Buy a House Fast

Any real estate agent who wants to win your business will make a lot of promises.  You want to buy or sell a great home at a great price that closes quickly with minimal hassle.  The agent assures you that he or she will make all this happen.  To facilitate this, if you’re a potential buyer, the agent shows you homes that fit your requirements and then helps you through the deal once you find one you like.  If you want to sell, the agent helps you price your home aggressively, attracts buyers including “the one” who buys it, and then helps you get the deal closed ASAP.

To make all this happen, your agent does a whole lot more than driving you around a few neighborhoods to see some homes or holding Sunday afternoon open houses to attract buyers. Real estate is complicated.  Sometimes both buyers and sellers think that once a buyer meets his dream home, some type of kismet takes over and all the details “fall into place.”  Your agent actually handles a million details behind the scenes so that you receive the quality of service you deserve.

Pick the Right Agent to Handle the Details

This is why picking the right agent – whether you are buying or selling – is crucial.  Express Realty Services, a leading Keller-Williams agency, provides the expert help you need to buy or sell a home in the Washington DC area, including Virginia and Maryland.  If you want to buy a pre-owned home, a bank-owned home, or a recently renovated and refurbished home, our simple buying process will be a quick and easy transaction.

Whether you are buying or selling, we will provide you with the latest information about the market and honestly help you assess what you can afford if you are a buyer or give you an honest appraisal of your home’s value if you are a seller. In either case, we are upfront and honest with you, even at the risk of losing your business if you don’t like what we have to say.  We take our duty of providing you with great customer service very seriously.  To us, great customer service is based on maintaining honest and continuous communication with you.

We Lay Out All the Details

We have a prepared a detailed manual on what to expect in your real estate transaction and what to expect from us.  Unlike the quick list of tips most agents offer, our manual is a comprehensive reference for what you need to know before, during, and after the sale or purchase.  Express Realty Services is in a client relationship with you for the long run.  Take a look at our buyer and seller manuals linked below then contact Express Realty Services today.

Express Realty Guide for Home Buyers

Express Realty Guide for Sellers

Lost in the Crowd?

When buying a home, you will likely become acquainted with a whole slew of real estate professionals.  From the realtor who helps you select a home to the listing agent who shows you some promising inventory, the experience can be difficult (and extremely frustrating) when any of these pivotal characters fail to meet your expectations.  One of the most controversial areas today is the whole appraisal process.

Help for the Weary

The folks over at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing their best to ensure that no one plays fast and loose with the appraisal process.  To that end, they’ve created a new code that holds appraisers to a higher standard of quality and professionalism. Sounds great, right? Well, it has already gotten serious backlash from people in the real estate business who believe stricter rules can only hurt an already struggling housing market.

As a result, Fannie and Freddie have tried to clarify what the new code means for homebuyers like you.  One major change outlined in the clarification document is the need for mortgage lenders to accept appraisals only from professionals with experience in the region in question.  Think about it: wouldn’t you want the appraisal coming from someone who knows the area your future home is in?

While communication between and real estate agents is permitted in the process (after all, realtors can be an excellent source of information), they cannot have a hand in selecting the appraiser.  The concern here is that a realtor eager to close a deal will select an appraiser they enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship, one willing to provide the estimate necessary for the transaction to be completed as quickly as possible.  Similar arrangements can often exist between appraisers and lenders, who have been known on occasion to lean on appraisers to overstate property values. While that may help a seller sell his house fast, it certainly won’t help when the buyer faces this dilemma: “I wanted to buy my house fast, but it didn’t meet appraisal. Now what do I do?”

Appraisal Delay or Consumer Protection?  You Decide which is Best.

Basically, Fannie and Freddie’s goal in creating a new code is to protect the homebuyer, and restore purity to the appraisal process.  Whatever delay these new measures may cause will be more than made up for by the increased confidence buyers will have in the accuracy and integrity of the professionals they turn to for an estimate.