SF Saga: Mad Dash Real Estate Hunt (part 1)

This is the first of a six-part series on my San Francisco Real Estate Saga, a months-long period involving countless house tours, sleepless nights, gut-wrenching decisions, and a total of three separate moves. In this first installment, we hear how I came to find myself in the San Francisco real estate market.

Our San Francisco house search started on a frantic fall day in 2009.

What brought us to this fateful day: After quitting our finance jobs in New York City in September, my boyfriend M and I moved into my condo in Portland, OR, while job-hunting up and down the West Coast. In late October, M was notified that he’d gotten a job at the big tech company he’d been interviewing with for 4 (!) months. Two weeks later, we were packing up to move to San Francisco.

I have family in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we were able to stay with them while finding a place of our own. With so much changing, we had tons of decisions to make. Rent or buy? Which neighborhood? How much to pay? When to move? What we knew was this: we wanted to live in the city, in a thriving neighborhood (we were still going though NYC withdrawal), in a nice but inexpensive place. We absolutely did not want to be house-poor, putting every dollar we earned into our home.

Autumn is a transitional season for real estate; everyone is getting ready to hibernate for the winter.

We had the sense that buying was the best plan, since prices were supposed to be down, and there were lots of government incentives in place to help first time homebuyers (which M was).

Where to start? Neither of us knew much about SF real estate. I’d lived in the Bay Area for a few years growing up, so I had a vague sense of the different neighborhoods. M had been to SF once as a kid. So we were basically starting from scratch.

Luckily, we were ready to jump right in since we’d done our homework. Before moving, we attended an excellent homebuyers 101 class in Portland, pulled our credit, and calculated what we could afford.

With that part done, the next step upon arriving in SF was to find a reputable realtor. We didn’t know any local homebuyers who could give us recommendations, so we turned to the Internet. We read glowing interviews of a realtor named Tim on Yelp, so on the advice of strangers, we made our first appointment. We met Tim at his office and immediately liked him.

Tim was great because he was not focused on making a sale right from the start. He told us up front that none of the homes we’d tour that week would be places we’d buy. Not only does real estate slow down in the fall and winter, these houses were just a starting point to start learning the market. He said he gets nervous when clients want to make offers less than 3 months after starting a real estate search–he’ll support their wishes, of course–but his philosophy is that it takes time to build the emotional readiness to make a home purchase.

Good philosophy. We’d found our realtor!

After asking us some questions about ourselves and our goals, Tim took us through a few properties on the MLS within our price and neighborhood parameters. We picked out a half dozen to visit, and made an appointment for the next day (Sunday) to start touring. Tim would accompany us for the next couple weeks as we toured homes and visited open houses. He said it was important for him to see our reaction to different places so he could learn our likes and dislikes.

Good idea. This partnership was something I’d never experienced, since I stumbled upon my Portland condo without the involvement of a realtor. I was now experiencing (and appreciating!) the buyer-realtor relationship for the first time. Another thing we liked was that Tim did not ask us to sign an exclusivity agreement–he said he prefers to earn his customers’ loyalty.

Day One: Our first official day of house-hunting was a Sunday. We had 6 homes on the itinerary. Tim said we could cut down the list if we started feeling fatigued, but we were raring to go and wanted to see all 6.

I’ll never forget the first home we saw. The condo was 1 bdrm/1.5 bath two-level in a small building on the southern outskirts of Noe Valley. The kitchen was new, the living room spacious, with a bathroom on each level and a loft bedroom. And–get this!–it even had a deck and backyard. Our eyes turned into little cartoon stars the second we walked in, so shocked were we that something so nice was in our price range. “It’s so big! It’s so new! It has an outside!”

Tim was baffled by our response. It didn’t take long to put it together: M and I were used to living like sardines in New York, so everything in San Francisco seemed palatial by comparison.

We strained to see the place through a San Francisco lens. Turns out the place wasn’t quite the wonderland we’d first thought. The backyard was 100% concrete, the bedroom had no privacy, the layout was awkward, and the far-flung neighborhood was depressing. So after some back and forth, we crossed that one off the list.

We promised to adjust our expectations and not try to buy every place over 400 square feet as we pressed on in our search.

Read the full story:

• Part 1: Mad Dash Real Estate Hunt
• Part 2: A Diamond in the Rough
• Part 3: Making an Aggressive Offer
• Part 4: Back in My Arms Again, But Do We Want It?
• Part 5: Perfection Discovered