Redfin Deep Dive: Tips and Tricks from Real Estate Insiders With Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. Of Arrivva

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

• Fred and René provide a comprehensive walkthrough of the Redfin website
• Dive into the world of buyer broker fees as they discuss the 2.5 percent commission industry norm
• Explore the significance of buyer agent fees and how they vary among properties
• Learn about negotiation tactics and the influence of property prices on commission rates
• Discover the wealth of information available on Redfin like assessing climate risks, real estate insights, and neighborhood competitiveness
• Uncover the vital role of real estate agents in navigating platforms like Redfin
• Plus, don’t miss out on exclusive jumbo pre-approval rates from Arrivva. Visit arrivva.com/rates for real-time rates

In this episode with Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr.

Join Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. on the latest episode of “We Fixed Real Estate” as they delve into the intricacies of navigating Redfin listings. 

From deciphering Redfin’s interface to understanding buyer agent fees, they offer invaluable insights for both home buyers and sellers. Explore the significance of commission structures, learn how to effectively use Redfin’s features to assess climate risks and neighborhood insights, and discover why transparent disclosures are essential in streamlining the home buying process.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Hello everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of We Fixed Real Estate. Today we’ve got a pretty special episode on. I’ve, I had some questions about Redfin, and Fred and René are going to walk us through the Redfin listing, what it means, how you should interpret it, and what you should do. Welcome to the show, Fred.

[00:00:18] Fred Glick: Hey, how you doing?

[00:00:20] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Doing well. How about you René?

[00:00:23] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah. So let’s get on it. All right, Fred, start talking.

[00:00:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Let’s dive in but first before we dive in over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about this buyer broker, the buyer broker fee. And I recently just was cruising Redfin for a listing that’s close to my house.

And for the first time, I saw it and it was asking Fred and René at the pre-meeting what it’s about. And we thought it’d be a good idea to just kind of go over Redfin for everyone’s sake.

[00:00:52] Fred Glick: Yeah.

[00:00:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So I’m going to share my screen, but we’ll verbally talk about it.

[00:00:56] Fred Glick: Okay, so I can’t share mine. You’re going to, you’re going to share yours.

[00:01:01] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You want to share yours? I’ll stop my sharing.

[00:01:02] Fred Glick: Yeah, let me share mine. Yeah, you share yours.

[00:01:04] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You drive.

[00:01:05] Fred Glick: It’s easier for me. I’ll drive. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so most of you are probably familiar with Redfin. com and their website and we, as real estate agents have access to the multiple listing service where we can set you up to receive listings when they come out, but you’re going to receive listings from the MLS that the UX UI is not exactly modern. Let’s put it that way.

What Redfin has done is made it really pretty, nice, and easy to lay out. Lots of white space, which is great for design. They know what they’re doing and they put a lot of information here and some information that you can’t find anywhere else. So even us as agents, we use Redfin to search sold listings, you know, generic stuff.

It’s because it’s the same info we have on the MLS. There’s certain things you don’t have, but you don’t really need it unless you’re buying the house and it’s for sale. Anyway, we’ll go into that. So let’s, let’s look at Redfin. Redfin does a nice job on the top. We’ll give you the main picture. And this is obviously the desktop.

The mobiles are complete. Well, it’s, it’s mostly the same, but there are some things that are missing. Anyway, this beautiful house is at 1246 Nagley Avenue in San Jose, California is new construction and lets you just stroll through the pictures, lovely house, beautifully staged, clean, and nice.

[00:02:46] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And you and René are the listing agents on this. Arrivva’s listing this house.

[00:02:49] Fred Glick: It’s Arrivva listing, yeah. I haven’t been there yet. René’s been taking care of this. So, but as you can see, this is with every house.

[00:03:01] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Now what happens when someone requests a showing? I see that big button there.

[00:03:06] Fred Glick: René?

[00:03:07] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, so when someone clicks on that request showing, you get taken into a little chat box with a Redfin showing agent.

So we don’t get contacted there. Now here’s what Redfin is doing now. We’ve, I believe we’ve heard that Redfin gives you, both Redfin and Zillow give you free tours. Right? But after the second tour, Redfin makes you sign an exclusive agreement to work with Redfin. Right? So if you want to show.

Right. Don’t just request showing because then you’re just tied down. I mean, if you want to work with Redfin cool, beautiful, that’s fine. Right? But make sure that you know what you’re signing. So don’t just sign people without knowing what you’re, what you’re doing.

[00:03:53] Fred Glick: Yeah. And that’s exclusive. That’s an important word because no matter who you go to after that, you owe them money is what they’re going to say, which is crazy.

We do non exclusives. All the time. We’ve never done an exclusive. It’s, it’s just brutal. Anyway, back to this. Let’s, nice page. So up here, you’re going to see some things new. Obviously, this is new construction is going to be there. Sometimes it’ll say hot home that will come and go actually based kind of on the day.

And it’ll also tell you the open houses up here. Now, some cool things you can go to off of here. We’ve done the photos, but how about a 3D walkthrough and this is a Matterport that we’ve done. Obviously, this isn’t not obvious, but it’s not digitally staged. Because this house was really staged included in the garage.

This even goes outside a little bit. It’s kind of cool. So, anyway, et cetera, et cetera floor plans. This comes from the Matterport. So, we know the numbers are right. Okay, street view now, really, the house is behind here. So this is a long time time before they started construction. So you can’t see it.

Anyway, so you can get a lot of information just from the top there. Now, going on down the address, the price, this number comes from, I believe, 20 percent down based on some generic interest rates. So it’s just a generic number.

[00:05:34] René Pérez Jr.: No, I mean, if you so if you want to click there on that, get pre-approved button it actually gives you different options of just actually.

[00:05:42] Fred Glick: Yeah, they have their own mortgage company.

[00:05:44] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, but there’s a way to do it. It doesn’t take you anywhere else.

[00:05:49] Fred Glick: Gotcha. That’s a network related to this. Yeah, they’re selling leads or something.

[00:05:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: There’s no words of caution there. You can kind of go through that or you can go to Arrivva Mortgage or but you’re, yeah, you have to offer up some information there to get approved.

[00:06:07] Fred Glick: Exactly. Exactly. It talks about the market. 40 percent of the homes, except for within a week toward before it’s gone. And they put up the tour times again, this takes you to the Redfin person. So, if you got your own agent, I want to do, and by the way, here’s a map and this that, but you get that. And here are their request showings.

I mean, Redfin’s there to try to get business. I mean, that’s what it is, but they just happen to have now you can add a search partner. So, if you’re logged in, that’s pretty cool. Now, this information comes directly from the multiple listing service about this house period. Same thing everywhere. How many days, what type of house it is, when it was built, acreage square, foot.

Please people don’t follow for script, but as the end all be all. Use it generically. It’s got two garages, has air, and unit laundry. And here’s the big thing, Drew. Was talking about a 2.5 percent buyer broker buyer agent fee. So our seller wanted to offer this because they thought that people, well, René, why don’t you explain why?

Why they choose the 2.5 percent buyer broker fee?

[00:07:22] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, I mean, so just in general, right? Like, and we’ll put another house in a little bit. But historically there’s a 2.5 percent for buyers, 2.5 percent for sellers given to the representative. So it’s usually negotiated with the seller’s agent on what they’re going to provide with the agents.

Now, that’s something that Arrivva does differently than probably 99 percent of the brokerages. I haven’t really heard of anyone that really lets you have full reign of what to offer a buyer agency. But if you list a property with us, you can even offer, say that you’re offering 0 percent commission and have buyers sign buyer broker agreements with their agents. Right?

So the idea is, I mean, the whole industry has scared the consumers into thinking that if they don’t offer 2.5 percent commission, agents will not show those properties. But the reality is that if you are working with the listing agent that is willing to list your home and have open houses, people will go to the open houses. Right?

And as Fred is showing here on the screen, you know Redfin, Zillow, Trulia, all of these websites will have so many places to, as a consumer, request is showing. So if one person, if one agent doesn’t want to show you a house, you know, guess what? You can go to so many different links where an agent will show you the house.

Now, of course you as a consumer, it’s obvious that you will pay some fees to the agent, right? But it is up to you to negotiate what you do pay the agent. So for, in this case, the developer said, you know what, we don’t want to mess with what the general market consensus is like, what if. You know, people what if agents don’t show the house?

So they were like, you know what, we’re, we’re okay with it. Let’s just let it be. And in the future, we can try, you know other percentages, the waiting game, people just want to see others do it first. And then if it works, you know, just kind of go.

[00:09:27] Fred Glick: Here’s the thing, the justice department, what they have prescribed as the solution is when you go and make an offer to a seller, you say, I’ll pay you 100,000 dollars to the house.

Plus, I want you to pay another 10,000 dollars as my buyer broker fee, total 110. That’s when you negotiate and for every deal you negotiate separately for the seller to pay the buyer broker fee. So that’ll be interesting. And NAR is fighting it tooth and nail. So anyway, moving on.

[00:09:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, here’s my question, because this is the part that I really am interested about. So we went, we, I had three houses up on the screen here. One house by me had the buyer agent fee of 3%. Then we looked at your listing in Venice, which is 2%. Now we’re at the one at 2.5 percent as a consumer. Looking at these houses and looking at all these different things, what can I do with this number? And what does it actually mean to me other than it means the agent’s getting

[00:10:24] Fred Glick: Let’s do a simple deal. If you’re looking to buy 100,000 house, you see one, three houses, all at 100,000, one has 3 percent commission, two and a half on the second one, and 2 percent on the third. All you know is the better deal for you if every house was totally equal, would be the one at 2 percent because you’re saving, the sellers getting more money. If you look at it as a seller, I’m getting more money, you know, and you’re more likely to buy that house because it just, it just makes sense. Yeah, you’re not spending as much as, the sellers getting more, but, you know, is what it is.

[00:11:07] René Pérez Jr.: So, I mean, there’s different, I think there’s no real consensus 100 percent all the way. But the reality is that if you are, you know, purchasing a 100K house. 3 percent makes sense, right? In a way in a 6 million dollar house, 3 percent does not make sense. And you actually won’t ever see that, right?

If you look at homes that are, you know, 8 mil, 8 mil and up or whatever, it’s going to be ridiculous if anyone offers a buyer broker percent more than 2%. You know, the higher the price of the home, usually you see more of a decline in percentage.

[00:11:44] Fred Glick: You know what? Here’s the way it is. The agent himself is thinking about the seller and what he can get away with.

It might be a guy who just doesn’t care. Just says, get rid of it. I don’t care what you make. I mean, there are rich people, you know, who don’t care about that. Little bits of money to them and they don’t care. And these guys take advantage of, you know, so there’s gonna be things all over the world, but it’s a buyer broker fee we’re really concentrating on, and that’s gonna be included.

You know, it’s just gonna include it in your bid. And then I believe we’ve kind of set the standard for the prices, but you know, the commissions are completely different than what people were making now. That’s the problem. That’s what it’s all about, all about. Anyway, let’s keep going right below here. I wanted to point out.

[00:12:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Keep on going in.

[00:12:31] Fred Glick: That shows our names because we’re both on the listing and a contact phone number so you can call the listing agent.

Boom. Want to ask a question about the property? Great. You want to arrange to see the property? Great. We’ll be happy to do that. We just need your pre-approval approved funds. You know, you’re not a real estate agent, but if you have your own agent, you can make arrangements to see the property. You don’t need to contact them to contact us.

We’ll send you the disclosures and the inspections. We do things a lot differently. And I’m glad our phone number is in here. And you can see who we are. Anyway, so here just the map, you know, it goes in and out and look at the satellite. My thing is go to Google Earth. It’s getting even better. It’s the best place to see the properties.

And see the neighborhoods. You know, here’s just okay. All right. Here’s another ad. Hello, Michelle. How are you? And an actual ad that they’re charging money for, but hey, if I’m Studio Shed backyard, good place to put it. Payment, so now they get into a bunch of mortgage stuff. Nice little sliders, nice, clean stuff.

Now, some other things, not really a big thing here on the coast, but down payment assistance. There’s a whole bunch of programs. This is how to save on your electricity, and internet plans. I’m sure these two, you’re going to get some, they’re going to get some kind of a commission. They probably put that in there and Redfin does not guarantee the information that is responsible or -.

Okay. So, they’re giving the ideas, but they’re not, don’t sue them. Some loans, credit reports, open house schedules. So no upcoming because he hasn’t scheduled and yet it’s only, what is today, Tuesday. More ads, property details, and this stuff comes right off of the MLS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:14:46] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If you update the MLS. How long does it take to show up on Redfin?

[00:14:51] Fred Glick: 15 minutes? They check every 15. Sales history, tax history, tax history doesn’t mean anything to you in California because when you buy the house they reassess it based on the sale price, so.

[00:15:08] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Sometimes I love to see the increases year over year.

[00:15:10] Fred Glick: Yeah, it can be fun. Here’s some more pictures. I don’t know why there’s more here. More of our description.

[00:15:21] René Pérez Jr.: So it is based on the, on the previous MLS system.

[00:15:25] Fred Glick: Oh, with a rock and roll half marathon. Wow. That’s interesting.

[00:15:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You can get some historical.

[00:15:32] Fred Glick: Oh, I see. Okay. August. I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying that attention.

I’m saying, are these our pictures? No, it doesn’t look great. Okay.

[00:15:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Those are from 2020. It’s cool that they show the previous MLS pictures.

[00:15:43] Fred Glick: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. That’s kind of new. That’s kind of new.

[00:15:47] René Pérez Jr.: Well, and it’s also going to piece of case, right? Because. You know, when you, when you are buying a property and you own it now you can request the seller’s agent to remove all but one of the pictures.

[00:15:59] Fred Glick: Right. You have to do that before they mark it as sold. We got to remember this.

[00:16:04] René Pérez Jr.: That’s not true. It just becomes more difficult as time goes on. And they ignore messages and things like that. But an agent can always go back and change the images or request the MLS that whoever lists a property has access to make changes if they request the MLS.

[00:16:25] Fred Glick: Yeah, and also Redfin and Zillow are really good about doing it if you contact them directly, so you can Google that. Anyway, more public facts, additional research. Okay, here’s where it starts to get good, schools. These are four out of 10 for the elementary schools, basically. It’s a little better, oh, here’s a different elementary school.

And the high school, so, you know, if you see these as 10 out of 10, you just and it’s a single-family house, just assume you’re going to pay a ridiculous amount of money.

[00:17:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That assigned to see the assigned school that you’re, if you are moving into that house. There you go, there’s your default Herbert Hoover Middle School.

[00:17:10] Fred Glick: You’re 4, 3 and a 6. So, it gets better by the high school. That’s getting to the high schools the problem, but, hey, these a lot of these areas are turning over and turning over quickly and new parents are coming in with more money, paying a higher price and then complaining about the schools and get make the schools better. And all right.

[00:17:32] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And you have some agents insights. Is that for that particular home?

[00:17:37] Fred Glick: No, no, it’s just a generic Redfin. Well, sometimes they do.

[00:17:44] René Pérez Jr.: They’re going to be generic Redfin comments. If there’s no comments for the particular property.

[00:17:53] Fred Glick: I see, so they’re just filling the space in with that. Got it.

Okay. Redfin, California, Santa Clara County, this zip code walkable transits half and half. It’s nice and flat and bikeable. I can attest to that. Okay. All the places, the grocery store, the transit. Climate, here’s some cool stuff.

[00:18:12] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I don’t think I’ve ever gone down this far on Redfin.

[00:18:14] Fred Glick: Yeah. Okay. So it’s minimal amount of flooding. Fire, it’s not going to get there. Heat, yeah, it’s taught in the summer. Wind is rated as minimal and air is extreme. So long as you don’t breathe in San Jose, everything’s fine.

[00:18:35] René Pérez Jr.: So it’s air quality.

[00:18:37] Fred Glick: That’s it. Now, so this is going to vary by the location.

[00:18:41] René Pérez Jr.: So we know that, and so all these risk factors and something to really pay attention to is the fact that they’re going to be general based of off location, not your exact parcel.

So you want more due diligence. That’s where you go into the disclosures, get the natural hazard disclosure, and find out how it affects your particular property. I think that’s the biggest takeaway.

[00:19:02] Fred Glick: Yep. Okay, they do a little generic estimate of the property, but they don’t mean much thereby comps. View them on the map. Rentals, we’ll skip over.

Now, some real estate insights. So, this is the last 30 days in this neighborhood. It gave you the median price, days on the market, number of listed homes, all this kind of stuff, you know, and then you keep going, and in different neighborhoods surrounding it, you can go single-family house, number of homes sold, number of days, median days on the market.

So you can kind of see things are starting, they were pretty, pretty fast off the market. Now it’s getting a little slower for days on the market. You could see the

[00:19:50] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Look at that price thing.

[00:19:53] Fred Glick: Yeah, that’s a number of homes sold. Median prices here, but you know, there’s so many different houses. That’s the problem. And that’s the three I’d rather look.

I always look at the one year because that’s what we’re dealing with. So it’s not as bad. Days in the market. Anyway, so there’s also different types of the year things get busier. Who knows? Okay. So you can embed this or share this. If you’d like to now, here’s the one thing I like, so they calculate what they call competitive score.

And let’s look at this part. It’s in this neighborhood calculated over the last 3 months. Sometimes I see this is 12 months, 6 months. So it’s really kind of hard when it’s a 12 months, but if it’s 3 months, it’s pretty good. And it says 72 out of 100 any homes get multiple offers. Some with wave contingencies, average home sales for about 1 percent over list goes pending in 29 days.

Hot homes, 4 percent above and go on 11. So, for a place that didn’t have super great schools, that’s not bad. Yeah. But it’s a 72 and then they just go through their algorithm, show you more houses, more houses, near sold, more frequently asked questions about this.

That’s a little AI thing they built. Okay. Anyway, so that’s our page of Redfin review.

[00:21:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That was a pretty interesting, thorough walkthrough. I really had no idea. I usually stop at the pictures and the price. So it’s below.

[00:21:43] Fred Glick: So thank you, Redfin, very much. You know, we appreciate it. We all like working together.

Your stuff’s out there anyway. I’d even pay for a branded site. So, anyway.

[00:21:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Awesome. Let’s see. René, anything top of mind for you as we get towards the end of this Redfin Masterclass?

[00:22:06] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, I mean, you know, pick your favorite between Redfin, Zillow, Trulia, whatever it might be, but keep in mind that they all have, they should have all the same information. Right? And it all comes from the MLS.

What you want to do is make sure that you contact your real estate agent, or broker, wherever it might be, because what you can’t see in most of these listings is an offer deadline, right? You can’t see the private notes and disclosures. I think that in the next two, or three years, what MLS should do and things like Redfin and Zillow is have disclosures be public. I don’t, I’m not really sure why they should be private.

[00:22:51] Fred Glick: Some of these agents hide them like they’re gold. It’s like, “Did your customer see the property? We want to see this pre-approval before we release the disclosures.” Get over yourselves.

Yeah, you know, open up, you know, and real quick, this kind of throws into it. We have our house in Culver City under contract. And the reason it went under contract is because we got it fully disclosed, upfront we gave the guy the inspection reports and needed some work and he realized it and he was happy to see what the work was.

He, you know, bid accordingly and we did a sewer inspection. That turned out a little funky. That was the only thing we didn’t work before. And next time I’m going to do it. But that was it, and it went smooth because of that. Everything upfront disclosed. You don’t have to wait. Just let people know, and they won’t waste their time if they don’t like it.

Time wasting between that and BS listing prices. It’s just, it’s silly. It’s all silly. It’s mean.

[00:23:57] René Pérez Jr.: We live in a mean world.

[00:24:01] Fred Glick: Mean world. No more mean, no mean from us. We’re the meaningless agents.

[00:24:08] René Pérez Jr.: Don’t include me then.

[00:24:14] Fred Glick: I don’t even want to know. Anyway, yeah, that’s it. Let’s get out of here. Let people get out of here. That’s enough.

[00:24:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Get out of here. You’ve learned everything. Go search Redfin.

[00:24:25] Fred Glick: There you go and then you come back to us. Yeah. Hey, by the way, we’re doing real, real last things. We’re doing pre-approvals for jumbos again, we can beat Wells Fargo’s interest rates. Can’t believe I’m saying that, but yes. So here you go.

[00:24:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Go to arrivva.com/rates to see real-time rates.

[00:24:49] Fred Glick: Yeah. Yeah. It’s fabulous. Okay. Now we’re out of here. Now we’re out of here.

[00:24:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay guys, everyone Have a wonderful week. We’ll talk to you next week.