Archive for April, 2008

I came across a useful website that helps you determine how walkable a home or neighborhood is. Walkscore.com allows you to enter an address, and it shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. A property’s walk score is determined by how far away nearby stores, restuarants, schools, parks, and other destinations are from the property you entered. The idea is that the higher the walk score, the easier it is to get to local establishments by walking.

I like the idea of getting to know how close local stores, shops, etc. are to a certain property. I guess you could do the same type of search on maps.google.com, but Walkscore.com puts it together in a nice, easy to use package. I would definitely put this site into your home buyer toolkit.

From the nightly news, to friendly banter between parents at soccer games, the credit crunch is an issue we all have to deal with. Potential home buyers may be emotionally and financially ready to buy a home, the problem many face is getting the initial financing. As an ongoing series on the PopCasa blog, we are going to post information and links to resources to non-traditional forms of home financing such has county of city specific programs.

Through their Department of Housing, The County of San Mateo offers various home buying assistance programs. It looks like many of the programs that were once available, are now gone. However, they list a few. Many of these programs have some type of restriction (income, city, etc.).  FYI…when considering using a county/city buyer assistance program find out if the county or city will be entitled to a portion of any equity gain when you sell the property.

Below is a nice document outlining the various programs currently available via the County of San Mateo.  Check back often as we plan to keep searching for more assistance programs offered throughout the Bay Area.  If you know of any programs, please let us know through the comments.

Home Buyer Programs In San Mateo Coutny - Get more documents

Hello everyone.  My name is Javiera Garcia, and I am the founder of PopCasa Realty.  I wanted to quickly introduce myself and PopCasa Realty.  First a little about myself.  I have been a practicing Realtor in California for over 10 years.  Personally, I have helped hundreds of individuals and families buy homes.  Also, I have assisted hundreds of other agents with their home buying clients.  I mention this not to pump up my ego, but rather to demonstrate that through my experiences, I have seen every type of transaction and worked through every form of complication.

During the majority of my career, I have specialized in helping first-time home buyers.  What I noticed was that many times my clients were just short in the money they needed to get the house they REALLY wanted.  In an effort to help my clients get the house they really wanted, I would usually credit back part of my commission to make up the difference my clients were short.  Thus came the idea for PopCasa Realty.

We only work with home buyers, providing them with exceptional customer service throughout the entire home buying process.  At the closing, we credit our home buying clients with 1/3 of our commission.  Ok…the one question I always get when I tell them about giving back 1/3 of our commission is….”Why do you do it?”.  Simple answer is because we can, and because it puts our clients in a better position financially.

The second question is “How are you different from the other online/discount real estate firms?”.  Another simple answer.  We are NOT a discount realty company.  We provide full service to all of our clients from start to finish.  I would match the service we provide our clients to any long standing real estate company, and I know we would exceed the level of service and professionalism.

Trust me, I have a ton to say about how we work with home buyers here at PopCasa Realty.  I put together this video where I go into a little more detail.  We are an open book here at PopCasa, so please feel free to contact us via phone, email, or skype.