I didn't use a redfin broker. If I had I'd get back 15% of the buying commission 3%. Of course I could have negotiated with a full price broker more say 2% of purchase price or at least 1%. With redfin I'd have gotten back $5500 or so. My current realtor offered us a rebate of $4000. I went with the full service realtor and I have to say I am satisfied.

I'm happy because I feel I got my money's worth using someone who knew the market and could explain the nuances of location. I had been looking for a long time and found someone who sold a lot and for a long time the area I was interested in. I also think she helped us win the home over using a redfin agent. I think she better strategized and wrote a better offer. You are probably sighing going really?

No seriously we beat out someone by $7500 who waived their financing contingency and their inspection contingency. We did a pre-inspection before our offer and we didn't waive our finance contigency or appraisal clause. LOL. The competing offer did. So I think I paid for someone to help me buy a house in the market we're in but minimize our risk. We still won when other people are doing things like no pre-inspection and no finance contingency. Our agent said she never does without finance contingency because anyone can lose a job and though she's sold for 30 years and it's only happened once during a home purchase it can easily happen. And she thinks she can usually win without it.

Besides since I got to see the competing offer they qualified like we did up to the same approximate number, but had way less money to put down barely 10%. We didn't strike our finance contingency/low appraisal but had offered up 40% cash down. I'm going to guess it was a hard decision since our offers were pretty much a wash. They could easily lose $7500 in a low appraisal. But I would have picked us too even with the finance contingency since the other offer had only 10% down even though they were risking the low appraisal and no finance contingency. Maybe also the banks we went with Chase and they were using So-fi which uses a lot of company stock in loan requirements.

FWIW it's 23% of our base, the bank because of DH's 1 year lack of income wouldn't allow us to borrow up to other people's limits. They wouldn't consider his bonuses so our income is solely on base salary. Considering 1/3 of his income (potentially more) is bonus we're pretty comfortable. Plus his base is less than what we were making in 2015 when due to his 10 year tenure at his job we were making "more" money with base and bonus so if we had applied for a mortgage we'd have qualified to borrow more.

So the way we look at it, we get a nice rental for a few years. We'll sit tight and see if the perfect home comes up and in 12 months they'll start counting all his base and bonus income. After which we plan on banking all his bonus anyway. So we are putting less money 20% down than we made on our last house but decided we're investing the rest. Although we are talking about using some cash to renovate the bottom floor. We can put down 20% cash DP, 1 year EF (will keep 6 months), and invest the rest. If we had bought up to the top of what they lent us now we'd still be under 30% but our cash would be capped out at 6 month EF. So I guess it's for the best.

I'll figure out what the cost of renovating is and then decide. I'm a lot more relaxed knowing how much play we have financially. We're closer to where we were when we last left our mortgage at 23% PITI. Of course because of our deductions it's closer to 50% of our monthly take home after savings. But this should be an interesting ride.