Buyer's Broker

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Do not hesitate to make Barbara Delantoni your buyer's broker. My husband's job transferred us from Cleveland Heights, Ohio to the Bay Area in 2011. I found Barbara on Angie's List that June, by calling to request access to the SF list. I e-mailed Barbara and told her I'd be in the Mountain View area the following week. She promptly replied and we set up a tentative meeting.
Barbara and I met at Peet's Coffee for more than three hours (initial meeting in June 2011) to discuss real estate in general and my family's needs. (I want to mention that I met with two other area real estate agents that week, neither of whom was as helpful or resourceful as Barbara. I met with each of these other agents for hours at a coffee house. One left our meeting at Peet's requesting that I should call her when we were ready to purchase. The other I met at Starbuck's; he did set up informative e-mails, but the e-mails ceased after January 1, 2012, and I never heard from him after that.)
Barbara's automatic e-mails were a godsend. I learned more every day from the listings and the property photos, especially in combination with Google maps and its street view feature. All that summer of 2011 I received e-mails and started to educate myself. I learned what prices were like in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Jose, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Fremont, Hayward, Milpitas and everywhere else. How much for a typical 2 bedroom/2 bath house or condo? A third bedroom costs how much more? What about an additional bath? What were the yards and neighborhoods like?
We relocated to a San Mateo apartment in August 2011, and we continued to learn by attending any and all open houses that looked interesting on the e-mails and on realtor.com. We knew we could not make offers until the spring of 2012, so we found the open houses very freeing. We could look at places and just talk about what we liked or disliked about the various homes, neighborhoods or cities, what features were necessities and what were deal breakers. At first, every house was way overpriced, no big surprise.
Barbara has excellent negotiation skills, so when it was time to make offers on attractive properties (late April 2012) our offers were noticed by agents and sellers. The first place we offered for did not completely fit our needs, and the second property was won by an all-cash offer. The property we purchased (third time's the charm) does fit all our needs, and we were able to outbid an all-cash offer by giving the sellers extra time to vacate (since we knew they needed to navigate this crazy market too).
The Bay Area real estate market moves fast all right, so it pays to have savvy people in your corner. Barbara referred us to other professionals like herself -- a mortgage broker who found us a great loan rate, inspectors, an appraiser and a title company to move us through the loan approval and closing process.
Barbara Delantoni stuck with us through our entire year-long journey to find a new home. We recommend her highly with no reservations. Call her. You won't be sorry you did.

We were amazed by her energy, professionalism, and experience. As we were new to the area, she helped us get to know different cities and neighborhoods for us to make the right decision about the location of our house. Being persistent and confident, she did the impossible to remove all obstacles and make sure the deal is complete on time and we get the house we really wanted to buy.

fantastic

Barbara did an excellent job. She was organized, explained the process clearly and gave us a useful handout on the process when we first met. She is very experienced, and easy and pleasant to work with. We got right down to business, looked at appropriate houses, and it wasn't long before we found the right house for us. She was very responsive to questions and requests.