The hunt begins

Now that all paperwork is done, We are currently in home searching heaven. www.mlslistings.com is being hammered by me and Sumathi several times in a day, scouting for prospects. Kumar, with the help of some SW emails us with properties of our interest, as soon as they get listed on the market. Our areas of interest right now - Sunnyvale, north san Jose, Santa Clara and mountain view(yeah right!).

One of the things which we want is a kitchen-family room combo. Given that Sumathi spends so much time in the kitchen(I help her out, but eating everything she cooks!), it makes more sense for us to hang out in this area. Traditions, a 10 yr old townhome community in Sunnyvale(fair oaks/tasman intersection) seems to have a floorplan that we really like. My friend Vikram, has a townhome there , which he bought through Kumar Talluri.

We did go to a few open houses on river oaks in north sanjose. Pricing was still too high for us. Still waiting....

Credit checks and other paperwork

The next step now is to get a pre-approval done and be ready with your scores or work on it to fix it.
Most real estate agents ask you to go get a pre-approval done, just to make sure you are indeed serious about the house hunting. We again went with personal referrals and word-of-mouth. We chose Cassie Su, from Baycal Financial, in milpitas as our loan officer. Faxed a bunch of documents - 2 years worth of W2s, bank statements, green card etc and we were ready to meet with her. We met her today at 8am and in an hour, we were done! Approved for a loan of XXX,000 dollars. Phew, I did not know that I could borrow so much ;)

A copy was sent to Kumar and we were ready to jump into the real "house hunting" expedition!!

Real estate agent hunt

Now that we have decided to go buy a house, the next step was to find a real estate agent. We did some initial research on the web and then asked around to see if our friends had a pleasant experience with anyone.
We were told by some that real estate agents are almost always compared to car salesmen. That was enough to scare us and be more prudent in picking the right one. We got a couple of recommendations and after some initial interviews, some "background checks" and some detailed analysis on each one's personality and temperament, we decided to go with Kumar Talluri with Coldwell banker, who had worked 3 of our friends.

There you go, agent - done. So what's next?

It all started on a hot summer day

We're at a point now, where a 1100 sq Ft apartment is filled with things like a bouncer, a stroller, car seat, exersaucer, etc.
Feeling the space crunch now, especially when we have guests over. The over-sized home theater equipment is not helping either, the wifey says.

We thought about it for a while and since getting rid of the kid, his toys and my monstrous speakers weren't an option, we decided it was time for us to look for a bigger place - our OWN place. The timing was almost perfect. We had just expanded our family, our finances seemed quite stable(??) and we were going to spend a lot more time around the house with the little one.
So the decision was made to look for a home.