I can't recommend WaLaw highly enough as a buyer's agency, as long as all of the below are true for you:
1.) You know the area where you want to buy a home fairly well. You know the pros and cons of the various neighboroods, you know the schools, you know the roads and traffic patterns.
2.) You know what kind of house you want, and in what price range. You're familiar with the various house styles in your neighborhood choices, you're familiar with what features you want.
3.) You're comfortable finding your own house choices on Redfin and similar sites.
4.) You're comfortable choosing a house after using a relatively low number of in-person property tours (<10 ideally).
5.) You're 99% sure that you're going to buy a house in the Puget Sound area in the next couple of years (because you pay WaLaw a flat fee whether you buy or not).
These were all true for my wife and me, and WaLaw made our first-time home buying experience far smoother than we thought possible. Saving over $8000 on the commission at closing didn't hurt either!
I would not use WaLaw if I was relocating into the Seattle area and needed to buy something that would suit my needs quickly, nor if I needed a great deal of hand-holding to figure out what I wanted in house and location.
WaLaw WILL NOT:
* buy you lunches
* interrogate you at length about your hopes and dreams
* call you up with houses they found for you
* drive you around to tour houses
* tour houses forever "for free" (in exchange for an enormous payday at the end)
* pressure you to close on a house - they get paid either way, so they have no incentive to sell you anything.
In exchange, WaLaw charges a flat fee 40-90% less than a traditional real estate agent (depending on property price).
We would use WaLaw again in a heartbeat.
-Olivia & David Aldridge
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