Top Tips to Win Bids in the Bay Area’s Wild Housing Market With Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. Of Arrivva

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

• Hear essential strategies that will help you land your dream home in one of the country’s toughest markets
• Discover why a fully underwritten mortgage pre-approval is your best weapon in a bidding war
• Learn the fast-closing strategy that can make your offer stand out
• Learn how to navigate the unpredictability of pricing and bidding strategies
• Find out why inspections are essential before making an offer
• Understand the power of non-exclusive contracts and how to negotiate buyer-broker fees
• Compare the Bay Area market to LA and get insider tips on navigating both

In this episode with Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr.

Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. of Arrivva guide you through winning strategies for the ultra-competitive Bay Area housing market. Learn how a fully underwritten mortgage pre-approval, savvy bidding tactics, and smart contract negotiations can set you apart. 

From Silicon Valley to San Francisco, this episode of We Fixed Real Estate offers expert insights on pricing strategies, school district priorities, and valuable advice for working with real estate agents. It’s your ultimate playbook for securing your dream home—tune in to uncover the tips no one else is sharing!

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Fred Glick on LinkedIn
• René Pérez Jr. on LinkedIn
• Arrivva
• Inspectify
• ChatGPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Welcome to the next episode of We Fixed Real Estate. Today we’re doing a deep dive into top tips if you’re a buyer in the Bay Area. Fred, how are you doing today?

[00:00:12] Fred Glick: Just great, Drew. How about you?

[00:00:14] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I’m, you know, it’s, I’ve got no complaints. I probably do, but no one wants to hear them. What are we talking today? Oh, it’s just water, not watermelon or anything.

[00:00:23] Fred Glick: The Boxed Water.

[00:00:25] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah. No, I like the…

[00:00:26] Fred Glick: Oh, it’s blacking out the name.

[00:00:27] René Pérez Jr.: Why buy a boxed water instead of just regular?

[00:00:31] Fred Glick: It’s just easier sometimes. I mean, I don’t buy them all the time, but I’ve been buying a couple of boxes.

[00:00:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: The sink’s a long ways away.

[00:00:42] René Pérez Jr.: You pay more for water.

[00:00:44] Fred Glick: I know that, but the water I get coming out of the spigot is eh. And it’s a pain in the neck to do the poor thing with the filter, but I’m getting a new one of those and I should, you know, have the whole water system redone, but you know. Sometimes you just, yeah, I’m getting beat up right away.

[00:01:05] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Time to turn those tables around. Let’s get some positivity in here and give people some insight as to what, as a seasoned real estate professionals, what tips do you have? Your top tips for those people navigating the heated Bay Area real estate market.

[00:01:20] Fred Glick: Yeah. Including Silicon Valley, Fremont even parts of San Francisco and sometimes the likes of Miranda have bidding wars. We lost one yesterday in Mountain View on a house that was, hasn’t been touched in a number of years from the outside. They didn’t even have inside pictures. I mean, this thing was, you know, you’re going to rehab it.

What was the list price, René? Do you remember? 1.899 or something?

[00:01:58] René Pérez Jr.: 1. 9.

[00:01:59] Fred Glick: Yeah, 1. 9. We don’t know what it went for, but there were 50, 5 0, 50 offers in Mountain view. 50. And someone came in and blew their doors in because they had no second round.

Like here’s a bag of gazillions of dollars of cash and we want this place. Can’t wait to see the comp on that because that’s just going to increase the price of everything. Interest rates mean absolutely nothing and this is why. If you’re in, you know, you’re buying in this neighborhood of these numbers, it’s in a great school district, great location, that’s the combination. So that’s what it is. But let’s start going through all the stuff of how you can fight the wars. Number one, and I can’t stress this enough, and I’ve stressed this over and over and over and over and over and over again. Do not listen to mortgage people. You need one thing, one thing only from your bank approval, a fully underwritten mortgage pre-approval.

That means they take your W-2s, your pay stubs, your bank statements, your fourth-grade report card, and whatever. They give it to somebody called an underwriter. The underwriter goes through it. They may ask for more stuff, but now you’re done. It’s done. You’re going to have to make a mortgage application anyway.

Okay, so there are some companies and there’s some mortgage brokers out there who send their business to some companies that sort of kind of tell you, you think you may have a fully underwritten mortgage, but you really don’t. Read what they give you. And if it just says pre-approval at the top, it’s not what it is. It’s commitment to lend. This means we’re going to give you the money. We’ve already done our due diligence. If you listen to me at all, you know, I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, but believe it or not, if you want to get into one of these 50-bid psycho-warfare bidding processes, fine.

We actually have a layer that goes on top of the fully underwritten mortgage pre-approval that is, we get you approved with a lender who will close in 10 days, will close for cash, and will tell the seller that if you don’t show up with the money, they will buy the house. It’s the guarantees of the seller.

It’s fabulous. It does have a cost. The cost is 1 percent of the loan amount you take with them, plus 750 dollars, and then you pay them at a rate of 9. 9 percent for the time you use the money. But the idea is, the day after you close escrow, you go out to whomever you want, refinance their loan as soon as possible.

So it’s just another way to try to get past everybody else who just has a great, you know, fully underwritten pre-approvals from the likes of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, or whomever. So that’s what you gotta do to get super prepared. We’ve used this loan. It works. We’ve won because of it, but it’s also about, here’s the second thing, and René can talk about this, is your pricing strategy.

You’ve got to kind of think about it in the way that we do. We have no idea who’s going to show up and what they’re going to bid. That’s the one thing we can’t figure out.

Let’s skip that and go to, go to the, what I call the crazy stuff.

I’ll give you that early.

[00:05:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:05:38] Fred Glick: The crazy stuff is, and we’ve used this in both Washington State, where it was really prevalent, and back here in California and that is, when you have an offer that you’re making where you’re waiving everything because everything’s done and you’re comfortable doing that and everybody else is, by the way, that we do know. What you might do is you have to give the escrow company 3 percent of the sale price. Normally, that’s what’s negotiated. And within 1 day. After you agree on the contract. So if it’s Monday, you have a signed contract, everybody’s happy. Then day one is Tuesday. So you have to wire the money to them on Tuesday at the worst. So first of all, here’s a little tip, have the money ready. In a bank that you can wire right away.

So if you have a Vanguard account and you got to sell some stock, you know, that’s going to be a problem because you’re not going to get it. Right.

And then you’re out in terms of, you’re out of the contract and they can try to push you out. It’s very hard, but they could try. So you don’t want that to happen.

And that’s just bad blood between you and the seller. So you want to keep on good terms. So you get that within one day, it’s all done. But here’s the second part of it and the crazy part, as soon as escrow gets the money, authorize escrow to give that money to the seller saying, why? Well, here’s the thing.

It’s non-refundable except that they’ve committed fraud, but then good luck getting the money back. But the idea is you’re waiving the mortgage. You’re waiving the inspection. You’re waiving the appraisal value. You’re waiving everything else. Anyway, if you don’t show up for closing, you’re going to lose the money anyway.

So just give it up and that really rents you higher in offers because we work with sellers so we know the offers that come in and what are the, it’s not just price a lot of the time, it’s, you know, one of the contingencies, I mean if you give me a higher price, but you want an appraisal contingency, then I know you’re playing games with me because you’re just trying to get it under contract.

And then you’re going to try to keep it going, even if the appraisal came in low and negotiate lower and the seller might not want to leave this contract, but don’t play the game with me. Just don’t accept an offer like that. Okay. So pricing strategy rock and roll.

[00:08:11] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So, I won’t get to detail in ethnicities and cultures and all that fun stuff because I actually need to do a lot more research as to how much I can really speak to without kind of breaking any fair housing laws.

Right. And I think that’s something that’s typically really hard for agents to do. Everybody wants to know if it’s a good school district or if I should live there, if it’s safe. Actually, if it’s safe is the biggest point that buyers ask, but agents shouldn’t speak about safety. It’s something that can lead into and the reason why is because it can lead into discrimination, redlining, you know, telling people to not live in certain neighborhoods because some ethnicities are there or because it’s the people are poor, whatever it might be.

So in any case, when people price homes, there is always a number 8 at the end of certain homes, because that’s, you know, in the messaging and the, you know, Reddit threads that are kind of in the underworld, it said that if you put an eight on the listing, it’s for good luck for certain cultures to buy. Right? So we know that it’s not the real number. For the most part, it really isn’t ever going to be a real number in the Bay Area. Most of the time, a good listing agent will list the house a little bit under what it should sell. The issue is that in a lot of markets, homes are really listed way below the actual market price.

So if a house is 1, 988, 888. It’s going to go anywhere between 2. 5 to even 3 million, right? The offer that Fred was talking about earlier I think it’s going to go for 2. 9. So 300K above the list price. The issue isn’t that it’s a, it’s not a huge fixer in my opinion, it’s just a bit outdated, but it’s just based on our location, right? The houses in the vicinity or in the 4 million million dollar range, right? That are fully renovated. But in any case, there’s going to be a lot of markets where there’s heavy underpricing. So we always say this in our calls, don’t look at the list price, look at what things sell for.

And of course, it’s not going to be every house, you know, we’re not telling you that every house you’re going to have to bid 500, 000 above list, but if the house next door sold for 3 million and you see a house that’s in the market for 1. 9, it’s not that it’s just a fire sale and that you’re going to get a good deal because there’s other buyers, right?

Something that our client that made a bid today said was, “Oh, there’s 50 offers.” That means that there’s 49 other buyers for that one house, which is not good, right? That means that, you know, there’s other people who were on vacation already for Thanksgiving, which means that maybe there’s another 5, 10 buyers that are out there.

People have just taken a break for November. And they’re not in the market right now. So there’s always going to be a good amount of people looking to purchase. Right? And that’s the hardest part that the consumer forgets that it’s not just about them, right? It’s about everyone else that’s also in the market.

So that’s kind of my answer in that.

[00:11:45] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s good advice. Is there anything you would have done differently with that offer?

[00:11:48] Fred Glick: That’s the price. It was a cash buyer. Yeah.

[00:11:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:11:55] Fred Glick: Waving everything. Well, he could have given up the escrow money.

[00:12:01] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like there’s just, it was an order of magnitude above all the other offers.

[00:12:06] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think it was one of those things where the only thing that we could do is, you know, be outside the agent’s door to make sure that we got a counter of sorts. Because I mean, it’s when there’s 50 offers, you’re not responding to anyone. You’re just looking at the top two, right?

So it’s hard to really do something different. I think that for the most part, we did everything right. It’s just, I think, a miscalculation and kind of knowing I, we, at this time in the market, I’m not expecting 50 offers in any house. It doesn’t matter how underpriced it really is.

[00:12:48] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And that can be a tip in itself.

I mean, there’s in an ultra-competitive market, there’s always that unknown quantified or that unknown thing that’s out there that you can’t really prepare for such as some ultra-prepared cash offer that just needs to have that house and it’s going to outbid everyone no matter what. That isn’t always the case, but you need to know that it’s there in this market.

So we’ve got fully underwritten pre-approval. What was the second one, Fred? It was?

[00:13:14] Fred Glick: Well, it was on it in addition to that, getting it let’s call it an interim financing loan.

[00:13:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh yeah. Creative ways to get a more attractive offer.

[00:13:26] Fred Glick: Right.

[00:13:26] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Understand the pricing.

[00:13:29] Fred Glick: Exactly.

[00:13:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And be prepared.

[00:13:34] Fred Glick: Doing the deposit to the seller.

 And what we didn’t talk about a couple of things. Number 1, our inspections. So here’s the story with inspections you have to know. The listing agent in the Bay Area normally gets them done. Probably not in condos, maybe less likely that they’re done. But on a single-family house, they’re usually done.

All these guys are licensed, and yes, they can make mistakes. But the thing is, if everybody gets the report, and they’re comfortable with it, they’re just going to bid, like this last one in Mountain View. They’re just going to bid, and yeah, depends on that inspection report. We’re playing with one now where it’s, inspection report showed some foundation issues.

And so what we do is our buyers say, “Hey, do you know anything about this foundation issue?” We don’t. We don’t know anything about the house. Don’t come to me to fix anything. I’m not your guy. And the listing agent is worthless too. That’s not their thing. They don’t know this thing. So we tell people, “Call the inspector.”

Most of the time we call the inspector, everything’s fine. This time the inspector wanted the permission of the agent, which is, which is fine and we’ll get it. So if that happens, have your agent call the agent, call the listing agent, and get them to contact the inspector because you’re basing your offer on that inspection.

But you want to do a couple of things. And this is case to case, depending on the house and the situation, you’re usually going to get a home inspection and a termite. What you’re not going to usually get is a roof, especially if it’s an old roof. You know, it’s just just predict that you’re going to tear it up and put it back and put solar panels on. The other big thing now is the sewers, the sewer video. So we tell people, “Look, if there’s enough time and you’re really super interested we can get an inspector to go out.”

We use a company called Inspectify. And we, the reason we do is because they’re an aggregator of all the inspectors, home, termite, roof and the sewer. And they can organize it. They can get people out quickly. They can try to make sure they get there about the same time. You know, it’s convenience factor and we’ve used them for years and we just refer people to them. And it’s actually in our Slack channel direct link. Anyway, having said that, what they do is they can get that sewer person out even before you make an offer or even a regular inspector, but normally up in Washington State, that’s kind of normal that you get inspectors to come out before you make an offer and just pay them for a full inspection. Down here, another product that they’ve developed along with us through our recommendation is a kind of a light inspection, meaning an inspector goes out and you go with them.

They walk through the house. They kind of look at what they can without doing the full-blown. Look at everything. Every tiny little screw. And this way you can kind of be confident, “Hey, the place isn’t falling apart. And I know there’s going to be problems.” And you get them back to do the finish of a full inspection later.

But also, and I’ve never had this yet, but we may be able to get the sewer inspection out early. Who knows? So it’s something to look into. It’s something to push to make it more comfortable for you, but that sewer inspection now is getting to be just a requirement. We just found one up in Washington state.

I mean, it was like toilets. It was insane. Parts of crap. And so like blow the whole deal, but the sellers maybe want to do the whole work. So we’ll see. So there you go.

I think last but not least, let’s talk about our competition. The other real estate agents who are out there. And most of them are out there still trying to get 2. 5 percent of the sale price as their fee. They can, you know, but it’s all negotiable. Make sure your contracts are in writing. They have to be. We do non-exclusive. We don’t understand anybody who has signed an exclusive contract. So don’t let them have you sign an exclusive contract. There’s no reason.

Because it’s like getting married the first time you meet someone, as opposed to dating with them first. So, you know, date a little bit. You can sign multiple non-exclusive contracts too. So you can try a few agents at the same time. So we charge a flat fee of 9, 750 at the close of escrow. And if there’s any buyer broker fees left over, you get them.

And we usually have you bury it in the price because that’s the best way in a multiple-bid situation to do that. So there’s another tip for you: know your numbers going in on what it’s going to cost you. Hopefully, it’s significantly less than the buyer broker fee and use that buyer broker fee to reduce the price, which nets the seller more money.

It’s all about the net, not the gross, or you can go in and say, “Hey, I’ll take the two and a half percent after closing.” And then in our case, we take out the 9, 750 and then we wire you the rest. So we love doing it and our clients love it. And it just makes sense because we do more work sometimes for a 500, 000 deal than we do for a 9-million-dollar deal.

Why do we care what the price of the house is? So there you go. Let’s make sure I’ve chatted enough.

[00:19:43] Drew Thomas Hendricks: No, that’s in the Bay Area. What about Los Angeles is, does Los Angeles market have any tips that are different or is it pretty much the same as you?

[00:19:53] Fred Glick: Well, again, it’s the school district. So, you know, super nice house for a couple million dollars in Pasadena is going to get a lot of people to see it.

Are they going to have 50 offers? No, but they might have 10. There can only be 1 winner. So it just depends. But there’s some houses that lie around for a long time, single families even. Also, be careful out there. There’s a house that was for sale. The neighborhood was good, school district was good.

The price was really good. We couldn’t get any cooperation from the agent to contact us about anything. And then we realized they had just done a whole rehab and didn’t pull any permits. Yeah. So you don’t want that house. No matter how good the work is, they could just come in and say, “Nope, take it all down.” and so it costs you a million.

We always say for open houses on the houses you love, not like love, go to the first open house in the very first minute on that very first day. Because if there’s 150, 000 people there, then you know the price is going to go skyrocketing. If nobody’s there, it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to go higher, but it probably isn’t going to go that high. And it might be manageable. And for some reason, people don’t want to see it but, you know, they can come the next day and nobody came on Saturday. Everybody came Sunday. You just don’t know, but it’s kind of the best way to do it. Another thing, don’t make yourself memorable to the listing agent. Don’t make friends with them.

If you have a question, be professional, just ask the question and, you know, always say, I have a buyer broker. Just want to know about the house. You know, does this come with the washer and dryer or something like that? Don’t talk to them about pricing because then once you do that, then they know you love the house.

And if you end up being, you know, there’s only three bids and you’re one of them, they’re just going to jack the price up on you. Don’t become friends with them. Don’t contact them. Don’t ask them for showings. Use your buyer broker. That’s what they’re there for because they’re, you know, we’re the wall between the two of you and we kind of, René is great with the agents and knows how to talk to them and invoke a lot of information and they like to talk so, but they’ll tell us things differently than they’ll tell you because and they’ll also try to recruit you to be represented by them. And so they can do dual agency, which is a whole different topic. But that’s a big no, no.

Anyway, René, got anything there?

[00:22:47] René Pérez Jr.: That not all agents understand contract laws. And then I think that agents. I think that there needs to be an overhaul in real estate licensing, because if an agent does not know the law, they should not be practicing.

I mean, I have an agent right now, and the reason why I’m not really paying a lot of attention here is there’s an agent who, because of this podcast, I decided to hire someone to do a showing today at 4:30. And, you know, they have a Supra, which is it’s a Supra box to go show, to allow agents to open the keys. That’s to open the lockbox.

And she’s saying that she expected me to be at the showing because there’s a buyer agency that I have, but that is irrelevant as to who shows a house. There needs to be a license agent. We’re under contract and we have 17 days to go see a property, right? So she’s saying that she’s canceling the showing and that she’s not letting us in.

Well, the fact is that them doing that is actually breaking the law. It’s breaking the contract.

[00:23:54] Fred Glick: They’re breaking the contract.

[00:23:55] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So it just creates a lot of issues when agents don’t understand what the contract is.

[00:24:02] Fred Glick: Yeah, we got to send her to her broker.

[00:24:04] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:24:05] Fred Glick: And we got to contact the broker and you know, he’ll, they’ll be all apologetic to us because we’re right. A hundred percent.

Yeah. Here’s the thing that I’ve told people, asked to see the first contract that someone wrote, an agent wrote for someone else. They can block out the name, but you want to see a contract that they wrote, not the one that they won in the end with all the attachments, just the initial contract.

Okay, run it through ChatGPT or show it to us. We’ll tell you what’s wrong. I’ve had three or four contracts in the last couple of months. I mean, just things not filled in. My favorite one was this agent demanding 2. 5 percent on the contract of a buyer broker fee and having the buyer broker fee agreement, which she’s supposed to attach, have nothing when it came to her compensation.

It was blank.

Hello. It’s a contract. It’s just pathetic. And the way people wrote contracts, they have no idea what they’re doing. And the problem is you’re, you know, one of these big agencies and you’re just another agent. Be careful of these people. They just throw them out there and they say, write contracts.

They don’t, don’t follow up with them. They don’t train them, right? They don’t supervise them, right. And it’s going to hurt you as a buyer. I mean, we see it, you know, we pride ourselves on getting contracts right. And, you know, when we see such sloppy on, I mean, they’re not contracts. They’re so bad.

Okay. I could be rambling, but check your agent with the contract and they’re all, you know what, they’re all the same price, supposedly. I mean, I know some great agents who are, you know, two and a half percenters, but whatever. And they’re great agents. They write a contract. They know how to deal with people.

They know, they understand the transaction and blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. And then somebody who’s brand new, but they all make two and a half percent.

All right, I’m done. Soap, I’m off the soapbox.

[00:26:20] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Off the soapbox and drinking your water box. Now there’s some good tips in there hidden.

[00:26:26] Fred Glick: I think we got enough for this week. Talked enough. We got…

[00:26:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You can tell podcast is almost over when, you know, I think we’ve said what we said.

[00:26:36] Fred Glick: And when René’s dying.

This has been another episode of We Fixed Real Estate, giving you real estate buying alpha.

[00:26:43] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Bye Fred.

[00:26:45] Fred Glick: Bye. Real estate buying alpha.