Friend moving to Big Island...needs to buy a home

[macuu222]

Thanks everyone. The couple moving here have family in Hawi...which is where they will be staying until they get a home in the Hilo area. They accepted a fulltime job offer in Hilo working for the National Wildlife Refuge so they will need to find a home in Hilo or Puna soon.... as the job starts May 8th.

[John S. Rabi]

The only web site you (and anyone else) should look at for properties is http://HawaiiInformation.com which is our official MLS site. All the others buy the data from MLS and display it in different formats. Some are updated regularly while some others, including some nationally known ones, are updated weekly or even monthly.

I try not to say bad things about any real estate agent, but my personal experience with Heather was similar with Kathy's, she never presented our offer to the Seller and ended up selling the property by herself to double her commission. Apparently, I wasn't the only one with bad experience, she recently was fined $5,000 and her license was suspended by DCCA for 365 days.

Whatever agent you decide to work with make sure that agent is knowledgeable. A five year old kid can show you houses, representing a buyer takes much more than that.

Aloha,
John S. Rabi, GM,PB,ABR,CRB,CM,FHS
888.819.9669
johnrabi@johnrabi.com
http://www.JohnRabi.com
Typically Tropical Properties
"The Next Level of Service!"
(This is what I think of the Kona Board of Realtors http://KonaBoardOfRealtors.info)

Edited to change "revoked" to "suspended" and to add http://cms.ehawaii.gov/cms/app/details.h...ision=RICO&crowId=110525

Edited again to add that I have received several threatening e-mails from Heather Hedenschau to remove this post. I don't like to be threatened, and since I only posted the facts with a link to confirmation, I refused.

[missydog1]

John, that is exactly what happened to me. She went for the double commission. That is very interesting.

I agree with Carol that a very patient realtor who is willing to show many homes is what you want if you are going to scour the inventory in HPP. And ... I know it is not the popular position on Punaweb, but living in Hilo has a lot to recommend it. I lived in town for two years, and now I live out of town. At first I thought the country living was great, but there are many things I could do if it didn't cost me gas and a 45 minute round trip to pop into town. Anyone who plans to work in Hilo should seriously consider the trials and expense of the commute.

[macuu222]

Thanks John and everyone else that offered insight into buying homes in this area. I will forward this info to them and also give them the punaweb url so they can read this themselves...

[birdmove]

Wow. Lots of suggestions for real estate agents. We had a great experience with Mark Cox and Ron Wood with Caldwell Banker. You should be able to find a nice 3 bed 2 bath place in HPP beautifully landscaped with lots of fruit trees etc for $165,000-$200,000. We did .Fixers or repos for less. And ours was FULLY furnished for that price. Not a new house (1996), but in fine shape. We needed a place that we could buy and rent out short term right away without any major fixes or landscaping to do, and we found it. It's rented every day but one this month, and it looks like we now have a renter from June through December. If we have good luck, after that we move in (!!). If not, then it will happen soon after.

Have your friends do the research on a computer and find places they would like to look at.

Good luck to them.

Jon

Jon

Jon in Puyallup, Wa.

[KeaauRich]

My only other advice would be to take the listing pictures with a grain of salt. We saw some places that looked like palaces online, but were dumps in real life. And look carefully at the pictures..if there is dirty laundry scattered about or dishes in the sink (can you believe folks and their agents would allow these kind of pictures to be posted???) then be highly suspect of those places. We looked at probably 50 houses over a two year period, and I'd estimate only about 10% were accurately represented by the pictures. A few were nicer than they appeared online, but most were much worse. If there are windows in the pictures, look out the windows to get a sense of the yard. If you're purchasing a house and the listing ad shows mostly pictures of the landscaping, that's another red flag! Oh, and be sure your friends know about "permitted " vs. "un-permitted" houses -- we fell in love with one house, and it wasn't until we were writing up our offer that the agent told us the house was un-permitted, and therefore had to be purchased with cash. That's when we stopped using that agent...

[missydog1]

Ah yes, the pictures! So true. I went through a similar situation with shopping east side while living near Hawi. I would find a list of properties and the agent would put together a showing day. I really didn't want to waste her time, so before we made the appointments I stared at all the photos, noted every red flag, looked up the TMK, studied the permit history ... and screened the list hard. Still hit ones that were were not as they seemed online.

Agents have access to larger, higher resolution versions of the photos you see on the MLS. Get the agent's link and you can see a lot more.

Once you have the TMK, go to the property tax site
www.hawaiipropertytax.com
and look at the permit history, the sales history, the zoning, the parcel map, and check what is built on the adjacent parcels. I did that for each property before asking to see it.

Of course a good agent will alert you to stuff, but realistically no agent has time to do four hours of research and devote a day to showings and do that several times, so I always tried to do any work I could do myself.

There are so many properties, and it's roughly 2 1/2 hours each way to come over from Hawi. Would be worth staying a night or two.

Another thing I do is take photos of each property, because they start to blur into each other. I am careful not to focus on personal stuff if the house is lived in, but just things like room configuration, materials of counters and cabinets, bathrooms, windows, flooring, landscaping and neighbor houses.

[riverwolf]

I fully agree with Kathy and might add that people need to take responsibility for some of the work on their own. Back when we were shopping we had our "list" and did drive by's before going to look at the house with the realtor. We saved a lot of time that way... being proactive. Also being clear on the type of house/neighborhood and what you want to be near to ( town, ocean,forest reserve etc).

riverwolf

[Hotzcatz]

We just bought a house last month and it was mostly chosen because of the location and not anything else. It is rather amazing, how much stuff we didn't notice between looking at the house to buy it and what we now see after we own it. Not that it matters much since we bought the house for the neighborhood, but when we were looking at the house, we were mostly focused on the "macro" and not the "micro". The location and size of windows was noticed, the broken louver handles and the holes in the screens were missed. The house looked clean and tidy at the walk through but now I'm washing walls and doing a lot of yard cleanup. Still, in a forty year old house, one would expect that sort of thing.

Since your friends have family in Hawi, would it be better for them to look for a place along the Hamakua coast instead of HPP? They can get a house for about the same price as HPP in the North Hilo area and still have the same amount of commute time to Hilo and yet be able to visit their family in Hawi easier than from HPP. A lot less traffic, too. A bit further up the coast is Pauuilo and the school there is very good although the drive time to Hilo is on the edge of "too far" for a daily commute. But, before they choose HPP, they may want to check out the other areas around Hilo.

---

"I like yard sales," he said. "All true survivalists like yard sales."
Kurt Wilson

[bjbTay]

I also recommend Big Island Brokers. Heather and her assistant Suzanne are awesome!!!!! Very professional, great advise, truly know the Puna area....and are fast becoming good friends of ours. I can't say enough good things about them.

Barbara Taylor...soon to be HPP resident!

Hawaii Dreaming