Todd explains why people are having a tough time finding reliable help in Las Vegas buying a low end home.

Here is the link I was referring to..   http://jcmacpherson.com/Our%20home%20for%20sale/Our%20home.htm

Todd gives an update to the Las Vegas real estate market.

Todd and Oana discuss whether now is a good time to short sale or not.

Todd shows a 4-plex just purchased at trustee sale in Las Vegas

Hello! Welcome to Todd Miller TV. I wanted to do an update today on technology, I wanna talk about web, talk about mobile, some of the exciting things that are starting to happen in Real Estate. I wrote down 5 things, we’re gonna go through ‘em one at a time, we’re gonna kinda see where we’re going and what’s some of the new things are coming down line. And maybe why it’s taking us a while to get to where we probably need to be with technology in Real Estate. Okay. So, 1st thing I wrote down is “Real Estate is an offline business” So you’re probably saying “Well, if it’s an offline business, how do we use technology?” Well, you know, taking the offline role of Real Estate and fitting it into an online world is sort of a challenge, which is one of the reasons why we have seen slow growth, we’ve sort of seen things like Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia, come out with mobile apps and that’s about it. Couple of things that are out there in the Real Estate space, Transitioning Real Estate form offline to online and using the technology to make this whole process a little easier, more comfortable, take out some of the complexity of it is sort of interesting. 2nd thing I wrote down “Real Estate is really a relationship business” The people I talk to are saying “I wanna avoid the pushy agent” that’s a relationship issue. They say “I wanna talk to people I trust, my friends, my family, get their opinions, and then ultimately when I find that person who I really trust, is then I’ll have all the people that make information”. You can’t replace that with technology, but you can use technology to help you find those people. So using/taking the offline part of Real Estate, taking that relationship part of Real Estate, and sort of taking that and do an online box is been sort of the thing that people are trying to figure out. 3rd thing I wrote down “cost of entry.” Now there’s a cost to this developing, the websites, the tech, the mobile, the engineering, the server calls, all the things that it takes to do that are not cheap. And Real Estate is a business where it’s very cheap to get in. Real Estate companies, Real Estate Agents to can start them for nothing. So people, they’re at mind set, don’t always wanna invest the money in technology and do things. Usually, had to have big companies and then they missed the mark on the local. So that’s sort of like you got a bunch of people in the industry who aren’t used to making the commitment financially and then trying to get then to do stuff, sometimes difficult. The other reason that we’ve sort of seen it lacking is Real Estate is not lively adaptable. It’s not like instagram where you can take a picture of a person and then post it on the Facebook immediately, and everyone can do that. That’s something people would use 3 or 4, 10 times a day, Real Estate yo would/you maybe do it when you’re ready to buy a house, once you buy the house you probably forget about it. So, if the application is not widely identifiable, the website or whatever, and it’s not usable to everybody, it’s not gonna be adapted a lot. And a lot of people don’t want to spend their time on it. They’d rather come up with something everybody can use. So what are some cool things that are out there right now? Home Snap, I think it’s gimmicky. People like it though because they take the picture of the house, it tells them all about it. But it’s really not doing that. Just finding that house nearest to them. You know Zillow and Trulia are doing some interesting things I think with, they’re staring to maneuver out of the space that they’ve been in, which is, don’t let them, you know, make you think they’re doing otherwise, they make their money selling leads to Real Estate agents. So when you’re on their website and you’re thinking “I just avoided the agent, I’m on Trulia, I’m on Zillow, I’m going through these websites” They take your information, they sell it to agents, Okay? Ask any agent. They’ve all been called by Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com we have buyer leads for you, pay us a certain amount. That’s what they do. Okay? But they do some other cool stuff in technology. Hey, so what are we doing here in Nevada Realty Solutions in regards to this technologies? So, we’re doing 2 things, our web nationwide service for finding agent and getting relocation expenses back, that’s will be launching probably within a month. It’s called “ReloRabbit” It’s actually on the web, it’s not fully functional yet but it’s “ReloRabbit.” Another thing that we’re doing here, techwise, is mobile. It’s gonna be very fun, it’s gonna be something you do with a mobile device in front of a house. It’s going to be very cool, I’ll talk about that more in a few months. It’s actually/the people I’ve talk to in the industry are blown away when I told them what my idea was. We’re following a patent on it to protect ourselves. It’s very cool. I think it’ll be really good. So you’re probably asking “Why is somebody like a small Real Estate company doing this? Not a big company?” Part of that is, Big companies have to have money right now. They have to have something they could take and you know, immediately start generating revenue from. The proven business model is to get eyeballs and then advertise to them or sell them leads, sell leads to agents and neither one of those is anything that we’re doing. This is not anything we have to make a penny off of at any time in the future, atleast within the first few years or anything. It’s just something very cool. Something that we’re gonna be using in here. It’s actually something our agents in this company are gonna be using and then agents at other companies, and people can use it, any body can use it. That’s a kinda cool thing is, we’re actually creating something for everybody on the mobile side and not just for consumers, not just for Real Estate agents. So, like I said, details will be coming out is that gets it all. Anyway, I thought I would talk about technology, talk about Real Estate, i think it’s sort of great space to be in and there’s very few players in it and we’re one of them now. So anyway, that is my update for today and hope to see you on another video. Thanks!

Hello! Welcome to Todd Miller TV. I wanted to do an update about new home sales and if you need a real estate agent to go to a new home sale. So if you’ve ever been to a new home track you probably realized that they have a person in there, and when you walk in they usually male you sign in and let you go see the model homes and then if you want you just tell them I want to buy this one, you pick the lot, you pick your upgrades and you get through. So, you’re probably saying “hey wait a minute, what do I really need an agent if I’m gonna go to a new home track?” So, it’s a really good question. And the answer is that you don’t have to have one. Actually you don’t have to have a real estate agent to buy any house. You could just go see a sign and then go call that agent who’s the listing agent and buy the house from that agent. Just what like regular sales, so you’re probably saying “well what’s the benefit?” So we’re talking about some of the benefits of having an agent. Okay so, benefit number 1 is: There’s no cost. So that agent’s gonna get paid a commission for going in there and then they’ll represent you and do a lot of work for you. So you’re probably be saying “well, I don’t really need representation because you know.” Well the truth is you do! And this is why, that person that’s working in the sales office, they work for the seller. Meaning, their job they have to make certain quotas and goals and make sales in that office, okay? So all they care about is selling you a unit. They don’t care who they sell it to so, you may or may not get the right information about the unit, they may say something they’re not supposed to, they may try to “oh yeah,” whatever promises they make, they’re gonna talk you into it, they’re all gonna tell you everything good, they’re not gonna tell you anything bad. Okay? And I’ll give you an example, we took a client to a new home subdivision and they filled out all the paperwork and then they got this disc that held the HOA rules and the person said to them “As soon as you sign this, you’re committed, you have to buy the house, you can’t get out, or we’ll take your earnest money deposit.” And they signed it and I was there and I said “Actually that’s/in front of the sales person and the offices, to them That’s not true!” Actually by Law you have 5 days to review the HOA. If you don’t like it, you can cancel it and get your EMD back for any reason. And the person in the sales office was adamant “that was not the case, that doesn’t apply to new homes whatever” The truth is, it does! It applies to any purchase of a home. In an HOA you have to have that. So this person wasn’t getting good advice. They were basically being told something that wasn’t true by that person in there. So you have to be careful about that. Okay. The next thing is, to be careful of is if you have a house to sell first, a lot of times you can’t buy on contingency. Meaning you can sell or go under contract by the house but only go for the transaction if this house sells. ‘Cause a lot of times they won’t do that. They’ll say “no, it’s not contingent, if this house doesn’t sell and you don’t close, you’re gonna loose your earnest money deposit. Sometimes you have to out down a lot more money for a 5,000-10,000 or whatever to get in those. The other thing is, they have Loan officers in there already; and be careful ’cause what happens is a lot of times those loan officers bump up the rate your gonna get because they feel they haven’t kept the value, it’s not competitive, sometimes the builder will incentivise you, “we’ll give you $5,000 of upgrades if you use our lender.” And the truth is, if they’re adding $10,000 of cost on the back end for them in loan fees and interest rates and it not all with the cost, sometimes it’s with the interest rate. So if your/they pay half a percent more, for $5,000 isn’t, you know, over the, ofcourse that loan entering way make up for that. Okay? So just be careful with that. Don’t be afraid to bring in your own lender and say “hey, I got a competitive quote.” So, and that’s something your agent should help you for his well/okay another thing is, keep this in mind that when you’re putting upgrades in the house, sometimes you charge a big premium; meaning, way more than you could get it done. I’ll give you an example, Toll brothers was building houses here and if you wanted upgraded flooring it was really expensive and I remember pricing it out. So I told this person in the sales office “hey look, we don’t want this flooring, we’re gonna have our own put in. So we just want the floors left there, and if we have the floors left there, how much money do we save?” And they said “Actually if we leave the floors there, there’s a plight of $4,000 cost for that.” “And I said “Really? Well that just doesn’t make any sense.” They said “No, it’s gonna be a cost to leave the floors there, it’s gonna cost you more money ’cause we already prepaid for all the stuff.” And I said “Fine, put in all the basic stuff. Basic carpet, basic everything, just basic basic, I don’t want anything in there not changing the flooring.” Because the flooring, when you get a big for flooring a lot of time, that includes the free removal of whatever’s down there. So rip up the carpet, tear up the linoleum, and put down the nice stuff. So, and you won’t know that unless you get a real estate agent, someone with some experience and expertise to sort of help you through that, okay? The other thing is, the person in the new home subdivision may not be telling you exactly what the future plans are like for example, they may start out with the big houses first and then later on they sell a bunch of small houses in the neighborhood. Well that could hurt you. ‘Cause if you buy a 3 or 4,000 sq.ft. house and then you know, 6 months later they’re building 2,000 sq.ft. houses that average sales price and that neighborhood’s gonna fall, it’s gonna hurt the value of your home, even though you have a bigger home. You wanna be the smallest house in the neighborhood or bigger homes is a general rule. And then you wanna avoid being the biggest house in the neighborhood. The most over you know, over done house in the neighborhood is typically not pretty good. But hey, last thing I’m gonna talk about\, Home Inspector. Yes I know it’s a brand new home but I guarantee you a home inspector will find things wrong sol this is my recommendation: You’re gonna get a final walk through, final walk through tells them I’m bringing my Home inspector with me. Have your home inspector do a full inspection of the house with them while doing their notes and everything he finds, have them fixed. We wouldn’t do a brand new house that was/it was brand new, the guy they freaked when we show up with the home inspector with the client, and they’re like, they were like “look, he can/we can by law have him there. We’re paying him.” Well he went up in the attic and found that the thrust that they used were twisted. They were physically twisted. He said “Hey look, these are/this things are twisted. You need to like put extra supports in there to keep/to hold them so that the roof doesn’t like collapse.” And the builders were not like really happy that they were just basically doing kinda you know, shotty work and the home inspector caught a bunch of stuff like that. So, anyway, bottomline is you don’t need a real estate agent to go buy a new home, you definitely go can hire one, the builder they’ll get paid the commission by the sales office and the seller sol you don’t have to worry about any expense typically out of pocket. And then, all the stuff I talked about, they should know, plus a bunch of some other stuff. I just want to cover like the biggest things because I know a lot of people go in, they buy they’re not represented, 6 months later they’re complaining about something an agent would have got. So anyway, that is my update for today and hope to see you on another video. Thanks!

Todd: Hello! Welcome to Todd Miller TV. Joined here today with Oana, seems to be a regular now. So one of our agents here, Mike Madsen have some suggestions for a video and this is one of them. And, we’re in a scenario right now in Las Vegas where inventories disappearing. We have under 5,000 single family homes on the market. And there’s a lot of frustrations out there when people make offers because the most common thing we get is how many offers do you have? It’s not “do you have any offers? How many do you have? So being smart about how to write offers whether you’re an agent or a consumer is super important. So let’s talk about hat I have with you; when an agent or a buyer asks how many offers, what information are they trying to get?
Oana: They’re trying to game the system.
Todd: Okay.
Oana: And there’s really no way to game it. Because the bottomline is, whether I have 1 offer or 15, you still don’t know the value of that offer. The thing that always, the question I get asked probably even more than that is: Okay you got multiple offers, I’m sure you do, what’s your highest offer so I could commit above that?
Todd: Okay.
Oana: And that really is bothersome to me because what happens is, when they wanna commit above that, they’ll tie up the property, the appraisal will not match the purchase price, and that property will go back on the market because their either unwilling or unable to meet the difference between appraise value and purchase price. I have a property right no where, you know for the sake of argument let’s say that it’s listed for $100,000. I got an appraisal for it for $90,000, and I have offers on it for $110,000. But they’re FHA offers, and I’ve and an FHA appraisal out there for $90,000. So these people are never gonna buy this house unless they’re willing to come with $20,000 out of pocket.
Todd: Is it a Fannie Mae property?
Oana: It is.
Todd: Could they go Homepath and have not to deal with the appraisal.
Oana: Exactly!
Todd: Okay.
Oana: So that’s really the/that’s really the big thing right now is they need to understand that if they’re going to go FHA or conventional, they’re going to have to cope with the difference. Because we have multiple offers, we don’t have to take appraised value, and if they want that house then they’re gonna have to go Homepath because remember, Homepath does not have appraisal.
Todd: Okay. So highest offer, not always the best.
Oana: Right.
Todd: Okay. So Mike wrote 2 things that I wanted to talk about. And this is kinda interesting. It’s the types of homes that quickly sell. Like what’s hot right now, and so this is what he wrote down: That turn-key homes ion high demand neighborhoods, excellent condition and priced well. So basically we’re talking about move-in ready for an owner-occupant in a descent area.
Oana: Right. But the thing you have to understand is, now while this home looks move-in ready, this home has been vacant for a long time.
Todd: Yeah.
Oana: And so we maybe re-painted it, maybe we put in appliances, and maybe we put in carpeting, it looks beautiful, and it is! But that home has been vacant for a long time. So people have to understand that when they’re moving in these homes, chances are that at those 1st 30 days are gonna seem like the money pit. Because they’re gonna run in to unbearably plumbing and electrical problems. I would say almost every homes is gonna run in to that. Because it’d been vacant for a long time and we just have now way of knowing what’s going in there. And until you’ve lived there, you’re not gonna know either.
Todd: Okay. So that’s actually very common because I hear a lot of people who will say “Why moved in and a month later we have a plumbing problem.” Well the house that empty for you know a year maybe, and by the time you got in the plumbing got on and it maybe took a while for the pressure to make something burst.
Oana: So those pipes become brittle overtime when they’re not being used so that happens a lot.
Todd: Right. Second thing that he set was Cosmetic fixers, so only cosmetic problems in good locations priced below comparable sales.
Oana: You know, in this market, I doubt it’ll be price below comparable sales. I think it can be above comparable sales and get your property sold.
Todd: Okay.
Oana: We don’t have enough inventory to have buyers be picky. Sp if they find a home that they like and it looks pretty good. Then that’s probably the only choice that they have.
Todd: Well so what do you say to that buyer out there who says “Well I kinda like it, I mean it works, it meets all my criteria but, I think I’ll just keep looking. And then maybe in week if I don’t find something I’ll come back to this one.”?
Oana: Uhm, this will be gone in a week.
Todd: It’ll be gone in a week. Okay.
Oana: This will be gone in a week but at the same time it is important that you actually like the house that you’re making an offer on. Because you’re taking it away from someone else who actually loves the house. And for you to type a house and then back out a bit. It’s not productive for you and it’s not productive for anybody else and the market place either.
Todd: Well what happens, do you ever list a house like put it in the MLS and then an hour later get an offer in?
Oana: Absolutely yes!
Todd: Knowing they haven’t seen it.
Oana: Absolutely.
Todd: But just trying to get an offer in and be the first one to try and get accepted before anybody else.
Oana: Yes. And we talked to them. And sometimes they say well, you know we know the house, we saw it when it was a short sale. We know we love it and we wanna buy it.
Todd: Okay.
Oana: And under those circumstances, that’s fine. If I know that they haven’t seen the house then I will go ahead and ask them to go please see the house and I will let the seller know that they haven’t seen the house.
Todd: Okay.
Oana: And sometimes the seller will say, well they have to waive conditions or something along those lines because the seller now knows that they haven’t seen the house either. And the seller does not want that property to be taken off the market for a buyer who is not committed to that property.
Todd: So, let’s say this happens a lot. That somebody writes an offer, gets accepted, but a week later they open Escrow, a week later they come in form out of town to see the house for the first time and they go “we don’t like it!”
Oana: Yup!
Todd: So they write up cancellations instructions, do they instantaneously get their money back?
Oana: There’s nothing instant in Real Estate.
Todd: Okay. So even though they’re within their due diligence, until the seller signs.
Oana: That’s right.
Todd: And it could take 30 to/the seller has 30 days to return that EMD.
Oana: Right. And it takes time. I mean, you know between the buyer sign it ,the seller sign it, title processing, you know it just takes time, you know it’s not gonna be instantaneous.
Todd: Okay. And if you need that/if that 1 of or $2,000 is the difference between you and being able to get a house or not get a house, ’cause you’re going FHA and you need all the money, you probably don’t wanna try to keep cancelling Escrow and finding another house. ‘Cause you’re gonna run into a seller I’m taking, that just says “forget it” you know I’m not gonna return it or whatever.
Oana: Right. I mean if that’s seller’s you know puts in that contract, you know/we know you haven’t seen the property, and you’re gonna buy it as-is, forget the whole thing, you’re gonna have a problem. And there are some sellers out there that will play hard ball. In the end, they probably will return the money, but it may take a while and they will drag their feet and they’ll be punitive about it.
Todd: Okay. What last piece of advice would you give to a consumer who’s thinking of buying in the next couple months where we see more people coming in to the market to buy and houses disappearing?
Oana: Make up your mind. Fall in love with the house and then stay committed to it. And just don’t make offers on 15 properties and then back out of them. How would you like if that was done to you with a house that you love? But most off all, be committed to the property, be committed to the purchase price. Don’t think that “well, when it doesn’t appraise, they’ll reduce the price.” They won’t. Okay? They will cancel your deal. They will cancel your deal before you can even figure “I can get an appraisal review.” As soon as that appraisal comes back bad, either you already agree to meet the difference between the appraisal value and purchase price, or you’re out of there. We’re not gonna wait for an appraisal review.
Todd: Okay. Good. Alright. So, I just wanted to go over the things that Mike has sent me. This was really great. There’s so much going on, there’s so much that either you as an agent, or you as a consumer have to be informed about to be able to navigate this really complex dynamic market that we have here right now. It’s gonna stay this way. I don;t see a lot of houses coming on the market so I think we’re gonna have this, this is gonna be the new reality for at least a while.
Oana: You know, the wonderful thing about Las Vegas, our market changes so fast.
Todd: Yeah.
Oana: That it’ll be different a month from now.
Todd: We were from the hottest market in the world, to like the worst market in the world. And now we’re turning back into the hottest market in the world again.
Oana: Yes. The market is super heating right now and it’s a great time as always to invest in Real Estate in Las Vegas because there’s limited supply, there’s lots of demand and there are opportunities.
Todd: Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So that’s/that was it. i hope you got some good information out of this. Once again thanks to Mike for giving me the/some stuff to go over here. Anyway, that was my update for today and see you on another video. Thanks.

Hello! Welcome to Todd Miller TV. I wanna do an update for the first 3 months of the year, so basically this is the April update for January, February, March of 2012 here in Las Vegas, Nevada Real Estate Market. So you probably heard some people come out talking about the lack of inventory, AB-284 which is the political legislation that happened last year, and all these other things that are gonna kill the economy and destroy the Real Estate market and everything, and I just wanna talk about those ’cause I actually got numbers here that explain that. So, the key factor of what’s gonna happen with prices and everything is really a function supply and demand. Okay? Whether at equilibrium or were not equilibrium. So depending on where we are, the market always tries to get to equilibrium. So either the demand curve shifts in a way that causes prices to fall, shifts in a way to cause it to rise. The supply curve is pretty much you know, that can shift too based on supplies. So, without going in to big economic explanation, I wanna talk about the actual reality and actual numbers, okay? So right now, you would probably be surprised to find out if I told you there are over 20,000 homes on the market that are not/that have not sold. Okay? Because you’re probably seeing there’s 4,000, there’s only 3,000, there’s only 5,000, but they’ve segmented it all down, they’re only talking about REOs, they’re only talking about single family homes, they’ve cut it out to make it seem more as it is. 20,288 homes is the actual number. Now, some of those homes are under contract. Actually, about 13,000 of those homes are under contract, okay? What that means is somebody wrote an offer but it hasn’t close. and a lot of those fall out of contract and so the sort of thought that there’s not any houses out there is super misleading. Because obviously there are 13,000 people out there under contract on a house right now, alright? And some of those are investors they have a few more than one houses they’re under contract on, alright. What that leaves is 7,142 houses, condos, townhomes, everything that’s in available status some would write an offer for it right away. Now, what’s interesting about bot that number is, that’s actually the normal healthy number. We’ve been so used to having in this industry a ton of houses for that last 4-5 years, this 2006 we’ve had, you know at anyone time between 12,000 and 20 something thousand homes available. So, you’re probably saying “why is this bad? Isn’t it good that this is getting absorbed because you’re hearing that there’s gonna be another flood of REO this year, there’s gonna be more foreclosures,” it was interesting a National article came out and said “Yes, there’s gonna be more foreclosures” but everything’s gonna get absorbed now and they said even though they predicted more REO this year than last year, they’re predicting Nationally prices come up here, we’re already seeing it. We have anecdotal information, we have the actual information, prices are going up. Okay? So, you’re probably saying “well why/what is the big deal?” Well this is the big deal, the people that are making the accusations or the implications or trying to say this is bad, bad, bad, this is a conspiracy and all this other stuff, many of them are in the industry. And many of them, it’s easier for them to do their job when they have a bunch of houses on the market. This is why: you have a buyer, you take the buyer out to the house, okay? There’s no offers on it. You write the offer, gets accepted, now you get a commission check, right? Or you can go to a house where there’s 10 offers on it, write an offer to it, the offer did not get accepted because there’s, you know you’re competing with 9 other people and you’re gonna be frustrated. So you’re gonna be upset, etc. and everything. So, you know, the problem really isn’t/look if you bought a house last year, you scored. You killed it. As a matter of fact, if you’re looking at this today, and you’re sitting there 6 months or a year ago thinking, I’m thinking about buying in Vegas, you should have watched my videos last year and should have listened to what I’ve said ’cause you missed out. I’ve always said you can’t time the real estate market, the transactional fees of going in and out of Real Estate are too much with all the taxes and commissions and everything that at cost, you can’t try and go buy and show short term, except for flipping which is completely different. But, you missed! I mean last year, the deals that were around last year are gone. We have investors that are going “Todd, why can’t you get me the houses like you got last year?” I’m like, “cause they don’t exist! They were all bought up, you want that house, $15,000, $20,000 more for that low end house.” Even the really low end stuff, you know, those 30-$40,000 homes are 50-60,000 now. So, this is not a bad thing that the inventories is down. 71,000 homes is a lot. When I pulled the numbers for the first 3 months of the year, January, February, March, I get about 12,000 sales. Well if you multiply that times 4 that’s 48,000 sales, that’s just as many sales as there were last year, there will be inventory to cover it. It will come out. There will be more shortsales, there will be more REOs, there will be investors who bought last year and the year before who I told you are have won in the short term, who will sell when the prices go up. Some of the people will just say “Hey, I’m gonna take my $20,000 profit and try another market or whatever. So, or just take the cash. So, this is not a terrible thing. Supply and demand rules does. The bottomline is, if prices go up, that’s really good, it’s good for everybody who bought. If not, could you have waited, you’re just gonna have to pay more but interest rates are low and it’s you know, and that’s just the way it is. But I wanted to talk about this, it’s not a big deal as everybody is making it, it’s only a big deal if you’re an agent with a buyer, and then you’re writing offers on, and getting 10, 20 agent all in clients, also writing offers and you’re frustrated ’cause it’s harder for you to do your jib if there’s few inventories. So, and it’s also tough if you’re a Loan officer ’cause you’re helping a person go through the loan process, getting qualified and they’re not able to find a house. So, it could be frustrating for those people, I totally get it, you know, and so, anyway, I just wanted to sort of give you an update, tell you what’s going on, give you the anecdotal information and explain the actual inventory, these inventory numbers haven’t really changed that much. Despite what you hear it’s definitely bias, it’s definitely skew towards scaring people. I really don’t know what the motivation is ’cause it doesn’t really give you the information to help. So, anyway, that is my update for today and hope to see you on another video. Thanks!

Todd and Oana talk property management.