Podcast

Using a swing loan in an insane market!

Using a swing loan in an insane market!

We’ve invented something new. Learn how to use a swing loan. Even if you do not have a house to sell.

Season 2 Episode 2

In this episode with Fred Glick, Rene Perez, Jr. & Wouter

Fred and Rene interview an Arrivva buyer who recently bought a home in San Ramon using the swing loan program. The client shares his first-hand experience and discusses what he believes gives Arrivva a competitive advantage over other real estate brokerages.   

After a brief discussion on the recent market conditions and how they affected our clients home sale, Rene shows off Arrivva’s new Matterport camera. The 3D camera and virtual tour software platform he uses to digitize his listings by automatically creating 3D tours, 4K print quality photos that can be virtually staged.

Then Fred discusses what we do at Arrivva to alleviate problems while getting clients prepared to make a winning bid. We want to make sure that if you’re going to buy, you can buy under the worst possible conditions. We will get you ready for any event that may occur and will discuss many tactics to make your offer stand out.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

We Fixed Real Estate Season 2 Episode 2 Transcript

Fred Glick (00:00):

Oh. I mean, the market’s starting to pick up. So-

Wouter Steenbergen (00:03):

Don’t tell me that!

Fred Glick (00:07):

Yeah, it’s great. I mean, people are going 18,000, 18 million over. I mean, it’s just this is crazy. Nah. Nah, it’s about the same. It’s like there’s still those first time… We lost a couple of deals with first-time buyers. They just freaked out and didn’t make the deposit. It’s like seeing the house 18 times, you read the disclosures, you read the inspections, and like, “But we had a cash deal, no contingencies,” but they come back the next day and say, “We need 10 days for contingencies.” I said, “For what?” And then I knew they weren’t going to make the deposit and moved on to the next person. So anyway, Rene you ready?

Rene Perez, Jr (00:46):

Oh yeah.

Fred Glick (00:47):

Okay. All right. So, we’re actually officially starting episode two of season two, We Fix Real Estate. I’m Fred Glick with Rene Perez above me in the video or in your ear somewhere soon if you’re listening to this on audio and we have secretly in here behind the scenes is Jen, our super admin. And she’s just hanging out here. So you may never see her. So she’s always behind the scenes.

Fred Glick (01:18):

So, we got a special guest star today. This is a gentleman who had been our client as a buyer who went through the swing loan, bridge loan process. It’s a little different with him because he had two houses. We tried to do it with one house. We’ll get into those details later. And also we have behind Rene is C-3PO or our version of it. And we’ll get into what that really is a little later. And his friend R2-D2. Or do I have them backward? I can’t remember. Anyway, so all the Star Wars fans are all upset at it. So, we said it wrong. And the Star Trek fans hate us. Anyway-

Rene Perez, Jr (01:58):

I’ve never watched Star Wars. So-

Fred Glick (02:00):

You never watched it?

Rene Perez, Jr (02:02):

Nope, never have. One day.

Fred Glick (02:05):

It’s a generational thing, I guess. It didn’t come out in your era.

Rene Perez, Jr (02:09):

Yes. Maybe.

Fred Glick (02:10):

Well Wouter, let’s start with the first question. Have you seen Star Wars?

Wouter Steenbergen (02:14):

Absolutely. Of course. The original, I don’t know. When my dad was young when he showed me the original, the first, what was it? Episode Four, I think it was the first one?

Fred Glick (02:26):

Technically. Yeah.

Wouter Steenbergen (02:27):

So, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve seen all of them, but I’ve seen a good amount of them and I think I’ve probably seen the last one in the cinema.

Fred Glick (02:35):

There you go. Oh, no. They’ll make thousands more. Are you kidding? [crosstalk 00:02:40] A lot of money for that-

Wouter Steenbergen (02:42):

… so far. I like it. I think it’s a little repetitive, it gets a little repetitive after a while because [crosstalk 00:02:50] same as the original generation does, but it’s [crosstalk 00:02:55] I like it.

Fred Glick (02:55):

There you go. I actually saw it originally when it came out. It was-

Wouter Steenbergen (03:00):

Is that what it’s called? The genre?

Fred Glick (03:04):

I’m sorry?

Wouter Steenbergen (03:05):

Space war opera, I think is what it’s called.

Fred Glick (03:07):

Oh, there’s actually a name for it.

Wouter Steenbergen (03:10):

Yeah.

Fred Glick (03:10):

Who would have thought? Anyway, this is not the Big Bang Theory. So, we’ll move on. So Wouter came to us and I guess he can kind of explain his process of selling. He was selling. So under the agreement, he’s selling a property over in the Peninsula and then jumping over to the East Bay. And this is interesting because he said, “Look, it’s got to work in the next couple of months because I’m moving my kids from this school to this school. We don’t want to miss the window.” So, the one thing about you is you understood the process and you understood that you’re just going to get seriously into it. So, why don’t you take us up to first of all, how you found us, who else you checked out and why?

Wouter Steenbergen (03:58):

So, I guess maybe I’ll do a quick background of my situation. I was located in the Bay Area. I bought my first house ever there in the middle of the Peninsula about seven years ago. And so, what happened is the pandemic hit and the kids were all in the house and we decided it was a nice time to get a bigger house. I have three children. My oldest is going right now into middle school. My youngest was going into a school until we figured why not buy another house or a different house and move?

Wouter Steenbergen (04:42):

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess I don’t tell this story a lot, but what really happened is I was in the middle of trying to refinance the original house because I had

Wouter Steenbergen (04:53):

And so I told my wife, I said, “Look, I’m talking to these bankers. And they basically tell me if I refinance and we can’t move for at least half a year, so we could also move,” and so that’s, I guess you could say my first mistake, because then she said, she thought about it for a while and said, “Let’s move.” And so now I had a little bit of a bigger problem because it’s right at the end of the pandemic, it’s always crazy to buy a house in the Bay Area, but this was the worst time in known history. And so, the first problem I had in my mind is can we afford to move? How does that work? I had never bought a house before. I’d never sold a house before. I bought one house. Never sold one. How does that work? How do you-

Fred Glick (05:44):

Buy and sell and-

Wouter Steenbergen (05:45):

How do you buy and sell? Do I have to move twice? Those kinds of things. And so I just typed in, I guess I just typed in, “I need a realtor,” in Google and I went and started calling the top listings and you were there. And so, the first thing that happened as per my recollection is I put in my email address and I got this invitation to say, “Can you meet on Slack or on Zoom?” I’m like, “That’s pretty cool.” That’s kind of how I live, right? I’m on Zoom and on Slack every day, all day. And the first thing that happens is this guy and his buddy show up on this phone call, and he just explains to me all the answers to all my questions, right?

Wouter Steenbergen (06:36):

Do you have to move twice? No. There’s a solution, right? How much does it cost? Well, if you go with me, it’s cheap or inexpensive or whenever you say. Is it hard? Well, how do I get financing? I have this difficult financing situation, how do I solve this? He said, “Well, I know somebody, Vinny with the big arms,” I think you called him at the time. It turns out it was a different guy, but [crosstalk 00:07:08] it was all of these problems basically slowly but surely disappeared or got solved or the answers to my questions got answered.

Fred Glick (07:17):

Yeah. It’s a good way to put it. So, let me go down and translate into actually what happened, what we did. So the bottom line, one thing that I really push, push, push, absolutely, to every one of our potential clients is they got to be super pre-approved, ready to go, yada yada. Wouter’s self-employed. Self-employed is just hated by the standard lenders because they don’t get it. They just don’t get it. His situation was that he had to go to what they call non-QM, non-qualified mortgage lenders. Still, to me, they’re known as subprime lenders just because it’s not plain vanilla, Fannie Mae, or Jumbo, great rate, blah, blah, blah. So they drove him crazy, I’m sure, with get me a statement every single hour of what your business is doing and freshening it up and it was just a pain.

Fred Glick (08:14):

So, we knew we were going to have a problem. So, what I said to Wouter is get approved for whatever you can get approved on, and then what we’ll do is we’ll use that approval to go to these swing bridge loan lenders. And because they’re going to get paid off, that’s all they really care about. So, what they will do is go and approve you for a loan of 75% loan to value. And your case is a little different, but I won’t go into that now, just by proving that you did have income, that you have this approval, and what they did is say, “Okay. We’ll go to 75% loan to value. We’re not going to verify your assets. We’re not going to do an appraisal of the property. We don’t care,” because they know the market. So, that’s what we’re able to do to leverage that, in addition to paying a ginormous price and I forget, what did we do with the rebate? Did we use that in the price negotiation or did we use that to pay for the swing loan? I can’t remember.

Wouter Steenbergen (09:17):

Yeah. I mean, so what happened at the end of the day, a couple of things happened. I got pre-approved for a loan. I got approved for a swing loan. I bought a house right with Fred and Rene-

Fred Glick (09:33):

Yeah, but I’m asking-

Wouter Steenbergen (09:35):

… sold my old house.

Fred Glick (09:36):

Right. But on the purchase, did you use the rebate to be part of the bid?

Wouter Steenbergen (09:43):

Yeah.

Fred Glick (09:44):

Okay.

Wouter Steenbergen (09:44):

And what happened I we wanted to have the most competitive bid and the price model where that Fred offers works very well with that [crosstalk 00:09:58] is on the offer, I think the way originally it worked is you have put on the offer that the total commission was going to be zero dollars.

Fred Glick (10:08):

Right.

Wouter Steenbergen (10:08):

The total commission will be taken care of in a different way. At the end of the day, that’s not what happened. I think the selling agent changed that around and ended up putting Fred’s commission back into the-

Fred Glick (10:32):

Just our flat fee of 87-

Wouter Steenbergen (10:33):

Flat fee-

Fred Glick (10:34):

Right. So, we used the rest. We gave it to the seller and the seller was able to have a lower sale price.

Wouter Steenbergen (10:40):

That’s right.

Fred Glick (10:41):

And pay less closing costs too-

Wouter Steenbergen (10:43):

That’s right. Yeah, and the message was simple. They said, “Look, you were competitive or you won the bid because you have the most competitive rebate.”

Fred Glick (10:54):

Right. What was your purchase price?

Wouter Steenbergen (10:59):

1.85 or 1.8… Well-

Fred Glick (11:02):

Roughly.

Wouter Steenbergen (11:04):

I offered 1.85 million and the buyer took 1.845

Fred Glick (11:11):

Okay, but there, it’s about 37 [inaudible 00:11:15]. So, in the high 20s, 28, 29,000 is what we used to just give back to the seller. So-

Wouter Steenbergen (11:20):

That’s right.

Fred Glick (11:22):

That’s pretty cool. And you can go to our page at arrivva.com/buyers and you can play with it so you can see how much rebate you get and a bunch of other information. So, okay. So, now we get to a point where the house is sold and now you’re going to list your house. So, yeah. We wanted to introduce our thing behind Renee. That’s a Matterport. That’s what they look like.

Rene Perez, Jr (11:48):

So, for those of you that have never seen how a 3D model is created, you have this little camera with three separate lenses. I won’t go too deep into that because I did not study what exactly are the different lenses. They’re pretty much throughout the whole property, this camera will turn and turn and turn at a 360-degree angle. So, it’s probably dependent on the [inaudible 00:12:16] of your house, it will take anywhere between an hour and a half to even four hours, but it’s really important for your house to have basic things like this because especially with the pandemic, I mean you don’t want just every single person to go inside the house and then decide they didn’t like it, right? So, they see this 3D. It has everything they might kind of, sort of like, and then once they see that, once they see the whole layout, they can then decide, “Yeah. You know what? I’ll go and see it. I’m a serious buyer. I actually like the property.”

Fred Glick (12:52):

Exactly. I think you guys can see on the screen, I have one of the 3D’s of one of the properties that we just put under contract. This is a completely empty house. This room is empty, except for this lamp. What they did is this is what we get done. We virtualize, stage the place and they did a nice job with it, this is kind of how the nicest, best layout of this room would work. Looks really nice. And then you can even do things where let’s go in the kitchen and then you get to the door here and we hit another button and we can take you outside. So, they’re now allowing this to go outside. This is the way backyard here. It’s pretty cool. So, you can get into some pretty deep detail with this. One quick another thing to mention, I will stop sharing this, is the other toy we have. I don’t know if you have some B roll for it, Rene?

Rene Perez, Jr (13:56):

Not yet, but I will bring out the drone. I mean, the aerial shots. I mean, making sure that there’s pictures from the entire neighborhood. I mean, it just creates the full-service aspect of what we do, right? So, I’m still learning how to use a drone, of course, but-

Fred Glick (14:14):

Yeah. We’ll have our magic drone soon that allegedly will fly through the house, remote control, and you’ll be able to eventually control it from your house or something. So, it’s another cool thing. Anyway, Wouter, back to you. So, tell us how this experience of being a seller was generically and what people can expect from agents, things that happened, buyers, brokers, goof stuff. I don’t know if you got into any of that or was it just pretty much bing, bing, bing?

Wouter Steenbergen (14:51):

No. I mean, it was pretty straightforward. I still feel like it costs a lot of money to sell a house. If you sell your house for $2 million, you’re going to pay $80,000 or so on costs, which was more than I expected. Besides that, the process of selling a house with whatever agent it was that I used was pretty straightforward. It was signing some documents, putting together the disclosures. They took care of all the repairs and stuff that I wanted to get done and all the painting and all that stuff. So, that was easy and straightforward, but it is one of the things that surprise me, it’s still quite stressful, right? Even though a lot is taken care of. There’s this idea, there’s a lot riding on it.

Wouter Steenbergen (15:48):

As a buyer, I always had this feeling that the seller was in control in some sense by making all these decisions. Interestingly enough, as a seller, I was feeling like the buyers were too much in control because how many buyers are you going to get in? What do they offer? And an offer comes in and then you have to respond to it quickly. Maybe it’s because it’s not my job or for whatever reason, the industry is broken or whatever. But it’s just, it’s still even as a buyer, it’s a painful process and I don’t really enjoy it.

Fred Glick (16:32):

Yeah. It’s like I tell everybody, buyer and seller, you got to understand, this is a business transaction. This is a contract between parties and you have to perform and they’re going to ask for different parts of the contract. And one of them is, and it’s as a buyer broker I do this, I want an answer from a seller right away because I also don’t want the agent to shop my deal to other agents because believe it or not kids, it happens that agents take your deal, call their friend who works in their office or somewhere that’s just another friend, say, “I got an offer for a million two, come in a million 210 and it’s yours.” I have documented evidence that it happens. So, you want an answer right away. You don’t want it to shop-

Rene Perez, Jr (17:17):

Sometimes it’s also about being slightly more patient. I know it’s a little difficult when it’s like, okay, well I really want to sell as quickly as possible. Everything else is being sold in a week. What happens? I’m a little scared. Even in the old listings that we’ve worked on, it’s like, yeah. One day you get an offer, one day you won’t. And then two days later you’ll get an offer that’s 5% more than the last one. And well, it’s a risk. It’s always going to be a risk and you accept that one that’s pretty good or you’re a little patient. And it’s all speculation. People tend to think that the housing market or real estate is not speculation. It’s all speculation. So, you don’t know.

Fred Glick (18:05):

It’s just another asset.

Rene Perez, Jr (18:07):

Yep.

Fred Glick (18:09):

It’s Bitcoin with sticks and bricks.

Rene Perez, Jr (18:13):

And Fred, I still do not want to be paid in Bitcoin. Just putting it out there.

Wouter Steenbergen (18:18):

So, what happened with my process is we’re on the market for two weekends and we set a bidding date for Tuesday afternoon at one, and I was going to call the guy an hour later and I called him up and he said, “I don’t have good news. We have one bid that’s about 5% under the asking price.”

Fred Glick (18:37):

Right. You were in that lull-

Wouter Steenbergen (18:39):

That’s not what I was expecting, right? I was like two weeks from now, we started going on the market. I was like two weeks from now, we’re going to have 10 offers and all I have to do is choose the highest one. And then we’re going to be done and I called the guy. Crickets. So, that was stressful, but that’s not what I was expecting. That’s also not what I was prepared for, I guess. It’s also, I guess, not what the agent was expecting and the reason may be what it is and then at the end of the day, it got sold. It took a couple of days longer and the price ended up being fine, but that created a little bit of extra frustration that I just wasn’t prepared for.

Fred Glick (19:23):

Yeah and I mean, it came. We suffered from it because we had three listings, four listings that all went up at the same time. At that time, there was this lull when people were able to take their masks off, it was summertime. The kids were out of school, pent up energy to get out. And they just said, “Real estate? It’s ginormous. It’s like let me relax for a while.” And so everything just fell off and slowly they’re coming back. We can see it. And like both houses that we had left, went. Sold today, where there’s just more and more interest. So, we got some stuff coming up and hopefully, that’ll be able to be an even better market because if you think about it, the supply didn’t change in six weeks. The demand, if it dropped off 10%, big deal, but you’ve got people reinvigorated to do it. And there are always new first-time buyers.

Rene Perez, Jr (20:22):

Well, and also the other thing is last time when we started doing this listings, it was masks off, free to go wherever you want. And guess what? Now we’re back into hey everyone, start wearing your masks again. So-

Fred Glick (20:38):

Yeah, and prices will go up. Masks on, prices up. There’s the headline for this-

Wouter Steenbergen (20:44):

Wait. So, I should have waited a couple of weeks.

Fred Glick (20:46):

Masks off, price down. There we go. Yeah. It’s exactly it. Crazy, but it’s-

Wouter Steenbergen (20:54):

The other thing and I still want to talk about my own process a little bit more because the thing that’s so frustrating for me is this idea that you have when you sell a house in California, you have to sell it in eight days because if it waits too long, the vultures are circling apparently. So there is this pressure, right? Of you have to sell it or you’re going to get less money, but there’s no control, right? As soon as you decide, “I’m going to go now,” you have to wait eight days, and then you’ll know if it was successful or not and you can’t do anything in the middle. There’s nothing to do.

Fred Glick (21:35):

But the funny thing is had you listed two weeks before that, you would have had that eight day gone, see you later.

Wouter Steenbergen (21:42):

That’s right.

Fred Glick (21:43):

It turned on a dime, it blew everybody’s mind.

Wouter Steenbergen (21:47):

But that’s what I feel like I was missing, right? Somebody that understood that part of it and really was able to, before I went through this process, map out based on some data that I could check myself, tell me, “Okay, this is the right time to list. This is all the steps that you need to do beforehand and these are all the steps that you shouldn’t do if you want to hit this date,” and I feel like no one really took me through that process partially because I didn’t ask for it, but it was the first time that I sold the house. When I was buying a house, it was the second time, right? And I found Fred because I knew what to look for.

Fred Glick (22:27):

Thank you. And we tried. We put in two offers before we got this? Or just one? I can’t remember.

Wouter Steenbergen (22:34):

It was the second offer that we-

Fred Glick (22:37):

Second offer. What did we end up losing the first one by?

Wouter Steenbergen (22:40):

So, the first offer that I made on a house was 1.92, I think I offered. And if you’re calculating your commission, that’s equivalent to 1.95 if you take out the difference. And I think it went for 1.955. So, they beat us. What happened is we put in the bid, they asked us to come back and give our best price, but they said they were asking four people for their best price. And so we’re like that just makes no sense. If you have two people that are on top, sure. But this is just greedy. So, we gave up. It was our first offer. We didn’t want to go all the way and we ended up losing it by 5,000 because they sell or shopped it around or whatever. But the second house we made an offer, it was a very competitive offer, Fred’s pricing structure definitely helped, and we got it.

Fred Glick (23:43):

Yeah. It was fun. So, how are you enjoying the house? Everything good?

Wouter Steenbergen (23:47):

Oh, the house is great. Oh, yeah.

Fred Glick (23:49):

The kids love it?

Wouter Steenbergen (23:51):

The kids love it. It’s a little bigger, it costs about the same in terms of the price, but the house is about 30% bigger. It has a little pool here and we’re getting ready to go to school next week. So, we’re all looking forward to this.

Fred Glick (24:05):

Because I know other buyers would want to know this, what’s it cost to run the pool? Let’s talk about the pool.

Wouter Steenbergen (24:12):

I don’t know the answer. Well, here’s how to break that down. So, this is my first pool ever. We had to look through all that information. The pool or the owner of this house had a pool guy take care of it. And so, we just called that guy and had him come out and he seemed responsible, reliable. And I said, “Look, let’s get through the summer on your monthly contract.” So, his contract offer is $175 a month. What that does is he comes out once a week, he cleans up. There’s a guy with a brush, he cleans up the algae and stuff. He measures the chemicals, he puts more in and he takes care of all that supposedly, right?

Wouter Steenbergen (25:03):

And it turns out that doesn’t actually work. The guys don’t measure it very well and if it’s covered, they won’t do it and they are unreliable. And they don’t answer any phone calls. It is ridiculous. The amount of bluster and fake people in pool care is unheard of. It’s probably even worse than in real estate. Although, it may not be. But anyway, so that’s the starting point. [crosstalk 00:25:36] It’s $175 a month to basically do nothing and then you have to run the pool pump and there’s some electricity that goes with that.

Fred Glick (25:44):

You got it. Why don’t we invent some kind of a unit that stays on your property, but a drone flies in and comes in and he does all the measuring for you. You don’t need people.

Wouter Steenbergen (25:57):

Yep. [crosstalk 00:25:59] There are definitely ways to completely automate it.

Fred Glick (26:03):

Yeah. There’s got to be a way to automate it.

Wouter Steenbergen (26:04):

It is completely automatable. With the current tools, you can. It costs about, for about $4,000, you can automate everything. You have to do something once a year.

Fred Glick (26:17):

Wow. That’s so worth it and you don’t have to worry about any of these idiots showing up or not showing up.

Wouter Steenbergen (26:23):

That’s right.

Fred Glick (26:24):

I love it. So, yeah. That’s a whole different podcast, but that’s-

Wouter Steenbergen (26:26):

Different podcast.

Fred Glick (26:28):

All right. So Wouter, tell the people who you are, what you got. He’s the start-up dude because he’s got the hairdo for it.

Wouter Steenbergen (26:37):

Oh, you want me to plug my business? I don’t feel like that’s necessary. I do some software product management. If you want to look me up online, I think, yeah. You’ll just have to guess where to find me.

Fred Glick (26:53):

You’re the first person I’ve actually met with the name of Wouter and it never has been in my consciousness and this year I was watching cycling and there’s like four guys named Wouter. Is it a very common name?

Wouter Steenbergen (27:06):

So, I’m from Holland originally. And it is a common name over there, yeah. It’s just the Dutch version of Walter is really what it is. So people my age, they’re all called that. [crosstalk 00:27:18]

Fred Glick (27:18):

There you go. Love to learn these things. So, anything anybody wants to add on this topic? I think we pretty much beaten it up at this part, but no. It’s been great having you on, giving your experiences buying, selling. It’s-

Wouter Steenbergen (27:33):

I want to add one thing and maybe for the listeners for your podcast, this is all known stuff, but I really appreciated this idea that Fred and Rene and Jen and the whole team were essentially always available any time of day. I had a question, I go on Slack, I type in my question, and lo and behold, two minutes later, I had an answer and that just, I mean I understand there are people that buy houses that don’t have Slack. I don’t know why they wouldn’t, but I understand some of those possibly exists, but if you do know what Slack is and you ever use it, the best way in the world to buy a house is by using Arrivva and using Fred and Rene’s experience.

Fred Glick (28:31):

Okay. Give him his free t-shirt now. He’s earned it. [crosstalk 00:28:35].

Wouter Steenbergen (28:34):

It’s true.

Fred Glick (28:37):

Yeah, thanks. We love it. And I mean, there’s a lot of people who don’t know what Slack is but do know what Microsoft Teams is because they use [crosstalk 00:28:49]. The same basic thing and even Discord is going Slack-ish now. They’ve started adding channels where you can have sub talks and all that kind of stuff.

Wouter Steenbergen (29:02):

Yeah, that’s true. The specific technology, that’s not the thing. The thing is if you have a question, you type it in and the answer comes straight away. And if you don’t understand it, you pick up the phone and you get a call and it’s just some other agents, you email them and at the end of the day, you get a response or you call them and they’ll tell you they’ll call you back and they don’t. And that is just not the experience I have with Arrivva.

Fred Glick (29:28):

I don’t even understand that, but the one thing that Slack added now, something called a Huddle. Have you tried a Huddle yet?

Wouter Steenbergen (29:34):

I think you put me in a Huddle once.

Fred Glick (29:36):

We did? We tried to do that? Yeah, it’s very cool. I annoy Rene all the time. Hey, Huddle invite.

Rene Perez, Jr (29:42):

The thing is, so the Huddle. So, Discord has this feature where if someone is doing work, you can have it activated and people can join your conversation without you bothering them and getting a notification or anything. It just appears on a sidebar of oh, this person’s online. You can join their channel and they’re available. So, Slack-

Fred Glick (30:05):

That’s pretty cool. [crosstalk 00:30:10] much better. I like that.

Rene Perez, Jr (30:11):

So, that’s why it annoys me because I would want that Discord feature in Slack. It’s better functionality. It’s like, you know what? He’s at his desk doing work. I can just join in his call and he’s available to talk. That would work better.

Wouter Steenbergen (30:24):

One more thing that I want to add, and then you can let me go. I also really appreciate it… So, Fred mentioned this before and I mentioned it before. I had a difficult or what I thought was a difficult financial situation at the beginning. And I just feel it really helped by… So, Fred knew some guy and I was like, “Okay. Oh great. He’s going to get, what’s it called? A referral bonus or they’re under cahoots and this guy, I don’t know what this deal is,” and as it turns out, none of that was true. None of my fear around how this was set up turned out to be true. In fact, right? There’s no business relationship between Fred and this guy.

Wouter Steenbergen (31:14):

He’s just trying to help me and he gave me this contact of the guy who was able to solve my problem and come up with a solution. And that’s just, it’s really appreciated, the approach that Fred took and the way he just wants to help seemingly without really this profit motive, right? It’s not about making shit tons of money. It’s about getting people the house that they want. And sure, you may or may not fit Fred’s target customer demographic. But if you do, then I want to say working with Fred was great, and Rene.

Fred Glick (32:06):

I so appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, we try because we don’t need the headaches. We just want to put everything up front as transparent as possible because for people who lie, their biggest problem is remembering what lies they told and to whom. That’s a full-time job for a lot of people. Yeah, and we have the same problem with agents on the side of the listing side. It’s very easy to post instructions online. Every one of our listings has its own page. You can get your disclosures, you can make an appointment, everything’s on it. It’s fully automated, yet these agents just don’t read and they call us. “Hi, I want to show you your house tomorrow,” and they think it’s on the Supra lockbox and it’s not and we have special code boxes.

Fred Glick (32:52):

Just it drives us crazy and now, we’re going through this little thing where we had these buyers who there’s credit, there’s a whole thing submitted to us. And then they just back out. These buyer brokers are not telling these people it’s a contract, don’t mess around. And it really pisses off the listing agent. And we have older sellers and they don’t understand what’s going on and it’s just everybody, just be straight, but they have a different way of doing things. And they don’t understand the way we do them. And we don’t understand how to work as they did. So, we’re trying. We’re trying to automate, make life easier.

Rene Perez, Jr (33:33):

And well, we’re trying to make sure at the end of the day, I mean it’s still a hot market in California, right? So, we really want to make sure that you’re prepared for, other than the actual exact price, we try to give you the A through Z of what you need to be prepared with. So, I try to respond at one, two in the morning, and if I need to be at some place at eight in the morning, it’s fine. I’m getting it done as soon as possible because you can’t wait three to four days. If you wait for those three to four days, it’s over and some agents, you’re a little more relaxed and well, we can get it done later and that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in California.

Fred Glick (34:15):

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:34:17] So, we do what we do. We try our best. We work for our client, whoever it is, the buyer, the seller. And by the way, we don’t do dual agency. So, I never represented the same buyer and seller of the same property, which is insane, but that’s a whole different subject, but no. I think that’s enough yakking I think we’ve done and we’ll let you go, Wouter. We really appreciate you coming on and thank you for the kind words and my best to your wife and kids.

Rene Perez, Jr (34:46):

I’ll update you with the shirt. Maybe I’ll have even a goody bag.

Fred Glick (34:52):

There you go. We got to send the kids something and especially his wife something. So, we’ll send a [inaudible 00:35:00] for the whole family. Send the kids to school with it on.

Wouter Steenbergen (35:04):

I don’t let my kids wear advertising-

Fred Glick (35:07):

Okay. I don’t blame you.

Wouter Steenbergen (35:08):

All right you guys, thank you.

Fred Glick (35:11):

All right. Thanks so much. Cheers.

Wouter Steenbergen (35:14):

All right, bye-bye.

Rene Perez, Jr (35:15):

Have a good day.

Fred Glick (35:18):

Okay. So, do we want to continue on anything, or we kind of bitched enough in this, of the stuff that’s been going on this week, but-

Rene Perez, Jr (35:28):

Well, we need to add a little more positivism to the podcast. I think we were just being negative and-

Fred Glick (35:38):

… the aggravation we go through and it’s just the bottom line is we shouldn’t complain about it. We work to alleviate the problems. I mean, what Wouter said is we just are prepared. We want to make sure that if you’re going to buy, you can buy under the worst conditions, which is 50,000 people making offers, multiple bids over the price, how to deal with the price, the inspections, everything. We just want you to be ready for that. And hopefully, you get just, somebody says, “Ah, just take 30 days and close whenever you want and yeah, you can add 10 days for inspections. Great.” We’ve gotten lucky on a couple of those. It’s all about supply and demand. That’s all it is, except if you’re in-

Rene Perez, Jr (36:24):

I’m going to have to stop you, Fred. So don’t say, “Oh, we can get lucky.” The term of luck, you can get that if it’s a property that’s a little funky.

Fred Glick (36:37):

Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s fine-

Rene Perez, Jr (36:40):

… nice, beautiful home, there will be no such thing as luck.

Fred Glick (36:44):

Oh, right. [inaudible 00:36:46], single-family and a nine school district, just you pay what you’re going to pay and that’s it because you’re at war with other families.

Rene Perez, Jr (36:54):

And I just say it because-

Fred Glick (36:55):

… mafia wars. It just has to do with real estate in California. Nobody gets shot. It’s you just get disappointed a lot.

Rene Perez, Jr (37:05):

Well, that you know of. Nobody gets shot-

Fred Glick (37:07):

You know what we need to talk about? El Cerrito, California. Real estate agents there. So, we’re selling a property there and I forget that we have a property. I want to tell you about how the market works there. There’s one major agent and other minor agents for probably a total of a dozen agents who do the same thing. If a house is going to sell for a million, they put it up for 800,000.

Fred Glick (37:33):

One of the code of ethics in the realtor code of ethics of which we are not members, but because we have a higher standard of ethics, is that you can’t list a house for something that’s not around the market value. So, what they’re doing is getting people all excited, “Oh, look. Here’s a house for 700,000. Let’s go out,” and half the real estate agents they have will just take them out not realizing what’s going on. It’s not their fault. They just don’t understand the market.

Fred Glick (38:00):

And what happens is they get this frenzy, they see all these people and it gets bid up and up and up and this $700,000 thing closes for 900,000. And it’s like, “Huh, what?” And we can pull these stats and we really should, so you can see original list price, what it’s sold for and the percentage. So, that’s the game. So, we got lost in the game.

Fred Glick (38:19):

Again, if you probably heard earlier, we listed the property right when that tiny crash happened, the unmasking time. And so, I put it up at market value based on an appraisal I had and it should have sort of sold for around there-ish, kind of theory. But then everything crashed. So, we had to come down and come down and we came down even further to a point so that we could drive enough traffic so that the thing could sell for over list. It’s just like, “Huh?”

Fred Glick (38:54):

And then some of these people started coming up with what they called transparent pricing. Shouldn’t all the pricing be transparent? You have to specialize and notify transparent pricing, meaning this is our retail price.

Rene Perez, Jr (39:10):

Well, yeah. You have to advertise transparent pricing because they know that what they’re doing is wrong.

Fred Glick (39:17):

Because they know the other game that the other people are playing. I think I even put it in the description, “Be very careful about initial prices because it’s not where they end up. We’re pricing it at what it should be,” and we didn’t get anything because people don’t understand. They look at Redfin here and here. They really don’t read. They say, “Oh, this is a great location. Blah, blah, blah.” You get emotionally involved in the property before you get intelligently involved, which is what it really amounts to.

Fred Glick (39:42):

It’s like you look at the pictures, you want to go out, every buyer we have is like this, But then it’s like now you see all the properties. Now you see the game. Hopefully, there’s a 360, but if there’s not, it makes it even worse. So, it’s just annoying to people who are buyers because if you got 10 people interested and you pick one, okay. But when you have 100 people interested and 90 of them don’t even qualify for what the actual real price is, you’ve just pissed people off and taken away resources to do nothing. You still have those 10 real buyers anyway. So, what’s the point of doing this? So, that’s my real bitch of the week for El Cerrito, California.

Rene Perez, Jr (40:30):

And I won’t add any because I don’t want to complain any longer.

Fred Glick (40:35):

There you go. Positive and negative. Here we go. We can’t [crosstalk 00:40:40] do that. Jen’s just in the middle going, “Oh, God.”

Rene Perez, Jr (40:43):

She probably already muted us.

Fred Glick (40:45):

Oh, yeah. She definitely, she muted us from the beginning. So, I’m sure. Anyway, I guess that’s it. But hey, interest rates are back to being really low. I’m starting to get some refinances here and there. I’m seeing that. I just locked somebody at two and a quarter on a 15 year. Oh, I’m sorry. On a 20 year fixed actually. So, the 20 year has a big difference on the 30 year. So if you’re thinking about refinancing, look at the 20 year rates this week. For some reason, they’re a hot commodity.

Rene Perez, Jr (41:18):

How much was the 30 year?

Fred Glick (41:20):

Oh, it was probably two and three quarters, but they’ve been an eighth or a quarter difference or sometime the same for a long time and I haven’t looked at the 20 years to be honest. Nobody’s asked about it. So I took it out of mind, but I’ve done over the years lots of twenties. Twenties are great. When you get your fires into the loan, you paid down the money, you’re making more money. And it’s like okay, I want to get rid of the loan now. That’s what most people who refi, they want to get down with 20 or 15 and get rid of it. So, second stage.

Fred Glick (41:54):

What else is cooking on our end? Well, we got the drone. We got the Matterport going on our own. We’ve done the first one and we’re sending it out for virtualization. It came out fabulous. Nice and clean, beautiful house coming in Belmont. We can’t pre-market it because when it’s out, it’s out and everybody knows about it. I don’t understand these coming soon. “Oh, let’s get people excited.” Same people are going to come out whether you do this pre-listing, whatever junk it is, coming soon, or an actual house.

Rene Perez, Jr (42:26):

Okay. Well, if any of you are agents listening to this and you have coming soon, then you’re going to offer cookies and coffee, I’ll join for the cookies and coffee. So, whatever.

Fred Glick (42:37):

He’s so easy. Mister free lunch. Oh, you’ll start going on tours and all over the place.

Rene Perez, Jr (42:45):

Oh, of course. Yeah and just know, and for all of you that are buyers and sellers, just know that that doesn’t work because it’s just people like me going for free food.

Fred Glick (42:56):

He has a free food nose this guy, especially he really picked up on the vaccination card for the Krispy Kreme donut every day. He was out-

Rene Perez, Jr (43:07):

Oh, absolutely.

Fred Glick (43:07):

Yeah. How many days in a row were you?

Rene Perez, Jr (43:10):

So, I have a record of 57 days and then there was a couple of days that I was traveling and I went on vacation. So, I stopped. But now I’ve been going one day, yes. One day, no kind of thing.

Fred Glick (43:23):

To be able to burn off calories in your 20s is one of the greatest things in life.

Rene Perez, Jr (43:28):

Yeah.

Fred Glick (43:32):

Just saying. Anyway.

Rene Perez, Jr (43:34):

Nice.

Fred Glick (43:35):

All right. So, we hit a little home mortgages, real estate market. Again, depends on the area, but it’s coming back in NorCal and ping us, do whatever. I don’t know. Push this subscribe. You know what to do kids. Anyway, I guess we can stop the recording now because-

Rene Perez, Jr (43:57):

… at some point in the next week or two weeks. Whenever you release the next one.

Fred Glick (44:02):

And remember, We Fixed Real Estate is a pending trademark of Arrivva Inc. So, don’t steal it.

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