Blog > Posts from July 2009

Welcome to the new Sawbuck site! We’re excited to bring you a bigger, better site loaded with features to make the home buying and selling process easier and more convenient for you. We've worked hard over the last six months to bring the new site to life and prepare it for nationwide expansion.
If you haven't checked out the new site, go on and have a look. During the design process, our goal was simple: make it more intuitive, more consistent, and more efficient. Here are some highlights from the new site that we know you’ll love:

• News Feed: live market activity within search results – new listings, price changes, contracts and sales – much like Facebook's status updates. Sawbuck is the only company that does this.
• More views: see homes in a list, gallery or map view with an outline of the search area. When zoomed out in map view, close-together homes are grouped to represent more than one listing; and nearby areas show the number of matching listings, giving an accurate preview of homes for sale in other areas.
• Market Guide: an overall look at the local housing market, including total listings, new listings, price reductions, days on market, months of inventory, median sales price, contracts and total sales; filter by property type and number of bedrooms.
• Market Health Score: Sawbuck's unique score combines metrics for inventory, change in median sales price, "pull-through" (percentage of contracts that close) and "equilibrium" (the balance between new listings, price reductions, contracts and sales); compare the market health of any city, zip code or neighborhood in Sawbuck's coverage areas.
• Instant Updates: easily track cities, zip codes, neighborhoods or individual listings with email alerts or a custom RSS feed.
• My Sawbuck: a snapshot of rated listings, most recently viewed listings, saved and recent searches, and mini-market guides for favorite areas; quick link to setup home tours of your favorite listings.

One thing hasn't changed and never will. Sawbuck remains your one-stop shop for the most beneficial and convenient way to buy and sell a home. We make it simple to work with the best while saving you the most.

Once you've checked out the new site, let us know what you think. We want to make sure we are satisfying your real estate needs and keeping you happy!

We've gone Hollywood!

We are excited to start branching out into new cities and are looking forward to helping customers in the Southern California region.

We are geared up to offer home buyers and sellers in Los Angeles County, Orange County and the Inland Empire the greatest MLS data, top-notch real estate agents and the best mortgage and closing cost deal. We also just launched our new site so Southern Californians can now enjoy all of our previous benefits, plus all of the helpful features of our new site.

Stay tuned for future city launches. We have major expansion plans for the remainder of 2009!

Well, for starters, we would not offer this guarantee if we weren't confident that you won't be able to find a better one out there. And if you are that determined to prove us wrong, go ahead and do some research. If you come up with a better deal, we'll pay you $1,000. Guaranteed.

After the research that we did, we found out that the average Sawbuck rate was .41% better than the national average, as reported in the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey. In other words, on a $400,000 mortgage, that's a savings of $101 per month and $36,360 over the life of the loan.

We also checked out the 2008 Bankrate Closing Costs Study and quickly realized that closing costs paid by Sawbuck Customers were often thousands of dollars better than the average. To be more specific, on a $500,000 purchase, the typical Sawbuck customer paid $3753 less than the average revealed in the study. How can we do this?

• We only partner with industry leaders, such as Bank of America and First American, already known for their low rates and quality service
• We NEVER ask our mortgage and settlement partners to share profits with us. This is unlike most real estate brokers, who try to profit from their customers' mortgages and settlements, which drives up rates and costs
• We pre-negotiate reduced fees for our customers
• We subsidize every deal, putting our money into the pot at closing
• The result is an unbeatable combination of mortgage rate and closing costs – guaranteed.

For more details, check out our Savings Guarantee page.