You can make up a lot of ground by avoiding the stuff

we're going to talk about here.

This can very easily get chaotic and get overwhelming and feel like just

a lot of things and a lot of stuff.

You need to get with the right people in order to execute that plan.

There's nothing worse than falling in love with a house that you can't get.

Having that plan and system has a 100 percent success rate of

making everybody's lives easier.

We really want your experience to be great.

We talk for a living.

We talk a lot, if you couldn't tell.

Hey, welcome back to millennium.

Um, Yeah, I like this new setup.

It's like you're sitting in the kitchen with us.

Hey!

have a conversation,

so what we're getting into today is 3 things that you need

to do to avoid real estate chaos.

. Seth: so I'm going to take the seller side and Jen's going to take

the buyer side because real estate consumers make mistakes on both sides.

And that is what good realtors are here to help you avoid.

So why are we doing this?

Why was this even

a

aid?

because, I'm going to tell you exactly why we're doing this.

Realtors annoy me a lot, on social media.

They really do.

I can't stand it because there's like this arrogance an accountant isn't

supposed to know how to do this.

A doctor is like curing cancer and like doing heart surgery.

He's not supposed to know like down to the degree of selling a house.

And I think realtors take for granted that like people are off doing other things.

And they don't know what the mistakes are the same way that, you go to the

doctor for advice or an accountant knows, like, how to save you on

taxes or, an attorney knows how to keep you out of legal pitfalls.

Realtors are no different.

there's a lot of, you don't know what you don't know, but there's

also the idea that, you can make up a lot of ground by avoiding the

stuff we're going to talk about here.

it's a lot to do in a real estate transaction, but you can,

have parameters and it is coming from somebody who can, overcomplicate

things, when it comes to my job.

That's when I do simplify, very much But it's very easy to just

put it into these three buckets.

To be able to stay within these parameters, and then everything

else will fall in line.

because this can very easily get chaotic and get overwhelming and feel like just

a lot of things and a lot of stuff.

if

if you just start in these three places, then it's going to be smooth

be I'm going to ask again, Jen.

How

One night at a time, even though I still don't know why

people would be eating an elephant.

why.

Useless information by Seth.

It's

the analogy is because it's the largest land mammal.

how do you eat a blue whale?

It's the largest animal on the planet.

one bl at a time.

yeah, one more time.

Um, so I would say sellers though, I want to start with those.

I am predominantly a listing agent.

I do work with buyers as well.

same thing with Jen, but, Sellers have, sometimes a lot more work to

do because they are also buyers.

And Jen's going to talk about that in a minute, but there is

a little bit of a balancing act, to be had to sell your house.

and I really, really push, my sellers.

To contact me early.

And I know we've talked about this before, but I just can't understate this enough.

there's literally never been anyone at a settlement table who said, I just

reached out to my realtor too soon.

I don't know what I was thinking.

it's just, it's not even a logical thing sometimes it's very simple.

I will admit that sometimes it's very cut and dry.

Hey, I'm moving to Cincinnati.

Here are the keys, sell it, call me when it's sold.

that's different.

But.

But in the real world, that is not really how things work most

of

the

time in the real world.

It's like I have two kids, they're currently also

in school, two kids, and I also have some dogs

have a dog.

Do I have to crate them?

do I landscape out front?

Do I, should I redo my bathroom before I sell?

Should I re

Am I gonna be carrying two mortgages?

how do I logistically have people walk in and out of my house?

Should I leave town for the open house the whole weekend?

I mean I've been working with one woman for two years, and she's probably not

even going to listen until 2025, but she calls me whenever she has a question about

the house, Hey, should I replace this?

Should I do this?

Hey, is this going to hurt me if I do that?

would, buyers care about this.

And every single time she calls me, I give her the best advice I can,

but she's doing things the smart way.

It's I know that this is coming down the pike, so I should be

getting guidance leading up to it.

to your point too, you're taking the seller's stance on this, I'm taking

the buyer's stance on this, what you're gonna find is that they both have the same

three key things to do, and those three things that we're gonna go over in both

scenarios is to not wait, number one.

Number two, is to have plans and systems in place.

And number three, is to have top people working with you.

And we'll go into what kinds of people those are, because it's not just your

I was just diving right in because I'm just so excited about

this

topic.

Oh my gosh, so excited.

But I actually want people to know what we're going to talk about.

So those are the three key

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

with sellers, you can absolutely wait too long and then you've got, a situation

where you have more chaos than you need.

This really though, when I say reaching out, it goes for families.

upsizing families or downsizing families or side sizing, which is

means you go just, you're moving across town or into a better school

district or something like that.

there are so many little logistical things that we can help you with.

And a lot of times I have seen people just they look at like, honey,

there's no way we could possibly work.

be a parent and sell this house at the same time.

And then it just seems untenable and then there's just paralysis

and then you do nothing.

New Year's episode where we said that one of the main reasons

why your goal is gonna fail is because it seems unattainable.

but also working a plan.

So a lot of times what I do with a seller is, I give them kind of what I call

their homework, so I go in, I assess, I look at things, whether it's like a

divorce where it's like your homework is hey, you need to speak to an attorney

or if it is somebody who needs to do things to their house or I have somebody

right now who has to get testing for their son to see if they're qualified

for a certain program in a certain school district, that's a different one.

That is their only homework because it's going to decide whether they move at all.

so getting a plan in place, that's what we do.

we're very, logistical based.

And then, we'll get to selling or buying the house.

It's, but this lead up is very important.

You want to work with somebody and you want to work with, like a team that

actually has all the resources for you and has the experience to, kind of line

you up and get you where you need to be.

From the ground up.

the ground up.

That's right.

And then the other side of it is really having the resources and the

team of, professionals around you.

like right now I have someone in Philadelphia who needs like a city

attorney because there's like a tax abatement issue and he wants

to sell before his 10 years is up.

I have a, an attorney in the city that has worked in this space before.

It's those types of things where you need to get with the right people

in order to execute that plan.

I give you your marching orders, but then I also can just say, Hey, listen,

you don't have to go Google anybody.

here's the deal.

Here's the guy.

Here's this person.

Here's that person.

And then that referral ensures that good service is given.

that communication stays streamlined, too, because, if you're

going off of the referral for what we're recommending, is work that

needs to get done, do you have to just, like, paint or do you need to

go redo some rooms or, like, replace certain, utilities or whatever?

I think home improvement

is, the most apparent thing when people are listening to this.

They're probably thinking that, but there are other things here's a perfect one.

You're selling your house and you need to go buy another one and you're an

independent contractor or you're a small business owner, how you file your taxes

that year is going to be super important.

oh, I'm going to sell in the spring.

Okay, you call your realtor in March, you file your taxes, and then you

go to buy, and you realize that your accountant, whose job it is to make

it seem like you make low, no money.

Now the lender can't list you

a

lease.

I am not admitting to that on the internet, IRS.

Yes, that's absolutely

that's absolutely right.

if someone had met with me in November, I'd be like, okay, so what do you do?

He's oh, I'm a car.

I'm a carpenter.

I'm like, okay, so are you filing your taxes?

when are you doing that?

And then we would get them in touch with their lenders.

So like the, everybody can speak to themselves because independent

contractors and small business owners are, can be a total nightmare.

And then the main reason is because of that tax issue.

that's a very good point to make.

if you're a realtor, listen to this, that's an important thing.

if you can't demonstrate consistent commission income, and you take

ton of deductions, it's lender to feel Good about giving you a loan.

so yeah, I will kick it over to you though, if you want to talk about

buyers, but for me, like sellers, this is like a passion project for

me, I'm like talking to people.

I'm like, listen, I am not coming over to this hat into your house to

try to like put a sign in your lawn.

Like I literally need to talk to you.

I think it's like systems are really important, whether like you are a like

type A personality who needs lists or not.

as soon as I go and meet a seller, it's You seem like a list kind of person, and

then the eyes light up, and it's like the gates open, and it's yes, I love lists.

love lists.

please give me instructions,

Yeah, and like, I'm so happy to be able to be like, here is a

list to be able to check things off.

forms are standard, but processes are not.

It all depends on who you're working with and who has what.

So don't be afraid to ask somebody, what kind of like systems that you

have or resources that you have to

to use.

Yeah, and just so you know, coming out of our eyeballs over here.

So we have all kinds of things and tools.

If you're like a box checker, and you like your little to do lists, that's something

we can provide and a good agency should, it's a demonstration of organization and

expertise if they have all those tools for

And you also know what to expect, too, going forward.

so, on the buyer side of this, and like you said, sellers are buyers,

cause they gotta go somewhere, too.

with the first point of not waiting, and we've mentioned this before, but,

say, you're like, I'm not ready to buy right now, this is going to be like a

later thing, I want to wait for interest rates to drop more before I buy, and,

and that's like fine and dandy, but like we said in a previous episode,

There's no such thing as too early, but there is such thing as too late.

And what I mean by that in this situation, and it's because I've seen

it before, where they go through the pre approval process because they're

ready to, get out there and get into the market and start firing off offers, and

they're like, okay, I am ready to go.

My lease is up in, I don't know, say, three months, and I think three months

is plenty of time, but consider, if your lease is up in three months,

and you're starting to go out now from the moment you go under contract

on a house, that's minimum 30 days before you actually go to closing.

You want to bake in time to be able to move your stuff out.

You don't have to pay your first mortgage payment for between like a

month and a half to two months either.

Yeah, depending on when you settle,

you want to give yourself time to move yourself out of where you

were living before and into your next place without being like me who had

literally three days between the end of my lease and purchasing my house.

It's stressful.

so that's 30 days right there and let's just say 40 days with moving out.

And then on top of it, you need to leave time to actually go see the houses.

So the longer you wait, the more you're limiting your own inventory

and your own options because then you're going to feel pressured to buy

because you have to and you're just not getting what you really want to get.

So give yourself more time to be able to look and get rejected offers because

every buyer has those growing pains.

gonna, it's gonna take a few tries potentially if the market

keeps going the way it goes.

Yeah, and that's okay.

It's all part of the process.

the right house always works out.

but you need to bake in the time for that to be the case.

the other mistake with waiting is you're going through pre approval process and

you find that, Things are not as, clean in your file as you would have thought.

Maybe your credit.

I always say whatever you think your credit is, or whatever your,

FICO score says on your, credit card statement or whatever, just

take off, 25 points in your head.

And that's what it probably really is.

So it could be the difference between, like, maybe you do qualify, but you

qualify as FHA, which is a government, uh, loan, whereas if you did.

these few steps that the lender suggests in a certain amount of time,

it could be as short as, maybe three months, or you be strategic with what

gets paid off in a certain order, and that is what a lender can advise to.

Then you will be able to go into the next tier and be a stronger

offer and a stronger file by being able to offer conventional.

So you don't know those things until you actually put in

that preapproval application.

I guess again, you wait too late and then, oops, you can't get

what you thought you could get.

that's the gist of why not to wait.

we also have, for buyers, having a plan in place.

If all you do is say, okay, Realtor, I want to go look for a house, and you

just go even and say, well, it needs to be three bedrooms, two bathrooms,

needs to have a fenced in backyard for my dog, which is what everybody's

looking for, and we just aimlessly go.

There's really no structure.

That's when, you spend a lot of time, and the time is costly.

It's probably the most expensive thing that you can waste because

you can't get any of it back.

You end up spending all this time, not focusing in on realizing that the school

district that you're in is important.

Or that, oh, maybe the kitchen is a make or break room.

Or any factor of things, or maybe you're buying with a spouse, or

a partner, and you realize Oh, I love this, but your spouse is

like, what are you talking about?

no, I hate that.

Oh, well, that's not important to me, but it is the other

Yeah.

And I will interject here real quick.

Is that a good agent, even when you're out, Is going to

ask you a lot of questions.

If they're not asking a lot of questions like, Oh, okay, what do you like?

How do you like this house?

we ask all kinds of stuff like, Hey, does it work?

Because it doesn't have a dishwasher.

does this bother you?

Does this bother you that like, you know, in Cape Cod, which in

the Northeast is, are very common, does it bother you that the kids

are upstairs and you're downstairs?

Like we ask a lot of different logistical questions.

Okay.

Because, those showings, you're busy, we're busy, and we want

to drill down as fast as we

can.

So, I mean, Lane, we want to respect your time, and then

respect the time that we have to be able to take you guys out, too.

what we have, at least, is a buyer questionnaire.

So, before we even step foot out to go in to see a house, we want

to make sure you've spoken to our lender, so you know what you can get.

There's nothing worse than falling in love with a house that you can't get.

and then, say, like, you want to be able to afford it, they'll tell you how.

Again, don't wait.

and then having the system in place where we have a system and it's

a, okay, you come, you talk to us.

Step two, we put you in contact with the lender.

Then we all speak with the lender.

You fill out your pre approval.

We know our marching orders.

Then you fill out our buyer questionnaire.

It's five beautiful pages that are very simple.

It sounds like a lot.

It's not that are able to bring up the conversation, whether it be you

getting yourself to think of things that you may not have realized

were as important to you or not.

And be able to streamline you and your partner of what is important to both

of you and have that down on paper.

It also allows us to know what is important to you so that everybody

is on the same page and that the time that you're spent together is used

in the most productive way possible.

So we will also know, okay, what is really important, what can be compromised,

but what really can't be compromised.

That's when we'll find that out before even having to step foot into a door.

And sometimes it changes and that's totally fine.

You just have a baseline of going into this, of what's actually important.

We then make a portal, and then so on and so forth.

So So, having that plan and system has a 100 percent success rate of

making everybody's lives easier.

And then, have the top people, so yes, obviously this means your

agent, and then go back to the one after the holiday episode to figure

out how to pick the right agent.

Boy, I could have a whole episode to talk about how having the wrong lender,

how having the wrong lender

triggered,

Yeah, triggered.

can completely ruin a, an entire transaction for

you

you

Jen and I

had a

war story at

the

end of 2023, my god, we had a guy who, yeah, it just did

not, it did not work out.

we were under contract for what?

Forty five days

No,

more

that.

in

total.

No, of that whole deal, yeah.

We had to flip it, yeah.

We had to flip it to another lender or whatever.

And the guy just, he literally just didn't look at the guideline.

And he didn't, he

put

he didn't listen.

Yeah, he didn't listen.

He he didn't look at the guideline for the loan program itself.

It boiled down to, he didn't listen.

He didn't listen to what she went to him with, but regardless, I digress.

the point to that though, is that, if your agent says here's my preferred lender.

everybody knows, we do not get a kickback for that.

We do not get paid extra, there is no incentive to us to use people we are

recommending other than we just know it's going to go smoothly and we know

that you are being well taken care of.

That's the kickback.

We don't get any financial gain for you using somebody we recommend.

But if you say, I just like to shop it around and I heard Rocket Mortgage

has a lower rate or they have this.

It's a really great thing they're advertising.

I twitch a little bit and I'm like, Oh my God, please don't because what I

can say is also with preferred lenders, typically you have an issue on nights

and weekends, which is when you're going out to go look at properties.

That's when they're available.

They will answer and happily.

It's just like us.

it's part of the

job.

And

it's a little bit of a bait and switch too.

Rocket Mortgage and some of these Loan Depot, outfits, they have low

rates, but they kill you on fees.

So what we always try to do is listen, you are able to shop.

force you to use anybody and agents across the country.

I don't believe Ken either, but at least in the state of Pennsylvania,

we can't force a consumer to use any inspector, any title, any lender, but

we always just ask for the courtesy of our people being able to get in the mix.

if you are going to be shopping around, Archive, archives are pretty good, man.

I don't think we don't lose a lot of, we don't lose a lot of files after,

once you pull the veil away from all these other programs, it's, it's

trying to get you to click on certain things and they say, Oh yeah, you can

get a, two, 2 percent lower rates.

nah, not really.

Because by the time they bake everything in, it's totally different.

different.

So it's just, they need to sell something.

And also you have the, uh, ad layer of what's their incentive.

I mean, those, those will.

Get paid at the end of the day regardless and be able to sleep at night.

when you're using more like private, lending companies, they get paid when you

get your house and they have way more skin in the game and there's more on the line.

They have, more to work for and they want to.

and it is more of a personalized experience, especially in

this kind of situation.

I would add, if it's my preferred part, like lending part,

like they're incentivized to make everyone happy because they don't have

to be my preferred lending partner.

so you have that kind of anchor where, yeah, like our lender

yesterday was texting us.

Pretty much through all the football.

And I know he was very, very interested in the football games yesterday.

And he told me, he's

like, I'm probably gonna

I'm probably going to quote log off at three.

Meanwhile, I was talking to him all at home.

Personally, I wanted to tuck and roll off to Commodore Berry

Yeah, well, we had a yeah, we had a little bit rough night

last night, but that's okay.

you get dinged up in this business.

But in the end, we definitely try to push you towards the people we

like to use, not because we get kickbacks or anything like that.

It's because we really want your experience to be great.

I started this entire episode by saying you're busy, and you have something

else you need to do every day.

This is all we do.

So the

and they know the way we work too.

yeah, they know our expectations like a guy for, you know, sitting in

a, in a call station and, you know, Boston who never worked with you.

He's never worked with me.

he has no real, incentive to pick up the phone on a Sunday morning, which

frankly is when we need numbers.

If we see something and offer it like last night, we had offers due at five 30.

If that lender isn't really engaged or he's some, some guys just, nine to fiver.

Yeah.

You're not going to get that offer

in,

so And you know what?

Not to mention, I didn't have this written down, but it's a really good point.

Having the right team working with you when it comes to

actually submitting offers.

the agent he's talking about for the offer we were putting in last night

She called me to talk about the lender.

If you don't have a lender with a good reputation, got the offer accepted

because I was talking to her and I, she said, I don't know that company.

Can you tell me about them?

I said, Oh, this is for sure.

My preferred lender is that we've done closed at well over a hundred

deals with him successfully.

And I was able to speak very highly of if you ever needed to get ahold of him,

you're going to, if it's nine o'clock at night on a Saturday, or if it's like, 7 a.

m.

on a Tuesday, you're going to be able to get a hold of him.

She was like, that really excites me.

And it was part of what got her offer accepted.

and even things like a title company, a settlement coordinator, a conveyancer.

So people who all play roles in this are so important to be able

to keep this all streamlined.

If there's any broken piece in the link, it's just going to fall

you got to hire the right people.

Yeah.

You got to get a plan.

plan.

Yes.

We've

And you gotta reach out and get this whole process started

earlier than you ever thought.

And if you're not sure if it's the right time, yes, go ahead.

I don't mean the right time to like go get out there, but the right time

to make a conversation, absolutely.

We talk for a living.

We talk a lot, if you couldn't tell.

Alright,

so that's really the gist of it, so three main things to avoid

chaos, don't wait, have plans and systems, and work with top talent.

Top talent.

alright.

Cool, see you next time.

See you

guys.

Bye.