“Finally writing a long, long over due review for the amazing Julie Peisner…Julie sold us our first home in Maxwell Park (Oakland) during the housing boom of 2004 – It was our first house and, quite frankly, we were clueless. The market was red hot, loans were really easy to get (even if you had nothing to put down) so we figured we would buy a house in Oakland…. Fast forward 11 years, and we’re still in our ‘starter’ home – turned out that crash in ’08 took a little time to bounce back from! There were many, many times we thought about walking away, but having maintained our relationship with Julie she advised strongly against it. Be patient she kept saying, the market will recover. That piece of advice was what allowed us to finally make it into our dream home in Alameda. Once Julie was confident that the market was fully recovered and we’d be able to make a little profit on our Oakland house we decided to list it. After a quick walkthrough, Julie made sure we were 100% committed to the sale. We were, and she then emailed us a calendar as well as a pretty intimidating ‘to-do’ list. This is where she really showed her expertise – my wife and I both work, have a 3 year old and didn’t have a ton of money (or time) to invest in the house to make it open house ready. Unlike other parts of the Bay Area, we couldn’t just put a For Sale sign up and get 20% over asking. We needed to put lipstick on this pig. A few coats. I fought her on almost everything she suggested – 3k for floors? Do we really need to spend that much? 8k for paint? Wha-wha-WHAT? We surely don’t need to do that…put 75% of our stuff in storage? That’s got to be a mistake. When do we need to get this done? In 5 weeks? Maybe we’ll just hold off until after the summer….Julie wasn’t having it – “Now is the time to sell, and TRUST ME – you’ll make every penny back you invest on the sale. I’m sure of it.” As much as I trusted Julie, it was really hard to put another 15k into a home that we were going to be leaving. After a little more arm-twisting, we agreed to the timeline and upgrades. Julie made sure it was as stress free as possible – she booked and met with the contractors, let them in when we weren’t going to be home, and most important, she kept everyone on schedule. When it was finally time to list, the house was done and looked amazing. I knew we did the right thing (so did Julie, she reminds me every time I saw her over the next two months). At this point, I had full confidence in Julie and let her price it and help us choose and offer – oh yeah, we got 12, all over asking. The winning offer was 33% over and we were ecstatic! She made sure the offer was solid – very few contingencies and a free 30 day rent back. Inspections, removal of contingencies and closing were all handled with ease. I can confidently say that the investments we made in the house made us at least $75,000. If we didn’t take Julie’s advice at every turn, we would have settled for less and never have been able to buy our dream house…. I don’t think Yelp has a cap on review length, so I’ll keep going. Now that we had money, we set our sights on the buying process. We were passively looking during the sale, but with properties moving so fast we couldn’t get excited about anything. As soon as we had money to spend (and knowing we had to be out of our place in 30 days) we started the search. That was a Tuesday. On Thursday AM, Julie sent over a listing of the house that would soon be ours. She arranged a viewing prior to the open house and helped us write a preemptive offer (there were 5!). The offer was just enough to win. Again, thank you Julie. She made sure that we were able to take occupancy the day we had to move out of our place (no easy task since the loan hadn’t funded yet), but again, her knowledge of the market made this happen. We are now in our dream house and I have Julie to thank for it. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU JULIE!”
