About


Thanks for stopping by! Let me introduce myself…

Kevin Boer

My name is Kevin Boer, and I’m the broker-owner of 3 Oceans Real Estate, Inc.

I’ve been in the business of representing buyers and sellers of real estate for about five years now, and I’ve been an active real estate investor for a good decade.  Prior to real estate, I got my MBA at Yale and I worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., helping clients in numerous industries figure out how to use technology more effectively.

So how did a Yalie and McKinsey alum end up as a broker?  Simple: I developed a love of real estate from my experience as an investor, and when it came time to leave McKinsey, I jumped at the chance to learn the business of real estate brokerage at a well-regarded local firm, Alain Pinel Realtors.  After 3+ years there, I ventured out on my own and now operate as an independent broker at 3 Oceans Real Estate.

My approach to real estate is what you would expect from a recovering management consultant:  a methodical, high-tech, problem-solving approach to meeting your home-buying and -selling needs.  Silicon Valley real estate buyers and sellers are smart, well-educated, fast-moving, and very busy; they’ve come to expect a certain way of working in their professional lives, so why not provide that for them when buying or selling a home?

If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to chat.  Call me at 650.387.2860, or email me:
kevin [at] 3OceansRealEstate dot com

Oh, the name 3 Oceans?  It’s a reference to my good fortune at having lived near to three oceans: the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (when I lived for three years in Cape Town, South Africa), and, now, the Pacific.

Finally, you’ll notice that there are other contributors as well on this site.  They are all friends of mine, each top professionals in their own right:  a mortgage broker, a stager, an attorney, and a couple of other Realtors as well.

————————-

How we roll:

  • Buyers – Working with some of the area’s leading mortgage brokers, I help my clients figure out what their fully-loaded home ownership costs are and what they can realistically and safely afford, and what makes sense from an investment standpoint.  We balance that with their lifestyle needs — size and type of home,  amenities, neighborhood, school district, proximity to work — and figure out where it makes most sense to look.Then we bring in some pretty cool technology to help us work well together:  auto-MLS searches, RSS feeds, map mash-ups, and social networking tools.  When we’ve located the right house, we find out everything we can about it:  good, bad, ugly, and in-between.  If it’s a good property, we do more analysis and figure out the best bidding strategy.  Finally, we do all the paperwork electronically, from initial offer right through to the final closing documents.  (Ok, that’s an exaggeration.  Many title companies and banks still insist on using medieval parchment paper at the closing table.  But my bit of the transaction?  All electronic.  Good for the environment, good for your signing hand.

    Finally, we’re done!  Those shiny brass thingeys in your hand?  They’re your keys — for YOUR new home!

  • Sellers — We spend a lot of time at the beginning getting ready:  Pricing:  What’s the right price to hit the market?  When do we need a price reduction?  Staging:  How can we make the home look as good as possible for a fair price?  Marketing plan:  Who are we targeting?  How?  Online presence:  A few years ago, a sign in the yard and an entry in the MLS pretty much guaranteed a buyer.  Now, a home needs to be extensively marketed online.  Zillow.  Trulia.  Google.  Good pictures, and in most cases, some video as well.  Agents might be looking exclusively on the MLS, but today’s homebuyers are wandering all over the Internet, and we need to be wherever they are.  We also figure out the right SEO play.  (If that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry — we’ll take care of it.)

    After hitting the market with a splash, we run some pretty intense open houses to attract as many buyers as possible.  We reach out to all the local brokers and make sure they’re showing the property to their buyers.

    Once we have an offer, we due-diligence the heck out of it.  Are the financials solid?  Will the loan go through?  Is the buyer serious?  We negotiate.  Hard.  If there’s one thing I learned at McKinsey, it’s to not leave any money on the table!  Then we work through the delicate, several-weeks-long escrow process — again, doing everything possible electronically.

    At the end of it all, you end up with a neat little piece of paper with some numbers on it.  That’s your check.  Go ahead and deposit it.

No tag for this post.