Podcast

Stop Overpaying! Why Fixed Real Estate Fees Make More Sense With Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. Of Arrivva

Fred Glick, a Broker, Real Estate Realist, and Founder of Arrivva, holds a stellar track record with over $2 billion in residential transactions while grounded in a lifelong passion for real estate. René Pérez Jr. is an adept Broker and Pricing Savant, who specializes in strategic problem-solving and long-term growth. 

Join them in the We Fixed Real Estate podcast by Arrivva, where they share expertise and insights about the dynamic real estate landscape. Arrivva, a leading real estate and mortgage brokerage, caters to buyers, sellers, and mortgagees with love, integrity, and a transparent fee structure. Featured in the Wall Street Journal, Arrivva is transforming the real estate landscape, one happy client at a time.

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

  • Delve into the importance of transparent pricing models in various industries, with insights into fixed fees versus hourly charge
  • Discover pioneering approaches in sectors like pharmaceuticals, citing Forest Park Pharmacy’s fixed pricing for prescriptions
  • Explore Arrivva’s fixed fee model versus traditional percentage-based profits in mortgages
  • Do you really need a local listing agent? Experts Fred and René tackle this question
  • Dive into the advantages of having a local buyer’s agent 
  • Explore the new luxury train service linking San Francisco and Los Angeles and the intersection of transportation and real estate

In this episode with Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr.

Tune in for an insightful conversation between Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. as they delve into the nuances of pricing structures within the real estate and mortgage sectors. From the crucial role of upfront pricing to dissecting the differences between fixed real estate fees and percentage-based profits, Fred and René offer invaluable insights into how pricing strategies impact both buyers and sellers alike.

Explore the ever-changing landscape of real estate practices, including the debate over the necessity of hiring local listing agents and buyer’s agents. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a first-time homebuyer, join us to gain a deeper understanding of pricing dynamics and industry standards in the realm of real estate.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Drew Hendricks here. I’m with Fred and René. It’s another episode of We Fixed Real Estate, where we discuss and go deep into how real estate should be fixed and what the solution is. Fred, how’s it going today?

[00:00:13] Fred Glick: Just groovy, dude. And you?

[00:00:16] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You know, I’m doing well. I am building a retaining wall in the backyard. And last weekend I lifted 11, 000 pounds of rock.

[00:00:25] Fred Glick: You are the man telling you, you could go to federal prison and work on,

[00:00:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Who needs to flip a tire over when he can go to Home Depot and get 20 bags of rock and do it four times?

[00:00:38] Fred Glick: So what, so this is good. I mean, tell us what happened and what you did, because I’m sure there’s people listening who have retaining wall issues and

[00:00:47] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You got it, you got to do it right, and you can’t skip.

You can’t just put up a couple six by sixes. So it’s a 48-inch retaining wall. But I had to dig every 24 inches, I put a six by six in 40 inches down, 48 inches up with three bags of concrete, then backfilled it three feet at an angle with rock and then put in a French drain.

[00:01:09] Fred Glick: Wow. And that would have cost you how much if you would have gotten a contractor to do it?

[00:01:14] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You know, I spent the two days lifting the rocks thinking about what it would be. I, my materials were about 800 dollars.

[00:01:23] Fred Glick: Okay, so, and how many hours do you think it took you?

[00:01:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, it’s not done yet, but I’m about 20 hours into it, but I’m figuring my health is what’s the true benefit here. I now have muscles again.

I’m rivaling René. René, you’d be surprised. I got biceps almost like yours now.

[00:01:41] René Pérez Jr.: That’s pretty good.

[00:01:42] Fred Glick: It takes, I’m just doing the math. If it takes 20 hours, let’s say, and you got contractors going to have 2 guys doing it charge. I don’t know, 50 bucks an hour, 100 bucks an hour, 20 hours, 2 grand plus 800 materials plus another 20%.

So, it should be like a 2500-hour job theoretically.

[00:02:09] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It’s a 68, 000. I watched a YouTube video of a guy in Menlo Park that spent 300, 000 on his retaining wall and she did. And well, the, the guy that was building, it’s like, look, I’ve got 10 guys out here. Each 1 of these guys is making 20 dollars an hour. I’ve got the, they had all the equipment out there.

The job, that retaining wall is a bit bigger and it took 3 weeks. But three weeks with 10 guys, 20 dollars an hour, it adds up. It’s all rich.

[00:02:38] Fred Glick: It sure does.

[00:02:39] René Pérez Jr.: And I think that’s the important, like upfront pricing because you know, if you’re charging, if someone’s charging you by the hour, that’s when the contractors just take their sweet time versus if you already have like the price, it’s like, hey, you’re getting paid for the actual contract for the, for whatever you’re building. You at least know what you’re paying for. Right. So.

[00:03:00] Fred Glick: Yeah, and that’s like our fixed fee as opposed to somebody charging per hour for real estate, which is what kind of people are talking about. They’re claiming that the Justice Department wants to have agents work per hour, but that’s going to be silly.

[00:03:18] René Pérez Jr.: That’s how it’s going to be, actually disagree with you Fred because we already do that.

[00:03:21] Fred Glick: Because that can be padded so much. “Oh, well, I take the time from my, when I leave my house to get to the 1st appointment. I’m charging for that.” These people could just start overcharging. Like, crazy on that. That’s why we love our flat fee.

You know, sometimes we work 20 times harder and sometimes, you know, we have people who know what they’re doing and it’s easy. So, but, you know what, that leads me to another thing while we’re talking about pricing, because it’s not directly related to the real estate industry, but it’s sort of related to where things are kind of going in different walks of life and prescription drugs.

There’s a company called Forest Park Pharmacy, and they’re in Texas. It’s Forest with one R. They have something interesting. What’s that?

[00:04:19] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Forest with an F versus a pH?

[00:04:21] Fred Glick: Oh, no, no, no. One R some. Yeah. Anyway. Sometimes we, some people spell with two R’s anyway. So forestparkpharmacy.com. What they’re doing is interesting.

They don’t take any insurance, and what they do is they just say, “Look, whatever our cost is plus 10 bucks.” That’s it. That’s what they charge for every prescription. It’s, you know, it’s for all intents and purposes, a fixed-price pharmacy because if you go to the website, the guy explains the difference. If it goes through these channels.

Between Medicare and the insurance companies and this and that there’s a guy in the middle, forget what he’s called, but he works on percentage so of course he’s going to price the thing high and the insurance companies pay it’s insane. I hope this guy takes over the world, him and Mark Cuban’s kind of doing the same thing he’s doing stuff cheap so there are crazy businesses that you never thought would change starting to change and we applaud them because it just breaking down old habits and old insanity, but, as we go on with our fix price.

[00:05:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Fair and transparent prices, we’ll put the link. We’ll put the link in the show notes for those Texas, that’s where you should be purchasing.

[00:05:46] Fred Glick: There you go. Oh, he does it all over the country. He’ll mail it to you.

[00:05:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, wow.

[00:05:51] Fred Glick: Yeah, so it’s pretty cool because you can do that. You know, it’s not state control. Like, each state has their own real estate commission.

It’s like, basically, everything’s the same all over the country. Same with mortgages. You got to get licensed in each state. It’s like a mortgage is a mortgage, a mortgage, and there’s certain little nuances that the states want you to do, but I’m sure if they all got together, they could come up with one process.

And it would make life easier and make licensing easier. It makes real estate agent license licensing on a national basis. How about those kids? You know, but I’m way out there with this. Let’s just stick to fixing real estate.

The other big thing I wanted to mention, people might not realize this, but we are also mortgage brokers, and our profit margin over our wholesale cost is fixed compared to literally everyone in the mortgage business, which is on a percentage. So we all get the basically the same rates from Fannie Mae every day. And if you’re going for a million dollar loan, you go to a typical mortgage bank or mortgage broker. They’re going to charge. Basically one and a half to 2 percent over that.

So it’s 10, 000 to 15, 000 is their profit margin. So their rates are going to be higher than us where we have a flat fee of 4750. Now that’s our profit margin. That’s our gross margin, I should say. It’s not the profit, but, so we’ve been getting a lot of mortgage business lately, and especially on jumbos.

We just had a buyer who was fully underwritten, pre approved by Chase. Went to Chase yesterday to get the rate because they got under contract and they gave them seven and three-eighths on a jumbo 30-year fixed. We were at 6. 99. It’s like, that was a monumental difference. So we have one lender who has really amazing jumbo rates.

They’re very strict 45 percent back end ratio. You have to have six months reserve. So, you know, it’s for clean deals, but the point is that we’re super competitive on jumbos now, which we weren’t for years, we were sending everybody to the likes of Wells or B of A, or Chase or somebody like that.

Yeah, it’s that’s great to do, and obviously under that amount, we’re very competitive to in the Fannie, Freddie world. So one thing that came out of their lender Fannie and Freddie this week, it’s kind of silly and stupid, but every, but the real estate agents are saying this is a victory. Fannie is basically saying, “Look, if you want to have a seller concession, which means that seller is going to pay for your closing costs. There are rules.” It’s anywhere from 2 to 9%. I won’t go into details, but it has to be for actual closing costs. That is still allowed. But what they said on a separate note is, “We don’t care if a seller pays the buyer’s broker fee. We don’t care.” Well, that’s not even a change because they haven’t changed.

They haven’t had a problem with it before, so it’s no change. It’s not like you can use, and this is the important thing, you can’t use the typical Fannie Mae seller credit to pay for the buyer broker fee. It must be for the actual closing costs, like points, appraisals, credit reports, title insurance, transfer taxes, insurance, real estate taxes, all the normal stuff, but they’re not going to pay for the buyer broker fee.

So, the way the agents were looking at it is saying. “Hey, well, let’s do a deal where we wouldn’t get a seller credit, but let’s get the credit so that the person can afford my buyer broker fee.” So these realtors continue to try to go down rabbit holes that they don’t understand.

They’re claiming the numbers work out and trying to keep their fees at least the same or more and keeping the buyer-broker fee alive. So again, we’ll see what happens. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that nothing is firmed up. There is no real plan. It’s just a settlement agreement that has not been approved by the judge.

There are many other lawsuits and the Justice Department has not chimed in. So that’s the bottom line. But like, we’re talking to people who are going to sell their house and we say, “Look, don’t offer a buyer broker fee. There’s no reason to.” Especially a million dollars and up. The buyers have the money to pay the buyer broker fee.

It’s not maybe, you know, if you have a buyer, he’s buying a 250, 000 house and scrimping money together. We understand that. And the fee is not going to be that much if it’s done percentage-wise. Yeah. Excuse me. They’re kind of hurting, but the more expensive properties. Yeah.

[00:10:52] René Pérez Jr.: I think you’re missing the whole point, Fred.

I mean, the whole idea is that, like, why does it matter whether they can afford it or not afford it? I think the only issue that’s important is the fact that commissions, you know, have be, it should always be to the front. Like, what am I charging? Right? So I don’t write the argument.

[00:11:11] Fred Glick: Well, I think I think though, what the, what the argument is, is they want to keep the status quo of buyers having the seller pay the buyer broker fee, because the agents aren’t thinking, they’re just thinking, let’s keep it the same. But in fact, I mean, we’ve had deals where the buyer pays us. You know, they don’t have a problem with it in the higher price tones. That’s kind of the thing. It’s just the realtors want to keep the status quo, even though the hammer is coming down on them. It’s,

[00:11:45] Drew Thomas Hendricks: It’s hard to change. People fear change. Unlike Arrivva, you embrace change.

[00:11:51] Fred Glick: I love it. I really love it.

[00:11:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Let’s talk about local listing agents. I mean, are they necessary? Should you find one?

[00:12:02] Fred Glick: René, I’m going to let you talk first.

[00:12:04] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, well, actually, I, here’s the thing, right? I think being local is a value addition.

I think Fred always is like, there’s no value like, like the, there’s always that kind of like angry remark against like local agents and not having any value. I think that it’s, it’s based of an entire like list of value add-ons that an agent can provide. So one of the, one of the biggest value add-ons is being local.

However, just because you’re local doesn’t mean you’re a good agent, right? A new agent that’s just a neighbor, I’ve seen agents who are new, but because they grew up in that neighborhood, the neighbors give them the listing. Now, how is you being local and fresh going to make you a good listing agent? It’s not right.

So it has to be really nuanced about what being local really means. And the second part of that is that being local meant a lot 30 years ago because there was no data points. There was no Zillow, no Redfin. There weren’t websites.

[00:13:04] Fred Glick: No internet.

[00:13:05] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. I actually, yeah. I mean, I wasn’t there, right? So I can’t really speak to that, but it was definitely not as easy as me right now going on Google Maps, having Earth just really tell me exactly how things look like, right?

Apart from that, a good agent that is not from that specific stream is going to make a lot of calls. Right? So I, you know, I do, I, we do business all over the state and we’re not in every neighborhood, but it’s our job that because we’re not in that neighborhood, we’re going to make contact with people in that area to get a little bit more context.

People are always going to be sharing information because that’s what agents should do. Nobody’s going to say, nobody’s going to pick up the phone and say, “Oh, sorry, you’re not from the neighborhood. I’m not going to share any information.” Right. And so I think it’s, it’s a misconstrued idea that being local means everything.

And I think that’s the important part. It’s not about, you know, “Oh, you’re not local or you are local.” It’s about knowing that now in the current moment, there’s a lot of technology that lets you become local through just the digital age. Right. So, and I think Fred can disagree with them.

[00:14:12] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, like the walk score and all that stuff, you’ve got it on the sound cloud, the sound score, and the walk score. I mean, you’re offering local knowledge at a, at a much larger scale than just anecdotal inferences.

[00:14:26] Fred Glick: I mean, the point is with a listing agent, number 1, do you know how to market a property properly?

Are you going to take nice pictures? Is your description going to be really good? Are you going to make people come to the house to see it because of what you’ve done? You’re going to look at comps to see what the pricing is. You’re going to be at the house, you know, driving around what the neighborhood is like, and especially the Bay Area.

I mean, basically an area of single-family houses. So people would ask us. “Hey, have you, I want to see that you sold houses,” and I don’t know, “San Ramon.” And it’s like, to me, it kind of doesn’t matter because I’ve so houses and say San Jose. I could sell a house in Los Angeles. The idea is. We’re going to market the place the same.

We’re going to do the Matterports and the drones and possibly the digital staging and things like that. And we’re going to know how to attract people to buy the house. So people aren’t going to come into the open house and say, the listing agent, one of us is like, “Well, do you know where the best coffee shop is? Or how long does it take to get to the freeway?” Or, you know, things like that, that would be the local knowledge type of things.

[00:15:43] René Pérez Jr.: And I think that’s what makes us better than local agents, right? Because we don’t discriminate against houses. And what I mean by that is that we don’t go and say, “Oh, well, in this area, there’s no Matterports. Agents don’t do Matterport’s.” We’re going, you know, across the board, we’re always going to have a 3d Matterport, we are always going to do a floor plan, and we’re always going to pay for professional photography, it won’t be some silly cell phone, iPhone pictures, right?

And because we’re not local, we’re not going to be bullied into paying the fees or the higher fees for a stager, right? Our job is to get different bids, for staging, for photography, for any marketing materials at a price that makes sense. And what a lot of the problem with a lot of local agents is, and because they know that neighborhood so much, and because they’ve just done the things the same way over and over again, here’s what they do.

And this happens all the time. I call an agent and I’ll ask them and we’ll ask them like, “Oh, how did you pick your stager?” “Oh, well, I have a relationship with them.” And that is ridiculous. Just because you have a longstanding relationship with someone doesn’t mean that they’re offering you the best price. So because

[00:16:59] Fred Glick: Know the right furniture.

[00:17:01] René Pérez Jr.: Exactly. Well, yeah, I mean, that’s, I think our furniture, I think people a little bit get stuck in that furniture piece because unless it’s like a Victorian house, you don’t need to have like the quote-unquote right furniture, it just needs to make sure that it’s neutral.

I think people just prefer to see a house that’s furnished versus not having furnished. Right. So, but the point, the point is that you know, we actually offer better pricing because we don’t just go off of relationships. So we’re not overpaying for things just across the board. And I think that’s what I want people, listeners to really think about, right? You’re not just. I’m getting lied to.

[00:17:40] Fred Glick: Yeah, and just in case people don’t know what we do, we charge a flat fee of 15, 750 dollars to list the property. It does not include a buyer broker fee, which we’re telling people just do 0. But we pay for inspections of the property, all the photography that René just mentioned, cleaning of the property, super cleaning, windows, everything, you know, whatever we can reach.

And we’re also now paying for staging because we’re either doing digital staging or we’re doing regular staging and I don’t think anybody’s got a complete package like we do at the fixed price that we have and, you know, and people ask, “Well, how can you do it so cheap?” Well, I’m not paying out 80 percent commissions to outside agents.

We operate, René and I are both brokers. We operate together. We’re all on Slack. Everything gets done through us. So you’re going to have us for every step of the way, which makes a big difference. And we’re just trying to get a good, good package together, and we don’t need to make gazillions on every loan or every transaction. So that’s where we’re at.

[00:18:49] René Pérez Jr.: Drew, any questions about how we list properties?

[00:18:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: No, I do have a question on the photography and you guys might be able to help me on that. Why do you guys. I don’t say you don’t do it. Why do real estate people use like a 10-millimeter lens, completely fisheye to make like a 10 by 10 room looks like it’s 20 by 40. And then you go look at the house and it’s like a closet. I mean,

[00:19:12] René Pérez Jr.: You know, I mean, I’d argue that that’s good marketing, right? The whole idea with pictures is that you want to get the most people into the house, right? That’s why you see a lot of the times they add more, the more floor into the picture than, than they should, right?

Because then you’re pulled in into going right into the house. It lacks a little bit of transparency and I think, I think that’s the argument as to like when some agents don’t post a lot of pictures or when they don’t do a floor plan because they don’t want people to know that it’s a bad, a quote-unquote bad layout, but you’re wasting people’s time.

Whoever’s going to buy it, they’re not going to buy it because they got fooled by the pictures and now they get there and they love it now. You’re just getting, you’re just going to get people who are upset and are not going to bid in the property anyway.

[00:19:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah. Well, images aside, so we talk about listing local listing.

I was, is there any benefit towards a local buyer’s agent?

[00:20:10] René Pérez Jr.: Any benefit?

[00:20:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I mean, is it the same sort of deal where a buyer’s agent, like you’re still looking at the list of properties on that are available and you’re taking your clients there.

[00:20:20] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s the same story. I think it all boils down to having like the data points of, of what’s sold nearby.

And that’s how I do a lot of my due diligence and into like knowing what to offer. Right? Because we know exactly what’s on the market, what we’re impending just now. We know what’s being sold. When it’s pending, we then call the agents to figure out if they can share a range of what it went for.

And the agents are not going to lie, right? Because agents know this simple fact. If they lie about what a property is going to sell for, eventually people are going to catch on into the fact that people, that those agents are going to lie. Right? So it’s, especially when you’re in a market of 2 million plus, agents are not going to just waste their career in, in saying that a price is not right because then it’s going to come back to them, I think.

I think there’s a lot of mistrust in the world of real estate, but I think a good agent that has those type of listings they don’t have a reason to, especially because they have 10, 15 offers. The market conditions right now enable a lot of quote-unquote transparency in what our house went for.

No, I mean, I think it’s, it boils down to like having an experienced agent, right? Brokers, and then both, but again, both Fred and I are brokers. We’re not just agents that just got our license and that’s the part.

[00:21:43] Fred Glick: That’s what happens. You work with some teams, you know, the Smith team and, you know, Susie Smith and 7 people.

They’re beautiful pictures and they’re all nice. And then you get, you know, Joni, you just got a license. You get assigned to her. We don’t work like that. It’s we’re together. You’re working with a company in Arrivva. You’re not just working with an individual agent. We work out of Slack, which makes life so much simpler for all of us.

Everything’s in there. Everything’s in one place. Every conversation, every document. So it’s just organized and that’s kind of the only way to do it. At least we see it that way.

[00:22:24] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Absolutely. I would also just add the pride talking about local knowledge. It’s more important for the person you’re working with to actually understand who you are and what you’re looking for, rather than having all this knowledge of what’s out there.

[00:22:37] Fred Glick: Let me add something about the words local knowledge. So I’ll use San Ramon as an example. And, you know, we want to list your property there. And someone asked, “Well, show me all the houses you’ve sold.” More importantly, show me all the houses you’ve worked with buyers on to get. Because it’s the buyers’ mentality that you need to learn and that we know because we work all over the state that we know what the buyers are looking for.

You know, in that area, you got to have a house. It’s finished. It’s nice. It’s ready to move in. You’re going to get top price. It’s got to be in this school district or whatever. So I think it’s more important to have us to have knowledge of the buyers rather than local knowledge of the area. I think that outweighs it a lot.

[00:23:23] René Pérez Jr.: I’ll add this even more. Both Fred and I work on a lot of deals together, right? It’s not a lot of outside agents. But what happens when another agent provides their marketing, they have tons of listings and purchases. But the reality is that those are probably not their listings. They’re just probably a big team effort. So that agent might, that company like if you look at Compass, Compass has billions of real estate sold, but that’s between clusters of so many agents that it’s not actually relevant, right?

 I think it’s going to be rare that you actually talk to an agent that really has more knowledge of writing more contracts and getting properties on their contract than us. Because they’re going to have one property every four or five months. And if they show that they have more, odds are that it’s because it’s not their listings. It’s going to be of a huge 10-person team.

[00:24:21] Fred Glick: Yeah, and there’s other little things that you should ask. I mean, for example, we, I’ve been in the mortgage, I keep telling people this. I love this. I’ve been in the mortgage business since Jimmy Carter was president. So the fact is I’m going to know a real fully underwritten pre-approval from junk.

So when offers are submitted, you might get the highest offer, but it’s with a pre-approval that’s worthless. Typical agents, not going to know the difference. They don’t read, they don’t understand it. We understand all of it. We know when a proof of funds is a joke. If it doesn’t have the name of the person and the date and the amount, we’re not going to accept it.

It’s the minutiae. It’s the, my favorite word, as everybody knows, is context. We understand the entire context of the entire transaction and what a seller needs to have for their protection to be able to get the right offers. You know, how to make the place nice, how to make it inviting, and how to get great offers because we’re going to put specifically in the MLS. And in the public notes and the agent notes, you must have a fully underwritten pre-approval when you bid, especially where we’re going to have 38 bids.

Because like, even if you have the highest offer, here’s another trick that people play and the listing agent may not even think about this. You come in 100, 000 over everybody, you have an offer 100, 000 over everybody else, but they want a appraisal contingency. So that if the appraisal comes in lower, they can get out of the deal or renegotiate.

Well, they’re playing a game with you. Because of course, they’re going to go higher than what it’s going to appraise for and then they pray that the appraisal comes in low and they get the place at a discount. So it’s, it’s a stupid game that they try to play on a multiple-bid situation. I mean, just, you know, you gotta know all these types of things to be able to do a listing and that’s more important than local knowledge of where the candy store is.

[00:26:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, it might be important to some people.

[00:26:23] Fred Glick: Yeah. Or order it online. That’s all.

[00:26:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, talking about candy stores with no segue, let’s talk about this new Dream Luxury Liner that’s going to be connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles.

[00:26:37] Fred Glick: So when René schleps from San Francisco down to see his folks in San Diego or comes to bring the Matterport to LA, he’s driving his Tesla and, you know, it’s fine and good and he’s, you know, hands-free and all that, but it’s still untrusted. But there was a bus that ran between Santa Monica and downtown San Francisco before the pandemic.

[00:27:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: The green -. That’s the hippie bus that goes up to Seattle.

[00:27:06] Fred Glick: Dude. No, I forgot the name of it. It was a luxury bus with like sleeping compartments. It was cool. I never took it. I never had a chance to take it. It was cool.

But now with the train and there’s some really interesting things about this train, whenever it gets going, it’s probably gone from Union Station to Oakland, I think. But the cool thing is that I’ve been talking about this for years. There’s a thing back east called the auto train. And what that does is you drive your car to this spot outside of Washington DC on the Virginia side. You, they put your car on the train and you go to a chair or sleeping thing, whatever you arrange. And overnight it goes from Lorton, Virginia, that’s right, to just outside of Orlando. And then you get to Orlando and you got your car. So you can go all over Florida with your car.

It’s an awesome idea. So why couldn’t we have that between LA and San Francisco? Well, guess what? This new train, it’s going to have that allegedly. So that’ll be great. And I can sleep all night and wake up in LA and continue on to wherever I can go up to San Francisco.

[00:28:20] René Pérez Jr.: And I mean, I hate renting. I hate renting cars.

[00:28:24] Fred Glick: Me too.

[00:28:24] René Pérez Jr.: It’s just a pain. Ridiculous.

[00:28:27] Fred Glick: Yeah, it’s totally annoying, but that’ll be great. That’s better than the bullet train. They should like forget the bullet train. Just keep doing these kind of things.

[00:28:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, you take a night train up to San Francisco. That’s perfect. It’s like the ferry is up in Washington where you can take the ferry to Vancouver for eight hours and get an interior car.

[00:28:46] Fred Glick: Exactly. Exactly. So it can help you if you live in L.A. and need to go to San Francisco for the week and you just go to your office and need a car and whatever. That’ll be great.

[00:29:00] René Pérez Jr.: I mean, I will say I saw the report about inflation. Right? And some of the things that have been actually deflating and being less costly are airfares.

And I mean, yeah, right now, if you book a flight tomorrow, LA, I mean, it’s 50 bucks. So I think that’s a comparable, like, how much of a difference is it going to be to take the train if it’s a train that’s 400 dollars? Well, probably the same thing. I just rent a car.

[00:29:32] Fred Glick: Yeah, we’ll see what the prices are. I mean, they’re going to have to adjust to the market.

[00:29:37] René Pérez Jr.: That’s where probably the government comes in, right? They have to subsidize it or else it won’t work. So that’s why we have all this debt. So we’ll see. We’ll see. I don’t want to, I don’t want to be negative, right? But I just, it’s like, supplies are so cheap these days.

[00:29:52] Fred Glick: Okay. I’m just talking theory. I love the theory. And let’s leave it at that.

[00:29:56] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, it sounds good. A luxury Dreamliner. And that’s the Dreamstar for those looking. Dreamstar Lines. If you want to Google that, that’s what.

[00:30:03] Fred Glick: Yeah. Or we’ll put it in the show notes, right, Drew?

[00:30:05] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes. Yeah, for sure as well. So last words, I know, René, you got, you’re rocking and rolling. You’re out of here.

[00:30:13] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, that’s why I brought up the plane issue because I, some people are coming in from LA and that they round trip, they’re paying 102 dollars. It’s like, it doesn’t get any better than that. Right? And they booked their flights, like 48 hours ago.

[00:30:28] Fred Glick: Yeah, there’s still a decent amount of competition between LA and San Francisco airports and it’s great.

[00:30:33] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Fred, last words?

[00:30:35] Fred Glick: Last word, you can fly a 787 and sit in premium economy between Los Angeles and Philadelphia. It’s fantastic because the airline, it’s on American because the airlines have always been stuffing us into crappy 737s and, you know, it’s awful, but yeah, real nice. So you got to fly to Philly, LA on American, look for the 787s.

Because they keep taking, they fly to Europe or fly to Asia with them when they’re here or in Philly, because Philly is a hub for America to Europe.

[00:31:13] René Pérez Jr.: So there’s not financial advice, but earnings on watch Boeing next Wednesday. So we’ll see, we’ll see what happens.

[00:31:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Wow. I can’t imagine it. More bad news coming though.

[00:31:27] Fred Glick: Yeah, well, United had an order for 737s. And I don’t remember if it’s the 10s or the 9s, but they just switched it to the Neo 321s out of Airbus, like 50 of them. So that’s going to hurt future Boeing, but it’s going to take a while for Boeing to come back.

[00:31:46] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I’m sure we’ll be talking about this next week.

[00:31:48] Fred Glick: There you go.

[00:31:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Time will tell whether Boeing’s too big to fail.

[00:31:51] René Pérez Jr.: Well, I bought some Boeing options.

[00:31:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay. Well, there you go.

[00:31:55] Fred Glick: So he’s moving the market.

[00:31:57] René Pérez Jr.: It’s okay. All right. Talk to you guys. Okay.

[00:32:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Go enjoy your drive. It’s been another episode of We Fixed Real Estate. Everybody have fun. Talk to you later. 

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