Choosing a buyer's agent is a little different from choosing someone to help you find a house.
Homes are easy to find these days. You can look at listings from your couch, save the ones you like and probably learn quite a bit about a neighborhood before you ever set foot in it, even if you're buying in Bend from out of the area.
But finding a house isn't the same thing as being well represented while you buy one.
I'm writing this for people choosing a buyer's agent in Bend, Oregon, but most of what follows should be true anywhere. Good buyer representation is good buyer representation.
How do you know whether you've found...
People sometimes talk about buying a home as though it's a process you simply work your way through: get preapproved, look at houses, make an offer, have an inspection, and close.
Those steps matter. But I think the harder and more interesting part of buying a home is figuring out which house is worth buying, what it's worth to you, and what you need to know before you make that decision.
That's particularly true in Bend, where the same budget can buy remarkably different homes depending on where you look and what matters to you.
So this isn't going to be a checklist of the steps between preapproval and getting your keys.
It's a buyer's guide to thinking through the purchase.