Buying a house is mostly about how you feel at 11pm

We had been renting for six years and had convinced ourselves we could not afford anything inside the beltline. Nadia ran the numbers with our lender before we saw a single house and it turned out the ceiling was higher than we thought, but only if we accepted a smaller lot. We got outbid twice and both times she told us not to chase it — she showed us what the payment would actually be at the number we were about to write, and it was not a number we would have been happy with in February. The third one we won at asking. It is 1,420 square feet and we are not moving for a decade.

Worked with Nadia Okonjo-Reyes · Broker · first-time buyers

I was buying on my own salary and every calculator I used online told me something different. Marcus sat down with a spreadsheet and separated the loan maximum from the payment I actually wanted, which turned out to be about eighty thousand dollars apart. We looked in Knightdale because the drive on US-64 is genuinely twenty minutes, not the forty I had assumed. Six homes, seven weeks, and a 2020 townhome with a garage. He also caught that the HOA had a special assessment pending and made us ask for the minutes before we went firm.

Worked with Marcus Whitfield · Broker · sellers and North Raleigh

We moved from Columbus with two kids and no idea how the Triangle fits together. Devon drove us around for two full Saturdays before we looked at a single listing, which felt like a waste of time until it very obviously was not. Sixteen weeks total, and about nine of them were us changing our minds about how far out we were willing to be. He never once made us feel like we were being difficult about it. We ended up in Holly Springs with a fenced yard, which was the one thing on the list we would not give up.

Worked with Devon Park · Broker · new construction and the southern towns

We had been in the same house for twenty-six years and the stairs had stopped being a joke. Rosalind sold that house in eleven days and then spent two months helping us work out what we actually wanted next. She talked us out of the first condo we loved because the reserve study was thin and the building had a roof coming due, and she was right — the assessment landed the following spring. The one we bought has an elevator, no stairs at all, and a fee that covers things we used to do ourselves.

Worked with Rosalind Alvarez · Broker · downsizing and relocation

My start date at RTP gave us thirty days. Priya set up video tours the week before we flew in, so by the time we landed we had already ruled out eleven homes without wasting a Saturday on any of them. We saw four in person on the Friday and wrote on the second one that evening. She had already introduced us to a lender who could close in twenty-one days, which is the only reason our offer beat two others. Thirty days from job offer to keys, and nothing went wrong.

Worked with Priya Raghunathan · Broker · relocation and north Wake

We wanted a house that needed work, which sounds simple and is not — most agents kept steering us toward move-in-ready because it is easier. Priya took the opposite approach and started sending us the listings other people were skipping. Twenty-two weeks is a long search and we knew it would be. What we got was a 1955 ranch with good bones, an FHA 203(k) loan that folded the renovation into the mortgage, and a kitchen we designed ourselves. She sat in on the contractor draw meetings, which she did not have to do.

Worked with Priya Raghunathan · Broker · relocation and north Wake