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.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Find out how a new California ADU law could let you turn your backyard into a separate, sellable condo
- See how some cities are already taking advantage of this and what it could mean for future property values
- Learn the difference between a condo, townhome, and single-family home and why the labels might be misleading
- Learn what “highest and best use” really means and how it can unlock surprising value from your land
- Hear why Arrivva’s approach to fees and service is shaking up the traditional real estate model
In this episode with Fred Glick
Can you really sell your backyard as a condo in California?
In this episode of We Fixed Real Estate, Fred Glick reveals a powerful new California law that lets you legally split your lot and sell your ADU as a separate condo. Whether you’re a homeowner, investor, or just real estate curious, this episode uncovers how cities like LA and San Jose are already using it and how you can too.
Plus, Fred breaks down confusing property terms, creative land uses, and why Arrivva’s transparent model is the future of real estate. Don’t miss this game-changing insight.
Resources mentioned in this episode
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Two white guys with beards and black shirts. This is another episode of We Fixed Real Estate. Fred, how’s it going?
[00:00:32] Fred Glick: Don’t forget the glasses, too.
[00:00:34] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, and glasses.
[00:00:36] Fred Glick: Yeah. So here you are. If you ever wanted to watch two white guys with black shirts, beards, and glasses, here we are. But instead, we’ll talk real estate.
[00:00:45] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So let’s see. We’re here to talk about real estate. Top of mind golf courses.
[00:00:51] Fred Glick: So in beautiful Irvine, California, which is basically a giant plan development anyway, that popped just out of the earth in modern times.
[00:01:01] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, growing up, it was all orange fields.
[00:01:04] Fred Glick: Yeah. Yeah.
And then all of a sudden, Irvine Company came in and had this plan development and boom, here we are. So they are continuing to wanna buy houses. Of course, we have lack of housing and of course pricing, which is nuts, but there’s still plenty of demand and there’s plenty of demand for the prices that you see advertised.
Yes, there’s tons of people who would love -to be able to buy, who can only buy half at half that price. But this isn’t 2009 anymore. I’m sorry. The economy has grown significantly. The jobs and income has grown significantly, so. And people wanna plant roots. So that’s what happens in a progressive society.
I don’t have the answer as to how to give people, you know, there are state programs or, and especially in cities like San Francisco, where if you build, you have to do moderate housing, but it’s not solving the problem. It’s taking a little piece. That’s about it. But, anyway, they’ve decided to take the Oak Creek Golf Club.
And yes, there was some written agreement between a bunch of politicians and them gazillions of years ago, like 20-some years ago, that it’s gonna be protected open space, but I don’t include golf courses as protected open space. Because all it is, it’s a bunch of people playing golf. Okay. Yeah, there’s nice trees and things like that, that they’re gonna take care of because they want to keep the place nice so they can charge higher prices for it. You know, and there’s,
[00:02:43] Drew Thomas Hendricks: But if it’s an open space, you expect the public to be able to just go out there like a park.
[00:02:47] Fred Glick: Yeah, and there’s chemicals that they spread. I mean, some of them now use non-toxic stuff to keep the grass a beautiful green. If you notice, if you go to Europe, they could care less if the grass stays green. They just keep in mowed because the ball and the club doesn’t know what color the grass is. So it doesn’t really matter. So it’s just an aesthetic. So you can say, “Oh man, that was a beautiful course.” Doesn’t really mean anything. So anyway, they’re gonna somehow rip up this thing, or augment it or change it around. But they wanna put 1500 houses on a golf course. And I said, “Go for it guys.”
You know, golf has this problem years ago that it was just for country club people and then you had really crappy public courses. You know, some great golfers came outta public courses. But are there too many public courses for what should be done with housing? And I’m more of a housing advocate. ‘ Cause the more houses you have the lower the prices allegedly. It’s gonna bring more jobs for construction, et cetera, et cetera. And you’re gonna get more people living in places. You add that into the idea of getting more housing near the train stations, like they’ve been talking about proposing, passing bills, et cetera.
And then there’s the third thing, and here’s the second. The third thing is really the second thing that I want to talk about is Los Angeles. So if you remember, maybe, gosh, it’s gotta be in like 2023 at this point. It’s been so long. The state of California approved a law that said you can take your single-family house if you have enough room and make a flag lot, meaning like a pole and a flag, so it’s like an l-shape, and build something back there. Let’s call it an ADU for the lack of a better word. It’s got full electric, full everything. And then take that unit and your unit, your single-family house, and make it into a two unit condominium. And then go off and sell that ADU.
Now if you have a $2 million piece of property, the house in front, let’s just make it up, it’s 1,000,005. You’re gonna be able to sell the little thing in the back for 500. You know, somebody’s gonna be able to afford it. Maybe it’s six, 700 square feet, not too big. There are things, you gotta get condo docs done and easements and approvals, but Los Angeles has, oh, and one of the biggest things about this bill, the worst thing about it is every single municipality, I believe, on a county level, had to approve it. It might even been on a city level. I’m not sure. Los Angeles is finally getting around to approving it. So what we’re gonna see in LA soon, I hope, is at least the start of these.
And getting, you know, there’s a business idea for a lawyer who’s in real estate to come up with a package that they could sell to a homeowner that will do the two unit condominium. Make sure it complies with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac guidelines kids. So you don’t have a problem. You don’t need a reserve study ’cause it’s not over four unit. But if it has a balcony, you know, everything’s gotta be inspected and all that kind of stuff. And rules and regulations, you know, this is, even though you have CC&Rs on your property, this kind of changes it and kind of upgrades it. But it’s gonna happen.
LA it’s a big city. So it’s really great that this is happening there. I could see them popping up in houses where you’re gonna have at least a half acres. So it’s not ton of properties ’cause like, you know, you go into Santa Monica that has the houses with the alleys in the back, there’s nothing much you can do about that. You really need to have a driveway. So it’s got gonna be for that bigger properties. But we’ll see how it goes and see what happens.
[00:07:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: In my understanding, it’s already been approved in San Jose and it’s implemented.
[00:07:06] Fred Glick: Yes. So it’s the very, very early stages and we haven’t heard anything. So it’s gonna be it’s gonna get rocking up there.
[00:07:15] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We haven’t seen those on the market yet to see how, not yet how they’re being received or what sort of profit potential the homeowner would have.
[00:07:24] Fred Glick: Yeah, I mean, you know, are you gonna want neighbors? That’s the other question you have to ask yourself first of all. What’s your day to day?
[00:07:32] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So this is different than a condominium. You can just subdivide your lot and sell that out.
[00:07:36] Fred Glick: Exactly.
[00:07:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So you don’t have to worry about…
[00:07:39] Fred Glick: Here’s the big confusion that people have. As soon as they hear the word condominium they think it’s gotta be a highrise. No. You can have a single-family property that is part of a condominium association.
[00:07:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Hmm.
[00:07:53] Fred Glick: Because I hate how the real estate industry has labeled property. Got single-family, obviously, but then they say townhouse and separately they say condo. Well, we have a listing, it’s a townhouse that is a condo, but I have to list it as a condo, but it’s really a townhouse.
So I would beg the real estate industry to change everything to single-family, townhome, flat, flat equals, you know, an apartment. And then ownership type. Fee simple, which a townhouse can be fee simple like, like a single-family, like look at all the row houses back east. They’re all owned by one person. No condo, no association. So fee simple, condo, the condo could be for any of them, and PUD. PUD, planned unit development, that’s the what everybody calls a homeowner’s association. But it’s not, these are the real, real, real words that mean real things.
[00:08:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:57] Fred Glick: Single-family, townhome, apartment. Can be either a, well, a single-family can be any of them: condo, fee simple, PUD. A townhome can be fee simple, condo, PUD. A condominium though can only be a condominium. And yet co-op can only be a co-op. Because you’re, as soon as you have somebody on top of each other, that’s a condominium period, or co-op, you’re done. So that’s kind of how these words are explained. But unfortunately, they actually hurt sellers and buyers of townhomes ’cause they label them as condos. So it’s crazy and stupid, but hopefully we get a change.
But every MLS would have to change. Zillow would have to change. Everybody with websites like Redfin would have to change. It would be an enormous thing, but they should do it and they should do it retroactive back to the beginning of the MLS and recategorize everything.
[00:10:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So townhome is just a multi-story?
[00:10:03] Fred Glick: Townhome is straight up, you know, one, two or three attached property,
[00:10:10] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Uhhuh. Okay?
[00:10:11] Fred Glick: And it could be a one unit attached property. And that’s called a townhouse ’cause it’s not a single-family; ’cause it’s not single-family detached, it’s single-family attached.
[00:10:20] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I see.
[00:10:20] Fred Glick: Can either be fee simple, it could be a PUD or could be a condo. So…
[00:10:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Now what about in San Francisco? You go out in the avenues and there’s all those houses. And some of you even share common walls. But you don’t think of those houses over on Taraval as like townhomes?
[00:10:36] Fred Glick: Yeah, like in the Western Extension. All, all out there, these attached houses, they’re just single-family attached property, but their own fee simple.
[00:10:45] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Okay.
[00:10:45] Fred Glick: That’s all. That’s like the row houses back in Philadelphia or New York or,
[00:10:50] Drew Thomas Hendricks: But those wouldn’t be a townhome town?
[00:10:51] Fred Glick: Call ’em the townhome, the two stories, but they’re attached townhome, fee simple. Okay. There’s gonna be a test, kids.
[00:11:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. I’m already failing it.
[00:11:02] Fred Glick: Everybody study up.
So yeah, it’s, I mean, I’m gonna scream and yell about this all I want on my podcast, but nothing’s gonna change and you’re, everybody’s just gonna keep doing the same wrong thing.
[00:11:17] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, change starts right here.
[00:11:20] Fred Glick: There you go. It’s a beautiful thing.
[00:11:23] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Circling back though, on golf courses, one of the more creative ways I’ve seen a golf course getting redone was the winery close to my house, Monserate Winery.
They, instead of like leveling the golf course or building houses, they turn the whole golf course into a winery and vineyards. And then they put in up a wedding reception spot. So now it’s a very big destination place. Whereas, and probably was, is making more than the golf course.
[00:11:49] Fred Glick: So when an appraisal is done on a property, there’s one line in there that has to be filled in. It’s what is the highest and best use for this property.
[00:11:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Hmm.
[00:12:00] Fred Glick: So they probably realized, you know, it’s expensive to maintain the golf course. They weren’t getting enough people playing, and they said, “Okay, let’s turn it around. Let’s make some money from it.”
You know, there’s golf courses that they take and they put houses, they drop them in different places. And they’re able to keep things nine holes. And now you live on a golf course. And you pay a fee. There’s a place, San Jose on the eastern part, kind of towards where the hills are. It is a, oh gosh, a whole, like, I don’t remember the number, but a whole bunch of townhouses and condos. So the whole complex is the condominium because of that, obviously. But part of your condo fee is the membership to the golf course. Even if you don’t pay, it’s part of the monthly fee. So it’s called, trying to think, the same name as that place, The Villages. It’s called The Villages. It’s the same this place in in Florida.
[00:13:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I just watch the documentary.
[00:13:12] Fred Glick: Yeah, exactly. I don’t think there’s swinger clubs going on there, but you never know.
[00:13:19] Drew Thomas Hendricks: There was, there’s 150,000 people in the villages.
[00:13:22] Fred Glick: Oh yeah. It’s gigantic. It’s ridiculous. I had a chance to buy one for like $5,000.
[00:13:28] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Really?
[00:13:28] Fred Glick: 2008. Yeah. I didn’t do it. Anyway, the idea, I think, in this place called The Villages in San Jose, is that eventually there’s gonna be less golfers. And what they’re gonna have to do is either build more houses on the golf course, change it to nine holes, make it a voluntary, you know, you pay dues to play. Or invite the public, you know, have a limited membership. There’s gotta be some other way because it’s a great place to be able to build reasonably priced houses and condos.
[00:14:05] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah. Right in, right near Rancho Bernardo where I lived there, they just took down a whole golf course. It’s all now housing.
[00:14:12] Fred Glick: Yeah.
[00:14:13] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And then North and Escondido, they did the same thing to a golf course. Escondido Country Club.
[00:14:18] Fred Glick: There you go. I mean, there’s, country clubs aren’t like they used to be. Let’s put it that way. I mean, I was a proud member of the Plymouth Country Club.
[00:14:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, wow.
[00:14:31] Fred Glick: Golf course built in 1912. So it was about the golf course. I didn’t go for dinners or any of that dinner. Saturday night dinner, dancing with the wife and little, little, little Sinatra music, you know.
[00:14:44] Drew Thomas Hendricks: The CNBC version of Fred Glick?
[00:14:46] Fred Glick: Yeah.
[00:14:46] Drew Thomas Hendricks: At the golf course in a suit.
[00:14:49] Fred Glick: Yeah. Suits, ties. Here it is. Blackshield.
[00:14:53] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. If you haven’t seen it, you gotta check out Fred Glick on CNBC. It’s on the Arrivva site.
[00:14:57] Fred Glick: Yeah. Or just Google it. Yeah.
[00:15:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah. Or Google it. But we really want you, we really want you to go to the site. So go to the site. Arrivva.com. Show us your support.
[00:15:07] Fred Glick: Do we have a search? Here’s a question for you. We’re gonna ask you a live on this podcast. Do we have a search bar somewhere on the site that you can search the site?
[00:15:16] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Let’s just ask why we’re revamping the site. We’re revamping the site because there’s so many copy catters out there. We need to actually take this to the next level.
[00:15:26] Fred Glick: Yeah, there’s guys who went to Y Combinator, went file, copy, paste, and redid our site basically, and then got money from Y Combinator. Here’s the difference. We haven’t raised a dime. Okay?
So they’re gonna run into a situation where they’re gonna have months where they’re not gonna be doing any deals and they’re gonna have to pay back their investors and they’re guys who are new to the business, but, “Hey, we’ll charge a flat fee.” They don’t have our experience.
[00:15:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: No.
[00:15:54] Fred Glick: I mean, to be really honest.
[00:15:57] Drew Thomas Hendricks: The only thing that’s given back a dime is Arrivva in rebates.
[00:16:02] Fred Glick: There you go. I’m sure that, and they also have a buyer broker agreement that says they will take two and a half percent, but they may change that on every deal. Meaning if you’re gonna get a rebate, you know, they change their buyer broker fee. We do it the other way, we say we are allowed to collect as much as we can for your benefit. Say somebody’s offering 4% broker fee at a $10,000 bonus and new construction, we’re allowed to collect all that, but we can only keep $9750. The rest of it belongs to you.
[00:16:41] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Wow.
[00:16:41] Fred Glick: And actually, all the money that we get in goes into a escrow account. Not our operating account.
So we haven’t earned the money until it comes in. We rebate you and then we take out our fee. So there’s a big difference. And be very careful as to what they’re doing. It makes no sense the way they’re just flipping around contracts.
[00:17:04] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.
[00:17:04] Fred Glick: And we’ve been doing contracts for years, and all of a sudden this is a new thing with agents and they’re still doing seminars on how to justify your value so you can collect your two and a half percent and how great you are.
[00:17:19] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I’m sure there’s one at the airport Marriott right now.
[00:17:22] Fred Glick: Or it’s online or something? Yeah. Or you know. What was the guy? Dig, Digger, you know, kinda clowns? Yeah, there’s a guy named Tom Ferry and he’s second generation, real estate coach and has giant seminars, and you know what? It’s all the same people.
I don’t care what company they’re from, they’re same mentality. We have a completely different mentality. We give a crap about buyers, sellers, mortgage people. We’re as transparent as we could possibly be. We live in Slack with you. Ask a realtor what Slack is. They’ll say, “Oh, it’s my teenage son, Slack.”
[00:18:05] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Well, you don’t need to, so if you need to go to a seminar to convey your value, you probably have a false value.
[00:18:12] Fred Glick: No value. Yeah.
[00:18:13] Drew Thomas Hendricks: With Arrivva being so transparent, it’s very easy to convey your value. You can do it in one sentence.
[00:18:19] Fred Glick: Yeah, exactly. Here’s an issue that some people have sometimes. The way we start with any buyer, seller, mortgage, we have a Google Meet. And here’s the reasons for it. Number one, you’re gonna get, let’s say if you’re in the Bay Area, wanna buy a property, you’ll get myself and René. We’re both brokers. We wanna both hear what your situation is, what you’re looking for, then we can explain exactly how we work in detail and then answer your questions. Whereas if you just want to have a text conversation real quick, you’re not gonna get the gist of what we do and everything that we’re gonna be able to do for you.
So, yeah, it takes 15 minutes sometimes. Hey, we’ve had these that’s less an hour. We’re happy to record them. We’ll put them in your Slack channel. Like if your spouse isn’t going to be there or your partner isn’t gonna be on the call, we like recording it. Because then you can play it back. Because what’s crazy is we’ll start a Slack channel, we’ll get involved in a property and the spouse will start asking us questions that we’ve already answered. And it’s very simplistic things. So if they had listened to it. Or even we do a summary, you know, we’re in Gemini, does a summary and even transcribes it. We put it all in there so you can share it with somebody. You know what, share it with our competition. We don’t care. We’re better than them.
So, you know, can you meet with these guys? Do, do you do what these guys do? Listen, hear us, hear everything we do. And that’s where you get the questions. You’re better off listening to us first and then going to other people. Because usually when that happens, most people come back to us. You know, ’cause people are typing in discount realtor, flat fee agents. They’re out there, but they’re not, they’re not what we are. And that’s for sure. I have to pat myself on the back.
[00:20:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, that’s well said.
[00:20:20] Fred Glick: Yeah. And we sleep at night. That’s our company motto. Period. That’s it.
[00:20:27] Drew Thomas Hendricks:I like that, “We sleep at night.”
[00:20:29] Fred Glick: All right. We got nothing else to talk about.
[00:20:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: There’s been another episode of We Fixed Real Estate, two guys in a black shirt with beards and glasses.