As many of you know we relocated to North Idaho. Usually we make a habit out of researching the hell out of things, going over online reviews and interviewing several realtors before deciding on one. As chance would have it when we were in CDA a few years back we were in a coffee shop chatting with some relatives we were visiting and a lady waiting on a coffee order saw us looking at real estate and talking about homes we were interested in. She mentioned her husband was a realtor and we wanted to see homes on short notice so she hooked us up and he took us to see homes that same day. Over the next few years when we'd visit CDA we'd sometimes have him show us homes but never found the right one.
Fast forward a few years, we finally moved to a rental in Hayden and began our North Idaho search full time. Stephen our agent was patient and saw dozens of homes with us over the course of a year. Got to say, we lucked out and found the best agent in the entire north panhandle. No joke. I've had about 10 different real estate agents in the last 15 years across 4 states (CA, AK, WA, ID) and I've seen everything the good the bad and the ugly. This one we found was hands down the best agent I have ever, ever worked with. Over the last year he worked with us and we looked at over 50 homes, possibly even close to 100 homes *after a while we lost count). The guy has stamina. He's an expert on urban, suburban and rural properties. He knows a lot about almost everything under the sun about laws, codes, counties, building types, utilities, HOAs/CCRs, land, wells, taxes, etc. He's also a great negotiator and helped us get our final property down almost half a million in price from where it started. He's also very friendly and not pushy. Cannot over-emphasize how hard it is find even a half decent realtor and this guy was incredible. The booming Idaho market that is now cooling down made everyone and their mother see dollar signs and think they could sell homes, and a lot of bad agents resulted. We saw everything you could imagine, people lying about sq ft, lot size, building type, HOAs/CCRs, hell we even had one lady lie about bedroom count because we told her the house was overpriced for 2 bedrooms so she changed the listing to 3 bedrooms, we had Stephen file a complaint with the local MLS and they forced her to fix it. Having a good realtor is priceless.
Idaho is a non disclosure state meaning people don't report sale prices to the state and the reason is to help keep property taxes down as county assessors can't see your purchase price. However it makes making real estate comps hard but agents can do it by pulling data from the non-public MLS backend. He helped us craft actual comps and develop offer strategies. It took us a year because we are extremely picky. We wanted acreage bordering usable state land or timber company land, we wanted a farmhouse, we didn't want to be near a major highway or railroad and we wanted it to be within 30 minutes of CDA and we wanted to get a good deal on it. It was very difficult to pull that off but he did it. Cannot over emphasize how impressed we were with him. His name is Stephen Preston and he's with the Sinclair Broker Team at Keller Williams in Coeur d'Alene. If you choose him tell him Kevin sent you his way and you expect great things. I am referring him to all my coworkers who are also escaping WA. If you're thinking about moving to north Idaho I highly recommend contacting Stephen.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateagent ... 0010b7dff1Also, here are some other resources we had that worked well in our home search:
Idaho well map, shows you wells and their stats, you can search by address or browse around maps to see what wells are like in an area (ie: how deep, how much they produce, their age, the company that drilled them, etc)
https://idwr.idaho.gov/wells/find-a-well-map/Idaho fire map and archive (see where and when forest fires occurred)
https://idfg.idaho.gov/ifwis/maps/realtime/fire/antenna search map, ideally you don't want to be too far from cell towers but you don't want to live less than 400 meters from them either for health
https://www.antennasearch.com/also, get landglide for your desktop and your phone, it was INVALUABLE for seeing who owns what and where property lines are while you're walking properties and also to see where state land, timber company land and who owns which parcels around you and how big they are:
https://landglide.com/you can use google maps satellite view to see where highways and railroads are, word of warning, terrain geography channels sound differently so sometimes even if a train is further away you might hear it due to shape of the land than other places with terrain that shields you from noise, but generally further is better
Another cool thing is these maps and services websites and apps all have different cached satellite overlays on them, meaning if you compare them all you can see back in time which will tell you if a nearby neighbor's junkyard grew or shrunk or if a road expanded or if an area was being developed and how fast.
_________________If you vote for Biden you are voting to be murdered when he sends Beto to come take your "semi automatic assault weapon" (any semi auto).
If you have family or friends voting for Biden show them this and ask if they are willing to vote for your murder or maybe even their own if they are gun owners or live with any.
https://nypost.com/2020/03/03/joe-biden ... n-control/Quote:
“I want to make something clear, I’m going to guarantee you this is not the last you’ve seen of him (Beto),” Biden said Monday evening during a campaign rally in Dallas. “You’re (Beto) going to take care of the gun problem with me. You’re (Beto) going to be the one who leads this effort.”
https://www.newsweek.com/beto-orourke-g ... ns-1465738Quote:
[Beto O'Rourke Suggests Police Would 'Visit' Homes To Implement Proposed Assault Weapons Ban] "In that case, I think that there would be a visit by law enforcement to recover that firearm... ..."If someone does not turn in an AR-15 or an AK-47, one of these weapons of war...then that weapon will be taken from them"