First-Time Home Buyers Secure Dream Home Through Strategic Backup Offer Advice

As first time home buyers with no experience whatsoever, it was very daunting putting the offer in, going into due diligence period, and then negotiating things we wanted after due diligence, going into closing. It was extremely low stress for us, which we were very grateful for. She did a wonderful job. I think a part of that was the team she helped us build. We used a lot of the closing attorneys, inspector agents that she recommended, and they were all wonderful. It was, in many ways, seamless and made it a much easier process than we anticipated. My name is Stephanie Stern. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and I am a college professor, specifically a professor of psychology. I found Shannon through a friend, which always makes me feel more confident going into a relationship like this. My friend was also a first time home buyer when she worked with Shannon, and said that Shannon was really great at working with first timers and specifically at educating. And that was something my husband and I cared a lot about because we like to learn as much as we can while relying on the experts, and Shannon really struck a really nice balance there for us. She was really diligent about wanting to teach us the process and not just kind of tell us what to do, and that was very apparent right off the bat. And after our first phone call, I was completely sold. What felt different working with Shannon compared to other realtors, and we didn't have an extensive amount of experience since this was our first time, but have of course experienced interacting with realtors, going to open houses by ourselves, and our experience was that a lot of realtors, while I'm sure there are many, many wonderful ones out there, just felt very impersonal and almost performative. And Shannon was the opposite of that. She is very personable and genuine, which we really appreciated. That helped us develop a greater sense of trust. She was very flexible and wanted, or seemed to want to get a feel for what we expected of her and what she expected of us being communicated, and was good at kind of figuring out what the right balance was between showing us what she thought we should be looking at, but also building off the work we had already done. She let us kind of take control there, but was also very good at saying, "You don't wanna look at this property. I know you think you wanna look at this property, but you don't and here's why." Early on when we would get to a property, she'd pull- we'd pull up and she'd say, "I have a good feeling, here's why," or, "I have a bad feeling and here's why." And that really helped shape our experience as we looked at houses. So she did a lot of really wonderful scaffolding in that regard. She was extremely flexible with her hours and very, very easy to get in touch with, very communicative, never left us waiting. It was wonderful. We're most pleased with the advice Shannon gave us on navigating a bit of a tricky market. We found multiple houses that we'd wanted to put an offer in, and found out shortly after that there was already an offer or tricky situations like that, and Shannon ended up advising us to go in as a backup offer on this house that we completely fell in love with. And we were like, "Shannon, are you sure?" And she's like, "Do it. You never know what's going to happen." And I believe three weeks later we got a call from her saying, "Hey, the house that you wanted, it fell through and it's yours now." And had we not built a relationship up to that point where we know we could trust her advice, I don't think that would've happened. And I wanted this house really badly, [laughs] so I'm glad we listened to her. Working with Shannon's team was like building a lot of very close trusting friendships very quickly, and especially as the process played out and we got a little bit more familiar with each other, comfortable working with one another. They were easy to get ahold of. They made us comfortable, and it felt very much like they cared what the outcome was, not just us, not just Shannon. So if you're thinking about working with Shannon and you want someone that you can trust, who cares about the outcome, who is available, who cares about educating and making you the best home buyer and homeowner that you can be, Shannon is absolutely the right choice.