Inspections. Bad Credit. Interest rates. Down payment assistance.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Navigating today's real estate market can be tricky. Want to
buy or sell a house, finance er and sure a house,
or stuck with a house and don't know what to do.
Florida Talk real Estate has been your local one stop
real estate shop since twenty twelve. Get the advice you
need from your local real estate pros. Here are your hosts,
jim Depola and Johnny C live on Real Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hey, Happy South Florida everybody. This is the Florida Talk
Real Estate show. And you've got Jimmy d half of
the Jimmy Dean Johnny C lineup. Johnny's taking a well
deserved vacation day today. I hope he enjoys. I think
he's out there doing music. I'm not sure, but whatever
he's doing, I hope he has a blast. But we've
still got a great show for you today. And we've

(00:58):
got Mike Row from the mortgage firm. Hey, Mike, how
are you doing today?

Speaker 3 (01:01):
All right? Yes, in the house, good morning.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
And we've also of course got producer extordinaire Jimothy.

Speaker 4 (01:08):
How are you doing, Jimothy?

Speaker 5 (01:10):
And good morning gentlemen, Happy Saturday. Did it be here
with you?

Speaker 2 (01:13):
I wanted to ask you about the football helmet on
the shelf.

Speaker 4 (01:17):
The F one is that an old Florida emblem emblem.

Speaker 3 (01:21):
It's a Florida Gator's helmet.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
I've never seen that emblem before.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
It just for the audience and so we can't see it.
Is got the just the letter F in.

Speaker 5 (01:31):
Blue of course of Florida blue color with a circle
around it. And I guess it's a throwback uniform from many,
many years ago.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I couldn't tell you what year on a white helmet. Yeah,
it looks like a a Miami University.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
Yeah, it does a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
It's a white helmet with an orange stripe and a
blue F in it.

Speaker 4 (01:50):
And I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
They did it wrong. They did it completely wrong. They
needed to call it FU needed f you in there.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
They didn't make it out of committee.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Mike was wondering if they were using leather helmets when
I went to UF.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
Said, I kind of made a joke because it's definitely
an older style. It's throwback. I was like, Oh, that's
what they were wearing when you were there too, Jingo's
helmets helmet yep.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
I told you the story once how I was voted
most hated man on campus. That's the actual title that
I was given at University of Florida.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
It's an actual award that you won.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I don't know if I will call it an award,
but yes, I was honored as if you will. And
I'm saying that faciciously is the most hated man on campus.
And they actually called it man on campus, you know,
like h And what happened was is I got a scoop.

Speaker 4 (02:44):
This is I.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Think nineteen eighty six, it's probably eighty six, it might
have been eighty seven, and Jimmy Buffett was supposed to
come do the Gator Ground. He had never done the
Gator Growl ever, and they asked him year after year
after year, and he turned down. He finally said yes.
So the student government group that booked him gave me

(03:08):
the scoop to let me know that Jimmy Buffett was
coming to Gator Ground. Back then, the Gator Grou was
called the world's largest student run pep Rally, right, So
that's what it's the annual pep rally for the football team.
But they called it Gator Grou And they always bring
in big acts like we had Robert Williams, Billy Crystal,
Bob Hope. You know Smothers brothers. This is eighty seven guys.

(03:33):
But anyway, we had all those acts.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
So they before their comeback, right because the mother brother
had a comeback show.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Oh yeah, this is probably it was probably yeah, there
was comeback time. Not not not not original smother brothers,
but but what they were pretty old. I remember seeing them.
They were pretty old. I don't remember. I don't remember
their act that much. I just remember that they were there.
They weren't you know, it was a very memorable. Now
Robert Williams, Oh my god, that one was memorable. But anyway,

(04:04):
so they gave me this scoop that Jimmy Buffett's coming
to the Gator Grause. So I run it on the
college newspaper. Runs on the front page of the newspaper,
big scoop, and all the state wires pick it up
through Associated Press, so all over the state it was
like Jimmy Buffett coming to Gator gral was like it
was actually state news. And I'm a college kid, so
I'm really happy that my newspaper, my article is everywhere.

Speaker 4 (04:25):
Well, i walk into my.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Journalism class and I'm thinking I'm big man on campus.

Speaker 4 (04:31):
R and I walk in.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I got yeah, I got a front page on the
you know, in the college paper today, and I'm in
the journalism class and the professor goes, hey, nice, and
he was a old grizzled, grizzled reporter and he was like, hey,
I see that you made the front page today, Jim.
And I'm like, yep, yep, and I'm beaming, and he goes,
You've got an F and I'm like what, and he goes, yeah,
anytime you spell somebody's name wrong, oh no, you get

(04:55):
it automatic. If you have a factual error, spelled somebody's
name wrong, you get an automatic F.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
Right. So you didn't have an editor at the time
I did. We had a bunch of editors.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
And how what we did is we said Jimmy Buffet
to attend Gator Ground because we didn't add the extra
te okay, so he called it Jimmy Buffet do the
whole thing.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
And nobody caught it.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
And nowadays grammar, yeah, who would care? Right, probably get
an eight plus for that story, right, because I did
it wrong.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
So anyway, So what happened was nobody told me the
contract for the contract for the for the concert for
his attendance was inches thick, right, It was an inchestick contract.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
It was crazy.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
I had seen some contract stuff and h reporting for
student government when I was at the College Paper, and
that thing that that sucker was thick and buried in
that contract said that it was going to be a
secret that he was coming.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
That's what I thought. I remember telling this story, I
think off air one time.

Speaker 4 (05:58):
Yeah, and it was this.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
I agree, there was something I was waiting for.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
And because they violated the contract because it went to
state wires and everything, he pulled out.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
So it wasn't even you weren't even talking about him.

Speaker 4 (06:09):
I know, I was only talking a bunch of me puffe,
you know.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
So uh he pulled out, and the students were so upset,
and I couldn't walk anywhere for weeks and weeks. The
fraternity people were anytime I tried to go in a
bar restaurant, the attorney guys were driving me crazy because
they hated they hated the College Paper because we were
a bunch of you know, you know, you know, leading

(06:34):
heart whatever or whatever that you know what they think.
And so the frat boys, if I walked into a bar,
people wanted to get a fist fights with me all
the time, so I just kind of like hunkered down
for a few weeks.

Speaker 4 (06:45):
It all went away.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
And then at the end of the year the college magazine.
We worked at the college newspaper, but the college magazine
they have this end of the you know, end of
the semester thing, and then there was a section they
most Hated Man, and then they talked about how I
made Jimmy, how I made Jimmy Buffett not coming to
the concert.

Speaker 5 (07:05):
Was there ever an explanation as to why it was
supposed he just wanted to be a surprise or he
wanted to be low key, he didn't want to be associated.

Speaker 3 (07:13):
I mean, it just.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
We I never got the answers to it. And the
thing is is that this we were actually getting bomb
threats at the college paper because our paper was off campus.
So the police were coming a bunch of times because
we were getting bomb threats that they're going to blow
up the paper. We never figured out what happened, but

(07:34):
he ended up coming, but it was like fifteen years
later or something he ended up coming and going to
the Gator Gral. But anyway, I always voted mostly of
usk Man on campus. I don't know how we got
on that, but going on a tangent.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Here, we were talking about the Florida logo.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Oh, the Florida logo. Yeah, where I was vaded. That's
why I call f UFFU. So anyway, we have a
lot to talk about today. We're going to talk about
a couple of closeness we had this week and some
teachable moments for buyers and sellers. We're also going to
talk about how I made one of my buyers this
week homeless. That's right, they just bought a house and

(08:10):
hours later they were homeless. So we're going to talk
about that in a little bit. And we have a
lot to talk about of what's going on. One of
the things I read an article and I thought it
was interesting to talk about today and they asked this question, Well,
we ever see three percent mortgage rates again, So we're
going to talk a little bit about that today, and
just like what's happening in the market right now, what

(08:30):
the economists expect.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
We know we're in a lot of not very known times.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
We're kind of in the unknown right now with the economy,
and a lot of people don't know what's going on
in the future of the economy, and a lot of
people don't know what to do with the biggest decision
of their lives for most of them at that point,
which is deciding whether to buy or sell. That's usually
the most biggest purchase or biggest sale that people ever

(08:58):
do in their lives, and maybe the do it three
to five times in their lifetime. So we're going to
talk a little bit about that, and we got a
whole bunch of other stuff for you, And of course
we'll take your calls on the air, which we love that.
We had a couple of callers last week which were
really good calls.

Speaker 4 (09:13):
Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
So take a good show to call because it's just
you and me.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yes, it's just me and Mike and Timothy and Jimothy.
Jimothy is always here. The reason why we don't mention
Jimothy because Jimithy is like having the radio tower. If
we don't have Jimothy, we don't have a show at all. Yeah,
because he's the only.

Speaker 4 (09:30):
One that knows how to work the board, never on camera.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
So Jimothy, do you know how they were supposed to
call us? If they want to call us today?

Speaker 5 (09:36):
Eight seven seven nine two seven six nine six nine.
That number hasn't changed and not on forever that I've
always been with Real Radio. It's always been eight seven
seven nine two seven six nine six nine.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
I used to love changed, Yeah, Saint Lucy's changed a
little bit. I still miss Doctor Rich's deep baritone voice
when he used to say the call letters like to
call us now sure, and the way he did it
with the pauses and everything. It was very cool. I
remember when we first started the show. I used to
try to mimic it.

Speaker 5 (10:05):
Yeah, but he was. He was the king of pregnant
pause that. Yeah, he knew right where to put it to.
And it's a it's a lost art, it really is.
You don't hear much anymore. You know what's been coming
up on my tiktoks recently from my for you pages,
A lot of the old stories that Paul Harvey used
to say, Oh yeah, now the rest of them.

Speaker 4 (10:26):
Now you know the rest of the story, and I
love them.

Speaker 5 (10:29):
He was again, two guys that I kind of compared
to one another, especially with the cadence of the wedge speak.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
Paul Harvey doctor Rich Dickerson.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
In fact, I think the Love Doctors used to have
a bit on their show about Paul Harvey talking about.

Speaker 4 (10:45):
Bonks right and didn't it was a bonk thing or pipers.

Speaker 5 (10:48):
I don't think they made it, but they because he
used to do you know, the live.

Speaker 3 (10:52):
Reads there Paul Harvey did.

Speaker 5 (10:54):
And somebody took He must have done a news story
one time about marijuana and bongs. And then that's where
they got all the clips. And since he had such
a distinctive and punctual type of cadence, it was easy
to clip certain words and somebody put that together.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
But they used to.

Speaker 4 (11:14):
Play that was hilarious. That was really fun.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
That's got to be around here somewhere.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
And you know what else I just saw recently.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
I saw him Facebook today when I woke up, some
guy I think his name was John's whoever it is, hello,
He put out a thing of a short of TJ
as a clip on the Love Doctors. It was a
two minute It was a two minute clip from and
what he did was he took the clip and then

(11:41):
put it into.

Speaker 4 (11:42):
AI and asked AI what was going on?

Speaker 2 (11:45):
And they had no idea and they were talking back
and forth. The AI, the AI and the guy was
talking back and forth about TJ's clip. Do you think
he's hurt well, and then I was like, we're not sure,
because it was Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot Mike.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
You don't know this.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
I thought that you had listened all the back years.
My TJ was a famous caller, one of the most
popular callers into the Love Doctors. Love Doctors was a
show kind of like ours, a live calling show, but
I always called it.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
No, I remember the show, and I would listen to,
not like religiously, but I would listen to Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
So TJ was one of the famous callers and he
would just call in from time to time, and he
used to go to these live events and do all
this crazy stuff. And I'll remember they used to say
to him. They used to say to him, Hey, TJ,
go to your fridge right now. And TJ would go
to his refrigerator. Do you remember this stuff? And he
would say, eat the do you have any mayonnate? What

(12:42):
do you got in your fridge? And TJ would start
mentioning what he got his fridge, and then I would saying,
go back to that mayonnaise, how much to got in there?
And he say, eat the jar mayonnaise? That you say
and then drink the pickle juice. And one time he said,
they try to get it this stuff his hand down
his throat. Yea, you'd hear this noise of him try
to stuff and you had you had no idea for real,

(13:03):
whether it's real or not.

Speaker 4 (13:05):
You didn't know.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
It's like that was the whole thing about some of
those callers back then. It's like, is this.

Speaker 4 (13:10):
Real or is it not real? Yeah, it's pretty funny. Anyway,
enough about that.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
Maybe TJ will.

Speaker 4 (13:17):
Yeah, maybe TJ.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Hey, TJ, if you're listening, give me a call, or
any of the old love doctor people that love the
love doctors, give us a call, love to talk to you. Uh, So,
let's just start off with a couple of things that
happened this week. Mike and I and Ross and try
to title. We all had a bunch of closings over
the last week or so, and I wanted to talk

(13:38):
about some of them because I felt there were a
lot of teachable moments in today's market. And I guess
the first one I'd like to start with is.

Speaker 4 (13:48):
Danny and Lynn.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
And uh the reason why I want to start off
with them is because they had, like so many different
things happened through their buying process. Right, they were first
time homebuyers, first time.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
Home buyers, and we're making a significant move geographically right,
coming from South Brown around and Brower to up here
to Palm Beach, and uh yeah, they had they went
through a lot of what you can go through on
a transaction, including right including where it just doesn't go

(14:20):
right and it can't can't continue right.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
And because they were they were in two they had
two homes, right, the first one didn't didn't work out,
and the second one ended up being exactly right. Yep.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
And that, you know, it just proves are saying, I
tell people a lot, and they don't always believe it
because they think it's kind of woo woo. But uh,
you know, I say, you know, if it doesn't work
out with the house, it's really not meant to be
and you're gonna probably get a house that you love
even better than the house that you didn't get it
usually and it comes out that time a lot, And
it definitely came out like that this time. And it

(14:54):
was so funny. The first deal that fell apart through
the whole process, I was still working with with both customers.
I was working as the listing agent for the deal
that Danny e Linn backed out of, and then I
was also working with Danny Linn to find a new
home once they didn't want that first home, and both
the seller and the buyers were asking about the other side, saying,

(15:15):
how are they doing. I hope everything's okay with them?
So they didn't leave. It wasn't like you hear a
deal falls apart and I think there's a lot of
anger and stuff. It wasn't like that this time. And
I really feel like part of the reason why both
of them had such a good experience in their process,
or such good success at the end of their deal
is because of the way they handled the problems that

(15:37):
they had. They didn't go off and go crazy or
anything like that. They were just very calm about the
whole thing and looked at it.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
I think, you know, let's just talk inspections in general.
So sometimes the whole purpose of the inspection is to
kind of.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Well, let's set the foundation. People don't really know, Okay.
So what happened was Danny and Lynn came to us
and they were trying to buy a house with a warehouse.
Danny owns a business down to Broward. He would like
to save the money on that. So he was trying
to find a home for his family, a long time home.
He has two beautiful young kids, beautiful wife, and he
wanted to make sure that he had a place like

(16:11):
a compound that he could raise his family and run
his business out at the same time. And he ended
up calling on one of the ads that we had
for a listing that we had in the acreage that
was a small, two bedroom, two bath home with a
gigantic warehouse. It was two thousand square feet. We talked
about it on the air several times and then Danny

(16:33):
was very interested in the house, but Lynn wasn't really
crazy about the house. Danny was more interested about the
lot shop and the shop. You know, the shop was everything,
and He's like, we could deal with the house later,
but Lynn was like, I don't.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
We got to live in the house now.

Speaker 4 (16:48):
So yeah, we got to live in the house now.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
And it was smaller than the house they were living in,
and their family was growing and the kids were growing up.
You know, they were like young kids and they're going
to need more space. So we got him over Mike,
and then Mike explored with them a construction loan can
you talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah, we're called renovation loan. So basically the idea is
that you buy a house, but it needs to be upgraded,
maybe it needs to be expanded, needs to be remodeled,
and so are you able to use a loan to
both acquire the property and then also fix up the property?
And the answer to that is yes, there are renovation

(17:28):
loans out there that essentially it's like you have the
acquisition costs, a purchase price of the home, and then
you have financing on top of that to do the renos.
So is that considered one loan or are they too
and it ends up yeah, it's one loan. So it's
a one you know, thirty year fixed rates conventional loan.
I mean you could do FHA as well, the two
or three K program. And you know, oftentimes the challenge

(17:50):
is being able to buy the home low enough so
that there's space for the renovation budget, right, because you
can't just within the value within the what they call
the after improved value. Right. So once all these you know,
projected renovations are done, what's the value of the home
going to be? And it's tricky, right, This is a

(18:10):
tricky loan to get the numbers right on because you know,
just because a home like for you isn't suitable for you,
right it needs to be fixed up, that doesn't mean
necessarily that it's way under value for the neighborhood. Right,
So you're kind of having to predict, well, what's the
home worth right now? Are you getting it for that

(18:32):
number or lower? Right? And then what's the home going
to be worth after you improve it? And you don't
often get like dollars per dollar, Like if I spend
Jim one hundred thousand dollars of renovations, that doesn't necessarily
give me one hundred thousand dollars in value your home,
right because it's just you know, putting on a new roof,
it costs a lot, but you're not going to get
it's not worth that in the value in the market

(18:53):
because the roof's a roof, right, and appraise will tell
you if the roof is sound. You're not going to
get a big dump. Even if you put, you know,
forty thousand dollars on a new metal roof, that doesn't
automatically increase the value at home that much. So it's
tricky to find that. But I think we had we
had that with this home, and.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
We spent weeks. I mean, we went through these weeks
and weeks of research. You and me the buyer, and
you know, Danny and you and me. We spent weeks
and weeks going through this. Really it was difficult. They
were first time home buyers too. Now luckily Danny had
some contractors.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yes, there were some advantages to being able to do
it and maybe a little bit more reasonable budget than
someone who didn't wasn't in the field, kind of didn't
have good contacts, reliable you know, contractors, things like that.
So but yeah, it's Memvera Jim. We our goal is
to get to the finish line and have everyone as

(19:47):
happy as possible, right, and like you want everyone's happy, No,
I mean sometimes there's a little bit give and take
through these things, but you have to. So we spent
a lot of time trying to understand what was going
going to be within the parameters of the financing, like
getting the loan approoves right. And we make that effort

(20:07):
because it's there's a lot on the line for people
and they're relying on us as a professionals, right, so
we're doing exactly what we need to do to kind
of predict where we're going to land and what the
limits of you know, what can be done. And that
renovation piece is kind of a mystery point, right because
you really don't know until until you figure out, okay,

(20:27):
we're going to do this when we're going to add
a bedroom, we're gonna you know, redo the roof, redo
the kitchen, and you work up all of that budget
and then you know it's like, oh, that's a that's
a pretty big number. Do we need to scale back
or what else can.

Speaker 4 (20:40):
We do this?

Speaker 2 (20:41):
This was an involved one because this wasn't just we're
going to rip out the kitchen and put in a
new kitchen and put some flooring in, or we're going
to put a roof on. This was we're adding like
a third more to the house than.

Speaker 4 (20:52):
Order to exists.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
Yeah, so they had a poor new foundation, new footers,
you know, build new footers, new foundation, add a tie
in the roofline to the old roof. Yep, there was
a lot involved in what they were trying to do,
but they were trying to make it work, and so
we got to the point where we all felt comfortable.
It took weeks and the buyer was very the seller
was very giving about giving them as much time as

(21:15):
they needed because the seller really liked the family and
they want She really wanted a young family to buy
the house. It made her feel good about that, so
she was willing a way to have this family try
to do it. But then what happened was we got
to the inspection, we felt it was good enough for
the numbers of construction numbers to go ahead and do
the inspection.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Yeah, and just so like on that point in particular,
So some of these things you're going to as a buyer,
you're going to spend money, and it's professionals are doing work.
So the home inspection, the appraisal are very two examples
of where you're going to be paying for that. And
regardless of whether you close or not, you're not going
to get that money back, right because somebody is doing work,
they're going to get paid for the work. So we're

(21:58):
always conscious of, you know, if you don't have to
spend money, don't let's do this in a step by
step process so that we're not wasting you know, six
hundred seven hundred eight thousand dollars and you're not going
to recover that if you don't close. So we're doing
all this legwork on the building part of it, the

(22:19):
renovation part of it, before they've even spent money on
the home inspection to start. And that's okay. We did
that intentionally, right, Chris.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
We wanted to save the buyer money in case the
construction was too much for the value of the home
after improved value of the home, and we couldn't do
the loan right, so we wanted to make sure you
and I discussed this with the buyer. We said, why
don't we find out if you can get the loan
first for real, and then we'll just you know, then
we'll get into the inspection period.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
And kind of like a simple way to think about
those numbers is, let's say that the predicted after improve
value is seven hundred thousand dollars right as an example,
But if your renovation budget is three hundred thousand, well,
you need to acquire the property for four hundred thousand. Right.
If your renovation budget is two hundred thousand, you need
to acquire it for five. So that's the balance that
you're trying to find because you have to not only

(23:09):
get the home, the acquisition or the purchase price sufficiently below.
You also have to convince the seller that that's the
current value of the home, right, because the seller has
to be like, well, wait a second.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
And that happened with us too, because originally we were
going to put the house on the market at a
higher price. And then we talked to AJ from experience
of praisers. Was really helpful, yep. And AJ really kind
of told us that he felt we were overshooting a
little bit, and he actually gave us some compst. You know,
AJ is awesome. So I went back to the owner

(23:43):
before we even put it on the market. I said,
I think we need to adjust the price before we
put it on the market because I'm not sure we're
going to get what we needed. AJ was way closer
to the praise value than I was. I'm being real
about that. So we listened to AJ and that ended
up working. It's still it came in right right kind
of where h thought it was. There was a bracket

(24:04):
and he was right in the middle of the price
was right in the middle of that bracket. Yeah, which
was pretty good. But then we so we got through
the loan part where we felt kind of comfortable that everything.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
Was going to work on.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
We had a workable plan, so the next step was this,
we had to do the appraisal, I mean the inspection.
And when you do an inspection on most homes, if
it's on public sewer and you know, public sewer and
water sewer and water city water and public sewer and
all that, using the inspection is pretty straightforward unless there's
something usual with the house. You know, you're inspecting all

(24:39):
the electrical and the plumbing and the structural of the house,
and then you know, making sure everything's functioning well inside
the house but out in the acreage. You have usually
a couple lecture expections that you might want to do.
Number One, if you're doing if you're buying a house
with the pool, you should always do a pool inspection.

Speaker 4 (24:56):
And a lot of people don't want to.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
Does it evolve swimming in the pool or yeah, yeah,
hang out with the cocktail.

Speaker 4 (25:02):
You have to have you have to have the pain. Oh.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
I almost said the you have to have the dakery
almost other.

Speaker 4 (25:10):
Words and said the other you know what I'm talking about,
the cold.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
The Yeah, the colada what they call it a pain
in the you know what they mix They mix a
strawberry Jaker with the plean of Colada and they call
it a pain and you know what in the Keys
and the Alborado they called a pain.

Speaker 3 (25:28):
In the I know that as a Miami vice. Oh,
I know it is a pain in the What are
you saying the Spanish word?

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Cool kulo? Yeah, okay, you have to stump that. Really,
I didn't know. Sorry, man, don't you.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
Hear un language? Is that true? Yeah, you can't say Spanish?
What if it's a technical what if that's the official
you know.

Speaker 4 (25:52):
Like, well what about what about like bloody in England? Oh?

Speaker 3 (25:58):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 5 (25:59):
So here's one that we never really got an answer on.
So we always aired on caution but that show Ship's Creek.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Or last Night.

Speaker 5 (26:11):
I mean, it's it's their name, right and it's not
the cuss word. But if you say it on air,
I mean, is it a problem or not. We never
really got a solid answer on that, so we just
never said.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
It probably goes to uh intent, like what's your intention, which.

Speaker 5 (26:27):
Is really how it should be, and it should be Okay,
you can say it because that is your.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Name and that's not it. So it's like, you know,
and that's that that that falls back.

Speaker 5 (26:36):
We were talking about it the other I think the
last week when we were you know, the delay and
everything that kind of came up in our conversation. And
you know, it's like there are certain words like I
can call Mike a dick, you know you're you're acting
like a dick today, or Richard and I can.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
Say that all day long and not a problem.

Speaker 5 (26:51):
But if I reference the male body part, now I'm
in violation of the FCC.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Yeah, I mean, is that stupid or what?

Speaker 4 (27:00):
It's crazy?

Speaker 3 (27:01):
It is crazy if you think of it as the
word jerky, right, yeah.

Speaker 4 (27:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
So I've got dumped twice in the last month and
i haven't been dumped in like twelve years. So sorry,
I'm going to make sure I'm not trying to Jimmy
worth his money, right, I've got right here too. So
what happens when I hit that, Jimmy, we lose for
ten seconds.

Speaker 5 (27:25):
It does the same thing, it drops out eight seconds
eight seconds.

Speaker 4 (27:28):
Well that's a lot.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
So so getting back to the inspections, so like a
pool inspection can cost as much as the regular inspection
for the house, almost the same amount, and a lot
of people are not sure they want to do that,
and most inspectors, if you just pay the basic price,
they'll check the pool pump and stuff to make sure

(27:49):
it's not leaking and stuff like that, but they're not
going to make sure the pools has any kind of
leaking or anything. The leaking is what you're really the
shell to me, the shell and the that wrap around
the pool underground. Those are the two big things that
are super expensive.

Speaker 4 (28:05):
I'm not a pool expert.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, those are the things I see pop up that
are the biggest problems.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
And there's how difficult is it to tell? I mean,
obviously if the water level is going down, that's the problem,
but like in the Florida heat for example, with you'll
lose water that way.

Speaker 4 (28:21):
Well, there's a bucket test.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
You could do this bucket test for free, but that
isn't like full proof. And if you're buying a house,
what I always say is is like it's worth the
inspection because if you have a big problem, you know
it's going to cost way more than inspection. You want
to negotiate it now with the seller. Then pulling the money.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
Out of your pocket because you didn't pay for an inspection.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
It's actually maybe a good overall topic. So you get
a home with a lot of stuff, So you got
your home inspection, pool inspection. So you're out in the acreage,
so it's a septic septic. Do you inspect the well too,
it's like a well, Yeah, inspect.

Speaker 4 (28:54):
I call it the slime test.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
But what you do is so, but so this house
didn't have a pool, but normally, you know, pool inspection
would be something. Now the next thing would be if
you have a well. So if you're on well and
you're drinking the water from the well, not if you
use it just for your irrigation, but if you're actually
using it for drinking water, you really should do what
I call the slime test. It's a very non technical term,

(29:18):
but basically they're going and checking your faucets and testing
the water in there to make sure that there's no
bacteria and other stuff in there, and if there.

Speaker 4 (29:26):
Is, it's usually pretty easily fix.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
You just take this chemical and you dump it into
the well outside where the well is, and you wait
twenty four hours and you come back and you test
it again, and it always passed. I don't know the
magic behind that, but it always passes after you do that.
But not doing that test, you're basically drinking stuff you
shouldn't be drinking even if you have a filter. You know,
all these houses out there usually have some type of

(29:50):
water softening system or filter filtration system to take the
iron out. So slime tests would be really important to
do because you don't want to be drinking gunky. And
the good news is if that is a problem, more
times than not, it's very a couple of hundred bucks
to fix.

Speaker 4 (30:06):
It's not a.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Big ticket item unless a well failed or something. Now,
the next thing is, and this is the port that
happened in real life with Danny and the homeowner for
this house, is that there was a septic tank. And
the costs for Danny through this process will higher the
most homeowners because they had to deal with the type

(30:28):
of things for the construction ownes. So he knew that
there would be extra costing securitying the loan than a
normal house because there were going to be more inspections
than things after he bought the home in order to
get the money for the construction, right, Mike, Yeah, right
about that.

Speaker 3 (30:42):
Yeah, if you're thinking, like, well, how much money do
I need to budget before we close? That I have
to spend before we close, one of them's like, you
earn his money deposit on the contract, you got to
put that money in. But yeah, paying for inspections and
what you know, sometimes it could be maybe you're budgeting
one thousand dollars total for appraisal and inspections. Well what
if it's two thousand, right, And it.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Can be with all these extual tests, but it's worth it.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
So he didn't want to do the septic test, and.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
I was like, it's probably what five hundred bucks.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, it's almost the same amount as the whole house inspection,
and that's why he didn't want to do it. And
and their first time home buyers, right, so, and even
if they weren't first time home buyers, I'd say the
same thing if somebody told me no. But they especially
don't know any better because they've never done it before.

Speaker 5 (31:29):
So I was like, you don't go through the process,
and there's a lot of you know, cost that kind
that come in there, creep in here.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
You don't think about. How about an architect in.

Speaker 4 (31:38):
That right case?

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah exactly at some point, Yeah, that was going to happen.
That's why he was he was trying to reduce the
costs for the house because His attitude was I'm ripping
apart the.

Speaker 4 (31:49):
House anyway, what differences to me?

Speaker 3 (31:51):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (31:52):
But I was like, no, but not the septic tank.
The septic tank is going to stay there. So what
happens if that failed? And he's like, well, what are
the chances? I go, well, I don't know what the
chances are, but do you want to take any chance?
Because that could And I didn't know how much septic
systems were and I threw out a number. It's like,
that could be a fifteen thousand dollars complete replacement with.

Speaker 4 (32:11):
The drain field and subjict tank. You just don't know
is that? How close is that number?

Speaker 2 (32:17):
It was actually high. That number came out high. So
what happened was I think that people could tell the
septic tank tests failed and the reason why I failed
usually it's failed because of the drain field. And the
drain field is the area that when the stuff comes
out of the septic tank, after it's been processed in
the septic tank to decompose, it goes out as slush

(32:40):
basically into your drain field.

Speaker 4 (32:43):
And uh, yeah, that's how it works. Pretty well, why
are you doing that? Why are you guys saying that
because what happens is the the stuff goes in the tank. Yeah,
if the solid bottom, the solid set to the bottom,
and then.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
The slush, the fluid, the leftover fluid at the top
of the tank that gets pushed out.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
So it's just the Yeah, so all the solids just
stay in the tank and then the fluid as it's
you know, fills up. The tank has an exit at
the top of the tank the same way it enters,
you know, same level, like you know, the level of
entering is about the same level. It's it's ex right,
So it's basically the drain field is a way for
all your liquid, the liquid portion of your waist to

(33:23):
just seep out into the ground.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
And there's a series of pipes and gravel and other
stuff in order to make a train well, and that
stuff can get clogged up. That that's usually where it
fails is the pipes get clogged or you know, or
grassroots or throw into it, or you drive over your
septic tank field and you compact and it has no more.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
The soil just gets so saturated that it can't take anything.

Speaker 4 (33:51):
It's clogged up.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, So that's what normally happens, but in this case
crack septic tank.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
So never it is not going to the drain field
to just going wherever it wants to go.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
It's going free. It's go free wherever it wants to go.
And there were multiple cracks and it wasn't fixable and
we I never had to deal with the replacement of subtict.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
Was it one of those like a poor concrete boxes.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yeah, sometimes there's fiberglass from what I understand, their fiberglass
plastic or concrete.

Speaker 4 (34:20):
This was concrete. There were so many cracks.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
I mean, I don't think you're going to be patching
a septic tank anyway, but it needed to be ripped out. Now,
the drain field was okay, So the septic tank I
forget how much it was, but I think it was
only like thirty five hundred just to a replacement. Pop
it in and thank you Danny sept it in. Yeah,
Danny Septick did the job. They were very professional.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
So that happened, so we didn't They didn't end up
uh proceeding with this, but the septic tank work was
done anyway, right, So the homeowner who was selling decided,
but this is going to be something we got to
deal with. No, matter what.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
And that's nice, and that wasn't the only thing, because
now did we have a bad septic tank, but the
warehouse that Danny was putting all of his hopes and
dreams into, and that's why he wanted the property. The
electrical in the warehouse was not permitted. And not only
was it not permitted, but they didn't do it right.
They used wrong wiring from and they wired the warehouse

(35:20):
which had two hundred amp service over to the house,
but they only used one hundred and fifty eight panel
and the wiring from the house to the warehouse was
not the proper gauge. So the whole thing was a
complete mess. And so now that warehouse became not valuable
to the buyer because he couldn't use his heavy duty

(35:41):
electrical equipment he needed.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
So he needed to get it up to a certain level.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Of So then it became really bad because now we
have a first time home buyer that really really wanted
the house. The wife wasn't so crazy about it, the
husband wanted it. We had some bad inspection stuff. They
spent a lot of time an effort to make all
this happen, and some money, and like where the big
question became were they in too deep where they just

(36:08):
needed to keep plowing for it, or maybe it was
better to back away. So I said right away, maybe
we should start. And actually they might have brought it up,
and I agreed with them because I was going to
bring up to them and they said while we were
trying to decide what to do, the first time home
buyers said, you know, maybe we should look at other properties.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Yes, there anything else out there?

Speaker 2 (36:29):
And I said, I really think that's a good idea
for you guys, because you haven't looked at enough properties
out there as first time home buyers. The seller was
okay that we were going to shop around.

Speaker 4 (36:38):
So what we.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Decided was the seller and the buyer agreed to stay
in contract even though we weren't sure. We were going
to continue with the contract, and then the seller was
going to fix the septic tank in the electric and
then the buyer was going to look for properties, and
then we'd figure out what was going to happen.

Speaker 4 (36:54):
By the time the smoke cleared, right.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
It was pretty I mean, it was pretty amazing that
these two sides were not combative at all.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
Yeah, because it can get contention, it.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
Could get very bad and it wasn't like that at all.
It was the smoothest. Everybody was very reasonable.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
Yeah, And I think when you're you know, one of
the big jobs of your real estate agent is like
putting the contract together and thinking about the deadlines for
inspections and appraisals and then your closed date and your
financing contingency. And you know, once you sign that initial contract, Jimothy,
it's like you're in contract, like that's serious. These dates

(37:31):
in here, And if, for example, you need to a
little bit more time before you even start your home inspection,
that should be pre negotiated. If you're within your inspection
window and you need to extend because there's some unresolved issues,
you need to have professionals who are on top of
that and extending those dates. Those dates are important, you know,
per your contractual obligations, and there is money on the

(37:55):
line if you can't fulfill your end of the bargain,
so to speak. So you know, luckily Jim has Nancy
who's very on top of the dates and deadlines, and
she'll say something like, hey, dis inspection, I know you
guys are working on this stuff. Inspection period expires in
four days. Are you going to have it resolved by then,
or do we need to extend And if you if

(38:16):
you're like not behind on that, you can usually negotiate.
You know, people are amicable about moving like, hey, we're
not we're not expiring tomorrow, right, it's not like midnight
tonight we're asking for e It's like it's a few days.
We're still going through this potential sticky spots. What do

(38:37):
you think about extending this so we have some more
time to sort it out and so.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
And that's exactly what happened here. So it was working
out really well. We went out a couple of times
to look for other properties and then we found the one.
I mean, they just slid up when they saw this house.
They were just so and it was so different than
the house that they were going to buy.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
It was much more suitable for their living situation, which
which the len was like more like we got to
live here, like we need this, And that's what they
were planning to do with the renovations too, like get
the home into something that worked for their family. But
once I think once they saw hey, wait a second,
we have these complications. Here's the home that's perfect. We

(39:19):
don't They're gonna have to do all this extra work
just to get livebl that might not suit our needs
as much on the work on the work side, the
business side. But this is a house. Is where we're
gonna live, We're gonna raise our family.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
This is a This is a neighborhood where the parents
take golf courts in the morning and drive their kids
to school in golf courts. Like it's one of those
kind of communities.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
At least.

Speaker 4 (39:48):
But there there's there's kids all over the place.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
Their kids I think are roughly five and seven, so
this is gonna be awesome for them. Lots of tons
of canals to go fishing in if you're young boys
and go have fun. You could go bike riding and
not be worried about like.

Speaker 5 (40:04):
The school system, the stores and you know a lot
of those things that take into consideration as parents.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
And there's nice parks around there. So it was like
a really good lifestyle. And here's the best part. You know,
out in the acreage, everybody's getting like basically an acre
in a quarter and the lot they have is situated
where the house is situated. Plus they got a pool
in this house, a really nice pool.

Speaker 4 (40:27):
Oh I love that pool.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
That pool I got to pay oh, and then they
got with the water treatment system. They got a ten
thousand dollars water treatment system as part of the deal
with the house and had a brand new roof. Okay,
so there were a lot of really good things on it.
So now instead of dealing with the house like they
were dealing with the first house, what they decided was,
we love the house, we'll probably fix it up a

(40:50):
little bit, but then we'll put the building in later.
So he'll come in and put in a metal building
later and it'll be the opposite. And that way he
could build a building the way he wants it to be,
you know, like for his business.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Right, it's going to suit his equipment and his needs.

Speaker 4 (41:06):
But the.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Some of the teachable moments in that whole thing, inspections
really do matter. And if they didn't do that, and
they went through this whole thing, and they imagine if
they put the addition on and everything, and then they
started using the house and then they found out they
had the septic tank problem, and who knows what would
have happened with the electric right like because the electric
so that turned all into a big thing. But Danny

(41:32):
and Lynn closed on their new home just Thursday, So
congratulations to them. The kids aren't going to see it
till next week, so they haven't even seen their new
home yet. Mike, I wanted to give it two to
the horn to you because right at the last minute,
you got them a little better deal on their interest
rate than what we first started out with.

Speaker 3 (41:52):
Correct, Yeah, so we're able to This was a little
bit of a longer contract when they finally got into
it was something you know, two months essentially to the close.
And I'm not sure if that was the sellers needed
to do that.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
The sellers on Danny's you know, the per the sellers
wanted to close, like.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Yeah, so they they it was a little bit extended contract.
And we're in we're in a market. Like what my
advice to people is just lock your lock in your loans,
like as soon as you can, just because it's so tumultuous. Uh,
you don't know where we're going to be too. Interest rate, Yeah,
lock in the interest rate. And so they had been
locked in about two months ago, right, And so what's
happened with the market since the Well, we've had some

(42:31):
incremental improvement from two months ago, right, Like just we've
seen every week we had that, you know, three weeks
in a row, down two tents or whatever. So I
was pretty uh aware. So our our float down policy
essentially float down means that if the market goes sufficiently down,
even though you're locked in, you may be able to
take advantage of that downward movement. You're still protected from upward,

(42:52):
but if it goes down, and it goes down enough, right,
we have parameters we're looking for, and once we're within
fifteen days of closing, we can look at doing a
float down or what's called a renegotiation. So I was
very aware with them that they may be able to
take advantage of that, and kind of I was watching
it every day and we just weren't quite there. We
weren't quite there, weren't quite there. And then just last week,

(43:14):
I think, so they closed on Thursday, yesterday.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
Or Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, yeah, Friday, So.

Speaker 3 (43:20):
On Tuesday we finally got to that point where I
was able to float them down essentially a quarter of
a point on their interest rate. So they went on
a quarter of a point less. Didn't cost them any money.
It just you know, from one night to the next,
and that's just because I was aware of it and
I was watching it, and I had spent the you know,
two weeks prior, pretty much every day just kind of

(43:41):
checking like are we there? Are we there? Are we there?
And so luckily we got there. It turns out on Wednesday,
maybe it would have gotten ty tiny bit better, but
you know, you pull the trigger as soon as I
was able.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
To see, well, what you're telling me. I'm going to
talk about this later in the show about interest rates.
And there was an article I read saying that if
the most important thing to do right now is lock
in your rate, I was going to ask you about that,
So we're going to talk about that later and just
a little Yeah, that's an interesting concept that we need
to talk about our technique or tool if you will. Okay, So, uh,

(44:13):
that's what happened with Daniel Lin. Congratulations, But I made
them homeless. They're the ones I made homeless. So how
did you make them homeless? If they bought a home?
So we got when we did the final walk through,
the agent gave me one key to the house and
she said the other keys would be in the house
when we close.

Speaker 4 (44:31):
Now, we're not supposed to give the keys to the homeowners,
the new homeowners until the house is quote funded. Funded
means the money from the title company that came from
whoever landed in the seller's bank account, right bank.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
What that means confirmation that they get a confirmation that
the seller's bank got the wiley.

Speaker 4 (44:53):
That's what funded is. No, that's what we can.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
You know what for me? Funded means the title company
is author eyes to release funds.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
Oh no, with us, you have to have the confirmation
that it's already transferred in the bank account. Not the
bank account, but at the bank where the seller is
getting their money.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Interesting.

Speaker 4 (45:11):
Yeah, that's and if you.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
Don't have the confirmation of it, you're not supposed to
give the keys to the house, even though of everybody signed, right,
because it's not most houses on the MLS or possession
at funding, not at closing.

Speaker 4 (45:25):
There's a difference, right.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
I think I would have a quibble with if I
got into it with somebody.

Speaker 4 (45:29):
Oh that's interesting. Yeah, Glenda's pretty tough on that.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Yeah, I think. I mean, I think if I were
a seller, I would want to say until I got
the money in my hand, this thing ain't done. But
I think technically not.

Speaker 4 (45:42):
If you have the contract possession of funding.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Well, yeah, I mean i'd have to tell you.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
You'd argue what the funding is.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
I would, yeah, I would say that. So that one
of the title companies. So everyone, when you're doing a closing,
you got a settlement agent, or we call it a
title company because they issue title insurance. So they also
make sure that title is transferring, you know, free and clear,
essentially right, a warrantable. They call it a warranty deed,
which means the deed has transfer ownership is transferred, and

(46:10):
it's warranted against you know, it comforts his claims on
title and it should go back as far as the
history books allow. Right, our record keeping, it's yeah, like
before they started keeping track of who owns what, who knows?
Like what do you do there? But so we call
it title company. So one of the things, and I say,

(46:30):
like what are the what are the things that the
title company is doing for you? One of them is
they collect all the funds and then they disperse all
the funds. So when they collecting the funds, like, Jim,
you're the buyer, so your earnest money depositor, you're sending
your down payment and closing costs it's all going to
the title company the loan that you're getting, right, So

(46:51):
the mortgage firm is sending a big fat wire to
the title company. H And then they're also dispersing, so
they're paying the county right, they're paying generally your homeowner's insurance.
They'll cut that, they'll send that first year's premium. They're
paying the sellers right. So for me, it's like once
the title company has verified they have all the funds

(47:14):
accounted for and they have received permission from the lender
really to say what we call funding, like you're authorized
to fund. To me, that means and you have all
your signed documents, you got a done deal, right. That's
the way I would think about that.

Speaker 2 (47:30):
Yeah, And the way that we're taught as realtors is
that you still have closing. If you click at closing,
then it's your way, okay. But if you do it
at funding, funding means sellers not when the money is
showing up in the seller's bank account, but the company
has a right has proof that they send it to

(47:51):
the bank because it's not up to the title company
for the seller's bank to release the money to the seller.
That's between them and their bank, right, So so that
so how I made them homeless, though I made them homeless,
is they were supposed to. So we got this one key,
and I thought they had other keys, and that you know,

(48:12):
there was a bag of keys in the house. And
they did mention that the people that left are real
tech ys. So the garage door.

Speaker 4 (48:20):
Openers are all on apps on their phones, and they
had like one of those electronic key for the front door,
and they even had like the blinds on electric and
everything in the house. Right.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
So anyway, when we were leaving to go to closing,
we did the final walk through, and they were there
and they went through the whole house and did the
final walk through, checked all the checklists, and then we
were going to the title company to close. Well, I
locked the door, and I'm not allowed to give them
the keys, you know, until closing, So I have responsibility
not to give the keys until funding. So I took

(48:50):
the keys with me and I locked the door. So
then we closed, we were funded, gave them the keys.
They drove back to the house an hour later, get
the call, Hey, Jim, we can't get in the house.
The bottom lock doesn't open with the key you gave me.
So I called the listing agent and she says, yeah,
we don't have a key to the bottom lock. Oh,
so I only had the key to the top lock, right,

(49:13):
So now there was no way to get into the house.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
The bottom lock is just a little twisty knobs, so
you like twisted that before you walked out.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
And I did. And I didn't think that. I thought
it was just double key, you know double keys. Yeah,
well nope. So I had a call and this was
another funny thing. I want to give a shout out.
I didn't even think about this. So the agent told
me I had a locksmith I.

Speaker 3 (49:35):
Was going to call.

Speaker 2 (49:36):
I was going to call locksmith because I was already
in a different area, like far away, and I wanted
to get somebody out there fast, right, I wanted like
done fast. So they told me about Wellington Locksmith. I
was going to go to a different locksmith company. But
when I heard Wellington, it was like, oh, that's close.
It's like five point fifteen. I don't even know if
they're going to get out here today. I got to

(49:56):
get this, I got to make this happen. So I
call up the guy and I found out later his
name is Rohan and I call up and I go, hey,
I'm an agent from Keller Williams. I just made my
home my buyer's homeless. I actually told him, I go,
just made him homeless. We don't have a key to
get into the bottom lock. I'm the one that locked it.

(50:16):
I didn't know any better. Can you help me? And
he's like, oh man, all our guys are like totally slammed.
And I'm like, uh, I totally understand. I know I'm
calling you, you know, late on a Thursday. And then
he stops. He goes, wait a second. He goes, do
you have a radio show?

Speaker 3 (50:32):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (50:34):
And I go and I laughed. I go, yeah, I do.
Feeling hopeful, right.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
He's like, finally I'll leverage it.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Yes, and apparently yeah, and apparently I totally used the card.
But apparently he knows Johnny C pretty well, and he
changed Johnny C's.

Speaker 4 (50:47):
Locks when I sold his house.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
When I bought Johnny c Is home, he went out
and changed the locks, so he knew. Johnny C's like, yeah,
I'll try to help you. So he was all ready
to go. And then the family worked all the doors,
a bunch of all the windows, a bunch of times
and then they got into one window, but then they
found out it was the garage, and then the garage
door was locked, so.

Speaker 4 (51:10):
They could get in the garage without in the house.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Then they finally found a window they could jiggle open
to get into the house.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
For the regular they didn't need.

Speaker 4 (51:17):
So Rohan didn't need it.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Then I told then I called Roehan and I said,
why don't you go over there and replace the lock
for them, and so they could either double key it
or whatever they need to do so they have keys.
I felt bad they didn't have all the keys and
the family said no right now, So but thank you.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
Going to change their locks at some point anyway, A
lot of people do that right or re key their lock.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Yeah, that would be very normal. So Rowhan, thank you
so much. Wellington Locksmith Okay, awesome company. Really loved their
customer service, so thank you and they.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
And that sounds like he might need, uh some employees,
maybe hire some some additional guys.

Speaker 4 (51:55):
Yeah, exactly, keep it busy. I couldn't handle the work.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
So any way, thank you so much for trying to
help us out on that, and we will be using
you in the future. So teachable moments, they're really important
that you do all the inspections if you're a buyer,
really really important. So then what happened to my house?

Speaker 4 (52:16):
Now?

Speaker 2 (52:16):
Now I have a listing right that I was trying
to sell to Danny and Lynn.

Speaker 4 (52:21):
And now the how the deal fell apart because we
walked away.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
Right that it's your listing, So you you were kind
of as far as tough negotiations go.

Speaker 4 (52:30):
That puts you in a yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
And that's the other thing I had to negotiate for
Danny and the seller whose name is Lorraine, Yeah, so
I had to work both of them together, right, So
and and the good thing was is because we were
doing that construction loan, that made it so much easier
having not a conflict of interest because legally you're allowed
to work both sides in Florida. Yeah, you have to

(52:52):
tell people you're working both sides and have a sign
a document, but you have to let them know you're
both working both sides. And the rules are if Mike
and Jimmy are in a contract together and I'm the
one trying to put the deal, if Mike is the
seller and Mike says to me, hey, jim I have
the house on the market at five hundred, but I'll

(53:13):
take four to seventy five right now, So get me
four seventy five or higher, and I'm taking it. And
then I find Jimmy, and Jimmy says, hey, I want
to buy the house. How low is Mike willing to go?
I can't tell Jimmy, Hey, just turn in four seventy five,
I can't say. And I say, well, here are the comps, Jimmy,
and here's all this stuff, and what do you think
is a fair price you want to offer?

Speaker 4 (53:35):
Right? That's how I do it.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
And then Jimmy, let's say, he says, ah, let's turn
in four sixty. But I don't want to lose this house, Jim,
so I'll pay five hundred.

Speaker 4 (53:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
So, now I know you're going to take four to
seventy five. And Jim's not doesn't want to lose the house.
And that does happen in real life?

Speaker 3 (53:51):
Right boy? How does that not be a conflict of that?

Speaker 4 (53:54):
Well?

Speaker 2 (53:54):
The reason why is I don't tell either side what's
going on. Right, So what I do with what I
do with you? I say, well, turn in an offer
that you think is fair. Then you turn into four
sixty to Mike. Then Mike goes, I don't like this number, right,
and I go, then counter right. That's why I tell
him right away counter right, Well, what should I counter?
I go, what would you like to counter at, Mike?

(54:15):
And whatever Mike wants to counterat, that's what I'm gonna
give to Jimmy.

Speaker 4 (54:18):
And that's how we get the deal.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
You just have to be very digilan about performing each
side as if you didn't have the other side's info,
right like that, the same way that he would deal
with Let's say you were the buyer in general, Jimothy,
he would say, hey, let's go in. Here's what I
think's a fair offer. Hey, they countered it this. What
do you think about that? Are you comfortable? Do you

(54:41):
need to come in lower? Like you would have that
conversation every single time, and the same thing on the
sales side, and you would know kind of how low
they would want to go, and you would want to
get them something better than that. Right, you don't want
to You're not going to drop to it, So you
just you have those conversations all the time. Now, you
just have to be very regimented about keeping.

Speaker 4 (54:59):
A hard mentalized right.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
I call it the lock box, Right, You got to
have it in a lock in your vault, if you
will like that information in your vault. But so now
I have a house that fell out of contract, has
a broke as septic system, has electrical in this gigantic
warehouse that's the real value of the property that is
basically has no electric now because it's not legal, right,
and the AC was broken the AC was shot right,

(55:23):
so on top of it, now we have no ac.
Basically a warehouse that's just a warehouse without any electric,
which was the whole value of the warehouse to a
certain extent, and now we have this major septic tank problem.
So Lorraine is the owner of the property. She's a senior,
she's retired, she worked. She was selling this house because

(55:45):
of a passing of her son, so it was not
fun for her to do this. She had to sell
her son's property and get rid of all his personal belongings,
not get rid of but like deal with all the
personal belongings in the house. And then she she had
this whole warehouse full of heavy duty metal working equipment
that she didn't even know, like gigantic blades and stuff,

(56:08):
the machine and forklifts and all kinds of stuff. And
here's this senior woman that has to deal with getting
rid of all this and selling it and get and
you know, not knowing what the stuff is worth. And
she had so many questions when she came to me
because she didn't know what to do. She was overwhelmed. Somehow,
somebody said, why don't you call Jim. Jim, it'll be

(56:30):
really helpful to you. So we met in August, Mike
last August, and we didn't close on her house until Tuesday,
So this Tuesday. So I spent a lot of time
with her over the months without even going to market.
We weren't even a market with Daniel Lynn and Think
until January or February. So from August to basically February,

(56:52):
I was just and never signed an agreement with Lynn.
We were just working together trying to help her. I
try to help her get contracts that might want to
buy the metal equipment right, the metal working equipment. Then
when we found out we had these major inspections, I
jumped in and really helped her out, like find all
the reputable people she needed. She needed a reputable electrician

(57:15):
that was going to be able to do what we
called a couple of them and thank you Anthony DeMarco
for DeMarco Electric. He did an excellent job for us,
nice and she was very happy with the results at
the end. And he rarely worked hard because he had
to basically start from scratch from the electric and he
had two agencies he had to deal with. He had
to deal with the building department for the governing agency

(57:36):
that's in the area, but then he had to deal
with FP and L and that was very very complicated
to get both.

Speaker 4 (57:42):
Of them on time, done on time. But he, you know,
he came through.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
So before that home was sold. Then event the electric
was up to the building was up to code, and.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
Yep, we fixed everything. So everything that had value had
value again. Okay, so we put in she put in
the septic tank and she also put in a brand
new AC. So now we had a house that still
needed to be fixed up and it was small, but
now we had a brand new AC, we had a
brand new septic tank, and we had a functioning electric

(58:13):
in the warehouse. Nice, so we put it back on
the market and when you know it, we found this
buyer like three days later. He loved the property because
let me tell you, that lot is gorgeous.

Speaker 4 (58:24):
I love that lot.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
You feel like you're in this own little tropical oasis. Yeah,
because all the mature landscaping.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Kind of on the on the boundaries of the lot.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
You have no idea of any of your neighbors, and
all the wind from the stuff coming through and the
mature vegetations, you don't hear anything.

Speaker 4 (58:41):
Other than in your property.

Speaker 3 (58:43):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
And the other thing is that for a business owner
or somebody that wanted to shop, there was an entrance
on both sides of the of the property. So in
the backyard there was an entrance, and there was a
front yard, there was an entrance.

Speaker 4 (58:58):
It was awesome.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
So if you had a come but you could just
go in the backyard, goat directly of the warehouse and
keep the regular house completely separated from the rest of
the place. So this guy loved it and he goes,
I don't even care about the house, because that's what
we're most worried about. And he says, I don't care
about the house. We're just gonna buy it because I
want to put my four race cars in the in
the warehouse. And he loved a lot, and so he

(59:20):
bought the house. So he bought it. It was so smooth.
I think we closed in seventeen days. And he picked
the title company, which normally we picked the title company
in Palm Beach County. He picked it so that means
he paid those costs. So that saved Lorraine a little
money and we got more money from that guy than

(59:41):
Daniel was going to pay Lorraine in at the beginning. Okay,
so she was happy. She you know, she's very satisfied.
She was so happy that that was done. And yeah,
we closed that on Tuesday, on Thursday, No, these are done.
So and Lorraine was just as happy for Daniel Lynn
that they were closing that week, and and Daniel and
Lynn were so happy that Lorraine closed on her house

(01:00:03):
and that she got a price that was even better
than what they were offering good stuff. So that was
like just a really awesome thing. And that's because all
of us worked really hard together. It was you and
me and we had ross involved in that deal and
tried it. We didn't have tried it. We had tried it,
but then we had to take them away because the
other people paid. But we had the whole Florida Talk
Real Estate cheam aj for the appraiser. So thank you

(01:00:26):
so much, the whole team for helping out everybody. It
makes a big difference. Let's take a break right now
because my computer's about to die. And on the backside,
we're going to talk a little bit about the economy,
and we're also going to talk about why it's a
great time to be a buyer. We're going to give
a real life example of Matt and Adena. We just
got a great deal on a closing that Mike did
with me, and we're going to talk about why it's

(01:00:47):
a great.

Speaker 4 (01:00:47):
Time to be a buyer.

Speaker 3 (01:00:48):
Today's Mark mcgalley, she posted a question about locking in
an interest rate on a home equity line of credit.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
So that's interesting. I didn't even know you could do that,
but she's asking. Yeah, that's a good one. Mcgley.

Speaker 4 (01:01:00):
Okay, guys, we'll take a break, come right back.

Speaker 5 (01:01:02):
If you have a question or a comment, call the
show eight seven seven nine two seven six nine six
and you got a question about a e lock like
we do here in the chat, give us a call
eight seven seven nine two seven six nine sixty nine.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
We'll be back on the other side of this break.

Speaker 6 (01:01:15):
On Real Radio, This is Florida Talk Real Estate with
Jim Dopola and Johnny C got a question for the show.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Call us Live at one eight seven seven nine, seven
sixty nine sixty nine.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Hey, this is jim Depola from the Florida Talk Real
Estate radio show. And I was typing in stuff to
our Facebook and YouTube page.

Speaker 4 (01:01:49):
I forgot that I'm Johnny C today.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
That's right, Johnny D is not here, So this is
Jimmy D all day, well at least for the next
hour or so.

Speaker 4 (01:01:58):
And we've got Mike raufrom the Mortgage Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
Sir, good morning, Good morning everyone, Hello, South Florida audience.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
And of course we've got Jimithy, the producer extraordinary. How
are you doing today, Jimithy?

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
Hello, Hello, doing it mighty fine. I hope you gentlemen
are as well.

Speaker 4 (01:02:12):
Yes, yes, and just checking in. Let me just finish
writing that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:18):
We were talking about some of the teachable moments of
some of our closings, and one of the things I
want to talk about is why it's a great time
to be a buyer in today's market. There really are
a lot of positives. And I know some people are
going to be like rolling their eyes listening to this,
but I mean, if you keep an open mind, you're
going to see that there's some real points to be

(01:02:39):
made about this if you really want to buy a house.
This is not for people that are trying to buy
a house to make money, right, But if you're looking
to buy a house to buy a house and live
in it, this is a really great time to do
that compared to many of the years that we've been
working in.

Speaker 3 (01:02:57):
If you don't know any of the history of this
show and you're just like, maybe you happen to cross
us on a dial or you got a link for Facebook,
and this is the first time you're hearing it, you
wouldn't be surprised that with a real estate agent host
and a mortgage professional co host and all the other
fields that were like, hey, it's a great time to
be a buyer, right, so caveat it's the agent and

(01:03:18):
the loan guy talking to you about, Hey, you need
to get a loan. But I think the point you
just made, Jim is correct, Like we're not telling you
it's a great time to get into real estate, or
hey you've got to get into this market. This market's
so hot, it's a great investment oppertunity. That is not
what we're saying. What we're saying is if you are
a buyer, meaning you have analyzed your situation and you've

(01:03:40):
decided that it makes sense not stop renting, you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
Know, don't want to live my parents' house anymore, locations
of my roommate downsize upside like, for whatever reason, regardless
of the market, regardless of the market, you it makes
sense for you and your family to get into a
new home.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
Then the question is is it a good time now
or should I be waiting for something or should like?
And I would say right now, Jim, it's better. It's
the best time to be a buyer than it has
been a recent by memory, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:15):
Five years or so.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
Yeah, I mean, I'm being real about that, because when
we were again when we're going to talk about this
a little later, like are we ever going to see
three percent interest rates again? But that was twenty twenty one, right,
And that was four years ago, right, And COVID started
at the beginning of twenty twenty. And there's a lot
of people out there over the last five years. When
you could get those low interest rates in twenty twenty one,

(01:04:38):
a little bit in twenty twenty two, when you can
get those interest rates you were competing against so many
other people that the interest rates were almost offset by
the crazy increasing increase in the purchase price because of
the bidding wars. You don't get that now, So I'm sorry, Mike.

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
You were saying, well, I was just gonna say, there's
a lot of people out there who do have Are
you going to see him again? I don't, And you know,
for new loans, I don't know good. I can't predict
when that is going to happen, if ever. But there
is a club out there. I call it. It's called
the three percenter Club. It's not the one, it's the three.
They've got th right, should we start a trend like

(01:05:17):
print some hats and some shirts like the.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Three the three percenter club, and they should be proud
they got that, because you know that those are crazy, crazy.

Speaker 4 (01:05:25):
Low interest rates.

Speaker 2 (01:05:26):
Didn't even see when Eisenhower created all these longer term
loans back in the day. Yeah, but but why is
it a good time?

Speaker 3 (01:05:33):
So buy?

Speaker 4 (01:05:34):
Is it a good time?

Speaker 2 (01:05:34):
Let me give you a real life example of somebody
that just bought a home, a couple that just bought
a home. So I don't know if this is appropriate
or not, but Danny, I called in my newsletter that's
coming out Monday, some of the stuff that we're talking
about on the show is going to be in the newsletter.
One of it was Danny and Lynn congratulated them as

(01:05:54):
first time home buyers, and then I had Matt Nadena
as last time home buyers because this is the home
that they think is going to be their last home
their seniors. Matt is a disabled veteran, Thank you for
your service, and it was time for them to buy
a home. And I helped them bail them out ten
twelve years ago when they were in trouble on their

(01:06:16):
first home and had them walk away debt free from
their house.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
And so the really full circle story just with you
right with Florida Talk real estate, pretty pretty neat.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Yeah, can you imagine we met them and we had
to help them get out of a house that they're
really in big financial trouble with and could have broke
them financially and helped them with that. But that's not
a happy time when you're helping somebody sell a home
they don't want to sell and they don't make any
money selling it. All they get is away from the debt, right, Oh,

(01:06:48):
I didn't see that we're going to get back into
them just because they didn't see we had a call.
Did you want to wrap that or I want to
go back to So what we're going to talk about
is Matt Nadeena's great, great buying experience. So what a
great deal they got and why you can too. But
let's come through the caller for him.

Speaker 5 (01:07:03):
In the meantime, we have Kelly checking in with us,
and Kelly wanted to talk to but it's probably gonna
end up falling more to Mike here about maybe a
possibly bad credit and how they can get into a
home even if you have a couple of blips on
your credit score. Kelly, welcome to Florida Talk real Estate.
I'll let you post a question probably better than I
just recapped it.

Speaker 7 (01:07:24):
Well, good morning everybody. The best of the best is here.
I hope Johnny is doing well. He's definitely missed. But
so of my question is you said about the three percent,
which most people think three percent interest is high. Well,
there's people like us out here or me who we're
gonna have a way higher interest rate because our credit

(01:07:45):
isn't so good And if somebody is willing to even
light you purchase home, it's going to be extraminal. So
my question is is there's things we can do to
fix that and do that and is it a silly
thing to buy a house? Say if I got approved
for seventeen percent interest, that's silly, but that's what some

(01:08:08):
people may do just to get out of a bad situation.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
So number one, yeah, I would say in general, leading
up to getting any type of finance and whatsoever, whether
it's a car loan, you know, a signature loan, unsecured loan,
or a mortgage, you want your credit to be as
high as possible, just in general, right, So the better
the credit, the better the terms you're going to get

(01:08:37):
on your loan. So interest rate essentially maybe cost cost
an interest rate, So you want to be focused on
getting your credit as high as possible within the timeframe
that you're targeting. There's various ways of optimizing credit, but
I the analogy I use a lot with people is
you want as many a's on your report card as possible, Jim.

(01:08:59):
And so if you know, even with your freshman year,
you you know you didn't pay attention, maybe got some
d's and f's like those aren't necessarily going to go away.
So poor you know, poor performance in the past isn't
necessarily going to go away, but you can start to
outweigh it with exemplary performance moving forward, right and adding
as many a's to kind of outweigh those others.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Making sure you make all your payments on time, making
sure that your balance is on your credit order are
too high things.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
Yeah, you kind of shift your mindset from you know,
using credit to buy stuff to using credit to optimize
for credit score. And there's a strategy you can use there,
so you know, some of that old stuff if it's
if you have you know, poor performance in the past,
it's time is what's required to fix that time and
positive credit. So that's one thing, So you want it
to credit as high as possible. Now, the second part

(01:09:47):
of the question is does it make sense to take
you know, what, maybe what you consider a penalty interest
rate just in order to get into the home. And
she had mentioned seven you're not going to get crazy
high thing unless you're doing like some sort of hard
money loan. Even those are like twelve percent. So you

(01:10:09):
want to be as close to what I would consider
just market rates as possible. And definitely if you have
lower credit, you might have a higher interst rate than
somebody with excellent credit. Your mortgage assurance if you're doing
a low down payment, might be higher than it is
with somebody with excellent credit. But I was gonna say,
there are maybe certain programs, certain things that you can

(01:10:30):
take advantage of that will kind of lessen that.

Speaker 4 (01:10:34):
Difference and tell me if I'm wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
One of the things I would have mentioned to Kelly
is that what the biggest problem that most people have
is they don't know what credit score they're trying to achieve.
They just feel like their credit score isn't adequate. Right,
So here's the thing, wouldn't if if Kelly and her example,
Let's say she's you know, in the five hundreds, Let's say, okay, okay,
really she only needs to get to six twenty, and

(01:10:59):
then one that happens, she's locked in. It doesn't matter
how high she gets past six to twenty if she
uses an FHA loan, yees.

Speaker 3 (01:11:08):
So that's exactly a very good point, Jim, which is
your credit at the minimum needs to be to meet
the minimum qualifying level, and then how much higher you
can go and how much that would benefit you is
going to depend on the loan program. So for FHA,
you're not going to have a big difference, if any
difference at all, between top tier credit and qualifying credit,

(01:11:29):
like just qualifying credit.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
Right, So if you have six forty or eight point fifty,
you're going to get the same interest.

Speaker 3 (01:11:34):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And there might be some like little
little thresholds in there. But on a conventional that's a
very wide margin. So FHA interest rate's going to be
pretty much the same. Mortgage insurance is going to be
the same regardless. So the mortgage insurance meaning the the
portion of your monthly payment that is paying for an
insurance policy that protects your lender, doesn't protect you, but anyway,

(01:11:55):
So that's fixed on FHA, So it doesn't matter what
your credit score. On a convention loan, your credit is
important not only to the thirty year you know, fixed
interest rate, but also the mortgage insurance factor, which is
expressed kind of as a percentage too. So not so
important on FHA, could be a little bit more important

(01:12:16):
on conventional. One of the questions when I'm doing a
pre approval for somebody is what type of loan are
we doing that we're trying to get basically I have.
You have to make a determination what's the best loan
program that's going to make the most sense for you,
sometimes based on credit, sometimes it's down payment, sometimes it's
sources of income. Like there's all these factors go into
like you know, are you doing FHA, are you doing

(01:12:36):
conventional or A you're doing a VA loan, or are
you're doing something that's none of those right?

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
Right, So that's the point we're trying to make, Kelly,
is that instead of wondering what score you need to get,
you need to find out what the score is you
actually need and then go for it, right, because when
you don't have the goal, it's just kind of like
this nebulous thing. My credit's not good. Credit it's not good,
but you're not. You don't know what to do about it.

(01:13:03):
You don't even know where you need to go. And
and a lot of people we talked to Mike, they
think their credit's horrible and they can already qualify for
the loan now right as far as credit score, they
might not have the down payment or something.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
Many times people aren't sure. There's definitely credit monitoring out there,
so you can kind of have an idea. But they
they think they're worse than they are and they think
they're just they can't qualify because of credit, And a
lot of times they were like, no, your credit's fine
for qualifying. You know, you may have other challenges, maybe
it's cash, maybe it's debt to income, but credit check.

Speaker 2 (01:13:33):
Right, One of the things we did when when oh,
I'm sorry, Kelly, go ahead.

Speaker 7 (01:13:39):
That's what's so hard is because there's four agencies out
there giving you different number.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Yeah, it isn't that hard. You're making you're making it.
You're making a lot of big things that are really
nothing as long as you make your payments on time
and you reduce your debt and you know where your
credit score is now, and like have a mic saying
this is what I would do to increase your score.
You have a goal because what you're trying to do
now is you're guessing what the well the credit score

(01:14:06):
companies are going to do with you and how they're going.

Speaker 4 (01:14:08):
To interpret it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:09):
I just looked at mine recently because I'm going to
be doing something soon, and my three credit scores have
a variance of forty points right between the low and
the high.

Speaker 4 (01:14:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
Yeah, but I am in the But if you bracket it,
I kind of know where I'm at.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
You know what a good idea. I mean, the reason
you see different scores, they're just using different formula r Right,
they have just different formula. There's probably thirty different formula
that are used, and you can imagine certain variables or
weight in certain ways. And so it's like, what's the
difference between a Google search and an asked search or
a bing search whatever? Right, it's just different formulas. But

(01:14:46):
what I my general advice to people is like, let's
say that I do a pre approval, I pull the
credit and the credit is not qualifying, and I see
certain things. Sometimes you can say, hey, we can attack
these very quickly and get your scores up. Or some
times it takes a little bit longer, like hey, you
have no a's. You need to establish some aze and
keep a maze. So my advice to people who are

(01:15:08):
in that situation is number one, try to clean up
as much as you can on the negative and there's
various ways to do that. But get your existing positive
credit as positive as possible. And then I want you
I don't care what the score that you see is, right,
What I care is that you're using a tool so
you can consistently monitor movement in the score. So if

(01:15:29):
Credit Karma is telling you with this bureau you got
you know, five point fifty, great, that's our benchmark five
fifty today. I want you to optimize your positive credit,
clean up your negative. Do whatever we're doing, and then
just watch that five fifty and if it's five sixty, well,
guess what, we probably got ten points positive movement regardless

(01:15:50):
of the formula, right, fifty points. You know, six months later, Hey,
I've gone from five to fifty to six hundred on
Credit Karma on this formula, they're showing me, great, we
probably got about fifty points a positive movement. So what
I'm interested in is telling you, hey, try to clean
up these things. Sometimes means ignoring them. Right, take your

(01:16:12):
existing positive and maybe we add some new positive. I
want those to be as positive as possible, which is
where your discipline comes in here.

Speaker 4 (01:16:19):
So here's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
Let's say that you have medical bills and that's screwing
you up right sure, and then people go out and
they say I got to pay those medical bills. Where
the medical bills really aren't counting as part of your
credit score. So you're spending money to the money that
you owe. Yeah, so there's nothing wrong with that part.
But if you're doing it to build your credit, that
isn't helping you at all.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
That's right. And sometimes I an old collection, something you
were supposed to pay you didn't pay, been sitting around
for years, Well do you do? You do something with that?

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
Or maybe you pay down a credit card that you
do nothing.

Speaker 3 (01:16:51):
So the very first thing you can do, which is
sometimes the hardest, is just optimize your existing credit and
or add new credit and keep it optimized, meaning it's
optimized for credit score, not for spending, not for buying.
And so that's the hardest because that's the change in
spending habits cleaning up your negative stuff. Maybe you don't
do anything at all, or maybe you wait until you've

(01:17:13):
optimized everything else and then figure out if there's money
towards it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:15):
So so there's two basic answers to your question, Kelly,
and thank you for being patient. Number One, call call
Mike right.

Speaker 7 (01:17:23):
Like, seriously great advice.

Speaker 2 (01:17:26):
Well, thank you, because the first thing you would do
is call Mike right. You call us and we'll get
you over to Mike, and Mike will give you a
free consultation to figure out everything that's going on and
tell you what to do.

Speaker 3 (01:17:34):
And I usually follow up with some sort of email
prescription like hey, yeah, doctor's orders.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Right exactly, and I use this. I'm a real life
example of using Mike's advice to build my credit. About
I don't know. It was like six years ago. Wow,
was it nine? Maybe it was eight or nine years ago,
I don't remember. It was eight or nine years ago,
and I unexpectedly needed to buy a house right away,
and I wasn't prepared because I didn't set up I'm

(01:18:03):
self employed like everybody else. I didn't really set up
myself to buy the house, but I really needed to.
So I went over to mic obviously, and he gave
me all this advice. And my problem back then is
that I had basically no credit. He was actually a
little surprised because of my age and I had no credit.
And I was very proud of that because my attitude
was I did everything cash because I got burned during

(01:18:25):
the last fun.

Speaker 3 (01:18:26):
You had a financial philosophical shift right where you're like,
I'm not borrowing money anything.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
Yeah, I'm doing everything. I'm not buying it. I sacrificed
a lot to do that. But also I felt like,
after I got burned in the last economic crisis, I
wasn't going to go through that ever again.

Speaker 3 (01:18:43):
So when I pulled your report card, basically I was like, Jim,
did you ever even go to school? Right? You got nothing?

Speaker 4 (01:18:49):
I hadn't got no record, right. I was very proud.
I was off the grid. I was so proud of
myself at work.

Speaker 3 (01:18:54):
I was homeschooled.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
Yeah, And I was like, it worked, it worked, But
now had to buy a house, and I was like,
oh bummer. So what I ended up doing. Mike explained
to me exactly what I needed to do. So I
followed all of his steps, and in my case, not
everybody's going to have the same results. In my case,
within three months ninety days, I went from no credit
at all to good enough credit. I think we used FHA, Mike, No,

(01:19:17):
we used five percent conventional. I think when you bought that,
I'm pretty sure we did five percent conventional, but we
did a lower down payment thing on the house.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
We probably did conventional with you guys because we were
looking for one year tax return it now, because that
was the other part. So what part of it was
like in prepare credit. The other part was, well, you're
self employed, so you need to have a certain amount
of income on paper, right on paper, income that we
could use for qualifying.

Speaker 2 (01:19:47):
So Mike, Mike told me. I did exactly what Mike
told me to do because I was highly motivated and
it went really smoothie. Now, the second piece of advice
advice number one, call up Mike free. You don't have
to start going in with all these stupid credit repair
companies that we've tried over and over again. They can work,

(01:20:07):
but Mike's system, Mike's advice us better.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
By the way, the.

Speaker 7 (01:20:12):
Credit repair system are very expensive.

Speaker 4 (01:20:15):
And you have to do a lot.

Speaker 7 (01:20:17):
And with Mike, no, but I'm taking people who want
to charge you, like.

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):
Yeah, but you still they charge you. They charge you,
but they still want you to do work. You still
have to do work, so you're not just throwing it
over them making it their problem. So even though you're
throwing money at them, you still have to do the work.
And most people don't. I know because I went through that.
But the second thing, though, the second part Kelly, is

(01:20:41):
use a use a tool, use credit karma, experience app whatever.
When I got on Credit Carma, and Mike told me
to do that. That was part of the thing. Jim,
go get credit Carmer or something some app like that
and use it and follow it because you're going to
learn how your credit changes week by week, day by day.
And I'm thinking, out, whatever, that's stupid app I've seen

(01:21:02):
on TV. I got to tell you that app was awesome,
and I still use even though it's nine years later,
I'm still using that app. And that's how I know
I've got a forty point bracket right now. Yeah, and
I know that that isn't my real credit score, you know,
from that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
Front, like from the model that we're using when we
do a mortgage pull, right, it's a different formula.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):
But it gives me a very clear idea of the
range I'm in, Like, am I in good, excellent or
very good or poor credit or fair credit? I know
exactly where I am in any moment.

Speaker 3 (01:21:32):
It's almost like a game of what's the game? Like
hot and cold or whatever? Right, So that these apps
they're just making you aware of what's happening with your credit,
and of course they're trying to sell like, hey, we've
got this credit card for you, and maybe that's appropriate
for you. Maybe you do need to add a new
credit card and use it the right way. But it's

(01:21:53):
kind of like, are you on the right track. You're
getting warmer, You're getting warmer, You're getting warmer, and you
see these movements.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
So I love that from the movements, Like, Yeah, after
you paid down your credit card a little bit and
you see the score go up, it's like wow. And
you see how much you went up based on what
you paid and your balance on that card compared to
your limit, and you can actually see things. So then
you can start just in totally saying hey, I'm going
to make an extra payer right now and pay down
this balance on credit card because I got a little

(01:22:20):
extra money. Let's go ahead and do that. Yeah, and
just start slowly building up your credit. So those two
things are the best things we could tell people that
want to buy a house that aren't ready yet. Number one,
call might get the advice of what to do to
build up your credit. Number two, get one of those
apps and really start using them.

Speaker 3 (01:22:36):
Yeah, I'll reinforce so and then I feel I talk
about it all the time, but it's really important and
it's part of our just philosophy which is, you know,
we're not telling you that you should be doing this,
but if it's right for you, you need to get things
lined up so that when the opportunity presents itself, you
are ready to take advantage of it. And so part

(01:22:56):
of that is doing a pre approval or having a
consultation just to see where do you stand from a
credit perspective, where do you stand from debt to income,
Where do you stand from a cash perspective, And you
have to kind of get all that lined up. And
you could have that conversation Jim, you and I could
talk on the phone for fifteen minutes, I get some
documents from you, and I'm like, boom, green light across
the board. One, two, three, You're good to go. Then

(01:23:16):
you can sit back and wait for those stars to align.
Maybe you talk to Jim and you start getting pinged
on homes that meet your criteria. But the other result
of that conversation could be like, hey, you're green light
in these two areas, but this area you need a
little bit of work. You got to focus your energy,
your effort, your money, your attention into this because that's

(01:23:37):
the only thing that you need help with. Or maybe
you got to work in all three areas. But guess
what it might take. It might be a year, but
if you sit down and you make a concerted effort.
So I think, like specifically with credit, the prescription is
the analysis, and the prescriptions, although sometimes hard to hear
and hard to face, that is the easy part. The

(01:24:00):
discipline that it takes to like really change, especially if
you're making a mind shift in how you're spending, like,
that's the hard part. Right If you're like going from
using credit cards for everything to now not using credit
cards for everything, but using them very specifically in a
very intentional way, that takes a change, right, Like, And

(01:24:22):
that's oftentimes the hard part. So even if it's a
three month, six month, one year plan, implementing the plan
is oftentimes the difficult part of it for people.

Speaker 2 (01:24:31):
I just want to wrap up with this, Kelly. This
last thing is that one of the things I learned
about working with Mike and going through that credit process
and now you know, all the years later, is that
doing everything that we just told you teaches you how
credit is, and it kind of gives you more control
about credit. Because before I actually got all the coaching

(01:24:53):
from Mike, I always felt like credit was totally out
of my control. It happened to me, right, my credit
score happened to me either one up or down, But
it wasn't I had no real control of it. I
know that sounds silly, but a lot of people, I
think a lot of people feel like I do. They
just feel like they don't have control of it. And
you actually have a lot of control if you have

(01:25:13):
a little knowledge in these apps could really show you
how your credits affected you.

Speaker 4 (01:25:18):
Cannot believe.

Speaker 2 (01:25:20):
I had to do a big purchase on one of
my credit cards recently and my score went down, you know,
and I was bummed out, and it's because my balance
went higher. And but but I learned now not to
freak out because like.

Speaker 3 (01:25:32):
Yeah, you turned an A into like a B.

Speaker 4 (01:25:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:34):
And then what happened was is that it made me
be more conscious. I got to get that down so
I can get my score up eventually and not just
kick it down the road. Well, I'll I'll just carry it.
I'll just carry it longer. Now I'm more like, hey,
let's knock that out. And I'm seeing and when you
see you score bounce back or even go higher, it
makes you more motivated.

Speaker 4 (01:25:53):
To keep doing it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:54):
Yeah, I like that, and you can even see maybe
have one you have one card and you can see, well,
you know, when I have my balance here, my scores
are hovering around here. And when I have my balance down,
you know, balance to race, balance, the limit ratio down
around here, my scores are hovering here. So you can
actually use that and say I don't need to do
anything now, but maybe that month or two leading up

(01:26:14):
before I'm really gonna make my house hunt, like begin
the house hunting, That's when I'm gonna target paying down
that balance exactly, so you can you can really get
a feel for not the score, but the movement and
the score with the various things that you're doing.

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
So, Kelly, we want to talk about a couple other things,
so before the show wraps up. So I really appreciate
you calling in, and I hope you like the information
that we gave.

Speaker 7 (01:26:37):
I appreciate it. And my analogy that I've come to
this is I'm gonna play my own credit like my
own personal stock market.

Speaker 4 (01:26:45):
Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.

Speaker 7 (01:26:47):
Have stocked I'm gonna look So that's how I'm gonna
I'm gonna stock I'm gonna buy stock and myself, I
try to fix my credit and that's how I'm gonna
look at it. And I think that might be my
little game enemys way to kind of play it. So
I appreciate you guys. You're amazing. Thank you for the
wealth of information, and I hope I didn't waste your all.

Speaker 3 (01:27:08):
Time with Mike No way, no your question.

Speaker 2 (01:27:11):
A lot of people are had the same exact question
you have, so thank you for bringing up so that
we could share it with everybody.

Speaker 7 (01:27:18):
Beautiful. Have a beautiful Saturday, and guess what I'll hear
you guys next weekend.

Speaker 4 (01:27:22):
Okay, thanks, thanks Kelly.

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):
Buy So getting back to Matt and Adena when they
bought their house, just to give you an idea about
credit score, so they had they I had a short
sail their house many many years ago and it was
time to buy. And it was so nice at the
closing table with Madadena this week because they said they
don't know how many lters came to them when they

(01:27:44):
were interested in buying it. Said hey, love to be
your relter, and both of them said nope, we're going
with you. You know, even though it was ten years ago,
they never forgot, and I'm so grateful to them for that.
They never forgot how hard we work for them and
how much we cared about their future as much as
they were caring about their future, which is really hard

(01:28:06):
to find people to do that when you're in trouble,
and we were able to make it happen. So they
got a really good deal on this house, and they
got their house.

Speaker 4 (01:28:14):
I was thinking about it today, Mike. Over ten percent,
just a little over ten percent below the list price
of the house, which is a pretty big deal because
most houses in today's market are selling about six percent below, okay,
and we got ten percent below. Now, it wasn't all
like I can't like toot my horn, that was all
us or anything. But it was some about the market, right.

(01:28:35):
Some of it was about the market, and some of
it was about negotiation.

Speaker 3 (01:28:39):
Some of it was about a praise value. Yep, that's
what I was going to get too.

Speaker 4 (01:28:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
So the house was on the market. We're going to
make up the numbers, but it's pretty much this. You know,
the ratios will be the same. So they were on
the market, let's say, for three eighty, and we turned
it in offer significantly lower than that right, Let's just
say it was like three fifty or something like that,
and they were at three eighty.

Speaker 3 (01:29:02):
Because you one thing that the real estate agent to
think about is like three because we were going to
do financing, there's going to be an appraisal. What are
the chances this home is actually worth three eighty in
the eyes of an appraiser, And you're thinking about that
when you're advising on realistic numbers, right, Like one of
the things you're thinking.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
About, yes, And the other thing is we kind of
knew that the roof was not going to make it. Ah,
we had a feeling the roof wasn't going to make it,
so we knew the roof was coming. So they went
in low, right. The buyers came in low, We came
in low, and then they countered back and the counter
was kind of reasonable. If the roof was okay, okay,
okay for insurance, yeah, No, the price was reasonable.

Speaker 4 (01:29:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
If it was okay for insurance, yes, so the price
would have been reasonable. The roof was okay for insurance,
but that was iffy. And when I say okay, it
was because the house was nicely fixed up. It wasn't
super mac Daddy it wasn't brand new everything, but it
had a lot of upgrades. They broke out the kitchen,
it made it open floor land, and they upgraded some
of the bathrooms and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 (01:30:03):
So that was good.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
But the problem was I was worried when we were
going back and forth that the house wasn't going to appraise.
And I brought it up to the realtor, and the
realtor said, she was an appraiser for twenty years before
she was a real before she was selling real estate,
and she felt very confident the house was going to praise.
And I said, I really feel like there are houses

(01:30:25):
in this neighborhood that are selling at the price you're asking,
but they're bigger model homes. Our house isn't that model.
Our house is a different model in the neighborhood, and
those homes are selling like twenty five thirty thousand less
than the bigger models. Yeah, but you're asking the bigger
model price. And her argument was where our house was
fully you know, had a lot of upgrades, not fully upgraded. Okay,

(01:30:48):
so we went into contract. We went into contract like
fifteen twenty thousand below list, and then we did the
inspection and found out. The roof was that five years
useful life, which means we could get insurance. But we
knew that the next year matt and Adena were probably
going to have to put a new roof on the house.

Speaker 3 (01:31:07):
So we got thinking about that with their inspection negotiations, and.

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
Like, do we really want to buy this house knowing
that the roof's coming unless we can get the roof credit.
So we went and got two roofers to come out.
I went out there for matt Adena. We got two
roofing companies through us that came out. They both gave
us quotes. We were in the twenties for the roof,
like low twenties. So then we came back to the

(01:31:32):
owners and said, we don't want the house at this price.
We want you to give us the roof or give
us the credit for the roof. They didn't want to
give us the full They didn't want to they didn't
want to put the roof on, but they didn't want
to give us a full price drop at first, And
we went back and forth and we ended up selling that.

(01:31:53):
We ended up getting the house for forty thousand dollars
less because number one, the house did not appraise right
the House of Praise, so that gave us an extra
like ten, right, and then the other thirty we got
from negotiations ten to fifteen maybe for the appraisal and
the rest of it we got from negotiations about the roof.
So they bought the house with the old roof, but

(01:32:14):
they bought it at ten initial the list price, and
they're really happy. They were so happy at the court.

Speaker 3 (01:32:21):
Yeah, this is one of those where Jim, you do
some pretty heavy negotiations based on inspection results. You kind
of know beforehand, then you can confirm it with inspections,
and then you negotiate, and then the appraisal came in
low after that, and you're like, this is for me
and Jim. It's like because we want things to go smooth.
We don't want to have to have combative negotiations right

(01:32:43):
where people are thinking like, oh, I'm they're getting over
on me or vice versa, right, And so that's what
we hoped for. But then of course these things happen,
and so this happened to be a VA loan. And
then you get what's called the tidewater notification, which is
a part of the appraisal process is very specific to
V a unique to VA where when they initiate tidewater

(01:33:07):
that means, hey, we're not gonna we're gonna be appraised
below your purchase price. We're not going to tell you
how far below. We're not going to tell you a
number could be a dollar below, it could be, you know,
fifty thousand below. But here's your opportunity to give me
some more information. Mister and missus real estate agent or
sellers or buyers, and uh, before I make my final determination,

(01:33:32):
just send me over whatever information you think is pertinent
that I may have missed or I may have included.
To go ahead and send that over. And it's almost like.

Speaker 2 (01:33:39):
Ugh, I didn't even know what it was. This guy,
this appraiser. He sends me a text I think it was.
I almost didn't want to click on it because it
looks so scammy.

Speaker 4 (01:33:49):
And all it said was tidewater rule.

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
Invoked and then it said BC and I didn't know
what BC stood for.

Speaker 4 (01:33:56):
That was the initials of the appraiser. Yes, that, I'm like,
that's how you notify a person.

Speaker 3 (01:34:04):
That's not how you do it.

Speaker 4 (01:34:05):
Well, that's how he did it, right, So it's.

Speaker 3 (01:34:07):
It's meant to go to we basically have what what
we call uh je's a saar. What does that mean though? Anyway,
respond the contact at the lender for communications with the appraiser,
and it's not me, right, So I'm an l O.
I'm kind of like an interested party to the transaction.
So we have somebody who's third party essentially who's the

(01:34:29):
main contact for the appraiser, and the praiser are supposed
to notify that person. So I don't know what went
wrong there. I just know that Tidewater was vo.

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
I thought it was a total scam. And then I
was like, I wonder, I don't even know why I
even cared. I really should, you know, Normally I would
just like, that's because I get so much scam stuff. Yes,
But I actually googled Tidewater will right. That's how I
found out, and I go.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
You've heard we've talked about Tidewater before.

Speaker 4 (01:34:52):
I didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
I didn't remember until I read the Google and I
was like, oh, that's what it means. I remember that,
and I looked it up that it was the you know,
saying it's about appraisal for VA's not not appraising.

Speaker 3 (01:35:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:35:05):
And then the other thing I wanted to mention about that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:07):
So so before we I want to talk about disputing appraisals.
But Matt and Adena they got a really really good deal.

Speaker 3 (01:35:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:15):
Yeah, they were able to use VA financing, so they
had zero percent down payment because they were VA, and
then didn't they use VM micro.

Speaker 3 (01:35:26):
They definitely used VA. But when we say zero percent,
I'm you know, I'm always thinking of the intricacy. So
we ended up because it appraise significantly below the initial
purchase price. There was negotiation that had to happen, and
one of those outcomes is meeting in the middle, meaning
your price doesn't drop all the way to the appraised value.
It's still a little bit above an appraise value. So

(01:35:48):
with VA financing andy, you're you're like borrowing in this
case one hundred percent of the value. So LTV loan
to value is one hundred percent. Well, when your price
is slightly above the appraise value, you have to bring
in that cash, right, So they're not quite doing it.

Speaker 4 (01:36:02):
For zero down because they're had a little bit money.

Speaker 3 (01:36:05):
They ended up somewhere in the middle, and so they
were buying the home for a little bit above the
appraise value, which is the V and LTV which we
can only borrow one hundred percent of value. So yeah,
they came up with a little down payment.

Speaker 2 (01:36:18):
So the sellers were willing to negotiade a lot. They
were motivated to. You know, they took a ten percent
haircut of what they thought it was worth, right, And
so could you've done that during the COVID phase pretty
much not and you would have been fighting with everybody else.
But because and this house was on the market seventy

(01:36:41):
eight days. It wasn't like on the market three days.

Speaker 3 (01:36:43):
Yeah, And I think the roof is something that everyone
can unstain like and like say, hey, wait a second,
we're going to probably need a renew roof. Let's say
in the next two years, can we buy this house?
Can we put up the money required to buy the
house and have money for a roof in two years?
And so that's something not everyone is willing to, you know,
go through or even able to able to consider. So

(01:37:06):
I wanted to go in, like, congrats to Manadina.

Speaker 2 (01:37:08):
Yeah, congrats to Matadena. I wanted to go into a
little bit. Mcgalley's asking a lot of questions on Facebook
and YouTube YouTube, Thank you mcgolly about uh locking in
rates and things like that. So my first thing is
I read an article yesterday because interest rates have been
going down a little bit. I don't think they're going

(01:37:30):
down dramatically, but we've seen a quarter point or so
drop over the last eight weeks. And the the article
I was reading yesterday given homeowners advice on buying homes
in today's market. Even if you haven't found your house,
but you're qualified for the loan, they're recommended locking in

(01:37:50):
right now, even though you don't have your house yet.
Like you're qualified for loan, you say, hey, Mike, I
know the interest rates are pretty good right now, let's
lock it in.

Speaker 3 (01:37:58):
So you know it's it's just a happens. I've been
hearing like radio advertising where this one lender is talking
about locking in your loan before you're in contract. Right,
we're all creative, so I guess it's possible to do Jim.
The thing is, when you're locking in that early, lenders

(01:38:18):
are exposed to a certain level of risk of market movement, right,
and lenders aren't typically set up to tolerate that kind
of risks. Of what they do is they mitigate it
by locking you in early, for you know there's enough
space in there for some risk to the lender. Right,
So when I hear somebody saying, I'm like, we're going

(01:38:39):
to lock you in before you even have a close date. Well,
when you lock in a rate, you're locking in for
a specific amount of time fifteen day lock, thirty day lock,
forty five day lock, because you're basically saying, hey, we're
going to lock in. We're going to protect against market
movement between now and time you actually close, which is
when your note, your promisory note is finalized. And so

(01:39:00):
typically you need a close date in order to know
how long to lock. Right, if we've got a two
month close, we're going to lock for something approaching sixty
seventy five days something like that. If we got a
thirty day close, I'm going to lock it in so
I'm within a thirty day window. So if you have
an unlimited timeframe, like what do you think is really happening?

(01:39:20):
There is a lender really going to lock you in
at today's rate and then have the risk of the
market being up a quarter point half a point between
now and then. Well no, so they're going to lock
you in at something a little bit above today's rate.
Some padding for movement right, So I can't tell you
that for sure. I just I just know how it works.
But in general, so when like two philosophies on this,

(01:39:42):
Let's say normal, you're in a contract, you got a
close date, so you know when you're closing, you know
how long you need to lock The question is do
you lock in your rate and protect against upward market
movement but also realize you can't necessarily take advantage of
downward market movement or do you float, meaning you're not

(01:40:02):
locked in. You have some prediction, some level of certainty
that the rates are going to get better for you.
If you had prediction that rates are getting worse for you,
of course you're locking in. But your prediction is I
think because of whatever economic, political, the crystal ball, the
magic eight ball, you're retrograde. My cousin's brother is a

(01:40:29):
market analyst and he's got this inside scoop or whatever
it is. You think your rate's going to get better,
and you want to float, say until next week or
until the week after that. Some of that is maybe predictable,
like jobs reports coming out, or the Fed's about to
bump up, you know, But I would say in general,
nobody can really predict that stuff. With any level of accuracy,

(01:40:50):
you could get lucky. So my general philosophy is lock in,
I don't let it ride. I don't let it ride.

Speaker 4 (01:41:01):
You're crazy and everything on black how much.

Speaker 3 (01:41:05):
I don't have much hair to lose.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
So don't let it ride. If you're happy with the
rate that you got, you don't just go ahead.

Speaker 3 (01:41:12):
I think you just take what the market gives you
at the earliest opportunity, and if it moves significantly down,
there's a rate renegotiation. There's a float down policy. So
that's like it had we talked about with with U
with any inland earlier, so they were able to take
advantage of float down. But let's say they had locked in,
they had waited until the fifteen days outside closing, could

(01:41:34):
they have gotten better even than the floating down rate.
The answer is probably at that moment, yes, Had they
risked forty five days of flow.

Speaker 2 (01:41:42):
You don't know who and hope and you and I
know that forty five days can be an attorney If
we're on an upward trend for the real estate market.
We've had two or three times in the last three
years where interest rates went up three quarters from point
to one point and like two to three weeks.

Speaker 3 (01:42:00):
Yeah, I mean you just said we've had about a
quarter of a point over the last eight weeks, which
is right. Well, leading up to that eight weeks, eight
weeks prior to that, we probably had a half a
point upward movement. Yes, you're right, right, So it was
like the exact opposite in that two month period.

Speaker 2 (01:42:16):
The fifty two week range as of today was six
point eight is the low, and the high was seven
two to two. The seven two to two was last May.
The six to oh eight was November, if I'm not mistaken. So,
but we've been hanging out at about six point five six
point six six now for about eighteen months. Yeah, that's

(01:42:37):
kind of where the range has been.

Speaker 4 (01:42:39):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
Has it gone as low as six point oh eight, yeah,
has it gone as high as seven to two in
the last year. Yeah, But the average is six point
six and right now that's exactly where we are. So
it isn't that we're in a high interest rate mode
right now and sellers are willing to drop their prices,
so you can't even say, well, the prices are so

(01:43:00):
the price is so I be whose sellers if you
find the right ones they're motivated to adjust price to
get the buyer if you find the right ones. And
that's why those are two of the reasons why it's
a great time to be a home buyer. But the
third one is also there's so many people out there
that could afford a mortgage payment but can't afford the
down payment. Ah, right, so the cash and now we've got.

Speaker 3 (01:43:21):
Let's talk hold on because mcgally was asking, I'm just
about just about the home equity products, because yeah, I
forgot So they got a first mortgage, it's it's in
the three percent. They're not going to do a cash
out refinal way, but they want to tap into their
equity for whatever reason. Maybe they got a project in mind,
maybe they just want a security blanket, maybe they got
some debt they want to consolidate, whatever reason, they want

(01:43:41):
to tap into the equity of the home. A home
equity product is a good way to do that. There's
two types home equity loan. I'll call it a he
loan or home equity line of credit. A he lock.
Home equity line of credit is like a big fat
credit card. Right, so you're basically applying for Jimothy one
hundred thousand dollars credit line and against equity in my home.

(01:44:02):
I don't have a use for that right now, but
I want it there. I want to be able to
use it as needed, and I'll pay.

Speaker 4 (01:44:06):
It back as needed.

Speaker 3 (01:44:08):
Right, you use it, and so you're paying interest on
the portion of the loan that you used that the
credit that you just think of it like a credit card.

Speaker 5 (01:44:15):
So if you got it up to one hundred thousand,
and maybe you only use twenty of it, right, exactly right,
in the interest on twenty, not.

Speaker 3 (01:44:20):
One hundred exactly right, right. Whereas a home equity loan,
you're going to take it as one one chunk and
you're going to pay it back over time. So the
home equity loan is more like your traditional mortgage. You'll
have a fixed period of time and a fixed interest
rate usually right, so twenty year repayment, I'm at seven
percent right, fixed home equity line of credit. And this
gets to mcgalley's question, which is can you do a

(01:44:40):
fixed interest rate on a home equity line of credit?
I would say in general mcgalle you know, it doesn't
mean there's not some exotic products out there that you
might be able to find in general, those are variable
rate loans. They're adjustable rates. And the reason for that
is because you don't know how much you're borrowing, and
when you borrow the money.

Speaker 4 (01:44:56):
You don't know when you're paying it all back.

Speaker 3 (01:44:57):
You don't know why you're paying it back. It's like
it's just I think it has to do with when
you take the money. The market is different than when
you applied for the loan, right, so the market is
that's why it's adjustable. And so I would say most
home equity lines of credit will have an adjustable rate mortgage,
which means there's some like baseline, a starting point, and

(01:45:18):
then there's a margin on top of that starting point.
So there'd be some index that they're saying, hey, here's
our here's our baseline rate, and then we're going to
put a margin on top that's your rate.

Speaker 2 (01:45:27):
So if you had a home equity loan, not line
a credit, yes, could that be fixed?

Speaker 3 (01:45:33):
Those are usually fixed because they're taking all the money
at one time, and therefore you think of it like
the in the mortgage backed security. It's it's almost like
a fixed income return, right, So if you know, it's
like getting your solid security checks. So someone who owns
that mortgage backed security and knows that they're going to
be making seven percent on that money for this period
of lime and it's very stable, secure product. So I'm

(01:45:58):
not sure mcgalley'sind of throwing in some stuff about their
current and their current ones on an adjustable rate. I'm
not I'd have to like get more details able to
answer what what she's looking.

Speaker 2 (01:46:10):
But golly, let's talk about this software. If you if
you're serious about it, you have real questions. So let's
get you over to Mike next week and they'll get
you the right answers. So you know, we're not high pressure.
We're just gonna get you the right answers. You figure
out what need to do. We looking forward to so
give us a call.

Speaker 5 (01:46:26):
Seven eight eight eight eight eight nine seven three seven
eight to eight.

Speaker 4 (01:46:31):
Thank you, Jimmothy, I almost forgot the number.

Speaker 3 (01:46:34):
Okay. So now the third pillar of the mortgage pre
approval we haven't talked about that income, which is the second.
So credit is the first one. Second one is the payment,
what payment you qualify for? That's that tankum. The third
one is with the money, how much cash do you
need to buy a home? And and Susan asked the
question relating to this where she says headline yea offering

(01:46:54):
first time home buyers up to one hundred thousand dollars incentives.
So let's talk about that because it's part of what.

Speaker 2 (01:46:58):
We're Okay, I want to I was going to bring
this up next week, but I'm glad Susan brought up.
And Susan, I'm so, I'm so glad that you reached
out through YouTube because I was just thinking a couple
of weeks ago. I haven't seen Susan come in here
in a while. I hope everything's okay with her, So
I'm really glad to see if there we helped Susan
buy a house a few years ago, like five years ago,
out in the Lake Warth area. But Mike, the first

(01:47:23):
we'll talk about the down payment. Yeah, So there's a
lot of people out there that can afford a normal
mortgage payment. When I say normal, like a payment, a
payment they could afford for the type of house they want.
But what they don't have is the money needed for
the down payment and sometimes the closing costs. And there
are ways around that, and in this market, another reason

(01:47:45):
why it's a great time to be a buyer. We
always say they could use the down payment assistance programs, right,
So there's a whole bunch of them. One of these
is the one hundred thousand and one, which we'll talk
about in a second. But there's the what I call
the Florida Bond program. I don't know if that's right,
maybe I made it up in my head, but it's
a ten thousand dollars program where everybody that can qualify

(01:48:05):
basically for a conforming loan and their first time home
buyers under the definition, they can get ten thousand from
the state of Florida. But there's a better program coming
out this summer called the Hometown Heroes program, where you
can get up to five percent of the total loan value,
and in that case you could hypothetically get up to
thirty five thousand. But what I'm seeing is most people

(01:48:26):
are capping out in the twenties, like the mid twenties,
because when you get to a certain high purchase price.

Speaker 3 (01:48:32):
Well there's income limits, so you have to be under
a certain income threshold to qualify. So these are down
payment assistance programs. Down paym assistant essentially money that you
can use towards your down payment closing costs basically your
cash obligation. There's usually some level of strings attached to
these things, but in general it's going to help you
with the cash requirements for buying a home. And so

(01:48:56):
there's income limits. You have to be under a certain
income threshold based on your household size and the county.
Your are not that bad really well that here's the
healthy liberal pretty expansive. So the question is like, if
you're getting thirty five thousand, thirty five thousand is five
percent of what number? Right? And if you buying a

(01:49:16):
house where your loan amount is that number, is the
payment going to be one that you can afford and
qualify for and you're under the income threshold. So that's
why you start to run into these limits because essentially
it's a pretty big loan amount to get thirty five thousand,
which is a pretty big payment. In order to qualify
for that payment, you got to have pretty big income.
And is it under or over that.

Speaker 2 (01:49:36):
Three We've seen a lot of people that we've worked
with get eighteen twenty yeah, twenty five thousand, yeah, So
we've seen that a lot. Now, So with those programs
you can also depending you have to have a good
loan officer like Mike to make sure this goes through.
But you also can get money from the sellers. Sure,

(01:49:57):
so now you're getting money from the state and this
and a lot of times you can get a big
chunk of the money that you would normally need to
buy the home from the program and the sellers, and
you a lot of times can go into the house.
If you're renting and you're paying first Last Security, you

(01:50:19):
can get very close to first Last Security to move into.

Speaker 4 (01:50:24):
The new home.

Speaker 2 (01:50:25):
So if you're going to do a rental, why wouldn't
you do the new home if you could afford it
and you want to move and all that. You know,
all that's still always our foundation is always there.

Speaker 4 (01:50:34):
But it gives you the opportunity. I think it gives
you the opportunity.

Speaker 2 (01:50:39):
To take advantage of these home programs because the state,
the Florida Bomb Program has been around forever. We've been
using that for ten years. But during COVID, Right during COVID,
the sellers weren't giving you money too. You would get
the money from the state. But if you were going
to the selling and say, hey, Mike, I want you
to give me an extra ten thousand dollars, Like why

(01:51:00):
I got twenty other buyers that don't want that.

Speaker 3 (01:51:02):
One of the things we're talking about, like is it
better now to be a buyer than it has been?
Is because of that. So like not only the down
payment assistance program to help you with cash requirements, there's
also the ability to negotiate with sellers because sellers, I
don't want to use the word desperate, but they're the
amount of buyers that they're seeing who are interested in
their home and willing to make offers on their home

(01:51:25):
is less than it has been, right, and so days
on market are increasing. Some sellers who are on the
market guys they want to sell. They're not like thinking
about selling, No, they're actively trying to sell. It's taking
longer for them to get as many eyeballs on the property,
it's taking longer for them to get legitimate offers. And
so you have an opportunity to maybe extract some additional

(01:51:47):
money from the seller, not just in a like a
lowered purchase price, but maybe it's giving them a little
bit more of what they want on the purchase price,
but asking for a seller credit, which can help you
get over the cash requirement hume. So down payment assistance,
seller credits like these things will allow you to not
have to I mean, it takes thousands and thousand dollars
to buy a home. Usually where's that money coming from?

(01:52:08):
So this is you have opportunities to get that, which
is why it's another really good time if you're a
buyer to be actively in this market negotiate.

Speaker 4 (01:52:17):
It really is.

Speaker 2 (01:52:17):
And you know, one of the things about this show,
We've always been very clear eyed about what's happening in
the economy and the real estate market in Florida. And
we've said many, many times, and I've said it on
the air. You know, if you're an investor and you
don't have to buy right now, I'd keep my powder
drive and saying that. Johnny thought that was a funny saying,
but I say keep your powder dry right now because
I think that.

Speaker 4 (01:52:38):
We're going to have something ready to use it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:40):
Be ready, be ready to have you talk about this
ship program you want to Yeah, so I wanted yeah
ship Jimmy ship hip.

Speaker 4 (01:52:48):
Ye okay, so what.

Speaker 3 (01:52:49):
I'm doing in my pants?

Speaker 4 (01:52:50):
Yeah, there you go. But yes, because you just used
that program, didn't you.

Speaker 3 (01:52:54):
So we I've used it successfully in the past it's
so it's one hundred thousands a great head line. Okay,
starting I think it's May fifth SHIP, which is a
state housing initiative program pum Beach County is basically saying, hey,
we're gonna take X amount of families. We're gonna give
them up to one hundred thousand dollars, which is down
payment assistance. Right, you can use it for your side.

(01:53:15):
It does stay attached to the home. There's some strings
attached to it, but it's not it's zero interest. It's
not repayable as long as you're there living in the
home and you don't refinance. But here's the kicker. It's
funded three million dollars. And if every family is getting
a hundred thousand, which they won't, but if they, let's
take that, that's thirty families. They take one hundred applications

(01:53:37):
right starting May fifth. So it's just it's it's there.
It's like you can get in, but you need to
like now, you need to be getting in line. You
need to have all of your documents. There's some education required.
If you're interested in this, let's talk because it's definitely there,
but it's it's gonna be very you're.

Speaker 4 (01:53:58):
Gonna be an inexclusive exclusive. It's true.

Speaker 2 (01:54:02):
I hope you guys enjoyed the show today. Mike, thank
you so much for a man in the show. Yes,
and Jimothy. If it wasn't for you guys, we would
not have a show today.

Speaker 4 (01:54:12):
So thank you, soming to you, Jim really really to
our buyers.

Speaker 2 (01:54:15):
Yes, and our congratulations. Thanks everybody, Yeah, and thank you.
And trust we'll have Johnny back next week so we'll
have a more normal show and hopefully Ross is going
to come next week. We're going to talk next week
a little bout insurance is the concept called slow ad
adaptation process that they're predicting that insurance costs across the
nation at seven states are not going to go down anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:54:39):
They're catching up to us.

Speaker 2 (01:54:40):
And do you think Florida is going to be in
that seven? We'll talk about it next week.

Speaker 3 (01:54:44):
Well, we still got about forty seconds.

Speaker 5 (01:54:47):
Well, I'll tell you what I can let everybody know,
if you're a sports fan, you're really gonna be interested
in want to keep it right here on a real
radio ninety two one, because we've got a little locker
room coming up here for a couple hours.

Speaker 3 (01:54:57):
Then we got a Florida Panthers game this afternoon.

Speaker 5 (01:55:00):
And then going into this evening, we're to be carrying
the final four, the Florida Gators' taking on who they
take Auburn.

Speaker 3 (01:55:08):
I believe that.

Speaker 4 (01:55:09):
Rumors say I think Josh Cohen is coming on with
the Greek today.

Speaker 3 (01:55:12):
There we go.

Speaker 5 (01:55:13):
There's more reasons to listen to Real Radio ninety two
to one, and thank you very much, guys, stay, thank you,