Kathy Louvar

It was unsatisfactory as the house we ended up bidding on we could not afford when the bank tried to get us approved due to lack of funds for closing. I would have been the perfect house for us.

We casually looked for our first home for a couple of months prior to attending a first-time homebuyer's class (which was very informative) that Kathy and a Mortgage Proffesional (Steve Rittgers) co-taught. During the class Kathy seemed extremely knowledgable about all the aspects of home-buying and potential pitfalls, she was personable and very straightforward so we decided to go ahead and request she help us find our first home. With Kathy's help we looked at what must have been hundreds of houses (including what she showed us and what we went to for open houses) in the greater Cedar Rapids area between May and August 2009 until we finally found one and got an accepted offer. During the process, Kathy was like a close personal friend - we saw her a couple times a week for showings (sometimes marathon showings of a dozen homes or so all at once!) she would call us if she knew something was coming up we might be interested and want to get a jump on, and she was very accessible and responsive and requested that we always call her cell phone so she could get back to us as soon as possible. Kathy knows a lot of people in the area and she knows a lot about houses. She knows what to look for when viewing a home that could end up being very costly or even dangerous and she's always got her eye out for what might be wrong with a home. From evidence of termites, water damage, foundation problems or just lack of maintenance or potentially costly cosmetic updates and whether she thought the sellers were priced too low or high, Kathy checks for it all when you view a home and tells you everything she knows about it; how small or serious a problem it is, how costly it could be to take care of, AND who she has known that would do the best quality work to take care of it for the best price. She would always walk through the home with us and tell us what she saw, but she was never pushy in any way - she never tried to hurry us or persuade us to buy anything, even when we looked at a house she was also the listing agent for- she continued to be just as up front about the problems she was aware of. In fact, she had a hand more than once in persuading us to hold off on writing an offer on homes we thought we fell in love with to investigate more on problems she saw. One house ended up having a bunch of retaining walls that badly needed replaced, that would have been a minimum of $35-40k+ cost for us to fix, which made us change our minds in a hurry about that house, thanks to Kathy's advice to wait for a landscaper to check it out. In the end, when we thought we could take just about no more searching, we found a beautiful home in a great neighborhood that we just moved into in October and we're confidant we got a good deal thanks to Kathy's help both with the offer and closing, but also with her general knowledge about homes. I feel like we're more knowledgeable as brand new first-time homeowners than most people, because of all the time we spent poking around houses with problems with Kathy! She's excellent, and whenever we move (hopefully not for a good ten years or so!) we intended to use her again.