New investor in Bay Area looking for investor friendly realtor

[Nina Sylvains]

Hi Everyone,

I'm looking for a Realtor who is investor friendly (especially friendly towards a new investor) in the East Bay area. I'm also looking for a Realtor who specializes in foreclosures. If anyone has any referrals it would be greatly appreciated! 

[Brian P.]

Well you just got two offers, that is good. Jeff's offer gave me indigestion because the words Mason-Mcduffie  were included and that gave me a bad flashback. They were the oldest and largest at the time and we selected them to sell our first home in Piedmont because the broker we used to buy it retired. We didn't know it when we bought it but that broker found us the deal of the decade. 

But the agents that came out to take the listing just used our purchase price and added the $1,000 a year appreciation that was going on in Piedmont and that matched an article we had just read in the Oakland Tribune. The trouble was that added up to $15,500 but the actual market value was $27,500-$28,500. and guess what one of the agents had a niece looking for the home in the area at that moment and they bought it, never hit the MLS. Seemed great at the time but when my company transferred me back to S.F. a couple of years later and we started looking in the old neighborhood we discovered what had happened to us. We also found Mason-Mcduffie had screwed us on the mortgage side of the deal.

That is when I started taking some real estate classes and begin my march to becoming a broker. And I drove the board nuts because all the listings my office placed on the MLS stated the coop offer does not apply to any Mason- McDuffie agents. Finally that company was being dismantled and the broker that bought some of the real estate sales offices called me and wanted a truce. So we signed a truce and all was well again in the land of Alameda and Contra Costa County. And once again I was happy to deal with them and the new owners really trained their agents and closings and day to day business went smoothly all the time. Ok that was my old age flashback.

Now back to Jeff give him a call, being as your in Oakland I sure you want to do as much as you can locally. Before I left the area to get a heart transplant it was still feasible to do deals in Oakland and the surrounding areas even though I kept getting the go out of state or to the central valley BS all the time. As of January 1st I retired even though I could come back and start an office, my license is still good for 3 more years.

Also call Ashley, investing is one of those fields that you never know who is going to bring you the deal or where the deal is. As a broker I used to tell my investor clients to work with other brokers that may be aware of something not on the MLS even though I did network with a lot of agents that worked with investors or deals that I was not aware of because of my own investing activities, and I didn't feel it would be right for my client to miss a good deal because they thought I would be upset or hurt. And her being based in Danville is old home week to me. That was my base camp for many years even though I did business from Santa Rosa to Gilroy, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Central Valley Rivers.