Mmmm ... Beer ... Woo hoo!

Our fantastic agent--Roger Steiner of Windermere Wall Street in Seattle left us a really cool housewarming present yesterday at the house--a hand-selected 6 pack of great beer. Two from Stone Brewing Co and 4 top-end Belgian Beers--including 2 Chimays: which coincidentally match my Chimay bottle opener!

Forgive the shameless plug, but Roger's been awesome. He's not only represented us well, but he's also been our good friend for the last month and helped us indulge in some typical Sawatzki adventures, including helping on the cinematography of our Home Depot contest video. He was also very supportive and patient during the emotional roller coaster this has been.

We picked Roger in a non-traditional way too. We didn't set out to do it this way, but we kind of went about the process all bass-ackwardsly. Jason and I can't do anything without extensive research first, so we ended up finding the house during our "research" when we went open house touring to see where we would likely be able to afford. Roger was one of the agents representing a house we looked at. He was unlike most agents, who ask 100s of questions about your intentions, and oversell themselves and practically force feed you their business cards from the moment you open the door. I quickly learned to lie to those agents: "a family friend is going to be our agent!"

Roger, however was painting a room for his seller when we arrived, and let us check out the place rather than stalking us from room to room. He was laid-back, but very professional and let us take our time. When we were done, we had a normal, human conversation, not the typical "let me force feed myself to you" exchange that happened everywhere else, which usually made you feel like fish food in the aquarium of real estate which seems to happen in a buyer's market.

He also was honest when we interviewed him: he admitted that he doesn't know everything there is to know, and mentioned that he was willing to do his homework when those situations arose. And they did several times in our transaction. Within hours almost, Roger would tap the knowledgable resources of his Windermere office and would come back prepared with the knowledge he needed. For instance, we asked the seller to help with the down-payment via Neihmiah (sp?), which he hadn't used before, but very quickly learned the ins and outs of.

Anyhow, that's enough of the shameless plug, but I wanted to put on the series of tubes we call the internets how great he's been (even before he gave us the beer, which was the foam on the pint, figuratively speaking), in case anyone decides to Google him when checking him out for their own real estate transaction.

Oh and he gave us another AWESOME housewarming gift: a 1 year subscription to Angie's list, which we already have used at least twice.