Jack Barry – Barry-Hill Real Estate

This is a review for Mike Hill, partner in this agency. We have not met or had dealings with Mr Barry.
Last year we looked at a condo Mr Hill was representing. We weren’t in a position to buy then but kept in touch and when we heard the sellers might rent the property as it hadn’t sold we approached the agent re a rent to buy deal. We spent time discussing it, didn’t seem to get anywhere but we agreed to accept him handling a dual agency since he told us the sellers had little equity in the property and he was only getting 1%.
We placed our San Jose home on the market and received numerous offers within 5 days so we decided to move on the SF purchase. By this point we’d already paid for an independent appraisal since Mr Hill was worried about the condo appraising correctly for the loan amount. We were good to go and asked for the basic disclosures. Having been through the process we were expecting to be provided with the same disclosures we provided our buyers upfront and in particular wanted the standard CA (free) disclosures filled in by the sellers and the HOA charter. Mr Hill refused to do these until we signed a purchase contract. He was going to come to San Jose one evening for us to sign this and when we said not until we had some disclosures he informed us he would do a contract when we were ready but it would be on a Saturday (eg to his schedule).
The next week we received an email with links to HOA info. On reading this we discovered the zoning was live work. It had been listed as a loft and condo so this zoning would affect the financing. When Mr Hill was asked about this he became rather agitated, said this was why he wanted us to use his loan agent and because we wanted to shop around we obviously didn’t trust him and that he couldn’t be expected to remember every small detail on zoning. I thought zoning was a big detail…
This coupled with other unpleasant emails (I still have them) and a conversation with my husband where Mr Hill said he wouldn’t do disclosures because we were still looking at properties and were not committed (still looking because we didn’t know if we had a workable deal!) led me to refuse to work with him. I’m hard to rattle and I’m ashamed to say I lost my temper and yelled. Not my finest moment.
The condo next door had been for sale and we approached the agent who advised it was now rented and offered to represent us. Lance from Fixed Rate properties was a godsend. He resuced the mess and drove the process including telling Mr Hill exactly what disclosures SF required.
He was also there to fix things when Mr Hill hit the loan appraisor up for property management business and in doing so left the appraisor with the impression he managed the condos which triggered a review since it wasn’t an at arms length transaction. Mr Hill did not manage the condos and frnakly had no right to be trying to gain business in this way. We lost 4 days to this and its only because of Lance and our great loan agent Jeff that we could close in enough time to move out of our current home before we finished the 30 day rent back.
It was only at closing when asked of his experience Lance remarked Mr Hill had made the deal way more complicated that it could have been, it would seem it was not us being difficult.