WHO WE ARE
Oregon First, Realtors® was established in 1994, adding Washington First Properties in 2006. We're a home grown, independent Pacific NW brokerage with around 250 agents.
Since our founding, we've been listed every year in the Portland Business Journal’s annual survey of Top Residential Real Estate Firms. We were voted Best Real Estate Company by readers of the Gresham Outlook and Sandy Post. Our agents consistently receive five star ratings from their happy clients. We've earned our strong reputation by concentrating on what’s really important, both to our brokers and their clients. It’s not about image or short term profits. Our business, like the business of real estate itself, is about long-term gains earned through hard work, professionalism, and careful attention to our fiduciary duty to our clients.
Quick Facts
- We provide free, high-quality continuing education to our agents every day of the week except Sunday. Our agents are on top of things which benefits them and their clients.
- We expose our listings to the maximum number of buyers by posting them to multiple websites all over the country, including Redfin, Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, and OregonLive, to name just a few. We even share our listings on our competitors' websites because that makes the most sense for our clients—they are our primary focus.
- We provide our agents with online networking tools so they can share information easily about homes they have for sale, homes that could be for sale for the right price, mortgage brokers who are ethical and capable, contractors who are affordable and reliable, etc. This ability to easily share knowledge is a benefit that gets passed along to our clients.
- We make sure our brokers have a managing broker on call, available to them at all times, whom they can count on for answers and assistance. Real Estate doesn’t just happen from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. Our managing brokers are some of the best in the business, with decades of knowledge and experience.
- We have agents who specialize in businesses, horse properties, mobile homes, new construction, short sales, and bank-owned properties; who are green certified, senior certified, and distressed property certified; who are fluent in Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, and Vietnamese (to name just a few) — in short, who would be the exact right fit for you, whatever your particular situation. We are proud that our team of agents includes agents from many backgrounds, cultures, and countries.
WHAT WE DO
Our Agents are some of the best in the business, with strong ties to their community and years of experience providing clients with excellent outcomes. Below are just some of the services we provide our clients and strengths they can rely on.
When You're Selling
- We're knowledgeable about your neighborhood, including what’s selling, what's not selling, and why.
- We understand what makes your home desirable to buyers and how to showcase those strengths.
- We give you detailed market information to help you price your home and advise you on the repairs and staging that will actually add to the bottom line instead of just wasting your money.
- We help you follow all the laws and regulations that apply when you're selling a home: what you have to disclose (and what you don't have to disclose), when and how to comply with things like the Federal Lead Based Paint Law and the Homebuyer Protection Act, what you're required to do when your property has a well or underground oil tank, etc.
- We know how to handle multiple offers. We have proven techniques to secure the best offers without alienating potential buyers or causing legal problems.
- We know how to handle complicated negotiations, such as when a buyer needs to sell an existing home before purchasing yours—or when you need the funds from this sale to buy your next house.
- We know what to do if a buyer can't follow through with the purchase, including when and how you can keep their earnest money and what needs to be disclosed to subsequent buyers.
- We keep track of buyer compliance with the contract terms, and we know how to handle it if they miss a deadline, like for the deposit of earnest money, or when their loan isn't ready when it's suppose to be, to name just a few potential difficulties.
- We guide you step-by-step through the process, from marketing your home to responding to buyer offers to negotiating buyer requests for repairs. We open escrow and work with the title company, your lender, the appraiser, and generally coordinate with all parties to shepherd your home sale to a successful closing.
When You're Buying
- We share the industry trends with you, interpret statistics, and advise you regarding the long-term value of the homes you are considering.
- We give useful information about where you should be looking given what you want in a house and neighborhood. We help you narrow down your search, saving you countless wasted hours viewing homes that look great online but are a big disappointment in person.
- We help you decide what to offer for a house, regardless of the asking price. The asking price is not always a good indicator of true market value.
- We guide you step-by-step through making an offer, negotiating counter offers, and requesting repairs or other contract modifications in response to what we help you find out about the property during your inspection period.
- We let you know what sellers are legally required to disclose and what they can keep to themselves, and we'll give you advice on how to protect yourself. We make sure it's in the contract that you have a right to review information about any homeowner's association, easements and liens on the property, condition of wells and septic tanks, etc.
- We know what laws and regulations sellers are required to follow and what the remedy is if they don't.
- We advise you about what inspections to get and who to talk to if you need more information about underground oil tanks, building on the property, living in an area zoned farm/forest—or any of the myriad things that can come up in a transaction. Every house is unique, so your due diligence has to be unique, too.
- If you need to pull out of the deal, we can advise you on how to do that without losing your earnest money. We make sure from the get-go that there are multiple opportunities in the contract for you to get your money back if you find out something about the property you don't like, or your financial situation changes and you can no longer get a loan, or the property doesn't appraise for the purchase price, among other problems that can arise.
- We understand today’s challenging lending atmosphere, and how to foresee potential areas of difficulty. We'll work with your lender, the appraiser, your inspector, your insurance company—including the title insurance company—and the escrow officer to get you into that great new home.
OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU
There are many fine real estate companies out there, but none who will work harder for you than your Oregon First, Realtors® & Washington First Properties agent. It's not just that we care, we also have the knowledge and experience to be your best possible real estate partner. Buying and selling real estate is an exciting time! It can be stressful, but it's also a lot of fun when you have the right team with you. We're ready to help you move to the next great stage of your life.
Wondering what our clients have to say about us? See our Client Testimonials page.
