Common Mistakes Sellers Make | REIal Talk | EP. 73

It was all set up, and I was testing it, so it should be good. All right, Are you ready?

Sure.

All right. Hi, guys. Welcome back to another episode on Real Talk. This is episode 72. I'm Caitlin, your marketing and communications coordinator. And this is Mark. Hopefully a familiar face. He's our director of investments. And today we are going to be talking about common mistakes that sellers make when trying to sell their property. And that could be whether they're trying to sell it retail or as a turnkey or from another investor or what have you. There's all kinds of different avenues we're going to be talking about. Do you have anything that you want to start with, or do you want to go ahead and get into what I have written down?

Oh, yeah. No, I mean, so we can touch those points, but, yeah, obviously there's two different styles that it can be sold. Right. So you could just sell your house retail on the MLS or for sale by owner. Of course, some of our clients, you know, for whatever reason, something happens in their life and that they need to sell back their property. And so we'll go through some different scenarios and.

Yeah.

And what we've done for them.

Perfect. So I think one of the biggest mistakes is probably underestimating the cost that it takes to sell your property. I know I just recently acquired my first home, and one of the things that I was learning in that process was that the seller pays the realtor fees. I did not know that. So that was kind of nice for me to find out. But that was something, you know, I wasn't expecting. So now when I go to sell, that's something that I'll have to remember.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, because, you know, the buyer's agent, you know, the reason that they. They're always paid. You know, sometimes a listing agent can do maybe a reduction or something on their listing price, but a buyer's agent, you know, they're. They're working hard. I mean, they're out there. I mean, I know that when I was a buyer's agent, I've had clients where I've shown 20, 30 properties. You know, so those buyers, agents, they get out there, hustle. So they definitely are earning. Earning their money on the buy side of the house. Again, the. The market's cooled down a little bit, but, you know, the last couple years, when it was also extremely competitive. I mean, you could be showing houses, writing offers, taking the time to do all those things, and then not winning the offers. So, yeah, it was a very, very competitive market. But, yes, the the sellers typically incur the cost. Again, even if you're a for sale by owner, you know, I mean, so as a buyer's agent, you know, one of the first things you would ask a, you know, someone selling their house by themselves is are you going to be offering some sort of buyer's commission?

Okay.

And what is it? So there's nothing set in stone. I mean, you can either do exact dollar amounts, you know, you could do a percentages. So yeah, there's nothing set in stone. But yeah, those are things that are, you want to make sure you have in writing, you know, prior to, you know, getting into agreement.

Are there any other kind of hidden costs, if you will, when trying to sell your house that you can think of or property?

Not really hidden costs, but I mean, so when you go to sell your house, some of the things to be aware of is, you know, making sure that you have it priced right. And we'll, we'll jump back into that. But I'm thinking more along the lines of if you overprice it just because somebody's willing to pay that, what if it's short appraises? So that's a cost to you because you're either going to have to cancel that contract or negotiate a middle point or something. So that's one thing. And then of course someone goes through inspections, there's going to be some costs for repair items, things like that, that you're living there, you might not notice them as much. But so even on new builds, Right, Even on new builds there's definitely some repair costs. Oh yeah, that. And then of course there's going to be some costs incurred by selling your house. You know, the transfer of title. Indeed. You're also going to have to be caught up on your taxes.

Yeah, that's huge.

You know, if you're in an HOA and you haven't paid it, you could possibly have a lien on your house, you know, from, from the hoa. So these are all costs that you have to keep in mind is that you may not just be selling it for the price you think you're selling it for.

Yeah, And I think that's, I shouldn't like, speak for the general public, but at least, you know, a couple years ago when I was still learning all this, that was, you know, my thought was you just list the property and you sell it. You don't like, you don't have to pay anyone except maybe a realtor or real estate agent.

Right.

And so, you know, as I've been here, I'VE kind of learned that's not entirely the case. So there's definitely a lot to consider under that aspect. One of the other things that we're going to talk about is not doing research on an agent. I know. That was kind of what we were just talking about, you know, having to pay out that fee. What is kind of your intake on that?

Yeah. So there's different ways to look at that. You obviously have realtors that spend a lot of money on advertising. So there could be two things, is that they have their own teams, so they have large amounts of people, transaction coordinators and buyer's agents and listing agents and all the, all these different assets that they have because of course, they have the money to be advertising. So sometimes you look at that and you say, okay, well they must be a good agent then, because they have all this money. But I think sometimes even over the last couple years, there's been agents that have just been, you know, out in front of it to have, have, you know, allocated money for advertising. But it doesn't necessarily mean that they're a good agent.

Yeah.

I mean, they may be so busy that you're just a number.

Yeah.

So sometimes when you're, you're considering that agent, you may want to look for one that has been an agent for a while, knows what they're doing, but, you know, is going to be there because they have a limited amount of clients and you are now a person, not a number. So that's one thing that maybe I would consider when looking at an agent is how many deals have they done? Ask them those. I mean, is this your first deal? And there's nothing wrong with an agent who's done it their first deal. But are they working maybe with. Under an umbrella of a broker or agent on a team who has done lots of them. So it doesn't necessarily exclude them from that list. But how many deals have you done? How long have you been an agent? What kind of education do you have? You know, have you. Have you gone back to school and learned some things about it? So those would be the things I'd look for. Because, you know, why not.

I think another point too is knowing the difference between a real estate agent and realtor. I think it's very common that those titles are intermixed as the same kind of thing, and they're not. Do you mind just quickly explaining what the difference is between the two?

Sure. So like once you. Here in Ohio, once you pass your real estate exam, you are a real estate agent. You know, you have the ability to buy and sell under your broker's license. In, in Ohio, a Realtor is. You're now part of the national association of Realtors.

Okay.

So it's a designation that you get. If your broker has it, you have to get it. You have to pay the dues and be that as well. So with that comes some of the things that the nar, national association of Realtors give you the ability to different things in the mls, different kinds of programs that they have for your education. So being a Realtor is just basically maybe another little step up or an advantage that you may have over agents that don't have some of the resources that come with the narrative.

Okay, perfect. So now we're kind of talking about, you know, hiring an agent and doing your due diligence. Due diligence on that. Now what happens if you kind of want to try and sell it yourself?

Yeah, sure. So in Ohio, you know, a single family home or duplex, I think anything to sell your own house. So a lot of people will do the for sale by owner in order to pay or to save the money on not using a listing agent. You know, so that could be, you know, there's, there's brokerages out there that may offer as low as a 1% list fee. Typically they have a minimum on it, though. It's like 1% or $3,000, whichever is the lesser of the two. So, so another thing to be careful of when you're looking at listing agents, if they say 1%, like is it 1% of the sales price versus, you know, a hard minimum? But so anyway, so yes, they. I'm sorry, I'm blanking out here.

That's okay. Selling yourself.

Oh, yeah. Selling yourself. Yeah, yeah, dub that out. So when you're selling it yourself, you want to make sure that you price it correctly. And I was going to talk about jumping back into that to make sure that you price it accordingly. There's different tools online, there's different websites. You have Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia. I mean there's, you know, name it. But you also then have to take a look at like, what metrics are they using to sell that. I know that. And again, I'm not going to single any of these out, but I mean, they're getting as close as they can. But like, say I have a house that was built in 1980 and across the street are homes that are built in 2020. Now those homes are selling for a lot more. But like these websites, they're not taking that into consideration. They're just doing the. The area, whether it's a quarter mile, half mile, whatever, and they're lumping that in there. And so then all of a sudden you're like, oh, well, my house must be worth the one in the 2020.

Yeah.

Okay. You know, maybe if you've done all the updates, things like that to, you know, to your house, and those are things obviously to consider as well, is if you bought a house and the market is moving up at a certain percentage, okay, that's. That's fine. But have you been keeping up with the times as well? Have you been replacing the flooring? You know, when's the last time you've had the air conditioner, the furnace replaced? How old's the hot water heater? What's the roof age? You know, how many square feet do you have in the house? Finished basements? So, I mean, there's so many things to consider. So again, a listing agent. I know, I was talking about that. A buyer's agent, you know, hustles, you know, they do a lot of, like on the road, but. But a listing agent, the advantage of using one of those is that they're a professional. They do that. They have, again, those resources we were talking about to pull an accurate comparable to maximize your value. Because again, you don't want to price it wrong. You don't want to price it short, you know what I mean? And have left money on the table. And then, of course, you don't want to price it too high, because then again, you don't want to run into these appraisal issues or the house sitting for a long time. So you have to kind of evaluate, like, what's the most important thing to you. Do you want to sell it quickly? Because you could always put online if it's overpriced. I mean, it might sit for three, four months. Yeah, but you only get one time to list it correctly. You know, I mean, and I'm sure that a lot of our viewers will know that if it is listed at the correct price, it sells very quickly.

Right.

Even while rates are going up, it doesn't matter. People still need to buy houses. You know, back in the 1980s, when I think interest rates were over 10%, I mean, so way worse than they are now, people were still buying houses. So it just cuts down on maybe what your buying power is. But so anyway, so for sale by owner, you got to make sure that you price it correctly. And then the other things are you want to make sure that you have Disclosed everything. So just because you're for sale by owner doesn't mean that you don't have to disclose possible things that are wrong with your house. You know, whether the basement has flooded, you know, I mean, or that there was a leak in the attic, you know, things like that. Or you have underground oil containers from when you purchased the house and you know, they're there, you've buried them over, but they're there. You have to disclose things like that. So yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of things that you still need to disclose even if you are selling it on your own.

Yeah, absolutely. There are a couple points that I was gonna bring up too, going back a little bit with the pricing, you know, and if you are, if you do choose to, you know, take the route of doing it on your own, if you're going to the sites, you know, don't just use what you find on one site and like what you were saying, you know, try to find houses that are similar to your property and maybe looking at a couple of different sites to get kind of an idea and make sure they're all kind of the same or in the same ballpark, at least that might help give you a better idea.

And that's, that's an excellent point because even when we here, like in our team, like our pricing our properties, it's very important to look at an apple and an apple, you know, if I have a single family home, but it's a ranch, I can't really use a two story home as a comparable.

Right.

I mean, I have to use other ranches.

Yes.

You have to try to think like what an appraiser would look like if they're, if they're going to do that, like, I mean, obviously be a cash buyer and they're waiving the appraisal, it doesn't really matter. But you're going to price that apples to apples, not apples and oranges, even though they're both fruit.

Yeah. And that's another thing too is when an appraiser goes out, you know, they're going to do that exact same thing. They're going to look apples to apples, not apples to oranges. So they're going to look at houses and properties that are as closely related to yours. And so making sure you're kind of, you know, doing your homework on that, that way you can get a more accurate price instead of like what you were saying with having a property that was newly built just across the street from you.

Sure. And I mean, you know, Just a real quick touch on, you know, the appraisers and some of the things that they do are called add backs. So if they are looking at a ranch, 2,000 square foot and another ranch is 2,000 square foot, but this one has added, you know, maybe a new garage, detached garage, where they've added, you know, an outside patio, you know, enclosure or whatever. So there's things that, that, that appraiser will use as value add backs that could raise the value of it. And so there's different ways that appraisers do it, you know what I mean? So there's, there's price point kind of stuff that they do. But most of the time what they're doing, obviously when they're looking at apples and apples is they want a superior property, an inferior property, and then like the middle of the road. And so they will, they will subtract from the superior properties and they will add to the inferior to make sure that they get that price right.

Now that makes sense. That makes sense. That's kind of what happened with ours. Little off note, when they ran our appraisal, we were both kind of like questioning it because they pulled a property on our appraisal that was like 17 minutes away from our house. And I was like, is this accurate? But typically it's us. Usually what within the mile radius would you argue?

Yeah, I was gonna say so like, you know, depending on like. So if it's a city property, right? Yeah, I mean you could be a lot more close, like maybe a quarter mile.

Okay.

Half mile might even be, you know, they open that up or whatever. But again there's no real rhyme or reason because sometimes, sometimes appraisers will do that. Quarter mile, half mile, one mile ring or whatever. And then sometimes an appraiser might even look back in time. They probably want the closest. So within 90 days, 180 days, 365 if they really have to go out. But we've sold some properties in the past that are pretty rural. And so yeah, they may have to do a 5 or 10 mile ring because you're looking for those apples, but they're 10 miles away.

That's valid. Very true. Something else too is having limited showings. And that could be whether you are trying to sell yourself or you're working with an agent. That's going to make it harder for your property to get views and prospects in there to look at it.

Yeah, absolutely. So the availability of it, homes that are vacant show very well, you know what I mean? Like now you can have the argument of whether staging and having furniture in there. Some people like that because they walk in, they can see what the house looks like, where the furniture would fit in. Yeah, that's good. I've had clients that would prefer it vacant because then in their mind they can kind of visualize what their stuff looks like in there. So there's that. You know, I think the statistics show though that like homes that are staged, you know, sell for more, sell quicker again because more people aren't as like visual. They need to physically see it, not imagine it. But, you know, those are, those are things that you have to take in consideration when you're selling home.

And that's something too, is trying to declutter the space. You know, if you have a lot of stuff in or items, furniture, what have you in one room, that's going to make that room look smaller than what it potentially is. And I'm speaking from experience. At my last house, you know, we were moving, we were in a 1100 square foot house. Then we moved up to a much larger house. And so we had one room where I was getting a little excited and was buying a little too much stuff for our new house. And so I was putting it in one of our spare bedrooms and I was like, this is making this room look so crammed. And so I started packing up a little early and getting it all in boxes and kind of in our shed. That way when people are walking through, they're not like, wow, that room is like crammed. So I think that helped a lot too, is, you know, decramming, cramming, cramming, decluttering. And also with that too, is, you know, we touched on this a little bit. Is not hiding any major repairs.

Yep, absolutely. So, I mean, you may, you, you definitely have to disclose things that you as the owner or seller, somebody wouldn't see if they just walked by it. I mean, if there's a crack in the wall and you can walk by clear as day and see it, I, I don't have to disclose that because you see it.

Right.

But if there was that crack in the wall and I decided to fix the crack and then maybe, you know, put up new something over the wall so you can't see it. Yep, that's where it's, you know, I mean, you have to make sure that you're doing the disclosure on that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, one of the things, and again, you were kind of hinting to it and I talked about it a little bit earlier, was, was the availability, you know, I mean, so when you have these vacant homes, so I'm going to go into turnkey mode for it for a, for a, for a hot minute. So sometimes we have our investors and they want to sell back their property, whether they're scaling up or whatever they want, they want to, they want to sell their property. And the first thing I always ask them is, is a vacant. I mean, because again, if you have a renter in your house, like so you have to give them heads up that somebody else is going to be walking through the house to look at it. Either that or you're selling it or hoping to sell it without anybody seeing it. Just. Yeah, you know, they're buying it on the numbers or they're buying it on what old pictures look like, how bad could it be? Which obviously is not a good idea. But so, yeah, the ability to have it vacant gets that showings that you were talking about because now multiple people can walk through it and not have to schedule ahead of time. And so that's another advantage of working with a realtor, you know, to list your property versus doing the for sale by owner. Because if not, every agent has to call you and say, hey Caitlin, it's Mark. You know, I mean, I saw your houses for sale by owner. Would you mind if I came by at 3:00'? Clock? Yeah, well, now you gotta come by at 3 o', clock, you know, I mean, versus a realtor that could put a lockbox on the door and you know, set it up through showing time or something like that, or different kinds of showing apps. But so yeah, so I mean, I, if I can with clients and you know, say you want to list a property on Thursday, you know, ask them. So even if you're living in the house and so maybe you got a good price and you're ready to go ask them, like, could you go anywhere for like three days? You know what I mean? Go take a little mini vacation. So that it's what an agent will refer to as a go and show, you know, I mean, so that I get on my app, I say, okay, what time you guys want to go? Two o'. Clock. Boom, we schedule it, you know, I mean, it instantly gives me the code to go look at it because I don't have the schedule ahead of time. Yeah, but yeah, that's another thing to possibly consider is you want the most amount of foot traffic you can going through your property. And so again, going back into turnkey, it's the same thing. You want to make sure that that property is vacant. Or that your tenant maybe goes away for three days, something like that, so that you can get people walking through it and seeing the house especially too.

At least in the state of Ohio. I know different states have different laws and regulations, but if it is an occupied property, you have to one, be honest with the resident, let them know that you are thinking of selling and you are going to probably have people walking through those kinds of things. But also if the resident just isn't responding or something and you have someone that's needing to look at it, you have if like you are wanting to show the property legally you have to give them a 24 hour written notice. That could be, I mean there's different ways that you could do that. Texting is now one of those options that you can do email or a hard notice on the door. But that kind of slows things down a little bit too. So, you know, trying to be in communication with your resident about that is going to be huge. And then another thing with that is if it is occupied and you are trying to maybe sell it to another investor, is making sure that you have your resident information in order and organized, you know, the contact information, the lease information, what is, you know, the rent, how long is the lease for, all that kind of things. And then having documentation of any new repairs that you've done or replacing assets, you know, like a hot water tank, a furnace, things like that, making sure you have all that so, you know, can hand it over nicely to an investor. That's just going to further help your case of selling it faster.

Yeah, absolutely. And you had hit it right on the head there, is that, you know, not only are you talking about giving that person like a heads up for showings, let's just say it's under contract. Now you've got to also let them know when you're doing inspections, when the appraiser is going to walk through. So there's two more times that you're going to inconvenience your tenant on the sale of the property. And let's just say that some inspections come back and there's repairs. Now you've got to, you know, also make time for those repairs to be done. So again, we do have buyback program here at the company and so we can work through those scenarios with our investors that are watching and thinking about, you know, you know, obviously we don't want to lose them, but you know, if it is something that life happens and you need to sell the property, these are, these are going to be the things that we're going to talk about. Yeah, we're going to talk about, you know, I mean, like, when is the lease up? You know, I mean, when, when are these things that maybe will make your life easier to sell the property, but sometimes you don't have that, that time and you just need to, to move. And so we understand that as well.

Yeah. I think another thing too is having, you know, it turnkey wise, be prepared to have questions, you know, in regards to how often are you increasing rents? What were like, what was the percentage that you were increasing it or was it by a certain dollar amount? How are you factoring that kind of thing?

Sure.

Those are things that I, based on my experience here and with my parents, because they have rental properties too.

Sure.

Those are general questions that they ask just to try to get an idea of that property. And again, you know, knowing that information on spot or having at least organized where you can quickly find it is just going to help tremendously with that.

Yeah, absolutely. Rent rolls, things like that. How, how often have they been laid or they have time, you know, what kind of tenant do you have? Because I know that, you know, legally there, there's rules that obviously protect the tenant and their, you know, their identification. So you can't really share names and numbers and stuff like that until they're literally the owner of the house. But you know, I mean, you can black out things, redact his thing. Yeah, things from the, from that. But those are great points.

That's a really good point. Especially if you're trying to sell as a for sale by owner is you can't really give away their contact information. You can't give away really any personal information about them, even, you know, like their gender, how many people or how many kids do they have? You cannot give away that any of that information. Can only give away the general lease information, you know, like the lease dates and the terms and things like that. So that was a really good point. I'm glad you brought that up. Another point that I wanted to touch on is selling when you're upside down on a mortgage.

Sure.

You want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. I mean, again, life happens.

Yes.

So, you know, sometimes you had bought a house, maybe it was at the peak of the market or you've refinanced it and for some reason property values have gone down and so you owe more than, than what you could sell for. I mean, these are just things that happen. I mean, you just have to, I guess evaluate what would be the best exit strategy for you. Is Selling that and taking the loss, minimize where you're going and what you're doing? Or would reevaluating, reconsidering, finding a new tenant. Again, if we're talking turnkey properties, something like that, hold onto it for a little bit more. See if there's a market correction, you know, anything you could do to increase the value of it. Again, this is usually where people start thinking, for sale by owner, because they're like, you know, I really can't afford, you know, 3% listing fee on this. I'm already upside down. I already owe more than I have. So those are ways. I mean, even when we talked about, like, acquisitions, you know, I mean, like, sometimes that's what we're doing. I mean, we're helping people to get out from under a rock. You may owe thousands of dollars in taxes that you haven't been able to pay. You know, I mean, you just want to break even on your mortgage and get out of it. And so on the acquisition side, that's typically what we're doing, is just, you know, giving somebody the opportunity to just walk away.

Yeah.

You know, just walk away. You know, minimize their loss, minimize their damages. So, yeah, like being upside down on a mortgage, you know, I can speak from experience. So when I. I lived in California, and the first home that I bought was in San Jose, and I paid, you know, basically the California premium for this house. And I swear. I swear, like, within, like, six months of me living there, the market, like, collapsed, you know, like, I mean, collapsed. It was. It was bad. And my neighbors were selling their. Their properties for, like, $100,000 less than what I had paid. So I was really upside down. Right. Like, I was like, what am I doing? So, yeah, so I could definitely speak that. That's not a good feeling. So you just kind of almost have to ride the wave, make sure that, you know, I mean, like, you. You look at, you know, because I was living there, I was. I was looking at opportunities like, do I get this rented just to cover the mortgage? You're talking to lenders on different options that you have, things like that. So, yeah, it's definitely a good time now.

So the last point I want to talk about, and we kind of talked about it a little bit already, but are, you know, the listing itself and bad, you know, having bad photos in it or not disclosing things within the listing? You know, and bad photos, it doesn't necessarily mean, like, you're showing, like, a hole in the wall or something. It could just be, you know, like, Bad lighting and things like that. Making sure that you have good photos is going to further improve your listings and it's going to further improve your showings and the ability to get it sold faster. One of the things that, you know, here that we like to try to do is when we're looking at, you know, IPMs listings or whatnot, we try to look at it, you know, would I rent this property based on the listing photos? So we try to put ourselves into the potential resident's shoes and kind of feel, you know, around for that. And, you know, same thing goes when you're trying to sell it. You know, photos are huge on listings, I think.

No, absolutely. Because, you know, nowadays with all the different sites out there that you can to look at homes, you're making your initial, you know, inquiry by looking at those.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, I mean, you're looking through. I mean, I know that when my wife and I were looking for a house, I mean, she goes right to the kitchen picks. Yeah, she doesn't even care about what the bedrooms or anything else looks like. But, you know what I mean? Because they are what they are. You can replace the carpet, whatever flooring you want, but the kitchen is what it is. Right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, you obviously want nice, bright, open pictures, because again, that is what's going to be the first step in having somebody contact a buyer's agent and say, hey, can I go look at 1, 2, 3, place? I mean, these pictures look great.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, yeah, and I think that we do a good job. You guys in the marketing do a great job of taking those pics and setting the expectation that, like, here, this is a nice, clean, you know, rehabbed home. This is what the floors look like. Here's what the kitchen looks like. I mean, and so, yeah, you want to be very clear and transparent. You know, sometimes there are photographs that come out, like, in that, like, walleye vision where the room looks kind of like super big or long. A lot of the realtors do that little trickery when they're working with, like, maybe a small backyard, and it makes it look like it's the size of a football field, but right then you get there and you're like, this isn't that big. But, yeah, no, the photos are huge. And so we had talked about this as well. It's like, whether you want it staged or not, whether you live there or not, you want to pick up the place for the photos, things like that, if you are living there, the new thing now is virtual staging. You know, I mean, so, yeah, I mean, I'm sure in the marketing you guys have seen that, is that you can take a picture of a blank room and start virtually adding furniture to it.

Yeah.

Just because that's what it would look like with furniture in it. So it's kind of cool technology. You know, I've spoken to some companies that do that for agents, but yeah, that's.

Yeah, there's also apps, not technologies. Crazy. But there's apps. Now I know we have a camera that we will take to Properties and kind of give you like a 3D layout where you can like click on the floor and move through room by room and get like matterport. Yeah. But now there are apps that you can download, I'm sure you probably have to pay for. Like, there's probably like a free version and then a premium version for extra. But I know that there are apps out there that you can do that as well, or you can do like a 2D or 3D floor plan and it will kind of like add in furniture and things like that if you want. So it is very cool.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And so, yep, photos are huge. You know, I mean, if you're doing it for sale by owner and you're taking those pictures, make sure you're aware of that's what's going to drive people to your house.

Yes, yes.

You know, taking pictures of the outside, you know, pictures of what's important to people. You know, bathrooms, you know, things especially if you've done any rehab on them, you know, I mean, you want updated baths, updated kitchens. Do you have an open floor plan or not? Yeah, you're going to want pictures of all that. You know, I mean, I don't think that people necessarily want pictures of the furnace or the hot water heater or something like that, but, you know, maybe. Maybe a snap of the basement or something. So.

Yeah, absolutely. And just a kind of general tip, horizontal photos usually turn out better than vertical. You just kind of get more in the room when you do it that way. And then lighting, like you said, is huge. Open the blinds, turn on all the lights that you possibly can. Anything you can do to try to make that room brighter and more warm feeling, if you will.

No, absolutely. I mean, any agent that has done any open houses knows exactly what you do. First thing you do, you walk in, you turn on every light, you open every window. Yeah, you want it like bright?

Yes, absolutely. All right, well, that's all that I have. Do you have anything else that you wanted to maybe add or anything? I didn't think of.

Yeah, one quick point. And again we were talking about a little bit, but again, just to go back into turnkey mode here for a second. Buying turnkey is a buy and hold strategy.

Yes.

And we talked about the upside down mortgages. We've talked about recuperating losses or things like that. And sometimes you just need to get out of it. That's, that's fine. That's one thing. But another thing that we want to try to remind our investors is this is a buy and hold strategy. And your home would have to appreciate quite a bit in order for you to pay the expenses of selling. You know, whether it's realtor fees, you know, paying other investors, you know, repair costs, all those things. I mean, there's no hard and fast rule. I'm not going to say that your house has to, you know, have gone up 20%.

Right.

But like, be realistic, you know, I mean, if you just bought a house for $100,000, you're not going to turn around and sell 140, you know, I mean, and you haven't put anything in it. Like, we kind of talked about, like, well, what upgrades have you done? You know, I mean, so, you know, I mean, you're not even turning around and sell for 130. I mean, the market's been hot. But if you haven't done anything to the house and you've only owned it for a year, maybe two, you may not recoup that. I mean, it may not sell for that. Plus, the other thing is to keep in mind and again would be the rents. So if you bought this house for $100,000 and it's renting for $1,000, well, that was a great cap rate for you as an investor then, you know, I mean, and let's just say that the rents over the last, like couple years have gone up to 1100. Again, you can't turn around and sell the property for 130.

Yeah.

With an 1100 rent. Because keep in mind who you're selling to.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, and so that's the other thing that I think we just didn't, we kind of alluded to but didn't talk to is who are you selling this to?

Yeah.

You know, are you selling it to another investor? Like, would you buy it? Would you buy that house?

Yep.

So you have to put your investor hat on that. If you're selling it to other investors, what would be a cap rate or a rent or sales price that they would want, you know, in order when they're doing their. Their homework. And so, you know, doing that for sale by owner or even working with an agent, maybe you had it as a turnkey property, but now you're selling it on the MLS because you feel like the value of the house has gone up, the rent isn't keeping up with the value add. So who's your audience?

Yeah.

Who are you selling it to?

Another thing too that I just thought of is, you know, if you are selling, if it's a rental and you're selling it and it's occupied, do you know what that current. The current state of the property is, you know, exterior and interior, you know, it happens often, but the resident could very likely have caused damage within it. You know, are you aware of the damage that's in there and are you aware that that's how you are trying to sell it or are you going to do fix those damages, you know, and kind of having that in your head that way you can know. I think personally, I think I would be upset if, you know, I thought that it was in great condition without really knowing anything and then having somebody go look at it and then giving me all kinds of feedback about damages that I didn't even know about.

Right.

So I would. That's something too that I would maybe look at is, you know, getting an idea of what the customer current state of the property is both on the exterior and interior.

Sure, that makes sense.

Yep. All right.

That's all I got, man.

Perfect. Well, I hope you guys had some or got some useful information out of this. Learned a couple of things, hopefully. If you guys have any suggestions on any other topics that you would like us to cover or any questions at all, please let us know. We are here to help and would love to cover any topics that you guys are interested in hearing. We always like to end these with.

Invest smart and live happy.

Bye, guys.

Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions and information on this show are not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss.