The Dark Side of Private Listings That No One Talks About With Fred Glick, René Pérez Jr. and Chris Gustavel Of Arrivva

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

• Discover why early inspections can save you from future headaches and big renegotiations.
• Uncover the truth about private listings—are they a shortcut to selling faster, or a potential minefield of ethical issues?
• Uncover the hidden dangers of dual agency in real estate transactions
• Learn about the regulations that are shaping how real estate transactions are handled across different regions
• Ever wondered what happens after a property goes under contract? The hosts break it all down, from escrow to the final walkthrough

In this episode with Fred Glick, René Pérez Jr. and Chris Gustavel

Get ready to unlock the secrets top agents don’t want you to know! 

Fred Glick, René Pérez Jr., and Chris Gustavel of Arrivva pull back the curtain on private “pocket” listings—how they work, why they’re popular, and the hidden risks you need to watch for. 

Then stick around as they walk you, step by step, through exactly what happens once your offer’s accepted—from escrow calls and loan estimates to inspections, appraisals, walkthroughs, and beyond—so you can avoid last-minute surprises and close on your dream home with total confidence. Tune in and stay ahead of the game!

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Fred Glick on LinkedIn
• René Pérez Jr. on LinkedIn
• Arrivva
• Summer Goralik
• Revive.realestate
• Fairhousing.dev

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:23] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If you’re wondering where you are, you are on We Fixed Real Estate with Fred, Chris, and René. And we are discussing a lot of good things today.

[00:00:32] Fred Glick: Our buyers who bought a property, we did the sewer inspection and found out the whole sewer was totally (beep). And so the seller had to replace it, but our guy learned a lot about sewers and he’s an engineer nerd. So, you know, he kept on it all the time and he kept getting into the details.

And now that we’re putting his house up for sale, lo and behold, when we run the sewer cert, a sewer video, it’s blocked. So the good thing is we knew the guy, Dan the man.

Moving on, we got the sewer cert. Dan gave us the bid. He starts next week, or the week after, which is delaying our house, getting on the market. You know, we should have started earlier knowing there would be problems, but we figured, hey, you know, we get this snow, we get that done.

They had to wait to fully move out. So it’s just timing, but I think we’ll be fine.

[00:01:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And you’re always saying that people need to, you know, get the sewer inspection when they’re buying a house. You’re proactively having the seller do it. So he is uncovering stuff that would’ve come up during the inspection anyway.

[00:01:40] Fred Glick: Here’s the big difference between us and most agents, especially in Southern California and kind of half and half in Seattle, but most of the agents, I’ll say 80% Northern California. Now I’m generalizing here. What we do is we get all the inspections upfront before we put the house on the market so we know what’s wrong, so we don’t have to renegotiate.

You know, there’s buyers are gonna come in, they’re gonna use these inspections that they get as leverage to try to lower the price on you. So if you know going in. What are they gonna say? You know, unless there’s something crazy and, you know, way off, off the beat and path or something like that where they found something that’s wrong.

You know, people make mistakes. Inspectors may not look to the left, they look to the right. It happens. But mainly, and we do this in Northern California all the time, we explain it to new buyers. Look, give us a sale price, the mortgage amount. The very minimum number of days to close, you’re waiving inspections ’cause they’re already done.

You’re waiving your mortgagecontingency because you’re already approved for your mortgage. You’re waiving the appraisal value because nobody else is going to do that. And the appraisers already know and ahead of time what the sale price is. And they can adjust based on something called a time adjustment. Which is a made up number. That’s the way it is. And we get deals done in 15 days up there. Down here in LA it’s like, “Oh, do your inspections.” Blah, blah, blah. Okay, we’re gonna renegotiate, but we list house here, we do everything.

And there’s, there’s no argument. So, and we even take care of solar panel leases upfront and get it dealt with. And then you determine what the payoff is, if somebody wants it or if it can be assumed, or any of the ridiculousness of these horrible leases, especially SolarCity.

[00:03:41] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So on the topic today, the big topic that I prepared for that we were discussing in the pre-show was the new regulatory listing, new regulatory environment for private listings.

Let’s talk about this. ‘Cause you had sent me the article from Inman what’s her name?

Summer Goralik did a great article about private listings and how regulators entered the…

[00:04:02] Fred Glick: Do follow her on LinkedIn. I’m sorry to interject that.

[00:04:05] Drew Thomas Hendricks: No, it was very good article and Zillow’s been commenting on it.

And really, why don’t you start by telling us, telling the audience setting the stage, what is the role of pocket listings and why have they been so popular? And what are they for the general consumer?

[00:04:22] Fred Glick: So here we are at Arrivva, we’re a small company. Okay. There’s plenty like us, there’s plenty of little franchises for Keller Williams.

You know, in Joe’s Real Estate down the street, you know, whatever. But there’s these corporations that have boards of directors and stockholders that are public that must make money. That’s their job, is make money. So right now, if you’re an agent for Compass you can put a listing on the multiple listing service.

The normal way, and you know, this is a little bit in the past actually, ’cause there are some changes in different parts of the country. But you know, you put your listing up, we bring our buyers, we close the deal, no big deal, thank you very much. They get whatever they get at the listing side. What Compass is saying, along with some other companies, it was like, “You know, we need to control the market to make money. How do we make money? Yeah, we can get every listing, but don’t we want the buyer broker sides?” And they say, “Sure.”

“Well this is how we do it. We make sure that we have private exclusive listings that only our buyers can see. So you have to sign a buyer broker contract to use us. You have to probably get a mortgage approval.”

I don’t know what their specifics are. I’ve never been in site. But they tie you down. And then you get to see the properties that are listed by them that are not marketed anywhere, but on Compass. Going back, I don’t know, 30 years ago when there was no internet, what would happen every week on Tuesdays back in Philadelphia, I remember the excuse where I was, we get a book delivered to our office.

And that book was the multiple listing service. The first pages were the new listings. And I forget how they even did it, I think by price.

I can’t remember. And so if you wanted to buy a house, there was like you couldn’t find it. Yes. You look in the Sunday paper and they would have what the open houses are.

 That was it. That was the way it worked. So when you got to the agent office or somehow ’cause they had the open house, or you just went and found an agent to help you go through this, you had to have the agent. So they were all making 6%. Every deal of 6%. I charged that too back in the day, nobody thought about it.

What’s the price or the representation? Everybody was like, “Hey, let’s double dip on these on our own listings ’cause we’re gonna get buyers. They’re not gonna be already represented. They’re all free agents.” So they come into your listing and they like you. You are a contract performance, dual agency city.

Dual agency means that one agent or one company is representing both you and the seller. So if you were picked up for DUI would you want the prosecutor to be the same person as your defense attorney? Think about it, kids. Think long and hard.

Now here’s some other bad things about these private listening services. So let’s say you’re a buyer and you’re in a neighborhood where there’s not many sales, and all of a sudden this house comes up for sale on the private listing. Let’s say the comps, the last comp was six months ago and it was 600,000, but this new house, it’s 750,000. Because they know how much the demand is.

So they jack up the price, the price really, if you put it out in the marketplace, would be probably 700. So there’s a tendency and the ability for people to overpay. And as I said earlier, with the appraisals from the lenders, they make these time adjustments that are just out of, out of thin air.

So basically out of thin air, I don’t wanna get screened at by appraiser’s eye now, but you know, it’s an easy way to make it a manipulation. You know, the algorithms can make it any dollar amount you really wanna, so that’s not gonna be a problem. So you got people overpaying, okay? Now you’re a seller.

You’re in your eighties, you’ve got no friends, you’ve got no relatives, you’ve got nobody. You got your wits about you, but you know you’re able to do transactions. You not have anybody to turn to. So you trust this agent. This agent says, “Look, you don’t want the hassle. We won’t need to do, we won’t need to leave the house. Let’s just do a private listing with just our X, Y, Z clients.” Fill in the blank. I mean, it’s Compass, but you can fill in the blank.

Okay. So again, play the same house. Now, maybe you were able to get it for 650 as a buyer, “I can get you this. It’s a great deal.” But the guy who’s selling it doesn’t know he screwed up by $50,000. You know what I mean? You look at the internet.

There is those chances of that happening. There you go. That’s the bad thing. The good things about it, if a seller really wants to stay off the multiple list service and be extremely private, that’s fine. There’s something called a members only viewing that we have in one of our MLSs and just for different reasons. And that’s fine. So it’s not only MLS, but as an agent, we know how to get to those.

[00:10:20] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay. That might be for like, some high profile individuals that are selling their house and they don’t really want the general public to know that it’s for sale?

[00:10:29] Fred Glick: Yeah. Or they don’t want their neighbors to know it’s for sale. That’s another one. I don’t want any signs. I don’t want any open houses.

[00:10:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Like why would they want their neighbors like, ’cause they’re best friends with their neighbors and they have a broken

[00:10:41] Fred Glick: Or they hate their neighbors and they don’t want to, they don’t want it to sell to somebody who’s one of their friends.

[00:10:47] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, okay.

[00:10:49] Fred Glick: I don’t, I don’t know. You know, people can act in different ways.

[00:10:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So there is some pluses to private listings, but they seems like the negatives far outweigh the benefits that you’re gonna receive.

[00:11:00] Fred Glick: Yeah. And oh, and they also have a chance to sell you third party services. Well, you’re here, you can use Compass Escrow and Compass Title and Compass Mortgage and Compass Insurance, and, you know.

It’s a bundle. Hey, it’s super convenient for some people. Like they don’t care. Just get it done for me price, you know, I don’t care if you make 50 bucks more, but just, there’s one thing that hasn’t gone away in this country so far. April of 2025. Yeah. I know. Keeping everybody awake is RESPA. They haven’t repealed it.

[00:11:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Fill us in for those people that are not quite as in tune with what RESPA is.

[00:11:42] Fred Glick: I know I needed a hit of my Evolution Mighty Watermelon Juice.

[00:11:47] Chris Gustavel: Maybe that’s what I need.

[00:11:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: 32 ounces. No extra sugars added.

[00:11:56] Fred Glick: RESPA, Real Estate Settlement Procedure Act. Every real estate agent should be required. I had one yesterday. This was great. He was a listing agent and René emailed every to him, “Hey, can we show your property tomorrow morning? Are you able to show it?” ‘Cause René couldn’t go. He said, “Sure.”

Oh, and the original email, he said these are cash buyers. They’ve been working with us for a while. They know what they want, but he writes back, “Well, tell me about your buyers.” Then in the next email he says something about, “Do they have children? Older adults?” like, I don’t even answer.

I mean, it is 2025, but people are just untrained. I mean, it’s pathetic. Dude, you’re not getting anything outta me. And by the way, I’m gonna put this out on a call and you can make a snippet of this. I have an idea and a sketch out of some system, by the way I do not code, and I’m looking for somebody to want to come in with a partner and code this thing up and I will be able to get this thing out.

It’s a system that basically you can make appointments on. You can submit offers on that does not reveal the buyer’s identity to the seller. Okay. In addition, we can even tie this to having a bunch of documents that come in there that we would put up, like we do now with some other couple softwares.

And there’s some AI. Things that I have as an idea to do it. And really it can go all the way down to having a page for each property that an owner can have, that they can upload the documents, say in the blockchain, like repairs. Every repair I’ve ever done to a property uploaded here. Something like that. And you can have a switch that says your property is on the market or not on the market, and you control that.

So I have more ideas, obviously I want -, but email me, fred@arrivva.com if you have any interest. Talk about this.

[00:14:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We’ve talked about it. I’d fascinated by the possibility of building that thing. We just haven’t gotten our act together yet.

[00:14:24] Fred Glick: I know. Ready to rock. We have the website. Or the website would be fairhousing.dev.

[00:14:34] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Dot dev.

[00:14:34] Fred Glick: We’re serious about this. So there you go.

[00:14:39] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Back to private listings,what are the regulatory bodies that can help alleviate this or help kind of regulate?

[00:14:47] Fred Glick: Yeah. See, here’s the thing. In some states you can’t do dual agency. Some states have this, like Florida, I’m not exactly sure. You’re a transaction agent, whatever that means, you know, you’re still kind of, sort of working for somebody. There is this what we call a…

It’s like quasi-governmental, I forget, you know? Or it’s an organization of government people, so these are like regulators.

[00:15:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And they have conferences and they chat all the time. So they each can find out what’s going on in each other’s state with what kind of freaky things and shady stuff and try to solve it on a more national basis, or go state to state. I mean, some states like Florida wants to abolish their real estate commission. Brilliant. René has joined the podcast.

[00:15:53] René Pérez Jr.: Sorry, I was the courthouse. So I’m at the Beverly Hills Courthouse.

[00:16:01] Fred Glick: That’s high class stuff, I’ll tell you.

[00:16:05] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. Some secret processing going on. Anyway. All right. What’s the topic here?

[00:16:14] Fred Glick: I don’t even want to know.

[00:16:18] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:16:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We were talking about private listings and the current regulatory, like scrutiny going on right now.

[00:16:26] René Pérez Jr.: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s actually really funny. Compass has, is being, is going all in on Instagram and Facebook on marketing there, like, work with me and you’ll have access to more listings. So they’re just pouring as much VC money as they can into that. So they’re, they’re milking that?

[00:16:45] Fred Glick: Yeah. They’d buy the market because they have to convince X number of people. And in order to do that, you need to have a broader reach and that takes money. So, yeah, I mean, we could be busier if we dumped gazillion dollars more into Google Ads every week.

So, but we’ll talk about that on a separate idea. Anyway. Yeah, you know, I went over the good and the bad on that. So there’s some interesting stuff going on with the Northwest multiple listing service, whereas, well, all three of us are members. Chris is local. They came up with a rule that said, “Well, if you do a private listing, then you can’t list it on our multiple listing service. We won’t. Oh, you can, but we won’t syndicate it.”

[00:17:40] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You can’t have it both ways? Or you could?

[00:17:42] Fred Glick: Can’t have it. Can’t have it both ways. We want a, what I love about them is they want equality for everybody. I mean, just make, just make the playing field even. And you’re screwing the public by having to go to Compass site for this Coldwell Banker site for that, you know?

And then, you know, a syndicated MLS Redfin. They’ve been neutral in all this. They don’t mind Zillow. They spend a lot of money on our SEO. I’m sure. Good for them. And they build a good reputation, so, and they have a good website. So, so that’s, you know, for what’s on the MLS, but there’s too many agents out there that can get listings. And you know what, the more Compass is also trying to charge more for all these listings, the more people are gonna come down a little bit in price and undercut them and they’re gonna have, you know, postcard campaigns from 17,000 agents every day. I mean, it’s just gonna be a war.

Post office is gonna make money, marketing guys are gonna make money.

[00:18:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That sounds good.

But yeah, we hope, you know, Zillow also said they won’t take the Compass listings, you know. How do you go and find these private listings? Like when you’re someone’s looking for a house in Cupertino, do you have resources?

[00:19:06] Fred Glick: As agents? Yeah. Well there is, yeah.

Here’s the thing that you can’t get is those members only listing in MLS listings, there’s no syndication for them.

[00:19:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So that would be a semiprivate listing.

[00:19:21] Fred Glick: Yeah. I mean, it’s out there to other agents. Which is fine. Well, it’s there to go look for them.

[00:19:27] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. I mean, the private listings, I mean, they’ve always existed in some shape or form. Right? Word of mouth. I mean, it’s like us, right? Like we have private listings because we have listings coming on the market soon, right? Theoretically we could sell them off market. The same thing with other brokerages. So with Compass is if each agent has one potential listing, like yeah, they have a bulk of potential off markets. So it’s only about like the process of it. Eventually all these off markets turn into real listings and they realistically will rarely actually sell ’em as off markets, but they can market them as like, “Hey, we have off markets.” Because theoretically they could be.

[00:20:09] Fred Glick: And they could also say, “Hey, I have the listing down the street also.” so they could be trying to get the next listing by telling them, you know, “I’m so good your neighbor picked me.” So it’s another level of things, but you know, we can go on and on about these people. They’re going to self-destruct eventually, and we’re just here to try to help consumers we’re we’d like, like I said to somebody we were talking to yesterday, I said, “We just wanna sleep at night.”

[00:20:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You know? That’s it. Well, you guys are champions of transparency and private listings with that. Chris, talk to me about private listings up in neck of the woods?

[00:20:49] Chris Gustavel: I mean, I’m sure they’re there probably for those, like really expensive, maybe exclusive kind of listings, but none of my neighbors.

[00:20:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I can definitely see the use case though, of someone, you know, wanting to sell the house fast and you’re, you’ve got a network of people that have been looking for houses. You run the phone up and if they’re offered along the lines of what you’re paying for, it kind of beats the hassle of going through a 30 day listing.

[00:21:15] René Pérez Jr.: What I have in my mind always thought about is the fact that if you’re a agent that is helping developers get deals, right?

At the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line, right? You’re gonna hurt the primary homeowner. But if you’re a developer who has a relationship with an agent, with a sleazy agent that’s knocking on doors, trying to get that 85-year-old to sign the contract and sell a property to a developer for a huge discount, I’d say that agent deserves a 2.5%.

They deserve 5% even if they’re doing a whole lot of work, right? Because it’s really difficult to find these properties. It’s really difficult to navigate talking to someone in their nineties, really. Right? It’s, I mean, I’ve gone to these listing appointments and reading line by line what the disclosures are, and thenthey’re like, no, “Well, actually I wanna read this a little bit more. Can you come back tomorrow?”

And then it’s driving, you know, whatever time it takes to get to a certain location to meet with them and they have, you know, weird schedules. So if an agent is finding those, like off market development lots or tear downs, for sure. Right? It’s a lot of work that comes to it, but, you know, whenever a developer gets a deal, it’s because the, because someone got screwed, right?

There’s no such thing as free lunch. There’s always a winner and a loser. There’s no such thing as a win-win. You wanna market things as a win-win, but realistically, there’s someone, there’s always someone who’s a little bit more unhappy, right? Unless, unless you bought in the sixties and you’re like, I don’t care if I make a million or 1,000,010 because I made my profit, so, even then there’s always, there’s always a grid of like, “Oh, I could have made a little bit more.” Right?

[00:23:02] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Or if it’s a probate and there’s like 10 children trying to sell the family house.

[00:23:05] René Pérez Jr.: Okay. Yeah. Well, even then though, right? There’s, even if you overthink it a little bit more, there’s always someone that’s gonna get a little bit more of the cut. And someone who just signed because they were outvoted. Right? So.

[00:23:19] Fred Glick: Yeah, we just got a house under contract in Redondo Beach and there’s seven trustees. So it takes a little time to get the digital signatures to go around, but they’re able to do it. That’s a good thing. Some of these people won’t do digital signatures, and you have to get, you know, every document signed or initialed. And in California… I think, I think if we ever need to do that again, René, we send a notary, pay a notary to sit there for an hour and a half.

[00:23:50] René Pérez Jr.: That’s the thing, right? Like like you can, and that’s the problem with like Compass and with every tech-centric brokerage really is that, you know, Fred is like, “Oh, we can just solve it by having a third party or some AI assistant.”

But the reality is to be able to capture the 85-year-old, the 90-year-old, the consumer who’s not well equipped to understand the technology, they want to trust a person, right? I mean…

[00:24:17] Fred Glick: You know what? Here’s what you should do in the future. Here’s an idea and pass this on. Know that the first appointment you’re gonna have with these people is just to go through the documents.

You’re not gonna hand them a pen. The idea is not for them to sign it. You want to go through and explain it, maybe even pre highlight it, and yellow highlighters. Important things to notice. Make sure you have the numbers. You know, here’s what you’re gonna net. Assuming we do this, worst case scenarios kind of thing, and you can add blah, blah, blah for any more thousands of dollars, and spend that time going over that with them.

And say, I’m gonna leave this with you. When you’re ready to sign, we will send someone over with a yellow highlighted thing to have you sign.

[00:25:01] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I did was bring a blank form and a pre-filled form, because I mean, a lot of these disclosure forms, they’re, you already know, you know, what’s gonna be disclosed or not.

Like, is it a forced property? Right? Like I, I’m gonna put no on that one. Right. If I know that the building was, I mean, the public records say it was build 2010. Well, it wasn’t build in 19 before 1978, right?

[00:25:29] Fred Glick: Need the land form, right.

[00:25:31] René Pérez Jr.: There’s a lot of stuff. I mean, on this transaction, it was asking about, you know, does the seller know anything about the property?

Well, they haven’t lived in it for the last 25 years. It’s just been rented. So all of that is, I don’t know, right? So, yeah, I mean, I think like the transaction that I’m kind of bringing the anecdotal reference from is from a recent listing of ours and it’s one of the things that the seller said was like, “Oh no, I think I can trust you and, you know, thank you for reading the line item. Sign by line. I know that you know what you’re talking about. We’ll go ahead and sign it. Can you come back another day?”

You know, and we come back another day and, yeah, it’s never gonna be, if you get something signed on the first meeting, either you’re incredibly good or the person has done many other transactions. But if someone who never met you and you signed something, I would be scared of that because that means that they’re either trying to hide something or they’re, you know, it’s just if it’s too good to be true as an agent, especially if it’s a big ticket item, I think Fred and I have learned about this is if we get something signed really quickly, it means that there’s a, there’s a good reason for that. Right. Especially if you, they don’t know you.

[00:26:48] Fred Glick: Yeah. Here’s another alert to be aware of. If your house is worth a million and you have an agent that says, easy peasy, I can get you 1,750,000. As a matter of fact, I have a buyer already. Run. Run them out of your house, drown them, light them on fire. I mean, they’re just making it up. They are lying, lying, lying, lying, lying to 99.9999999% of the time.

[00:27:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

[00:27:24] Fred Glick: It’s like, ugh. Then what happens? “Oh, well that buyer, you know, thought the house space to the west and face to the east and they can’t buy it.” And then nobody comes to see it, have to start marketing it. Then, “Oh, the market has changed and nothing we control and interest rates are up, and now let’s come down 200,000 bucks.” And in the end you sell it for like less than it’s worth. Not every market is a hot market. Okay? Not every house is wanted by people. Sometimes there’s just awful houses. They’re just in the wrong place. They smell bad, they look bad. You want top dollar for it? You’re not gonna get it. You know, it’s like learn the word fastidious. Okay, look it up, kids. Assume you’re that person who’s going to be the buyer? That’s how you have to make your house look. Period.

[00:28:23] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Seems like pretty logical for any sort of selling situation.

[00:28:27] Fred Glick: Yeah, but there’s people, they just wanna cut corners here and there and little stuff means a lot.

[00:28:34] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Unless you’re selling it is a flip. Like you’re, you know, that someone’s gonna tear it down or you know that someone, you know, it needs that amount of much of remodeling you’d do great.

[00:28:46] Fred Glick: I’m trying to say, if you want the higher value, you’ve gotta do the higher things.

[00:28:51] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Now what’s that service? Now’s a good time to rehype that service you guys were talking about where you can work with a construction company to help sell the home, like bring it up in line and make those repairs before you sell the house. So you’re almost flip your own house.

[00:29:06] René Pérez Jr.: There’s different concierge services. We’re not going to just refer someone to just one place. One of the big ones, and they’re really good at finishing their products fairly quickly, is Revive Real Estate. It’s revive.realestate. That’s their website.

And I don’t get paid anything to market them. But what they do is the, they actually have different products. The main one and the product that we’ve used in the past is the, Sell 360, which is they go in there, they actually have deadlines where they say they’ll finish within five weeks and they can remodel the A through Z.

They take care of doing the permits, they take care of doing the project management of it, everything. Right? So they’ll give you different options and they have, you know, the basics, you know, the middle and premium plans. And that way you get the home remodeled without you having to, you know, deal with the contractors and someone canceling on you and et cetera, et cetera. They also pay for it upfront, and you just pay them at closing. So that’s, that’s a big value. Especially for those that don’t have thethe financial means to it. Secondarily, there’s other products, right?

The second product that they have is where we might sell it first as a fixer. That way the sellers can get some money out of it. And then there’s a contract where, well, actually, sorry, I’m misspeaking. So Revive will pay the seller like what an appraised value of it is, kind of probably as is value. So they pay the seller, the seller has the money, but then Revive then remodels the house.

We list the house again. And once it’s fully ready, you know, and we get the premium value, then the profits are split with the sellers. Obviously the Revive takes a cut, so that’s helpful as well. And their newest product, I think it’s their newest product, is where, let’s say you’re buying a fixer, Revive, can actually go into the property and do estimates and help you remodel the property. You know.

[00:31:12] Chris Gustavel: Is this just in California? Is that just in the Bay Area or?

[00:31:15] René Pérez Jr.: One of the people that we worked with in the past, I told them that I was gonna get all of you guys to get a demo for it. ‘Cause they have different things for them. So yeah, I spoke, I actually spoke with them last week, so it’s, we have a few different things. They have AI generated tools as well.

So I actually ran something but it’s, Fred and I have been dealing with other stuff. So I kind of have left, Revive to the side here. But it’s a really great product. I mean, you’re paying for the, for the ease of, you know, having one place. Obviously it’s gonna be, obviously when there’s middleman in between, you’re not gonna get the best price, right?

And that’s what you lose, right? So it’s, I’m always hesitant to use these type of products or any product unless you can quantify like, “Hey, not gonna be able to do it myself. I’m realistically not gonna look into 3, 4, 5 different contracting companies for painting and get different quotes.” if you’re not gonna do that, might as well use this company because they know how to do things correctly. Right? And they’re licensed.

[00:32:14] Fred Glick: They hire the subs, they take care of all that. You know, they’re a bigger company, so they have bigger good insurance. It’s little things.

[00:32:23] Drew Thomas Hendricks: For a busy person living in an older house, that definitely needs to be fixed up. That seems like a great way. It seems easy to line item out how much potential more you can make by just it’s being flipped. In terms of timelines to Revive was telling me that, let’s say that you buy a fixer that’s barely livable. If you’re gonna move into the property, they are able to finish a project in around five to six months.

But if you want to stay there and live there, actually. Sorry. If you stay there they can, they can finish in like, like five to six months because they’re gonna be working like in different section modules. Yeah. If you’re not living in the property, they can finish in 12 weeks.

[00:33:14] Chris Gustavel: Like a kitchen remodel and all that? And bath?

[00:33:17] René Pérez Jr.: They can do an entire…

[00:33:19] Fred Glick: Three months is, it shouldn’t be a

[00:33:21] Chris Gustavel: I know, but it’s like unheard of if you do that like a remodel, like that never happens.

[00:33:26] René Pérez Jr.: Well, what happens is that someone starts to remodel and they don’t have a, you know, one size fits all.

[00:33:32] Chris Gustavel: It’s always something. You’re always waiting for something. Something’s back order.

[00:33:36] Fred Glick: That’s the thing. You gotta be able to order everything and have absolutely everything ready to go, and then that’s a good finish. Sometimes there’s little finishing things, but yeah, have it all done. The cabinets…

[00:33:48] René Pérez Jr.: I mean, depends on the permit, right? It’s city to city. Some, I mean, and it depends on what the remodel is. When it takes a long time, it’s because someone’s trying to, you know, do something funky, like do a deck that is not necessarily legal, but they want an exception and they, they’re saying like, oh, my neighbor did it, so I want it to, but if it’s like a, you know, just a simple kitchen thing. I mean, it’s gonna go fairly quickly, right? I mean, if you’re gonna do like solar, like things like solar panels, solar panels sometimes take a little bit longer because not only do you have to get the permits for them, but the electric company has to go in there, and approve it.

They said 12 weeks and in our listing that we’ve done, they did finish everything in five weeks. They actually did an entire rehab in five weeks.

[00:34:42] Chris Gustavel: Wow.

[00:34:43] Fred Glick: That’s pretty impressive. Good tip, Fred. What happens after you’re under contract? The escrow responsibility, the lender stuff? I just want to kind of throw into your head what happens once you sign a contract. First of all, let me say, you have a legal contract. It says you gotta do things. The seller’s gotta do things and everybody’s gotta follow what it says. The number of days, the dollar amounts, whatever’s in the contract.

I shouldn’t have to say that, but it’s amazing how many people, like today, the escrow company’s name is in the contract who we’re gonna use. Our buyer decides, “Eh, I’m gonna go out and shop escrow companies.” Like, no dude, you don’t understand. You signed a contract. That’s the way it’s, and don’t worry about it, we’re good about finding companies who do great work and this escrow company basically has a flat fee because it’s the title company that also does escrow.

It’s part of their title company as opposed to a separate escrow company that needs to find title. Anyway, that’s another whole discussion. So anyway, let’s speak about them. The first thing you gotta do is you gotta contact in one way, shape, or form the escrow company and find out their wiring structures or however they’re gonna do it.

Fidelity National that we deal with it. What they do is they have a system where they text people. And then they get logged into their backend system, and that’s where the numbers are exchanged as opposed to most escrow companies. “Oh, email me your wiring.” Like, no, no, no. Or, “I’ll call you and get your wire instructions.” No, you don’t want to do that. You always wanna contact the escrow company ’cause you don’t know who’s contacting you. It could be the escrow company. There’s a 99% chance it is, but you never know. So always try to contact the escrow company, contact them right away.

The next thing, you’re getting a mortgage. Let the agent know, your loan officer know, “Hey, I’m under contract. Here’s the contract. Send them the contract. Here’s what happens then.” also, oh, I’m sorry. Also let them know who the escrow person is. Ask your buyer broker if you don’t know who that is because the lender and the escrow company hook up and then they make up estimated numbers of what the closing costs should be and how much cash you’re going to need. It’s called the LE, Loan Estimate. It’s not the final numbers. I’ll let your loan officer explain details of what’s locked in and what could fluctuate by 10% and what could fluctuate that they don’t have any control over, like homeowners insurance.

Anyway, so that’s the next thing. Then you, what you must do is acknowledge the LE in one system or another. I’m not sure what kind of system you’re using, but that LE gotta be click and all borrowers have to click through it. Then that’s accepted. That’s when the mortgage company can actually start doing your mortgage. Before then, they can’t do anything until you finish that thing. So it’s really important that you sign it. Then once they do that, they can order the appraisal. And that’s the only thing that really takes time. Everything else is just paperwork that you’re giving them.

So that’s, you know, pretty automatic where it should be. So, they order the appraisal. They need a copy of the contract. The appraiser needs a copy of the contract so the appraiser knows the sale price of the property before they do the appraisal. That’s the wonderful system, kids. That’s another thing. Anyway, on you go. That’s number two.

Number three, homeowner’s insurance. If you’re even in a condo, you need the interior covered. It’s called an HO-6 policy. Go start searching and you should have kind of done this before you signed the contract just to make sure that the place is insurable and be prepared for FAIR Plan until they go bankrupt. And then who knows what’ll happen. But for now, that’s the worst case in, you know, some parts.

So those are the things that you gotta do and you do ’em right away. The other things to then go, like, there’s like a quiet period after you’ve started that stuff. Maybe the lender asks you for a couple things. Maybe you’re doing inspections on the property. So you gotta have, have those arranged and set up. Keep within your time bracket. Okay? Then we kind of come around second base and our, I use the baseball analogy since the season started. Once you hit third base, now it kind of, everything speeds up again. Everything’s done. You’ve negotiated everything with the seller with inspections or mortgage contingencies or whatever.

I’m just blast going past that ’cause the agent will be deeply involved in that stuff. Then you come to the home stretch. Okay? The lender says, “Okay,” the loan is clear. Now the lender and the title company get together and they make sure the final numbers or what’s 99%, the final numbers come together, and then the lender issues the documents, and then you sign the documents.

They arrange for notary. You go into an office, you’re in a wet state as they call them, like Pennsylvania. You actually meet with the sellers at this closing. But before you do that, or maybe at the same time, same day, you sign, you want to go through a walkthrough. You wanna make sure to arrange that a couple days before, in case there’s people moving or whatever.

So once you go through that walkthrough, that’s where. And René, I’m gonna let you talk about the walkthrough, since this is what you do with people and what it is.

[00:40:35] René Pérez Jr.: The walkthrough is, it’s a really complicated, I think it’s a form that needs to be redone because here’s the thing.

First and foremost, a walkthrough does not have to be done when it’s completely empty. So there’s nowhere in the contract that says, “Oh, staging has to be out of the property for this to be a valid walkthrough.” Which I think is ridiculous. I think that in order for someone to do a walkthrough, the property should be empty.

Anyway, what a walkthrough is, is you as the buyer, are going to the property a few days before the transaction is closed to verify. It’s a verification of property. So to verify that everything that you saw when you first saw the property, it’s still the same. If there were any items that were supposed to be left behind this can include anything like electronic doorbells through chandeliers, anything that is attached to the property, we wanna verify that it’s still there. This can be appliances. What we don’t wanna see is something where we go into the property, the stove is missing, the fridge is missing, you know, no windows.

Things, no copper wiring. That’s never really happened to us. But the whole idea is, you know, maybe the sellers weren’t happy with what offer they got and they’re like, “You know what? Screw this. I’m going to, you know, destroy the house.” Or maybe if the tenants were living there.

[00:41:59] Fred Glick: Oh, I’m sure it happens.

[00:42:00] René Pérez Jr.: I’m sure it happens. It hasn’t happened to us luckily.

[00:42:03] Fred Glick: Knock wood.

[00:42:05] René Pérez Jr.: Knock on everything. But the whole idea is it’s not an inspection, right? So sometimes people confused or walked through with an inspection, so we can’t just go back and say like, “Hey, we noticed that this foundation is messy or something.” That is, you waived the inspection period. You had to have done that before the continuing period goes over. But it’s anything that would’ve been, that’s easily changed from when you first went on the contract. If there’s, you know, three broken windows where before they obviously weren’t broken windows and it wasn’t a disclosure, then it’s a big problem.

And it’s always about if there’s anything new that was not disclosed before. Right? That’s a big thing. So it also depends on how big the item is.

[00:42:52] Fred Glick: Here’s one other thing you should realize too. There might have been a carpet down and now they moved the carpet and you don’t like that it’s a two-one floor. That’s your problem. Okay? The carpet was there, you could have moved it. And that’s the way it works. Ask permission and see it. But yeah, and the inspector should have gotten it. That’s another thing.

[00:43:16] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Talking about extreme circumstances. You’re doing a walkthrough and you just happen to notice that the slab is cracked and it wasn’t noticed before. Disclosed. How does someone get out of this? Or how do you work through that?

[00:43:28] René Pérez Jr.: Well, it depends on the seller, right? Sometimes the seller says, “Hey, look, dang, I did not realize that this was happening. You know what?” Well, first of all, from our side, we’ll contact escrow and say like, “Hey we don’t agree with closing, because we just found something that was out of what we expected.”

So we shut down escrow so that it’s not, you know, it doesn’tget recorded by the county. And then we go back to the sellers and say, “Hey, we found this problem.” And then it’s up to the seller what they want to, how they wanna proceed. Realistically, that would be something that would be a legal claim where you have to go to court and say, hey, it’s a new disclosure that the 3% deposit is being held by escrow, so that 3% escrow would be held. And that’s why the third party because then you have to resolve those issues. It would just be a, depending on like how much you want to fight in and how much money you think it’s going to cost.

Does it cost more than a 3% deposit that’s there? Do we just walk away from the transaction? Theoretically, the sellers can say, you’re not performing. We’re going to keep your deposit. You waived our contingencies, and then you as a buyer have to go to the court and say, “Hey. I want my 3% deposit back. We found something that was that was not expected. So we should be able to get outta the transaction.” But that actually out of our you know, purview, we’re not attorneys. So you would have to talk to attorneys to kind of figure out, “Okay, what is the big next step?”

[00:44:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I mean things, life just happens. What if you set up a 30 day escrow and just you need another 15? How hard is it to change it to a 45 day close?

[00:45:04] Fred Glick: I mean, number one, I mean we’ll bite for you, but the seller could just say, you know, no, but it would be stupid of them because then they’d have to get out of this contract, that’ll take a few days to negotiate you, giving you your deposit back, and then they gotta put it back on the market. Then an open house. So within the 15 days, if you know it’s a solvable problem. Fine. Go ahead. It’s case to case, so that’s why you have buyer broker who tries to do their best to help you.

[00:45:41] René Pérez Jr.: I think it just depends on the seller, like if they needed the money for something else.

The other thing that can happen is it’ll be a negotiated extension or they will just charge the buyers how much it would cost. The seller, it might be a 20 day per late, it might be a hundred dollars. So it really just depends on like how nice or how aggressive the sellers wanna be.

But theoretically they can give a notice to close, which that’s the other thing, right? In the transaction, they would give a notice to close, and you have three days. After three days you can’t close, that’s when you can collect a 3% deposit. But usually if it’s a small delay, it’s not a big deal. If we needed an extra month, that’s when things get a little bit rough.

[00:46:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Interesting. We covered a lot of material today. Do one more round-robin, any last thoughts, Chris?

[00:46:34] René Pérez Jr.: Yes. One of the big things.

[00:46:36] Fred Glick: Your name’s not Chris.

[00:46:38] Chris Gustavel: I didn’t have any last thought? Go ahead.

[00:46:42] René Pérez Jr.: Give her 70 seconds of think. Chris is thinking. Well, the big thoughts is if you’re buying a house, make sure that it has its renewable energy and its own source of electricity, or else you could end up like Spain and Portugal today, where most of the country still does not have electricity.

[00:47:03] Chris Gustavel: I didn’t hear that.

[00:47:05] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. It’s a massive problem.

[00:47:07] Fred Glick: In parts of France. Yeah. Portugal’s back, I think.

[00:47:10] Chris Gustavel: Really?

[00:47:10] Fred Glick: But I didn’t hear about Spain. Yeah.

[00:47:13] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. I mean, I think Spain is at 50% power right now.

[00:47:17] Fred Glick: By the way, congratulations to California, now the fourth-largest economy in the world. Four.

[00:47:24] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If you take California out of the United States economy?

[00:47:28] Fred Glick: 14%. Yeah, 14%.

[00:47:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Still number one if you take California out.

[00:47:34] René Pérez Jr.: Oh, yeah. No, the US is number one by tenfold. No, it’s not even, that’s not close.

[00:47:41] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay.

[00:47:42] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:47:43] Fred Glick: There you go. We’re available on TikTok, kids. We take snippets of the show and interject with some other stupid stuff every once in a while, but it’s been, then I just attack 2.5% agents. When they’re just giving misinformation. It’s just, it’s pathetic. But anyway, it’s a war out there, kids. It’s a market. Getting our transaction.

[00:48:08] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Engage there.

[00:48:10] Fred Glick: Yeah. How do we get the transparency that we do out to the general public and with all these people that are all the same. Lasting the same thing that every real estate consultant is telling them to say about their worth and value. Anyway.

[00:48:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. There you have it. Fixing real estate one day at a time. a very, but there wasn’t very rum, much rumble where we were. It was more of just this like loud kind of, it was a loud rumble, but not much movement.

[00:20:07] Chris Gustavel: That’s interesting.

[00:20:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay. Fred, René, Chris, I think this has been another episode of We Fixed Real Estate.