Rita Roti – Zephyr Real Estate

As first-​time house sellers in SF, we were especially concerned about finding the right agent to assist us, and we were so very fortunate to have enlisted Rita Roti’s services. Her expert advise and guidance all along the way were key factors in getting us the best price for our home. She has a strong and highly skilled network of people who worked together to showcase our home in its best possible light. Even in a sellers’ market, it’s important to feel comfortable with the integrity and capacity of your agent, and Rita earned 100% of our confidence and satisfaction. The entire process went quickly and smoothly, and we were absolutely thrilled with the results! We would recommend her services to anyone who is interested in selling or buying a home.

Rita is an expert on San Francisco real estate market conditions. Her promotional services connect to a large number of potential buyers. With 10 years of real estate law negations, she protects client interests and moves transactions to settlement. Her detailed knowledge of the selling and buying process, facilitates & accelerates the process of matching buyers & sellers. She’s naturally helpful and responsive, leveraging tech savvy tools to create a true partnership for first-​time home buyers, sellers and investors. Her success is in part contributed to her unmatched integrity, transparency and referral business. I highly recommend Rita!

Rita was a pleasure to work with. She is organized, efficient, calm and pleasant, even when things get hectic. She helped us sell our TIC unit in the Western Addition and got us a lot more than we expected! She has a good network of people that assist with all aspects of the selling process, i.e. quick fix-​ups, painting and staging, so we didn’t have to screen and hire those people ourselves. She was very flexible with us and listened to our particular needs and wishes, and she really seemed genuinely interested in making us satisfied clients, which we were! You won’t regret choosing Rita.

Rita was recommended by a friend of ours who also purchased their first home through her.
About us:
–First time home buyers and San Francisco natives
–Using a loan assistance program through the SF Mayor’s Office (translation: more bureaucracy/​work for both the agent and our lender!)
–Short on time due our work schedules and our baby
–SMALL budget (under 550K)
–Wanted to be SF Homeowners more than anything.
About Rita:
–Prompt communications from beginning to end
–Knowledgable about the market
–Advocates for you and your interests
–Has a wonderful sense of humor
–Always professional something that does NOT hold true for all the so called «professionals» in the real estate world.
–Believes in honesty and transparency in all our offers and during our escrow
–Very respectful to us. She NEVER judged us, nor made us feel like we were less important than other clients because of our modest budget. She never pressured us to make decisions we did not feel good about.
–Recommenced top notch inspectors and contractors (we cross referenced them)
–Is an organization ninja. She developed clear and tight timelines for the escrow process and literally hounded the selling agent when necessary for signatures and paperwork to ensure we closed on time!
In short: she’s there for the entire ride and ensures you end up home safe in the end.
Our experience:
We searched for approximately 1.5 months between early June and mid July 2012. We entered our search during the peak of moving season (summer) in a seller’s market. Prices were beginning to climb and multiple offers are the norm. Our situation was sticky to say the least, there were many stress points with this purchase from loan approval, to making offers, negotiation processes and underwriting. Rita was incredibly aware and supportive every step of the way. She was able to provide input on everything, but let us make our final decisions. And more importantly I feel like she gently guided us where we truly wanted to be in the end. We started our search VERY broadly outside of SF because of the current market. She kept reminding us to hang in there and not give up hope of purchasing our first home in the city. Often people come to this process with very high expectations of what they want, I think I took the opposite approach at one point out of desperation (my philosophy became If it had walls and wasn’t completely rotting from inside out I’d take it!). Rita helped us keep our vision and sanity during a very low inventory market. We found a small home, but one that genuinely fit our criteria! We live and work in San Francisco. I can now walk to my job and my daughter can sleep better because we live in a quiet family friendly neighborhood. For these San Francisco natives, she helped us make our dream of owning a home close to family, work and friends a reality. Thank you Rita!

Undoubtedly one of the very best real estate agents in town! Always speaks from the heart and not scared to speak her truth (in the interest of protecting you from making a less than smart investment, of course). She’s patient, smart, experienced, kind, available and flexible. Not to mention, she goes WAY beyond the call of duty. This is my second purchase with Rita and I plan on doing all future transactions with her.
STRONGLY recommended!

If you are thinking about selling your house and are looking for the best realtor to represent you, look no further. Rita Roti is the right choice for you. She has the skills and experience to prepare, present, and quickly sell your property. She did a great job for me.
She is tech savvy and works very hard to sell your house for the best price. She knows how to use social media to get the word out about your property. She even pulled together a friendly competition with other local realtors as part of a blog posting. We won! I loved that she had all the forms online. When we were going through disclosures, reviewing offers, and signing off contingencies it was a breeze compared to the last house I sold. Rather than having to go to her office for signatures we could do it all online! I was even out of state for part of the time and could still get business done.
She arrives on time and looking good for any in person meetings or showings and has always done tons of research. She knows who the competition is, the details of the houses they are selling, and how to best outshine them. She knows how to highlight the best attributes of your property. She did a great job at every showing of my property and reported back to me concisely who had come and if they were serious or not. She also followed up with any prospects to keep them interested. I used my own possessions for staging and she kept an eye on my stuff, protecting it form unattended children or thoughtless visitors. She knows great ways to save you money and time. She does an amazing job and is a pleasure to work with.

Rita is an agent who does her homework, goes above and beyond to help you see the places you want to see, and has an amazing depth of knowledge about the San Francisco housing market. She worked with me and my partner for several months in a tight market where not much was coming up from week to week and she was always available to talk more about our limited options, to show us historical data of the area, and every single time we had an appointment she was always there on time and ready to keep trying to find us a great place. She never acted like we needed to move fast on a property just because of how the market was moving at the time. She’s incredibly patient and places a lot of importance on finding the right fit for her clients.
Needless to say, we did find a place, a beautiful Victorian condo in the Mission and we couldn’t have done it without Rita. We circled this place 6 ways from Sunday and it was too high for a long time. Rita was in it to win with us and kept us in the loop about any new information she could glean about the property. With her and her recommended mortgage broker we felt very safe about going into this purchase — she’s not one to gloss over the ‘bad’ parts of an inspection or a location. She never pressured us, never seemed interested in just making a sale. I loved working with her and have already recommended her to two other folks in the market and I recommend her to you too, Unilocal review-​reading stranger :)

Rita was a great agent to work with. We were first-​time homebuyers with an embarrassingly small budget so we asked a friend in the real estate business to recommend an agent. She suggested Rita for her candor and depth of knowledge, and Rita turned out to be a perfect fit – extremely honest and patient, despite us not having deep pockets.
Rita came with stellar recommendations from her recent clients, most of whom had worked with her to purchase single-​family homes in the more southern SF neighborhoods (Ingleside, Portola). That wasn’t what we were looking for (we bought an apartment in the Noe/​Bernal area), but Rita is equally knowledgable about all types of homes and neighborhoods. She is, in fact, an encyclopedia of SF real estate knowledge. She knows the history of every block, building and development project, and can tell you all sorts of useful secrets that agents keep out of the listings. She’s also really helpful with real estate and mortgage regulations, which came in handy when we bought a TIC.
We worked with Rita for nearly a year before finally purchasing our first home. For the first several months she spent hours with us every week taking us to listings we found interesting and showing us properties and neighborhoods we never would have found on our own. Before long we were familiar with every single part of the city and had a really good idea of what properties were worth, which made us confident about our purchase because we knew exactly what we wanted and how much to pay for it.
When we finally got into contract, Rita did a fabulous job of keeping the process on track and looking out for our interests, often having to make up for the selling agent’s lack of attention to deadlines and required documentation. Even after the close she kept in touch and gave us great recommendations for everything from insulators to lamp stores to good restaurants in our new neighborhood.
If you want an agent who is brutally honest, knows everything there is to know about the business, never pushes you in a specific direction, and has a great sense of humor, Rita is your gal. We are loving our new home and couldn’t have done it without her!