PCS to San Diego: the home-buying questions we get from every set of orders.

Yes, and most of our military buyers do. We tour on camera the same way we shoot the channel: a full walkthrough, unedited, with the phone pointed at the things listing photos leave out: the neighbor's second story, the pitch of the driveway, the road noise with the windows open.

Offers, disclosures and escrow documents all sign electronically. If you will be deployed or otherwise unreachable at closing, a power of attorney lets your spouse or a named agent sign for you. Both the lender and the title company have to approve the exact form in advance, so start it early rather than in the last week [VERIFY notary and POA rules, and lender-specific POA acceptance].

What we ask you not to skip in person: the drive to your gate at the hour you will really drive it, and the inspection walk. If nobody in the family can be here for the inspection, we attend and record it, but video is a much poorer substitute for a crawlspace than it is for a kitchen.

A VA loan has no maximum price. What it has is a limit on the entitlement, the portion the VA guarantees, and in a county priced like this one, that is the number that decides your down payment [VERIFY 2026 San Diego County VA and conforming loan limit].

At or under that limit, with full entitlement, zero down is real. Above it you are in jumbo VA territory, where most lenders ask for a down payment calculated on the difference between the county limit and the purchase price rather than a flat percentage of the whole [VERIFY current jumbo VA down-payment formula with your lender].

Budget for the VA funding fee, which is normally financed into the loan; buyers with a service-connected disability rating are generally exempt [VERIFY exemption criteria]. Then build appraisal time into the offer. Coastal appraisals run longer here than inland ones because the comparable sales sit further apart, and the VA appraisal has its own queue on top of that [VERIFY current VA appraisal turn times for San Diego County].

Start from the gate you report to, not from the neighborhood you have already heard of. San Diego is wide, and the freeway that looks short on a map is the 5 at 0700.

Those are starting points, not promises. Every one of those drives roughly doubles in the morning window. Drive it once, at your real report time, before you commit to a zip code.

It depends on your rank, your dependent status and the zip code, and the table is re-issued every year, so we will not quote you a figure on a web page [VERIFY current BAH table for the San Diego MHA].

What we can give you is the shape of the trade. A family home within reach of the coast generally starts in the $1.5M to $3M tier, which is where most of our buyers land. Move inland and the same money buys more square footage and a longer drive. Your BAH is a fixed input; the price tier and the commute are the two dials you actually control.

Count what a mortgage payment leaves out, too: property tax, coastal and fire insurance, HOA dues, and Mello-Roos in the newer inland communities. Those four lines are the difference between the payment you modeled and the payment you make.

The federal protection most people have heard of attaches to obligations you already hold, not to a purchase you have not closed yet [VERIFY SCRA scope with your installation legal assistance office]. Plan on the purchase agreement being exactly what it says it is.

So we write for it instead. A military clause tied to written orders, contingency periods matched to your real reporting window rather than the default timeline, and a clear path for the deposit if a change of orders ends the transaction. Sellers accept those far more often than buyers expect when the rest of the offer is clean.

Tell us the odds on day one. A contract written for a real chance of new orders looks different from one written for a certainty, and it is much easier to build in at the start than to negotiate in later.

We run the same seven-step selling strategy we use for every listing, compressed. Pre-listing prep comes first: the paint, the landscaping, and the one repair that would otherwise reappear as a line in a buyer's inspection request three weeks later.

Then pricing. The coastal market punishes an optimistic first week harder than any other mistake a seller can make. A listing that sits gets reduced, a reduction is visible to every buyer's agent in the county, and the discount you end up taking is larger than the one you refused at the start.

If you know orders are coming, start six weeks before you tell anyone else. The full walkthrough is in our Sell My House in San Diego guide on luxurysocalrealty.com [VERIFY link].

We would rather tell you what we actually do than name a program we cannot document. [JOY TO CONFIRM any military program, lender partnership or closing credit before this page publishes.] What is true today: we tour on camera for buyers who cannot be here, we work around watch schedules and time zones instead of asking you to, and we have done this with enough sets of orders to know where the timeline really breaks: almost always at financing or at the inspection window, almost never at the paperwork.

Roughly 60 to 120 days from the start of a serious search to keys in hand. The spread is financing and inventory, not paperwork.