Realtors

So tonight Mr. Cap and I plan to meet up with a friend who is a Realtor to see about what sort of areas we should be looking to buy in. She's pretty new to the industry, and real estate is more of a side-job that her main one. But we've known her for awhile now, and we think that she'll be able to help us out with this. Also, since she's a friend we'd rather have the sale go to her rather than to someone that we don't know. So tonight we'll meet up with her for dinner and house-talks. Hopefully we can come to a few decisions after this--we're still torn between the house vs condo issue, for one thing. 

Our loan officer doesn't seem to be too pleased that we're working with a friend instead of a professional that she knows (who is actually the Realtor that my parents are using). But my thought is, in the worst case scenario that our friend isn't able to come through, we can always switch to the other Realtor--right? But I think that our friend will work out fine. She knows us as actual people, so I'm hoping that will help more with us finding the right home. And I'm hopeful she won't pressure us in to spending more than what we're comfortable with (I really doubt she will) just so she can get a bigger commission. Since this is her side job, the money she'd make off of our purchase would be more bonus income than what she's actually needs to live off of. So....fingers crossed on all counts of this. I really hope our friend comes through and we don't get put on the back burner too often!