Urban Acres Real Estate, Coralville IA

Had the best experience with Brent Kimm buying our first home. We had to do it all virtually and he made the process easy and seamless. He was readily available for any questions we had and had offers prepared and ready so we were able to stay competitive in the market. He took our feedback into account on each house we saw to ensure we found a house to fit our needs. If you are looking to buy or sell your home I would recommend Brent and the Urban Acres team 100x over.

Daphne Patton with Urban Acres was amazing when buying our first home! She was incredibly responsive and helped us purchase in a competitive market—rearranging her schedule to get us in for showings quickly and writing offers on evenings and weekends. She also is very honest and trustworthy, and helped steer us to the best possible house for our family. We highly recommend her!

This is a combined review for the company Urban Acres and three of its agents: Taylor Blazek, Tom Kaut, and Mollie Kilburg. I’ll start off with the easiest of the four.

0 stars for Taylor. Sent him an inquiry and he never responded.

1 star for Tom. Tom spent more time bragging about his accomplishments/experience and how he’s consistently a top realtor in the area than he did actually helping us and asking us questions about what we want. He never asked us what we’re looking for in a house; location/neighborhood, size, beds/baths, amenities, etc. Not even price. We tried to get some info from him about new construction houses because he said he specialized in that, but he gave us almost no useful information at all. The listings he ended up sending us were often either not what we were looking for or wildly out of price range.

4.5 stars for Mollie. Mollie was very friendly, quick to respond, asked us useful questions, and answered basically everything we asked about. The big thing holding us back from giving Mollie 5 stars is that she sent us very few listings. We were also in contact with a realtor outside of Urban Acres (who we will continue to work with) who gave us considerably more options. We would rather see everything that’s out there and narrow down our options from there than have our realtor narrow down the options so that we only see a small selection of what’s actually available.

2 stars for Urban Acres as a company. First, we were initially excited to work with Urban Acres. They have a fun website that definitely sticks out from the other realtor websites. However, and maybe we got terribly unlucky, but only 1 out of 3 realtors being useful is not a great starting point. Second, the website they use to send house updates to prospective buyers is far inferior to any website we’ve used in the past. First, any new house that is added does not get added to the original link; instead, it gets its own link and cannot be accessed by any other link. So, say the initial link we got had 10 houses on it and now a new house is sent to us. That initial link still has only those 10 houses and the new link has only one house. Every time a new house is sent to us by a realtor, it again has its own link. So now we have one link with 10 houses and another 4 that each have 1 additional house. It’s terribly inconvenient and really just an awful way to do it and completely unlike anything we’ve used in the past or want to use in the future. Every other website we’ve used would be able to access all 14 of those houses from any of the links sent to us. The other large setback to the listing website is there is no way to rate a house. The websites we’ve used in the past (and the one we’re currently using to buy a house in Iowa City) has an option for favorite/possible/reject. This is a simple and easy way to filter all the houses sent to us. Unfortunately, the website Urban Acres uses does not have that feature. So, there’s no way to organize the houses we really like or get rid of the houses we don’t want to see at all.

Overall, I would not recommend Urban Acres to help you find your next home.

Buying a new house and moving across state lines is always a stressful process, but Ross, Lauren, and Grace did a tremendous job of helping us pull this off without a hitch. Even though we were several hours away, they put as at ease with their clear and prompt communication, delivery of expert industry knowledge during the buying/inspection process, and top-tier customer service. Definitely call Urban Acres Real Estate if you're looking for a new home in the area!