Brian E.
Philippe and Noelle are the best! This is a long review, so if you're short on time, here are the high-level takeaways: -They (and their lender referral) are the reason our offer was accepted. -They care about the entire escrow or inspection process. -They know EVERYTHING about buying and owning a house. And if they don't know something, they will find someone who does. -Their responsiveness is unreal. -They continue to treat us as a client for life. The house hunt is pretty straightforward. We talked with Philippe and Noelle (will refer to them as "PN" for the rest of this review) for about 20 minutes to go over our budget, target neighborhoods, and wants or needs, and got their opinion on a variety of questions we had (e.g. house vs condo, the impact of the school district on value, etc). That night they sent us a link to a custom Compass online portal populated with 15-20 houses that fit our description. If we liked a house, we'd let them know and they'd pull comps, gather research, and reach out to the selling agent for intel to put us in the best possible position to make an offer. And because they're a kickass husband and wife team, at least one of them is always available and super responsive. One crucial piece of making an offer is having a mortgage pre-approval letter. Unless all of your income comes from W2 wages (which ours doesn’t), you know how hard it can be to get a mortgage even if basic logic says you're qualified. After running into some issues with traditional bank lenders, PN referred us to a mortgage broker who provided a number of loan options as well as a contact at a regional relationship bank as a backup. The broker and the regional bank both have sterling reputations in the industry and the selling agent treated their pre-approvals as a guarantee that our financing would not fall through, which ended up being a big reason that our offer was accepted. How do I know this? We found out the details of the other offer and aside from our offer being higher by a negligible amount, the other offer was better than ours in every regard. No financing contingency, shorter time to close, etc. If I was the seller, no way would I have accepted my offer. But the selling agent had previously transacted with PN and vouched to the seller that they’re the “real deal” – there was no need to worry about us falling through or asking for unreasonable price adjustments later on. The reputations of PN and the lender essentially eliminated the risks of our weaker offer so the seller's sole consideration was the price. So at this point, PN did their job and got us a house, now I'm on my own, right? Wrong. Right after our offer was accepted, PN scheduled inspections with all of their preferred inspectors. Over the next week, as escrow or lender emails started piling up, PN would let me know which ones I had to respond to and which documents to sign, and then they took care of everything else. So now PN has found us a great lender, helped us write an offer that was accepted, took care of our inspections, held our hand through escrow, and we've successfully closed on the house. At this point, they've earned their commission (and then some) and I have no expectation that they'll continue to be so helpful and responsive--nor, by the way, would I blame them. But as I quickly learned, when you're a client of PN, you're a client for life, not just when there's a commission in it for them. A few days after we closed, SoCal Gas comes out to turn the gas on and they say the earthquake shutoff valve is faulty, something the sellers should have caught (note: it ended up being SoCal Gas's fault, but at this point, we didn't know that). Unsure of what to do, we reached out to PN. Keep in mind it's a Friday afternoon. PN immediately jumps into action. Philippe sets up a text thread with his plumber to see what he recommends. Noelle reaches out to the Seller's agent to see how this issue passed inspection. They're both texting me with updates constantly and coming up with new potential solutions to try out. This went on for two hours. On a Friday afternoon. With no notice. Unbelievable. The last thing I'll add is that PN has recommendations for any service you may need. Handymen, contractors, electricians, plumbers, landscapers, etc etc. And because PN's referral is worth its weight in gold, all these service people treat you like absolute royalty no matter how small the job to make sure PN keeps referring them.