What Lenders Actually Look For in 2025 With Fred Glick Of Arrivva

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

• Get lessons on long-term real estate investing and finding hidden value
• Hear the latest on crypto in real estate. Can you really use Bitcoin to buy a house? 
• Find out what lenders actually need to see in your mortgage audit trail and what could derail your home purchase
• Learn how to market and buy unique, remote properties with strategies most agents don’t talk about
• Thinking about buying a condo? Here’s what you need to know 
• Get homebuyer prep tips on pre-approvals, insurance, and finances

In this episode with Fred Glick

Frustrated by unclear mortgage rules or denied home loans?

In this episode of We Fixed Real Estate, Fred Glick and René Pérez Jr. of Arrivva break down exactly what lenders will scrutinize, from Bitcoin as proof of funds to the strict audit trails you must follow. Learn how to protect your financing, avoid common buyer mistakes, and position yourself for long-term real estate success. Whether you’re eyeing a condo, investing in remote properties, or navigating volatile markets, this episode is your essential guide to what it really takes to get approved in today’s shifting landscape.

Resources mentioned in this episode

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Welcome to the latest episode of We Fixed Real Estate.

René Pérez, freshly back from a gold prospecting journey to Alaska. René. Show that.

[00:00:29] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. For anyone that’s looking for an extra gold, you can’t, I guess you can’t really tell. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea. Let me see if I can blur the,

[00:00:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, I can see it.

[00:00:39] René Pérez Jr.: So lemme see.

[00:00:40] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, I can see it.

[00:00:41] René Pérez Jr.: It’s hidden in the black sand.

So usually when you pan for gold, you get a lot of the heavies. So you collect, if you see black sand, that means that there’s probably gold. So I have a little different bottles from different days.

[00:00:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s cool.

[00:01:00] René Pérez Jr.: I mean, it’s pretty, pretty small. But the idea is, I mean, if I spent there, you know, two weeks every year, five, 10 years, you collect, you collect a good amount of gold, just like appreciation in real estate, right?

[00:01:15] Fred Glick: You sell the house same year, you’re probably not gonna make a profit, but if you keep it for five, 10 years, you’ll come out with a pretty good chunk of cash. For those of you that don’t wanna mine Bitcoin.

[00:01:28] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:01:29] Drew Thomas Hendricks: You’ve got a couple more vials to go before your Parker Schnabel.

[00:01:33] René Pérez Jr.: That’s for sure. Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s a really good hobby. I mean, every person that I’ve met that’s like panning for gold, I mean, they’re super nice. They’re just there to relax. They share their stories. Some people say that it’s for exercise, ’cause like you’re, you know, moving the pan back and forth.

So, I mean, my arms, I do think my arms got bigger.

[00:01:55] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, you’re looking buff. You know, I was watching a, it was a YouTube thing. Do you, have you ever done it where you snorkel through the river and just kind of out?

[00:02:04] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So, that’s probably the next trip, maybe in a couple years. So if you, if you go up to Nome, Alaska or up in, yeah, up in the, I forget which ocean it is. But yeah, that’s still, I mean, there’s still a lot of gold, gold mining operations up there. Gold prospecting, and that’s where you’re gonna find the big nuggets. I mean, people make $50,000 in a day, still, so.

[00:02:29] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Paid for the whole trip.

[00:02:31] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, but I mean, that’s dangerous.

I’m sure that there’s animals that can just rip you apart. Right? And it’s really cold too.

[00:02:38] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. The video I saw, I think it was in New Zealand or somewhere in South America.

[00:02:42] René Pérez Jr.: They also have it in Australia, in Tasmania. So there’s, there was a, there’s a lot of operations out there.

[00:02:51] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s gonna be interesting. Now, Fred, you opened the subject. Bitcoin, I saw last week, they’re recommending that crypto assets can now be used for,

[00:03:02] Fred Glick: Yeah. You know what they’ve been using them, but you just had to convert it to cash. So now they’re saying, “Okay, we’ll just take the value of the bitcoin today. That’s your asset that we’re going to allow you to use for your mortgage.”

You’re eventually going have to convert it to cash to get it to the escrow company anyway. ‘Cause I don’t know of a single real estate escrow situation where the escrow company, the title company will accept Bitcoin. They only work in cash.

[00:03:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, not to pay for it. I think it’s for proof of funds.

[00:03:35] Fred Glick: Yeah. So it’s just, you’re gonna have to move it anyway, but now you don’t have to move it right away. That’s really all it is. It’s, you know, the headlines sounded great. “Oh, I can use my Bitcoin.” Well, you can always use your Bitcoin, you just gotta change cash.

[00:03:52] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Oh, thanks for clarifying. I thought it was like, you’ve got $5 million in Bitcoin, you don’t wanna sell it, they can’t prove that it’s an asset. $50,000 down payment and you wanna use that 5 million in Bitcoin just to prove that you have enough money to pay the mortgage, but you don’t wanna sell.

[00:04:07] Fred Glick: Right. It just used to be you had to convert it to cash for the underwriter to accept it. Now it’s just, “okay, you give us your Robinhood statement or something,” and there it is.

[00:04:16] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Use it or not and so it’s not a tax,

[00:04:18] Fred Glick: But eventually you have to convert it to cash. And you’re gonna have to prove the conversion to cash and the sending the money to escrow because let’s get into this, ’cause this is something important for people to know: The funds that you’re using for the purchase of a house—it’s a complete audit trail. If you don’t know what an audit trail is, you basically have to say, “Okay, here’s where my money is, and now I show it going either to the escrow company via a wire.” Or, “I got a gift,” then the gift went to one account. But then you gotta prove that it really was a gift. There’s a whole process. Don’t get pissed off at the lender. You have to do it. It’s not negotiable. You gotta trail your money. So the thing is, if you just got yourself a bag of cash, a couple hundred grand. You think you can go buy a house; you deposited the money in the bank, and the lender says, “Where’d you get the money from?” And you say, “I found it.” Dude. No. They won’t allow that money to be used for you to get a mortgage. And this is on the standard, you know, fully documented owner occupied things. There are no doc. Like loans for investors where you can, they don’t care ’cause they’re gonna charge you out the wazoo and rates.

But yeah, it’s really important. We had a buyer who got, I don’t know, about four or five different gifts from different family members and some were in foreign countries and bank statements in foreign countries. And it was just a whole mess. It took time to clear it all out. It has to be, the gift letter has to be for the exact amount as the gift.

So if you’re wire sending $50,000, but they charge you $50 for the wire and you net less than the $50,000 by the $50, you have to get a gift letter for the net of what you received, not the $50,000. It’s crazy, but everything has to match. It is a, an audit trail that must be done, even if you’re putting 50% down, it doesn’t matter.

They have to know where the money’s come from because there’s all kinds of shady deals going on. How they fake people with the money, how they would jack up the price and you buy a house that looked like for a hundred, but you’re really buying it for 40 because they raised the price and the seller’s taking a second or some other crazy thing, those days are gone. So it’s a full audit trail. So be careful and think about it.

So, but let’s go back to this situation where you have four different gifts coming in. Here’s the easy solution. Have the three of the gift givers give all the money to the person who’s closest to you. In other words, parents are usually the best.

So have your aunt send the money to your parents. Have it all come out of one account, one gift letter, one proof of funds, one proof of the wire to the escrow company or however they got it, or to your bank statement. Just makes life easier. That’s another little thing to watch out for with funds.

As we keep going with that, it’s basically, they’re gonna look at your bank statements for two months, and if they see a deposit that’s large, that’s other than your regular pay stub, they’re gonna ask where’d the money come from? If you transferred it, say from, you sold some mutual funds, you transferred it from that account to your checking. Gotta document it.

Give the lender every bit of documentation. Two months so they can easily see, “Oh, we see it, a credit coming, a debit coming out of the mutual fund. A credit coming into your checking account.” Obviously that was that. So, be careful. Two full months of physical statements. That’s what you gotta do. So if you’re trying anything else, put it in the bank, wait two full months, because then you know they don’t go back more than two months. So there you go.

[00:08:40] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s a helpful tip.

Think about it. Back to Bitcoin. Last week’s big announcement was really just no news.

It was just a…

[00:08:47] Fred Glick: It sounded like it, but you’ve always been able to use it. You just thought it converted to cash sooner, so no biggie.

[00:08:54] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We won’t dwell on it. What about using Bitcoin to get a loan on your Bitcoin to buy the house so you never have to sell the Bitcoin?

[00:09:01] Fred Glick: Lending rules are that any loan that you take, number one, they have to count what the monthly payment’s gonna be on the loan, but it must be secured by something. And to be honest, I don’t think they’re gonna let you secure it with a token like that. Usually it’s secured against a house, another piece of real estate or even a car loan. But the Bitcoin is fluid. So I don’t know the answer, but I’m going to err on the side of caution and say no. And I don’t think any guidelines come out about that, but we’ll look into that next week. We will answer that question.

[00:09:47] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. I’m just wondering, how do you know, like if you’ve got 10 million in Bitcoin and you want to take out a $1 million loan on it and just pay 1 million for cash, what is the, the mortgages don’t have anything.

[00:09:57] Fred Glick: No. If you’re gonna pay cash, it doesn’t matter. If you’re getting a loan, that’s when it matters.

[00:10:02] René Pérez Jr.: I mean, it’s similar, like if you have stocks, right? If you have stocks, they only count 80% of your value of stocks. Right?

[00:10:07] Fred Glick: Or sometimes 50%. It depends on the lender. Yeah. We’d borrow against the stock. So I’m sure if I had to guess, it’s probably something like that where they’ll say, okay, 50% is probably the number that you can secure it against. So.

[00:10:25] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So before we dive into the, what we’re actually talking about, since we’re still speculating, René, you were telling me you can buy a mine or a mining rights claim up in.

Yeah. How’s the track? Is that like real estate in Alaska?

[00:10:39] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, so I was, I haven’t looked too much deep into it. But the way it works is you can buy a claim, right? And you can’t build, right? It can only be done for recreational use and for mining rights. So that means that you can actually dig holes, depends on the state. Like in California you can’t dredge. And dredging is when you go deep inside and just start vacuuming, right?

And I mean, that creates a lot of environmental losses, right? That’s where, you know, back in the olden days there was a lot of mercury, right? So it pulls up all the dirtiness of that. So you don’t wanna bring mercury up. But in in Alaska you can dredge, in Alaska you can have a lot more sloshing.

So you can also, usually when you go to these places, you can only use your hand shovel. You can’t have a huge, you know, mechanic, you know, bulldozer to go through rocks because again, environmental concerns. But in a place like Alaska, there’s less restrictions. So you can have a slosh, which kind of functions like a little, it’s a little machine that you can just drip water into it. Right?

And if the river flows, it’s gonna go through all the dirt, and it allows for you to go through more dirt to look at the gold. And gold’s really sneaky, right? It’s heavy, it hides underneath all the dirt. So obviously if you have a big nugget, you’ll be able to see that more clearly. But since it’s heavier, you wash it out with this slosh and yeah. I mean, in Alaska, I was looking at, there’s places that, you know, one acre for like 25 grand. Right? So it’s kind of nice, but also you don’t know what you can actually find there. So.

[00:12:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah.

[00:12:22] René Pérez Jr.: It’d be good. There was a guy, so we actually went to a place called Resurrection Creek. Right? And there wasn’t any part, we did a couple pans, test pans, and we couldn’t find anything. We didn’t find any black sand. Which if you have, if you find black sand, it’s indicative of gold. And we just kept driving and at the end of the creek there was actually a house. It looked like a residential area and like Airbnb modules or what it seemed like to be.

And we’re like, “Okay, well this is a house we probably should get outta here.” You know, in Alaska it’s easier to get, so you don’t want to be in a place where you, you don’t wanna be a clean jumper, which is actually problem in Alaska. Or anywhere that claims exist. But so we talked to this guy and the guy is like, “Well, yeah, you’re not gonna actually find gold out there, but you know, today’s your lucky day because I actually have a gold panning school, and I do have an area in my property that does still have gold.” So, he charged us to use to use a claim50 bucks per person, which it’s, you know, if we’re gonna find gold, it’s nice.

[00:13:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: If you find a $30,000 nugget, it’s worth it.

[00:13:37] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So he says, yeah, he says like, you know, it depends on how much of a gambler you are. You know, and sometimes the house loses and, but you know, it’s a coin toss. So, but yeah. I mean, he has 18 acres. He has his, you know, his residence there and then he does have like 10 ADUs in his property.

So he’s like, yeah, I don’t actually market that I have a gold panning school. It just depends, like family and friends reach out and have the kids, you know, dig through the dirt and find a little bit of gold. And then I put it in vials for them. They have a little lake. And he actually said that his property had been on the market for almost three years. So he is trying to get rid of it.

[00:14:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I was gonna ask you about real estate in Alaska as we try to segue back to the topic of this show.

[00:14:26] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So, that’s actually something that I started doing this morning. I couldn’t find his property on Zillow. And I don’t have his exact address but I have his phone number, so I’m gonna reach out to him and say like, “Hey, like, what are people doing to market these homes and why can’t I find it on Zillow?” And it’s like, ” Hey, you know what? You probably need better representation.” I mean, these are, that’s a difficulty of unique homes. It’s you’re probably not going to have a buyer from a nearby location.

You’re probably having, I mean, it’s like if I’m trying to buy this from Alaska and I’m in California, I mean, where the money exists, you know, how do I find that location? Right? And it does boil down to people who are on the ground, who are looking at properties, word of mouth. So yeah, it’s for the, for the regular homes, you know, Manila, Cupertino, four bed, three baths, Zillow is the key. But if you’re looking for unique properties, that is where you need a little bit of more handholding.

[00:15:25] Fred Glick: Maybe some TikTok kind of exploded thing with some influencer ish. Kinda offbeat stuff.

[00:15:34] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah. So Fred and I, I mean, we’re kind of, you know, we’ve had the good luck of, we work in markets where there’s just, just everything is easier to come by, right? It’s Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose. These markets, you know, they’re easy to find. But it’d be interested to kind of get more into the pursuit of the difficult and more unique properties, more actual work that gets involved than how can we help them, right? Because we bring a model in which we could help the consumers more, so.

[00:16:08] Fred Glick: Yeah. Now we just have to see what’s the reciprocity between the state we’re licensed in and Alaska.  Washington?

[00:16:17] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, it’s state to state, but a little known fact. It’s once you’re actually licensed in one state there are co-op opportunities. You can’t necessarily practice real estate in that state, but the agent that has a listing on the other state can help you in navigating the contracts and just have a separate agreement with you, a cooperation agreement. So it is trickier and it is best to get licensed in that state.

But let’s say that you’re looking for anyone that’s viewing this. Let’s say that you, we helped you in San Jose to buy a property and then you are looking to purchase in South Dakota, right? You can reach out to us and we can reach out to the listing agent and see like, “Hey, can you work together on this deal?”

Because it’s gonna be easier if it’s, if you work directly with us, right? Versus going to a new person that doesn’t know what they’re doing in terms of real estate but then that listing agent can help write the contract, right? Because they’re licensed in that state and we just help with the negotiation, right? Because we are licensed. So there’s a lot of nuances in that, but we’re all, we are able to technically help you in all the United States.

[00:17:32] Fred Glick: There seems to be no reciprocity with Alaska, but you just take their courses and test and show that you’ve been in the business for six months and yeah. So it’s not that hard.

Not that hard. I really wanna do that.

[00:17:50] Drew Thomas Hendricks: As you’re doing your research, do they allow rebates? Unlike,

[00:17:53] Fred Glick: It doesn’t say, we know Oregon doesn’t, but…

[00:17:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: They don’t even allow you to pump your own gas.

[00:18:01] Fred Glick: It’s interesting up there. I mean, we’re gonna get there soon and we’re gonna make a play. Because we have a flat fee that’s a lot less than everybody’s two and a half percent. So everybody should go with us in Oregon. But let me say this ’cause something I found out today, there was an agent on TikTok basically saying, “Portland’s condo market is deader than dead.” Deader than dead.

[00:18:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Like walking dead?

[00:18:33] Fred Glick: Like beyond that. Sleeping dead. Which brings me to, I was gonna talk about condominiums in general and what’s going on as you, if you listen to this podcast regularly, which you should.

You know, the condos have had their issues, especially with balconies and structures and condo fees and insurance. Condo fees have just skyrocketed. You know, I don’t know there’s a number, but I’m sure minimum every condo has increased by a third in, in the monthly payment. So when the condo fee goes up, the value comes down.

So now people are saying, well, you know, if it was a $500,000 condo with a $500 fee, now you got a 750 fee. That condo’s maybe now worth 400, but people are looking at it like, I’m not touching a condo. Look at the condo fee going up. Well, it’s not gonna continue to keep going up a third every year.

Yes, insurance is gonna be a problem. Maybe there’s going the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac is allowing condominium associations to borrow the money to be able to do any of the repairs that are necessary based on the reserve requirement form that they get and in California with the balconies, so it’s not gonna be as bad.

So they’re trying to help. Eventually, this is gonna take probably, if everything stays the same, two or three years to stabilize, and then condominiums are going to get back to vogue at a lower price. And then we’re gonna go through, it’ll go up a little bit, but you’re, you don’t buy a condo for appreciation.

I mean, you just don’t, it just doesn’t happen. They’re there as places to live as opposed to investments compared to a single family in a great school district. That’s something to keep an eye on. And there’s two kinds of, I wanna remind everyone, a condominium is a type of ownership. When you think of a condo, it just doesn’t mean an apartment because actually a condominium could be a townhouse, a condominium could be actually a single family house.

So if you wanna know about this, Google it or ping us and we’ll, we’ll go into detail. But the bottom line is they’re talking about the flats, the apartments. Those are the ones that are having the problems, and then a little higher up the scale are townhouses.

[00:21:09] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Hmm.

[00:21:09] Fred Glick: So yeah, we have a couple townhouses in San Jose now for sale, you know, and the seller on one of them, “Well, I want to get what I paid for it.” Well, it’s not a matter of that, it’s a matter of what someone’s willing to pay. And that’s part of the problem. So you probably still have a lot of sellers who are out there. Well, you know, this is what I paid, so I don’t wanna lose. But you’re selling now and this is what the market is. It’s just like a stock. What you paid for, it doesn’t matter ’cause it’s price based on today.

So, you know, are we gonna see defaults on them? Yes. So Florida is just gonna keep getting worse. I mean, it’s unfortunately just a nightmare down there. But the condominium association, really, one of the things you want to do is make sure you have the right property manager.

50% of the condos we deal with, the property managers are worthless. I mean, there’s one now, matter of fact, one of our listings where something was supposed to get done by law by the end of last year and they finally are getting it done now and it’s the end of June.

They took their time. They didn’t care. But you know, people weren’t able to get financing. It’s like, and that’s been dropping the value of the units because of it. So be really careful with condos.

[00:22:34] Drew Thomas Hendricks: How do you find out if you’re, I mean, when you’re going to pursue, you’re going to look at condos and this pick a town.

[00:22:41] Fred Glick: Excellent question. Depends on the quality of the listing agent. For example, we upfront get every single bit of documentation we can. And we give it to everybody upfront. Take those minutes of the meetings from the last two years and see what’s going on. We had one the other day in San Francisco where they got all the stuff. We gave it to our buyer.

We hadn’t had a chance to review it, but he reviewed it and said, “Well, wait a second. They’re talking about spending $370,000 and have they spent it? Is it part of the budget? What’s going on?” And, you know, I posed this question to the listing agent who, you know, is supposedly gonna go get the answer from the property manager. But yeah, ask.

[00:23:26] René Pérez Jr.: You know what? It’s not on the listing agent. The listing agent’s role is not to know everything about the HOA. Some sellers don’t even know what their property has ’cause they don’t go to the meetings. If you’re looking into condos and you’re looking into plays with HOAs, the only real way to get the real information is for you to look at the developments that you’re looking at way ahead of time.

Not before the houses in the market, but looking into seeing if you can attend the board meetings. Some board meetings are open to the public, some are not. That is the only way for you to get the answers. Because you get the board meeting minutes, well, guess who controls the minutes? The people in charge.

And they’re not gonna have every like, yes, sure, you should write the big line items, but there’s nuances. “Oh, there was one party who was angry at this and they left the meeting or they yelled at.” They’re not gonna include all those little things.

[00:24:17] Fred Glick: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

[00:24:18] René Pérez Jr.: So if you really wanna know how bad things are within, attend the meetings because that really is the only way. And it sucks because if you’re looking to buy a house quickly and you’re rushed to it and or you see something that’s really pretty and you’re gonna jump on it, you, you do face the risk of like getting into an HOA that is bad. But of course, if it’s a really nice property, odds are that, you know, it probably isn’t a bad HOA, so it’s, you can’t.

[00:24:45] Fred Glick: And call your lender and say, “Look, I’m looking at this condo and can you find out about it? Are you going to be able to approve it?” And then the, that loan officer can try to get ahold of the property manager and have them answer the questions.

These property managers are obnoxious. Oh, you have to pay us a $500 fee for us to fill out the form, and it’ll be two weeks. It’s disgusting. And if you’re on a condominium border, you’re in a  condominium, you wanna make sure that the property manager responds immediately or very quickly to any lender questions.

Anyone who’s going to be buying, they need to know this information. If not, you make a contingency in the contract subject to lender approval of the condominium association.

[00:25:30] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Hmm.

[00:25:31] Fred Glick: And so you can get out of the deal because you could waive the mortgage contingency and then you get screwed ’cause they, your lender won’t approve the condo.

So it’s really important that you check out all this stuff out. Your buyer broker should be helping you, you know, kind of get everybody to do it.

[00:25:51] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Let’s just say it’s a hot housing market at the condos, there’s two or three condos in the same area overlooking the beach. It’s a place that everyone wants to live. Is there certain like red flags that just stick out like this facility has way more condos for sale than this other facility. Like is there something you can just kind of tell by analyzing it?

[00:26:09] Fred Glick: Well, here’s what I always tell people: do not buy the condo with the lowest condo fees, ’cause problem number one is I’m sure they have nothing in reserves. Which means if something happens, you’re gonna have to pony up the money. So yeah, look into the details of reserves. Just if it all makes sense, income and expense wise. Have they done the reserve study in the last three years if it’s a over four unit condominium? You wanna see that. How are they gonna fund the reserve issues if they haven’t? So it’s more nuanced. It’s like, you know, all these people screaming on Reddit, “Oh, you don’t need a real estate agent, you can do it yourself.” No. This is one of the reasons why you have an agent ’cause you can’t do this yourself, ’cause you don’t know about it. You don’t know what to look for. Yeah, if you’re an expert in this, great. But the average person wouldn’t know. So get the lender involved. Get your buyer broker involved. The listing agent should have some info. See if you can contact the association. But yeah. Cover yourself. But the fact is nobody’s buying condos now anyway, so it’s just all fruitless information.

[00:27:25] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah. I would also think you’d also want to analyze how many vacation rentals are in that building.

[00:27:30] Fred Glick: Yeah. How many investors.

[00:27:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: How many people are actually occupying it versus speculating.

[00:27:34] Fred Glick: Yeah. Yep.

[00:27:35] René Pérez Jr.: And that is information that should be a part of the CC&Rs, which is part of the HOA documents. Some developments have limits on how many units can be rented. And if there aren’t any limits on rentals, that can also be a potential red flag, because that means that you don’t know who’s gonna be next door to you, right? And taking up parking spaces and people when they’re visiting, they often don’t respect that, right? So…

[00:28:01] Fred Glick: Here’s another question. You gotta check to make sure that pets are allowed if you have a pet, you can look at this great condo and you really don’t think about it and go through the whole vacillation of putting offers in all nine yards. Then they find out, “Oh, there’s no dogs allowed.” So…

[00:28:18] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Or they’ll say small dogs, and it’s like,

[00:28:21] Fred Glick: Define that. Yeah.

[00:28:22] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Define a small dog. My dog’s a pretty small lab, but it probably wouldn’t be allowed there.

[00:28:27] Fred Glick: Yeah. So, you know, it’s things like that. You gotta look at all those things.

Another thing that you wanna look for early in the process, kind of transitioning to this, is homeowner’s insurance. Please, we beg of you, talk to a homeowner’s insurance company. They, in California, I know for a fact they can actually, once you have a actual address you’re interested in, most of these firms can plug in the address and tell you if they can insure it or not, or if it’s going to go on FAIR Plan. But the other thing is they’ll also know through their system if there’s been claims and we’ve had people have trouble finding what, because, you know, three years ago there was a claim for, I think it was a plumbing issue.

So they try to get out of doing the insurance on minutiae sometimes. Sellers should actually disclose if they’ve had any insurance claims in the last X number of years, but sometimes they don’t. Or, you know, there’s a lot of agents that just don’t give you disclosures or anything before you buy, put an offer on a house.

You just don’t know, you know, afterwards. So that’s really important. That’s, and the condo too, is the condo properly insured.

[00:29:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: That’s fascinating.

[00:29:58] Fred Glick: Do your homework and make sure you get a fully underwritten pre-approval. Today we had an issue. We had a guy who thought he was perfect and fine. He wasn’t. Now he is not able to probably make an offer on a house. But you don’t know what the lenders are going to look for, so you really, really, really need to get a fully underwritten approval. It’s just makes sense.

[00:30:23] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Switch topics. The last week we were talking about that house in Arcadia. How’s it going?

[00:30:28] Fred Glick: Well. We got the engineer out to tell us about putting up a

[00:30:35] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, that’s what I was, that’s what

[00:30:36] Fred Glick: Wall we haven’t gotten in writing. But what he did say is that the wall’s gonna go kind of on the side of the backyard as opposed to in the back of the backyard where it faces the road because the noise is coming from a different direction.

We thought that was interesting. He’s sourcing materials, but he’s figuring it’s gonna be something around a hundred grand. So we’re actually having an offer date tomorrow. Had nice attendance in an open house yesterday and we’ve just told everybody this. The seller’s not gonna do the work. We’re just giving you an idea of, “Hey, this is how to make a little quiet.”

But yeah, everybody’s a little different. There’s one woman came in, loved everything, but just couldn’t take the noise. Another couple came in, he didn’t care. They didn’t care. So they were cool with it.

[00:31:24] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I can speak, I have firsthand of firsthand knowledge on sound walls, how they can be deceptive.

One of my good friends lives in Carpinteria, a block away from that I-5 from the 101.

[00:31:35] René Pérez Jr.: From the 101. Right.

[00:31:37] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And they never had a sound wall. You could actually see the cars from his front yard.

[00:31:40] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:31:40] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And they put in this big 10 foot sound wall, and it actually got louder in his backyard.

He’s thinking it just bounces off the wall and lands straight down into his backyard.

[00:31:50] Fred Glick: Crazy, crazy. I told people, “Look, you know, if you ever saw an outdoor concert like Coachella, those big speakers, buy a couple of them, put a loop tape of Helter Skelter and just blast it towards the 210. You won’t hear anything.”

[00:32:08] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Yeah, yeah. Drown it out.

[00:32:10] Fred Glick: With something louder.

[00:32:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: What about like noise canceling headphones? Could you get like noise canceling speakers beaming into your house?

[00:32:18] Fred Glick: Hmm. The inside of the house is not a problem.

[00:32:20] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Or the outside out by the pool.

[00:32:22] Fred Glick: It’s the outside by the pool.

That’s something that needs to be invented. There you go. All right, nerds, get on it. Break down the sound.

[00:32:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: So René, you’re back. What’s the latest now that you’re back? How’s the Bay Area as far as housing?

[00:32:37] René Pérez Jr.: When there’s a holiday, I think it is a more normalized market these days. Right? People do things as they expect. Right? Where like Father’s Day weekend, “Hey, we’re not gonna be looking at houses. We should spend time with family.”

4th of July, same idea. People are on vacation. Especially for the, I guess just in general, summer’s a good time to take one month vacation to Europe, one month vacation to see Southeast Asia. And the list goes on, right? So there’s people who are just not looking right, and they have time before the fall and before they have to get them, get their kids in schools, right?

So I mean, we still have people who are looking, right? People who have not been looking for a long time jumping in. But that’s normal. I mean, we’re in one of the few markets where that happens. Right? There’s a lot of part markets like Austin, for example, Austin, Texas. It’s being hit deeply with just a lot of new construction out and empty rentals, speculative markets where people are just not wanting to rent them for that price. Right?

I mean, I actually just, and even in San Francisco, there is a extreme AI move to San Francisco. People who were in New York looking to move to San Francisco. I’m actually gonna meet up with a friend who, he was in New York. He’s trying to build a real estate startup and he’s like, “Hey, can we chat on Thursday? I’m moving from New York.” Right? So there is that shift. Usually it’s the SF to New York, New York to SF shift. You’re seeing a lot of that shift to the Bay, but you’re also seeing and in the, even in the rental space.

So I am moving outta my apartment actually, and I rented this place in March and I remember I quote unquote lowballed my landlord to for the rent. And you know, they were like, “Yeah, you know what? Sure. I’ll rent it for you,” because they were not getting anyone, right? And the rent was in the market for like a good 45 days.

Outdated. You know, I actually came in and I painted the walls, you know, and I fixed it myself just because it’s like, there was black walls and there was like dark orange walls, you know, and it’s, this is actually, you know, if you’re looking at rentals, it was crazy. It’s insane that the landlord had hired a leasing person to lease their apartment and the leasing agent had only marketed the property in Zillow.

Now sure fine, for the most part, Zillow is the most used website for rentals, but the fact that they did not have any professional photography. They did not have a 3D Matterport. They did not have drone shots and that they didn’t tell the landlord like, “Hey, let’s just spend 200 bucks to paint the walls.”

It’s ridiculous. That’s why they weren’t getting the rents that they wanted, and that’s why it was probably in the market for longer. Now, I put the rental on the market myself, and it was, it was insane. I mean, I did a 3D Matterport on the unit. I put it everywhere on the MLS and we had over 40 applications.

[00:36:03] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Whoa.

[00:36:03] René Pérez Jr.: Right. 40 applications and yeah, I mean, people, it was, I mean, there were waves of people begging and asking to rent the apartment, and now, and with a higher price as well. It’s just an insane, I mean, for rentals, it’s crazy. So, it’s people who are kind of staying out of the market. I mean, all the people that, you look at the incomes and salaries of the people that are renting these units, they can purchase a house, right? But you have a lot of people who are just staying on the sidelines. And that’s the other thing. So, it’s a crazy market. It’s still unaffordable. I used to always tell Fred that, like, I see a crash coming and such, but I don’t think there’s a crash coming, you know?

[00:36:49] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Might be in the middle of the country, I saw, heard on Reddit, they have this cool guide subreddit and it was a map of the United States, all the counties in the United States.

[00:36:57] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:36:58] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And it had housing inventory. Whether it’s tight or open. And the whole California seaboard was dark red, like the, but tightest you could go. And then the whole swath, other than like a little pocket here and there was all green. And even what I was surprised is on the East Coast seaboard. That was mostly green to like light yellow, which is not too impacted.

[00:37:19] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah, there’s just too much money in the Bay, right? Like, we’ve seen it where like one of the, one of the partners, you know, it’s a couple and one of the partners gets laid off and it’s just like, “Oh, okay. Well. It doesn’t really matter ’cause we don’t even need the other persons for the pre-approval. There’s enough cash and down payment funds for only one person to be on the mortgage.” Right? And like, “Oh, don’t worry. My parents are gonna give me funds to buy the property.” Right? So there’s just, you know, the price can’t go down because there’s just too much money. Right? The stock market would have to go like 50, 80% lower.

We talk about like, “Oh, what if the stock market goes down 20%?” Well, sure fine, but 20% lower is still like insanely high to what it was 10 years ago. A 20% drop is nothing. 20% drop in the existing current market is nothing as well, already in the millions. Sad.

[00:38:18] Fred Glick: We’re a different market than everybody out there.

You know, you see on Reddit, “Oh, how do all these, who are all these people buying in California?” Well, we can introduce you to them, but the fact is, you know, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, et cetera, et cetera. They’re paying really smart people a heck of a lot of money, and they end up producing a heck of a lot of money because, you know, we’re basically run by the tech companies now, and that’s where the money is. It’s just like the gold back in 1849 with all those people making their money in gold. The new gold is tech.

That’s all it really is.

[00:38:59] Drew Thomas Hendricks: And unless you’re looking for real gold, then the real gold’s still gold.

[00:39:04] Fred Glick: Exactly. And mining has become Bitcoin as opposed to gold.

[00:39:11] Drew Thomas Hendricks: We’ve come full circle.

Exactly what I was trying to do. Real estate.

[00:39:16] René Pérez Jr.: I think either Texas or Florida is accepting like gold as legal tender or something like that. I saw an article about that. So. It’d be interesting. You walk into Walmart and like, “Hey, here’s my chunk of gold. That’s what I’m paying today.”

[00:39:31] Drew Thomas Hendricks: I think you’ll see that in Alaska first.

[00:39:33] René Pérez Jr.: Yeah.

[00:39:33] Fred Glick: Yeah. Pretty much. Hang in there kids and study hard with tech and make some money. But. I mean, the great thing is, you know, even Google has said they don’t care if you have a college degree, if you know something that they need your expertise in and you’re good at it. So you can now focus on one thing and not think about anything else.

So it’s a different way to get hired for lots of money without having to go through the aggregation of a hundred thousand dollars in student loans. And there’s plenty of free courses out there, and there’s plenty of people. If you know what you’re doing to get into a small startup or something, or volunteer, if you have the aptitude for it, go for it kids.

[00:40:21] Drew Thomas Hendricks: Sounds good.

See you next week, everyone.