Homebuyer Tells All: Lessons from Working with a Flat-Fee Broker With Fred Glick Of Arrivva

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Hear a real homebuyer’s story of landing his dream home with a flat-fee broker
• Discover the strategy that made open houses lead to a winning offer
• Find out the hidden challenges of home insurance in California and how to handle them
• Learn how to secure a mortgage and handle challenging situations
• See how modern tools are changing the homebuying process
• Get insider tips on appraisals, PMI, refinancing, and preparing finances with RSUs and multiple accounts

In this episode with Fred Glick, Omar ElNaggar, and Jennifer May

What’s it really like to buy a home with a flat-fee broker? 

In this episode, buyer Omar ElNaggar shares how Arrivva helped him land his dream home—navigating tough mortgage approvals, home insurance challenges, and competitive open houses. Plus, hear Fred Glick and Jennifer May of Arrivva reveal insider tips on preparing your finances for mortgage applications, the truth about appraisals, and why a modern, transparent approach beats traditional brokers. You’ll also learn about mortgage myths, refinancing, and where rates are headed next.

A real buyer’s story, real lessons, and real savings. Don’t miss this episode!

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Fred Glick on LinkedIn
• Arrivva
• Arrivva Mortgage
• Live Mortgage Rates
• Omar ElNaggar on LinkedIn
• Jennifer May on LinkedIn

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:35] Fred Glick: Omar.

[00:00:36] Omar ElNaggar: Hey, Fred. Hey everybody.

[00:00:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Hey Omar. Nice to meet you.

[00:00:40] Fred Glick: I don’t think you’ve ever seen Jen, but that’s Jen.

[00:00:43] Omar ElNaggar: Just a magnificent headshot in Slack when she’s solving all my problems.

[00:00:48] Fred Glick: Oh, okay.

[00:00:48] Omar ElNaggar: Good to meet you, Jen. Thank you so much.

[00:00:51] Fred Glick: How’s the house, by the way? Everything good?

[00:00:52] Omar ElNaggar: We’re so excited. It’s magnificent. I think our formal move day is gonna be September 23rd. Rianna is doing a lot of shoveling back and forth until then. But yeah, everything we dreamed of bit more and we keep seeing all these other houses getting sold in the area for higher prices. So we’re like, “Oh yeah, Fred nailed it.”

[00:01:12] Fred Glick: We got lucky. You know what, that’s what I tell people. July and August are great times to buy a house ’cause…

[00:01:18] Omar ElNaggar: No. Do you see my notes?

Like, do you remember I went and did my visit to this place the week before July 4th, and there was just nobody out there. And you know, again, like you gave me great guidance on what the right way is to visit a house. It’s not to go and like introduce yourself to the seller’s agent and sign in on a sheet and like, you know, try to make them feel comfortable.

It’s actually should be a ghost. And just go there and like, get as much information as you can and then you could feel it. It didn’t feel like there was a ton of demand on that open house day that I went there and then, you know, we make our offer on Tuesday and got accepted on Wednesday. It was magical.

[00:01:55] Fred Glick: It’s a beautiful thing. Yeah. we have a couple of listings. I mean, it’s shown, but it’s quiet. It’s just, everybody’s doing nothing. I mean, I have a, the two listings, I’m telling both the sellers, “Look, let’s just take it off the market for the last two weeks of August. Nobody is doing anything.”

Kids are getting back to school, da, da, da, da. I mean, it’s just the whole bundle of everything until Labor Day and then everybody breathes. It’s crazy.

[00:02:24] Omar ElNaggar: Again, I feel lucky, right? I’ll always remember July 2nd as the day that my offer is accepted.

[00:02:32] Fred Glick: Well, one of the things I wanna point out about this is we were looking at a couple different houses, but I remember you saying on Slack, If you get this house, my wife will be indebted to you forever,” or something to that extent. This is the house.

[00:02:44] Omar ElNaggar: You completed her.

[00:02:45] Fred Glick: She absolutely love. I completed her. Right, exactly. It’s great to hear because you know when you get into these competitive bid situations and there’s 38 offers and you’re buying just because you think you have to buy and it’s okay. It’s a nice house, but it’s when you really want one, it’s really awesome. And you get it.

[00:03:04] Omar ElNaggar: Oh, couldn’t agree more.

[00:03:05] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And sweet. Where did you buy a house at?

[00:03:08] Fred Glick: Somewhere. Somewhere in here.

[00:03:11] Omar ElNaggar: Exactly. I think I see it right on my ridge.

[00:03:13] Fred Glick: Yeah. There it is. Oakland Hills. That’s why I put the picture up for you.

[00:03:17] Omar ElNaggar: Exactly it. Yeah.

[00:03:19] Fred Glick: So, let’s talk about some of the negative stuff and how we solve the problems.

First of all, it’s fire insurance. Talk about what you went through to get there.

[00:03:29] Omar ElNaggar: There’s multiple iterations, right? You know?

[00:03:31] Fred Glick: Exactly. Exactly. I want people to really understand what they may have to go through in order to just get the house insured. With the bottom line being, you can always get FAIR Plan. It exists. You can get insurance. It’s just gonna cost you. So go ahead and explain it.

[00:03:48] Omar ElNaggar: But it wasn’t even like you go to a FAIR directly, right? You need to go and find the right vendor that’s going to go and, you know, get the FAIR Plan coordinated for you. And you know.

[00:03:56] Fred Glick: Actually, let me interrupt you there.

There’s actually, you can go to the FAIR Plan website and do it yourself, but it’s the same price, so it doesn’t matter. But FAIR Plan doesn’t cover everything, so that’s why you need to have liability and a bunch of other stuff. So.

[00:04:12] Omar ElNaggar: I mean, like, you’re getting to some of the later things. When we had left it with that other insurance agent, you remember it. Like, we actually had a hard time coordinating between the insurance seller and the lender. And, you know, we kept trying to go in between, this is where Jen, you were a superstar for us. Right? You kept going and trying to make it to the two parties we’re speaking the same language.

And then even at the end of the day, the fact that like the Farmers Insurance plan was separate from the FAIR Plan, actually weirded them out a little bit. We had to sort of explain that like in California, the only way you’re gonna get fire insurance is by going through a FAIR Plan, which is kind of like a different item than the Farmers Insurance for all other liabilities. And you know, it was like a point of heartache, I think over two weeks after we had gotten our offer accepted. Right. It was like really late, late stage in the game there.

[00:05:02] Fred Glick: And you ended up with FAIR Plan and then the Farmers’ policy with the liability and some of the other peril coverages. And so the lender had to be on both of these, but they were wondering why there was both, but which is kind of weird ’cause they do a ton of California business. I’m sure they’ve seen something like this before, but it’s work.

And in the contract, by the way, there is a line. If you waive all contingencies, you technically have waived this. But if you’re not waiving the inspection contingency and all those, I think it’s letter Q things or L. No, it’s L. And you get 17 days to get insurance if you have these contingencies still active. You know, agents. Smart agents will come back and change it to seven, you know, so it doesn’t drag on.

But you know, they, what we try to do is in advance tell people, “Hey, here’s gonna be the problem. Go to a couple of places, start finding out if it’s feasible or what it’s gonna cost.” ‘Cause it might come back, we had one that came back at like $20,000. I mean, it was insane for the just FAIR Plan or just added coverage plus FAIR Plan ’cause of where it was. So it can be a little crazy.

[00:06:22] Omar ElNaggar: And you remember we actually had to restart the entire process like halfway through because it had been my wife’s name on the policy, even though it was only my name on the loan.

[00:06:30] Fred Glick: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:32] Omar ElNaggar: It was both of our names, but her name was listed first or something like that. We had to go and have, “My name was first.”

[00:06:37] Fred Glick: Yeah. But you know, minutiae, that’s what lawyers are there for and lawyer will make it worse. Exactly. Exactly.

One other interesting thing about Omar’s situation is his mortgage. So he did not have a fully underwritten pre-approval, which if you listen here all the time, you will hear me screaming, yell in the mountaintops. Fully underwritten. Fully underwritten. But the problem was he’s got a real job now with a real paycheck. Okay. With a real company that you’ve heard of.

 The issue was for the last two years, he decided to play startup. Startup in year one, you get this massive write off because everything’s an expense which is a beautiful thing, without paying taxes. Second year, I think you made a little bit of money. And then, and if you, what they normally do is they call yourself your, you know, average the two years it comes out to snorkels. And a big loss. So because he still has the company, even though he has a real job, most normal lenders would take his current salary and add the negative to your average, and he’d be in negative money with the fact is he was scaling the business down. If you can explain this better than I, but you were kind of selling off the licensing of things and kind of being done with it and just rolling out of it. So…

[00:08:07] Omar ElNaggar: You got it. Like the nuance there is that we had an acquisition from a company over in Europe that was like slope playing it as they went and raised funding to go and use that ip.

And so we had this entity that was, you know, net positive for the past year, but the year before that it had been doing startup style losses because I own over 50% of the company. They were holding that against my personal return. And, you know, it was something where we could go and have all of our accountants and lawyers signing documents to that effect.

But, you know, the lenders don’t like nuance. Nuance is not their friend. They just wanna go forward with it. And if you remember, it was actually like, we had an underwritten note from, I think it was the first lender that you introduced us to, and he was actually the guy that spotted this landline.

And it was one of those ones where like, I’m very glad he did because if we had gone through the entire process, assuming that everything was okay without that, it would’ve been a really bad situation later on where we probably would’ve lost our, you know, earnest payment for the escrow because it just, it wasn’t gonna work out. And we talked to a hundred different lenders. It wasn’t gonna work out until you introduced us to the one that did. And it was, we have multiple different brokers and nobody could find it but you, Fred, it was pretty special.

[00:09:22] Fred Glick: It’s a beautiful thing. It works out. I know you had talked to some lenders and they were kind of quoting it 10% in three points or you know, so, you know, when it’s double digit, it is commonly referred to as a mob loan. You know, you’re paying vague, paying vague and not interest at that point.

[00:09:43] Omar ElNaggar: Exactly. Points up front and all that good stuff. But I mean, exactly. I had worked at a hedge fund for 10 years. I like had leveraged all my connections at all the banks. But again, like people don’t like nuance. You were able to find that last one. We have a very reasonable mortgage from my perspective.

[00:09:58] Fred Glick: So, we have one lender who as long as you’re putting 30% down, they’ll listen to your story.

[00:10:05] Omar ElNaggar: Yeah.

[00:10:05] Fred Glick: And it makes sense. They’ll lend. And that’s what this ended up being. I mean, there aren’t many of these lenders out there. There’s some private people who might’ve lended the money, lent the money. But you know, you gotta be licensed and all that kind of stuff. But these guys were great. We gave him a good letter of an explanation and I think a letter from your accountant, your CPA, saying what was going on. And the fact was that we gave them P&L for this year so they could see this still going.

And the fact that he’s got a real job was like, “Oh, okay.” You’re going to, the definition of income in the mortgage world is what is your ability to pay on an ongoing and continuous basis. One of the people you talked to, I think even said, “Oh, just don’t put down that you’ve been working the last two years.” If anybody says that to you, run the other way. That is called mortgage fraud, especially when you have this gigantic loss on your tax returns. So that wouldn’t, that wouldn’t really irk me.

[00:11:11] Omar ElNaggar: That was so interesting though. Like I had no idea that one of those lenders was going to suggest mortgage fraud to me until you went and like validated force. Like, no, no, no. I’m not interested in that path in the slightest.

[00:11:21] Fred Glick: Yeah. It’s only 10 years in jail and a million dollar fines. So I’m sure Riannana would enjoy the house, but be a little quiet.

[00:11:30] Omar ElNaggar: Wait, she gets to keep the house? Oh.

[00:11:34] Fred Glick: Or you’re selling it to pay off the judgment. But yeah, there you go. Like, you know, like they say on South Park, “Drugs are bad, don’t do drugs.” Fraud is bad. Don’t do fraud. Okay. Same thing.

So, yeah, so we’re able to get it through. Took a little bit of work. The account executive helped out a lot. Weaned it through. They’re a little weird ’cause they’re not standard Fannie Mae type of thing, but it all got done and in the house he went. So, I like talking about this because this is something different. That if you’re out there and you have a little different situation and you don’t think you can do vanilla, talk to somebody about it ’cause there might be a way. Obviously talk to us.

[00:12:21] Omar ElNaggar: That was actually surprising to us, though, right? Like we didn’t quite know what the process was gonna be with you versus a traditional real estate broker and you were like holding our hands the entire time. You were more responsive than the usual broker would’ve been. And that was really, really important to us. I’m tremendously grateful.

[00:12:38] Fred Glick: Yeah, that’s a, thank you. That’s a great thing to tell people. You know, we get the question, well what do you do that a traditional broker doesn’t? ‘Cause they’re thinking, hey, our price is lower, so we must do less and really the only thing we don’t do is accompany you to open houses ’cause you know, we teach you how to go to an open house and,

[00:13:00] Omar ElNaggar: And you gave us access every single time that we were looking for.

[00:13:04] Fred Glick: Right. So. That’s basically it. But what can you bring up and tell people that’s a difference that we have that other people, other agents know? Regular agents.

[00:13:15] Omar ElNaggar: Is Slack okay to talk about? ‘Cause that was a…

[00:13:17] Fred Glick: Please, I beg you.

[00:13:19] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s Fred’s favorite conversation.

[00:13:21] Omar ElNaggar: I understand why, because I can’t imagine like having to go through this process with like only email coordination or heaven forbid, trying to like phone call anybody. You know, I was giving you like nine point lists, Fred, that I was like queuing up in Slack to get there 7:00 AM Monday morning and then by 7:15 Monday morning you responded to all my items and it was just amazing how fast we were.

[00:13:45] Fred Glick: But we wanted you to hit enter after each one of them so we could have separate threads.

[00:13:49] Omar ElNaggar: Yeah, sorry.

[00:13:51] Fred Glick: That’s the only thing we bitch about is people don’t allow us, you know, they’ll list three properties on one thing. Like, “No, do it three times. We can have three threads.” So…

[00:13:59] Omar ElNaggar: But you guys used threads perfectly. You did. Like we could put ’em to the channel and close them out when they were done. It was amazingly well organized.

[00:14:08] Fred Glick: I must have been using Slack now for, gosh, 10 years. I mean, I was an early adapter. I was, what was that? There was like a couple of them out there before Slack. I can’t even remember the names. And I tried them and I loved it the minute I saw it. This type.

[00:14:24] Omar ElNaggar: There was one like Gira, I dunno if you remember.

[00:14:28] Fred Glick: I don’t remember that one. David Sacks did one. I think. That’s, I don’t remember.

[00:14:38] Omar ElNaggar: Messenger. AOL is messenger. Do those count?

[00:14:41] Fred Glick: Not that old

[00:14:42] Omar ElNaggar: ICQ.

[00:14:44] Fred Glick: Yeah, you’re going way back dude. Tech people are laughing right now. ICQs. Wow.

[00:14:50] Omar ElNaggar: Yeah. Generally though, like you are more experienced with Slack than most of the people I’ve worked with in finance and big tech. It was really awesome.

[00:14:57] Fred Glick: It probably aggravates ’em. That’s why they don’t wanna learn it. My favorite thing about Slack is we work in Washington State and we get some people who work at Microsoft and we tell them we’re on Slack, and they say, “Oh, thank God. It’s so much better than teams.”

[00:15:11] Omar ElNaggar: Hundred percent.

[00:15:15] Fred Glick: Anything else you wanna add?

[00:15:17] Omar ElNaggar: Hmm. Well, I did think that it was beautiful that you kicked off our relationship by just going in, sending that disclosure patch to it through ChatGPT and be like, “Oh, this is how you can go in diligence documents. Here is this amazing report. Don’t be shy. Do it yourself.” And we did, we used it for every single one of the documents that we got.

[00:15:34] Fred Glick: Actually it’s getting a lot better GPT 5 spit out something today and I was really impressed about it. I mean, and kind of talk to you in a certain way about it. ‘Cause you can set kind of how you want your tone and it actually really worked. We love it.

I mean, the estimates for dollar amounts right now, it’s gonna work for you because we’re sending it off to other agents when we’re trying to argue for credits, for repairs, and they don’t even, they don’t even know where we got this stuff from. So it’s worth like a dream.

[00:16:12] Omar ElNaggar: We try to do some like competitive market analysis using ChatGPT in the early days.

And like the trick with all these large language models is they’re only as good as the information that you give them. A lot of those early estimates were off, but that’s where your team was great at calibrating because like the best case scenario is that you have the ChatGPT to go and handle all the like weird little bits and things that take a lot of time, and then you have an expert review the output to ensure that there were no whos nations there, that everything’s grounded properly. And really it was fantastic.

[00:16:41] Fred Glick: What I’m looking forward to is an agent I can set up. Where I can just say, “Go and open my multiple listing service. Go through each and every statistic you can find in there that’s buried, and then analyze, you know, what the price should be based on all that and trends.”

The problem is they hold it so tightly. They do things monthly. They put out, “Oh, monthly home for santa Clara County.” Well, I wanna know what happened this week. You know, if I’m doing comps, I need them absolutely up to date and so hopefully they get better or we’re gonna be able to extract it and make it better.

So that’ll be a beautiful thing.

[00:17:27] Omar ElNaggar: Spread GPT?

[00:17:29] Fred Glick:  Spread GPT.

 I dunno, it’s just, there’s whatever up in here and it’s what I use. That’s good enough. Yeah, no, really appreciate you coming on talking a little bit about this and I know what you’re doing and I don’t wanna say it out loud, but the thing that, that Omar is now working on, we’re praying it becomes amazing. So that’s all I’m gonna say.

[00:17:56] Omar ElNaggar: I appreciate you Fred. And now I have the house to build it from. So, thank you very much.

[00:18:01] Fred Glick: There you go.

[00:18:02] Omar ElNaggar: More grateful.

[00:18:03] Fred Glick: There you go. Enjoy. And keep in touch.

[00:18:06] Omar ElNaggar: Will do. Thank you all so much.

[00:18:07] Fred Glick: Thank you, Omar. Alright. Anyway.

[00:18:09] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So, that brings up a point. Like the whole mortgage issue. A good point about how long do you have to wait to refi?

[00:18:16] Fred Glick: Here’s the newest, biggest lie in mortgages. You’re talking with a loan officer, I don’t care who it is, bank mortgage, banker, broker, and they say to you, “Oh, you can lock in now, you can refi anytime after six months.” If you read all of your documents that you get at closing, your note, your mortgage disclosure, this, that, and the other thing, it says right on the note, there is no prepayment penalty. Period. Owner occupied property in the United States based on all the rules they changed back in 2010 after the opt-in arm crisis, as I call it, the one percenter, says that all owner occupied property, you must verify that they have an ability to pay.

So you’re always gonna get fully documented in one way or another, and there’s no prepayment penalties allowed. So why they say six months is here’s what’s happened. Let’s say you get a zero point mortgage, zero cost mortgage. You’re saying this is great. So the thing is how the lender broker loan officer get paid is that you’re taking a higher interest rate so that the lender is actually paying them for you to get that rate.

So the lenders all have in their contracts to say, if within six months your buyer, your borrower refis, it doesn’t have to be with you, it could be with anybody, and obviously you have no control over ’em, the broker, lender, whoever has to pay back.

[00:19:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh no.

[00:19:55] Fred Glick: That buyer broker fee. If they’re charging a 2% on a million dollar loan, it’s 20 grand. They gotta pay back the 20 grand if it refis, if that loan pays off within the first six months, so literally, your bar could win the lottery the next day, pay off the mortgage, and the broker’s gotta pay back the 20 grand.

And by the way, we’re at a flat fee. We’re not a percentage. I think we’re the only company in the United States that charges a flat fee on mortgages, it’s insane, over the wholesale price. Or you could get, you know, the zero point rate from the lender and pay us our flat fee. That’s another way to do it so that you get a lower interest rate.

So there’s ways of doing it. I’m rambling as I usually do, but that’s the reason why. So the six months is, it’s fake. It’s completely fake, and they’re all lying to you, but they’re trying to preserve their money.

[00:20:48] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Companies have to, to like keep that revenue like out of, like, they can’t spend that revenue for six months in case they have to pay it back.

[00:20:57] Fred Glick: Well, they pay the loan officer usually. They do that and then they’re, they figure it out later. I did have some people in the 21 refi craze. One of ’em was the threes and fours, and I told them, quite frankly, “Look, you know, I lose the money if in six months.” And they understood and they were good. And I had a guy called me every six months. I think I did three loans with ’em, just getting his 15 year down. I am sure he is in, he was in the two and a halfs or 2.625. So he’s never gonna refi. But that’s the way it works. So just ask that question or they’re gonna tell you that, and then you’re gonna know more than they will about it, so.

And it seems like, and here’s a little economic predictions now that we’re Monday, August 18th, 2025. Rates came down last week a little bit, and then they ticked a little bit back up after the PPI came out and my issue is everybody talks tariffs. These tariffs haven’t really hit yet in full. I don’t even know what’s going on with each individual country. I don’t dunno who’s keeping track of this stuff, but it hasn’t finalized completely once it finalized.

[00:22:17] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It finally hit in some things.

[00:22:18] Fred Glick: Yeah, then we’re gonna see inflation tick up. But then because of the inflation, we’re gonna see people being laid off and the economy not spend as much.

So the economy’s gonna slow. So you have this thing called stagflation. Not like a stag party, it’s inflation stagnant economy. And you know, there should be a re, the reason you lower rates is to stimulate an economy. So. But you can’t do it if it has inflation because you need to charge a higher rate. So people will stop inflating the prices and lower them.

So you see the problem everybody’s up against? You see the problem that the Fed, the Federal Reserve, I’m not just saying the chairman, but the entire Federal Reserve is up against, that’s what they’re arguing. That’s what they’re talking about. That’s why, you know, the rates didn’t just drop. And so, I think we’re gonna see a few months more of kind of where we are. Little dip, little raise, little dip, little raise. But I think in six months or so, if this all pans out, maybe nine months, we’ll see the rates come down. And I think we’re gonna have a busy 2026 with refinances. Keep Jen dizzy. That’s the idea.

Jen, what do you see when we do mortgages that people kind of don’t get or maybe forget or don’t give us. Or anything that you,

[00:23:51] Jennifer May: They just have so many different bank accounts, like 10 different bank accounts.

[00:23:57] Fred Glick: Yeah. It’s a problem when we gotta verify it for a purchase and they need to show it all, it’s pain in the neck. On a refi, we don’t need it all. We only need to show they have enough money to pay whatever they need to pay for the refinance. Plus we grow a little more just for fun, for reserves, and that’s a standard Fannie, Freddie, maybe a jumbo. It’s gonna ask for six months of payments. So you don’t need to give tons and tons and tons of accounts.

And I know everybody does this. “Oh, I get a bonus and I sign up for this one. So I sign up for this one,” and you forget it’s there. And then you get this one and that, and it’s all digital. It’s not like you’re getting 50 statements in the mail. And I think that’s why people tend to just have all these counts ’cause they can. Crazy. But…

[00:24:45] Jennifer May: That and RSUs.

[00:24:47] Fred Glick: The RSUs.

[00:24:49] Jennifer May: Yeah. If they don’t have ’em for two years, it’s hard to use them. Or they’ve been there three years.

[00:24:56] Fred Glick: Right. You need to show a two year history of getting the RSUs. That’s really it.

Everybody’s contract’s gonna be a little different. Some are based on performance, some are just based on time. So the ones on time, it’s great. It’s easy, so we can figure it out. But if you’re just getting RSUs for a year, again, I have that lender with 30% down. They’ll kind of, they’ll look at that. So I’m not saying they’re guaranteed to do, but they’ll look at it.

So the RSUs are a big thing mostly in California with the bigger companies, but that’s another mortgage thing to look out for.

[00:25:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Do you advise people to consolidate their bank accounts?

[00:25:35] Fred Glick: Well, we just wanna make it easier for us. Yeah.

[00:25:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I know a lot of businesses will do like that profit first where you open up six bank accounts, one for income coming in, one for tax, one for owners, one for OpEx.

[00:25:49] Fred Glick: Yeah.

[00:25:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And one for payroll, and then you jungle money that way based on percentages.

[00:25:55] Fred Glick: Yeah, it’s kind of crazy. I guess when you get big, you kind of need it. I mean, we have an escrow account for California and Washington that we have to have, and operating account. Pretty simple. But yeah, we could put a lot of different accounts away for little things.

[00:26:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Probably opening accounts to get a free toaster.

[00:26:14] Jennifer May: Yeah.

[00:26:15] Fred Glick: That still exists? Walk into a physical bank and walk out with a toaster. Wow. I don’t know. I haven’t.

[00:26:25] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Maybe a credit union.

[00:26:26] Fred Glick: Oh, I walked into a Wells Fargo the other day ’cause I got like a $32 check from some something. Some company for something.

And I figured, hey, I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll just, you know, instead of taking, I was out. So instead of taking pictures and putting it in the app, I’ll just go to the Wells Fargo. So I went there and, you know, gave her ID and she said it’ll be $10 to cash my $36 check.

[00:26:51] Jennifer May: Really?

[00:26:52] Fred Glick: $10 because they didn’t have an account there.

[00:26:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Was it a Wells Fargo?

[00:26:55] Fred Glick: Wells Fargo. Yeah. So…

[00:26:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Man.

[00:27:00] Fred Glick: They don’t want the transaction. It’s what they’re saying. Go do it digitally, dude. I mean, they’re gonna, they save so much money digitally. I can only imagine. I’m amazed they have tellers anymore. I’m sure there’ll be you know, there, I’ve seen banks with tellers, with a screen. Hooked a screen. It’s a person. But they’re not in, they’re not in the bank and they don’t do cash. That’s one of the other things. I mean, there’s not as many bank robberies ’cause there’s not as much cash. 10 years from now there’s gonna be no more robberies than banks ’cause there’s no not gonna be any cash. So these guys.

[00:27:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Online heists in hacking.

[00:27:37] Fred Glick: Control your bitcoin. Wallets, all that good stuff.

[00:27:43] Drew Thomas Hendricks: This week on Reddit.

[00:27:46] Fred Glick: This week on Reddit. So we dealt last week with should you be a real estate agent for yourself?

[00:27:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yes. And why it might not be best to buy a house. It might just be better to be a renter.

[00:28:01] Fred Glick: That wasn’t from Reddit. That was the TikTok, but yeah, that was great. The appraisal process. This is one that got into Reddit a little bit, and people were talking about it and I stuck in. There was a woman, I can’t remember her name, who wrote an article basically saying, you know, these should be the modern way of doing appraisals.

One of the things that always irks me is when you apply for a mortgage for your, your house. The lender requires that you upload a copy of the actual contract, and what they do is they give that contract to an appraiser ahead of time before they do the appraisal. So the appraiser sees, oh, it’s $1,733,314 and 26 cents. It’s the sale price. Amazingly, the appraisal comes in at the exact same price. Amazingly. That’s because it kind of makes it easy for them. They kind of know where they’re going, but it doesn’t give you an accurate valuation based on a blind appraisal. It’s like “Hey, what’s this place worth?”

It’s like when I do comps for someone, “Hey, I wanna put an offer in 123 Main Street. Can you do some comps?” Okay, I’m gonna start from scratch. We don’t know what we’re bidding. I’m saying, “Okay, these are, this house went for this price, but here’s the differences, be it negative or positive. But here’s three of them.” Or I looked at one today and there’s literally no comps, nothing has sold in the last 90 days in this little area. So what do you do? You gotta work for it.

I mean, there are things you can do, but this would be fair. This would probably kill the real estate industry, piss off sellers and listing agents like there’s no tomorrow. Make every deal have an appraisal contingency ’cause you just don’t know, or more of them. Silicon Valley competitive offers and Cupertino 38 offers, there’s never an appraisal contingency. If I’m working with one seller with, we’re the only buyers. Hell, I’ll put everything in ’cause I can. So you just gotta be real careful.

And here’s the way it works. If the appraisal comes in low, the lenders use the lower of appraised value or sale price. So what they do, if your mortgage amount is still lower than the sale price, they just reprice it based on that loan to value. So, for example, if you bought a house for a million, you were getting an $800,000 loan, 20% down, but it only came in at 900. So now whatever, 800 divided by 900 is you’re, you’re gonna have PMI, you’re gonna get a different rate because rates are based on the loan to value and your credit score and a whole bunch of other things. But actually sometimes over 80% you get a little better rate because they have the mortgage insurance. And the mortgage insurance can be paid monthly or actually built into the loan.

If you think your property’s going to appreciate fairly quickly within a couple of years, take the monthly payment because what you do after 24 months is contact the lender and ask them to take it off. And they all have different procedures. Maybe they do a in-house appraisal, maybe they send a real appraisal out there. Maybe it cost a couple hundred bucks. But that way, you know, you can get that off the monthly payment. If you finance it in, you’re done. They can’t redo that at that point, you have to refinance the whole loan to get rid of it.

So, there you go. If you’ve been in the house a couple of years, property’s appreciated to not 80%, 78%. Because this, they made that up just so they have a little wiggle room. I guess. I wasn’t in the room when they did that, but that’s kind of the idea. So when you get to 78%, they can take it off. So there’s something to do when you got nothing to do. If you got PMI, not FHA can’t get that off. That stays on forever. VA, it’s all upfront. It’s built into the funding fee.

And remember kids VA refinances with absolutely no documentation. It’s the best.

[00:32:34] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Really?

[00:32:35] Fred Glick: Like, yeah. I don’t need income docs. I don’t need do an appraisal. I don’t need nothing but a credit report. Your DD214 and your a couple other forms and we’re rocking and rolling. It’s easiest loan in the world to do. I wish they did this for conventional and even FHA. We used to have FHA streamlined, but they’re not like they used to be.

But anyway, we can do a whole thing on refinancing, once the rates start dropping a little and more people are into it and how to be prepared for it. You know, you’re still gonna need income documentation for current pay stubs, 30 days, two years, W-2s. Sometimes, well we’d like to run the Fannie Mae computer and it’ll say one year of W-2s. So you don’t have to get all that. So kind of wait to do that, but be prepared for two. And then enough cash to show the money you need to actually close. And that’s on too much bank statements and that’s it. So copy of your insurance, ’cause we’ll need to change the insurance over from one lender to the other. And that kind of gets you going. And you make the full application and brought it, yada, yada, yada.

Now let me just throw this out. Just if you really want to track interest rates, arrivva.com/rates and we’ll put that on the screen. And you can sign up to get rates and you can get ’em every day or whenever they change. Some day, this was about two weeks ago, three weeks ago, you would’ve gotten four rate changes on a Tuesday, I think it was.

[00:34:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Wow.

[00:34:12] Fred Glick: So this way it kind of keep, gives you an idea what’s going on. It’s just nice to know if you’re looking to refi.

So do the refis also, not by rate, but by dollar amount. Because you know, half a point on a $2 million loan is different than a half a point on a $200,000 loan in dollars. And it might just make sense if you get a no fee and you can drop a half a point and save 300, 400 bucks a month. A no brainer. So, or down to 15 year. By the way, they do 25 year, which is the same rate as 30. So no sense of doing that. 20 year you get a little better rate. 15 year you get an even better rate and it’ll come back soon. But the 10 year is an even better rate than the 15th. Well, not right now. We’re still in a weird curve. I’m just gonna call it weird stuff that have totally inverted. Anyway, it’s just fun with mortgages. 

[00:35:12] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yes. I think this has been another episode of We Fixed Real Estate.