the fax machine to fax our loan application, financial documentation, student transcripts, and other papers over to Lender C when we get a call from Lender A. Lender A has received our voice mail from two days ago, and wants to have a chance to match or beat Lender C's rates. We say sure, tell her we're getting 5.5% for a 30-year fixed. She says she'll talk to her manager and call us back within an hour. We hold off on faxing our application to Lender C.

We wait. It's hard to wait. Especially when you don't have anything else to do.

In an hour, Lender A calls us back, and says she can offer us 5.375% for a 30-year fixed, and gives us a slightly better rate on the second mortgage as well. The lender fees are lower too. Plus (have I mentioned this yet? I don't think so), to trump it all, since they are our employer's preferred lender, they already have documentation about my income and we have a good credit rating, they don't need any further bank statements, W-2s or explanation of why, as a student, I wasn't making enough money to afford the house that, as a full-time employee, I can afford. She's already received our purchase contract, on day POA+1, so we're practically done. Wow, sounds great.

We call our real estate agent. He sounds happy to switch away from Lender C. We call Lender C. She doesn't sound so happy that we're switching away, but is polite. She's surprised that someone else beat their rate from POA+1 today, on POA+4 with all the market changes.

Lender A is going to get the house appraised and a loan processor will call us in 24-48 hours if there's a need for additional documentation for our second mortgage. We had to go through a relatively short period of stress, but it looks like we're now getting a lender that has a pretty good reputation, is certainly hassle-free in terms of required documentation, and is giving us the best rate. All we have to do now is find home owner's insurance...

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Let's say that POA stands for Post-Offer-Acceptance, so POA+1 is the day after our offer was accepted

I'm not in the habit of tracking changes in the mortgage market. Maybe you are. Maybe I should be.

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Last week, my wife and I had a whirlwind of a house-hunting trip. There's lots to talk about, from neighborhoods and restaurants to commutes to inspections. But for now, here's a quick timeline:

Day 1: Arrive at the airport in the afternoon, check in at hotel, have
lunch and go out with our real estate agent to tour neighborhoods. We
see a few houses, but don't like any of them. We go out to dinner and
fall in love with house #1 from the outside.

Day 2: We see house #1 on the inside and realize it's a huge fixer upper
and fall out of love. Painful. We see a couple more houses
and fall in love with house #2. We have a nice dinner at a neighborhood restaurant.

Day 3: We try out the commute from house #2 to the eastside. We
look at house #2 again from the inside. Nothing wrong yet. Decide to
go ahead and make an offer. Agent suggests we have the house
pre-inspected so we can wave the inspection contingency and make our offer more
appealing.

Day 4: Get the house inspected. Wow, house inspectors are cool.
They know everything about houses. House #2 is in great shape overall, but
needs a new roof immediately. We decide that's ok.

Day 5: We make the offer. Fly home to the California. Wait
nervously by the phone. The sellers accept the offer. We beat out another
offer of the same price because we were able to waive the inspection contingency.

Day 6: We start to fret about mortgages...

My favorite part of the process was (other than finding a great house) the inspection. Right now, I can't imagine that I'd want to commit the time and effort to making an offer on an older house without getting it inspected first. First of all, it wasn't too expensive (about two hundred dollars; it's cheaper than a normal inspection because you don't pay for the final report unless you get the house), and for our money we were able to learn a lot in general about houses in Seattle, the various problems they tend to have, common pest issues in the Northwest, neighborhood geography, older homes, etc. In the end, not only did it strengthen our hand because we could waive a major contingency, but we were much more comfortable making the offer because we knew more about what we were buying. As an added bonus, holding the inspection the day before the sellers were going to listen to offers scared off at least one potential competing offer, increasing the odds of our offer getting accepted.

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I just found out about a wonderful real estate site, redfin that combines aerial maps, accurate parcel placement, and real estate listings in a nice web interface. Great!

Compare this to what we did before here. We still have to do some of that to check out the neighborhood cafes and shopping on Yahoo Maps, but Redfin certainly replaces how we were using www.Bradhinckley.com, the King county parcel viewer, and Google Maps for.

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We're going up to Seattle on a house-hunting trip soon. We're planning to spend our time exploring Seattle's neighborhoods a bit, as well as looking at individual houses for sale, checking out potential commutes, etc.

In the meanwhile, we've been doing some reading about these neighborhoods, and found some nice resources:

• Newcomer's Handbook for Seattle: This book has short descriptions of neighborhoods, as well as lots of useful information about the whole area, such as lists of libraries, post offices, grocery stores, banks, etc. A bit of everything you need to know.
  
• Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Webtowns: This is a great guide to Seattle's neighborhoods, including historical information, maps, census data, community resources, and links to the neighborhood web site.
  
• Lost in Seattle is a building-by-building map of the Seattle, labeling the location of restaurants, hardware stores, dentists, and basically every other business that has a storefront. A very explorable view of Seattle.
  
• To get a feel for the neighborhood eateries, the Seattle Weekly Food section has a neighborhood-by-neighborhood list of restaurants and reviews. Just go to their site, and find the neighborhoods link in the middle of the page.
  

Given financial and commute constraints, we've narrowed down our interests to a handful of neighborhoods. We're going to be look at Green Lake, Fremont, Phinney Ridge, Wallingford, and Ravenna. We'll also be keeping an eye out for houses in our price range in Madrona, Madison Valley, or Capitol Hill.

Yup, we've sure narrowed it down. I'm hoping that this trip to Seattle clears things up a bit more. When we come back, I'll write a bit more about our impressions of these places.

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Before we leave the Bay Area, my wife and I are trying to get a few items crossed off our "things to do before we leave the bay area" list. One of the major items we want to get through is to visit several bay area restaurants that we enjoy or think we'd enjoy.


So, we started off our restaurant trips a couple weeks ago, with our first vist to Limón, a great Peruvian restaurant in the Mission district of San Francisco. We heard about it a year ago, and have run into a couple raving reviews since, and decided we finally had to make the time to go. We enjoyed their chicha morada and sangria, my wife had a great saltado de pollo, and I had a yummy arroz con mariscos. We were with a group, so were able to taste a good set of appetizers and desserts. Everything was delicious, and the service was impeccable.

Last week we had dinner at Taste Paul K, a self-described "edgy mediterranean" restaurant in Hayes Valley. The food was great. We ordered the mezze platter as an appetizer; the lamb riblets that came in the platter had been marinated with pomegranate syrup and just melted in one's mouth. I had the pressed sumac chicken, and my wife had their pan roasted halibut. It's definitely not your standard mediterranean food, and its quite well done.

For a year now, we've been frequenting a Chef Chu's whenever we're in the mood for chinese food. The restaurant has been around since 1970, and is in my opinion, the best chinese restaurant in the Bay Area¹. The sauces are the best I've tasted. We had lunch there a few days ago, and I'm sure we'll want to go again within the next four weeks.

I'm sure we'll go to several more restaurants before we leave, though we haven't planned anything in particular. However, we have chosen our first "we've left California" restaurant. On the drive up from San Francisco to Seattle, we're going to spend a night in Ashland, OR, just north of the California-Oregon border. There, we have reservations at Amuse, a Northwest/French restaurant with a tasty looking menu.

[1] The Great China in Berkeley comes in second.

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So, we're looking to buy a house in Seattle. We're living about 850 miles away from Seattle. That's a 15 hour and 13 minute drive without traffic. But, it turns out we can find an incredible amount of information about Seattle houses on the Internet, without ever leaving our living room. I probably shouldn't be surprised, this being the information age and all, and computers being my, you know, my job and all. But I am.

Here's what my wife and I do every day. Or at least, the days on which we feel like procrastinating on our PhDs (I'll write about that some other time):

We start our search by going to BradHinckley.com, an easy to use web site listing real estate. There seem to be quite a few sites seem to work well, but we've settled on this one. It's very easy to do a property search for houses that have come on the market in the last day ¹. Give it a try. The listing show up on a map, and you get to see details including (usually) photos. Here, there's already a lot of information at your fingertips.

If we find a house we like, the next step for us is to check out the neighborhood. The first thing we do is look at maps.google and get a better idea of where in Seattle the address is. This is important to us, since I'd like a reasonable commute to work, and we both want to be in walking distance to shops and restaurants. To check out traffic, I use the Puget Sound Area traffic congestion map, giving current and historical traffic data every ten minutes going back to October 2003.

To check out the neighborhood shops, we use Yahoo Maps (I won't go into the reasons, but, while I find Google Maps to be a much prettier map, I find Yahoo's local search much easier to use). Finally, if we're looking at a neighborhood we haven't explored recently, we go to a third site, A9's yellow pages and look up some of the nearby restaurants and cafes. A9 has photos of most of Seattle's businesses, and it's easy to "walk" up and down the block and get some feeling for what the neighborhood commerical areas are like.

If we find a house that we like, but it seems to be underpriced, we wonder what might be wrong with it. Now, it's time to do just a little bit more digging, so here's what we do. First, we'll pull up a satellite map of the area using Terraserver. Google Maps has satellite maps too, but Terraserver's are more detailed. Terraserver doesn't pinpoint the address perfectly, however, so we still don't know which house on the satellite map is the one we're interested in. So, now, we have to go to King County's Parcel Viewer. Searching for an address here gives you a view of all the lots in the neighborhood, and you can count how many houses you are from the corner. With these two tools together, you can usually tell whether there's anything obviously wrong with the house, such as nearby freeways, power plants, etc. It's really quite a nice tool.

King County's parcel viewer gives a lot more information as well; I'd encourage you to poke around. You can look up recent tax information, summary descriptions of the house, and some permit information. More permit information is also available at Seattle's department of planning and development.

Finally, take a look at the real estate section in the Seattle Times. They have interesting articles every week or so. I originally found the King county records and DPD sites from an article here.

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[1] If you want to check for new houses more than once a day, you can use decimal numbers, such as "0.5" to search for houses that have come up in the last 12 hours. Here's a cheat sheet of fractions if you don't feel like pulling out a calculate or pencil and paper: If you checked for new listings 6 hours ago, use 0.25; 4 hours ago, use 0.167; 1 hour ago, use 0.042. Not that we do this. To be honest, the real estate market in Seattle doesn't change that quickly.

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An introduction

My wife and I are finishing our theses and will be joining the real world over the next few months. During this process, we're going to be moving from the San Francisco Bay area up north to Seattle. I'm hoping to use this space to talk about a few different things:

• Finishing the thesis and leaving the student life: After ten years of college and graduate work, it feels good to be almost finished. I'm sure it will feel even better to be finished.
  
• Moving away from the Bay Area: Though I travel a lot and have spent some time on the East Coast and Europe, I've had always had one foot in California. My wife and I are already making lists of things to do before we leave.
  
• Buying a house for the first time: We've started looking at the real estate market in Seattle, and have even been pre-approved for a mortgage. We like the houses we see. Unfortunately, the ones we're seeing now aren't going to be on the market by the time we get up there. That's ok. I feel an emotional roller coaster beginning already.
  
• Settling down in Seattle: I've been to Seattle quite a few times, and probably spent a total of 6 months there, all told. It's a great city and I'm looking forward to learning its ins-and-outs.
  
  

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