Buying a home in san diego: useful websites, background info, etc

We are planning to buy (a cheap, of course) home in San Diego. Here are some things I've found out in the process which might help others. Not exactly our usual topic, but certainly San Diego relevant.

My favorite website for looking at listings is sdlookup.com. They pull together more info than most websites, all on one page, which makes it very easy to browse, as compared to say, http://www.trulia.com/, though trulia is better about letting you limit the houses shown to you by price, etc.

But in the end I used Redfin.com, because they made the whole process point and click, from scheduling a tour of a home to making a bid. SDlookup is slightly nicer to use for just browsing, but Redfin wins hands down in the event that you want to actually buy a house.

In fact, we used Redfin as our agent, and were very pleased. Here is a review I wrote for another website about my experience:

Being a first time home-buyer I didn't know what to expect from our agent, but Tamara and team provided everything we wanted in terms of help, advice, and information through this long process. There were huge headaches in this deal, but 0% of them were due to redfin as far as I can tell. If anything, I wish I had listened more to Tamara, esp. with respect to the loan company, as the one I selected on my own was really, really horrible. Some of the things I really liked: fast responses to my emails; everything was signed electronically so I never had to make any special trips just to sign yet another document; the refund. The only thing I really wished I could have gotten more help with was deciding on the bid price we put on the house. Obviously, that's going to involve a lot of guess work, no matter how much help you get, but I felt like I had to come up with that more or less on my own. I never met Tamara in person, but I never had trouble getting her on the phone, and she always made time to talk to me or the selling agent on my behalf, so I really don't mind that at all. I would recommend using Redfin over a traditional agent to anybody buying a house, esp. if you are web 2.0 savvy.