KGCI: Real Estate on Air - An Agent's Playbook for Selling in a Buyer's Market

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

Summary:This episode is an essential tactical guide for real estate agents navigating a market shift. It provides a clear playbook on how to successfully sell properties when high inventory and low demand give buyers the upper hand. Listeners will learn the most effective strategies for pricing homes to attract immediate attention, creating marketing that stands out from the competition, and negotiating terms that lead to a successful close. It also includes powerful scripts for managing seller expectations and having those tough but necessary pricing conversations.

You're listening to the Investor Agent Nation podcast, empowering agents and investors to collaborate effectively and grow their businesses symbiotically. Your host, Randy Zemnock and Eric Gross, share real-life case studies, trending tactics, and expert strategies that have helped them to accomplish over $1 billion in sales volume. Whether you're a seasoned agent looking to expand your business or an investor seeking to optimize your returns, you're in the right place. This is the Investor Agent Nation podcast. So today's topic is very timely. So it's selling properties in a buyer's market. And again, we're just going to assume that most of the nation is in a buyer's market. You know, if you're not, well, then congratulations because you're one with you.

But at the end of the day, you know, you're going to run into a buyer's market one sooner or later, right? if you're not in one right now. So I'm also speaking from my Southern California experience. Last two years in the fourth quarter, the market has slowed down quite a bit. So two years ago, I mean, last year in the fourth quarter, the market dipped about five to eight percent,

depending where you were. Two years prior to that, the market actually went down 10 to 15 percent in the fourth quarter. both of those quarters, of course, we also had a decrease in listings going live, logical, right? People taking off for holidays. They don't want to be dealing with selling their home. They want to spend time with family, blah, blah, blah, right? So listings always, you know, tend to dip quite a bit in the fourth quarter. And then in January, what we've experienced in San Diego, specifically or Southern California even,

is market started picking up again second week of January, showing things going under contract. So I'm going to be speaking from that perspective here and how I talk to my investor clients, right, that are planning on listing their home potentially right now when I actually have a specific client right now that I'm working with and I'll share a little bit about what we're deciding to do. But that's kind of where it's going to come from. Anything you want to add before we kind of start jumping into the points that we want to cover. Yeah, I mean, just typically November, December, tend to be their overall pretty slow months. That's just normal. So Tampa, I know I've talked about this multiple times. Like we're already kind of transitioning just in a normal.

normal kind of balanced market. We have been for the past two years. We've increased on inventory. And then with recent storms, we've moved probably a little bit closer towards the buyer's market. But I think just nationally, December's one of the slowest months.

So kind of like what Randy said, the holidays tend to be a really, nobody wants to move during Christmas time. Wow, I see. Is this Jeff Fallon in here? Oh, did he leave? Oh, here, there is Jeff. Fallon. How did you sneak in here? Who let him in? Who let him in? Yeah, well, I just got done with

a 12 noon and I was like, before I go to lunch, I saw this on Facebook as I was like it and I was like, I got to go say hi and listen in to some tips over here from some of these experts. Oh, man. I go way back with Jeff. So this is, this is a bittersweet to see you here, man. That's awesome. Likewise. Good to see you and Eric, nice to meet you. I'm going to, I got a pen and paper. everyone else you know one of the coaches investors here i'm going to take notes also all right i love that great too much yeah let's let's connect offline uh for sure sounds good buddy yeah for sure cool uh jeff and i we know each other from a previous company that i was partners with and speaking for and jeff was working there and so anyway but good to see him but um so bottom line

here here is i'll speak from this specific even case study that i have have now situation. So a previous investor client of mine from Southern California reached out and said, hey, you know, we, my sister passed away. My family doesn't necessarily want to do the renovations, but can you, you know, hook us up with some of your investor clients? So, so we did. But at the end of the day, she talked her family into doing some of the repairs based on our suggestions that we gave her. And we actually recommended in this particular case not to go through a full renovation, even if they convinced the family to do so, or if they, you know, use my friend who actually would then offer them to do the renovation for them, right, and keep the loan in the seller's name.

So it's kind of like the program we talked about, I think a few couple months ago that some investors do, where they will come in not buy the property. They would renovate it with their own funds and participate also in the profit on the back end, right? Different topic. But that was the idea we wanted to also bring to the table for this particular client. I said, look, we can list it as is if you don't do anything. And this property was very lived in, okay? Like very lived in.

Like 10 cats, two dogs, three kids. I mean, like lived in, okay? Smell everywhere, right? And thank goodness, I didn't have to walk through it because I couldn't. I'm in Tampa. But my team member did and my investor client friend did. Nevertheless, we said, look, here is your as is what we would list it at. And here's the, you know, the cons with that and the pros with that.

Here is what potentially if you want to renovate it, what it will probably cost you. And our investor friends, clients would be able to do it, you know, put up the money and renovate it. However, we actually don't suggest that. So if you do want to spruce it up a little bit and get rid of the smell, paint, carpet, paint the kitchen cabinets. But everything else was outdated. Everything is outdated, right? So this is like the green bathrooms or like old tile, but you can still use it, right? So we gave them a scope of work that was what we call almost like a prehab, right?

But it's something that you can then put on a market and feel like an end user might actually talk themselves into buying, okay? And get a loan and all that, right? And not feel like, oh, my goodness, I can't buy this unless I renovate it, right? So that was the idea that we pitched them on that said, hey, if you actually renovate it, it actually will work against you because you're then competing with new builds. And we cannot get that price, right? Because we got new bills. There's more inventory now.

But what you can do and it will be better is this limited scope of work. And we can list it a lot lower and get a lot more attention. Right. So they decided to actually do. the work. But now it comes time to, you know, discussing pricing, discussing, hey, you know, should we go on market in December? What do you guys think, right? So we started getting into these conversations. And bottom line, we're hoping, we're like hoping that they can do these repairs and be ready for us to take over December 1st. So we would go on the market. We told them

first week of December, we can still test the market, not great. However, if we have to and you want to, then let's try it, right? If we do not get any strong offers by the third week of December, I told them we're going to take it off the market, right? And relist it and come back second week of January, right? And the idea behind it is I don't want to be racking up days on the market, okay? And I don't know how you feel, right? If you're a realtor or if you're an investor, I don't know what you feel.

When you look up a listing and you see days on market, let's say 60 days, right? When I see it, I automatically start thinking that if my client likes that property, I automatically think that there's no way I have to offer list price because of 60 days on the market. Sellers probably a little motivated, right? They haven't sold it in 60 days, right? So I want to avoid that as much as possible, right? And I know it's easier said than done. However, we do have that ability, especially to do that in this type of a market in December, right, going into January.

So I would actually take it off the market, even though I have to redo my listing documents, whatever. It's worth it for me, right? Because I'm trying to do the best thing for my client. In this case, it's a savvy investor that decided technically not to sell it to another investor and do their work themselves, right? So anyway, so we're going to hope that we're going to get on market and test it because what will happen? I don't know about every MLS across the country, but a lot of times, if you take a property off the market, and maybe Eric, I would like to know if you know the answer to this.

If I take a property off the market in San Diego, I don't know where the break point is, but I've seen this happen that the days on the market get reset on Zillow, on Redfin, on Realtor.com, when it gets syndicated, right? And that's what I'm after. And I don't think there was a perfect answer to this, right? But I could almost guarantee that if we go off market, third week of December, and come back,

second week of January, most likely in Southern California, it will probably show up as a brand new listings with zero days on market. Now, people will be able to scroll down for some of you that are thinking, well, that never goes away the history. I know, but most people don't do that, including realtors, believe it or not, right? They don't scroll down and check and like, oh, let's see if this property was listed before. most people people's behavior the consumer they look at photos they look at price they might read some of the description not all of it right so if you're one of those that writes you know three paragraphs like might want to not do that but people want to make quick decisions what they like right and there's a chance there's a really low chance where they're going to actually start going deeper and

opening up all those areas where listing history sits. And that's what I'm after. I'm after those type of people that can see that property second week of January. If we don't get the offer we want in December, right, and see it as a brand new listing, right? Even if it's the same buyer that might have looked at it in December and it will happen, right? Eric, can you, I don't know, share what you've experienced with us in Cincinnati and maybe Tampa? Like, if you take the the market, do you notice that the days on the market carry on most of the time? Do they reset? Like, what do you experience? Typically, if you do like a temporarily like a withdrawn or a temporary off market, it'll reset on Zillow as long as it's been a couple days or even a week,

but it won't reset in the MLS. So that's one thing to look at because typically a lot of agents will jump on there and be able to pull up the days on market pretty quickly. But there is a certain time that if you have it completely removed or canceled off of the MLS, that it'll reset the days on VMLS as well. So we actually just had a listing that we had in a previous meeting that had some

hurricane damage and it came off. And then I just told my cellar, hey, take it off, we'll remove it. And then once it's all just some wind damage, once it was fixed, I was like, we'll put it back and then reset the Zillow days and everything else is fresh. So definitely helpful. And Zillow actually hides a lot of the listing history.

So like if you click on Zillow, you have to scroll almost three quarters of the way down before you're getting any sort of. And I use it all the time because you can see if it's changed brokerages, how many times it's been listing, taken off, listing, taking off, price reductions, and everything like that.

So it's one of the first things I'll typically look at with clients or I'll send them a screenshot. And it's actually usually a red flag. If it's been on and off four or five different times, like listing removed or anything like that, I'm usually like, hey, this is a little, or if it's gone pending four times and hasn't sold, I'm always like, let me reach out to the agent and see what's going on here. And I will tell you, you're one of the few agents that would do the things you're describing.

Most agents, especially newer agents, are not going to dig that deep. And then another thing that I'm after is the consumers that don't have a realtor. There is a ton of those looking on Zillow, looking on Redfin, looking on Realtor, and they see that and they if we have an open house scheduled, they'll just go to the open house. And they would have no clue that this thing was listed maybe twice or whatever in December, right? So there's a many different type of buyer kind of buckets that were going after, right? But bottom line, the ones that have their search criteria set up, right? When that property hits the market again in January, right, because I took it off for those two weeks or three weeks,

it will then hit their inbox as a new listing. And that's what I want. I wanted to get in front of them again if they did forget about it. And who cares if they even know that it was listed in December, right, at that point, if they're that savvy. But at least now they're looking at it again, right? So to me, that's the biggest thing as far as like what I tell investors. If you, you know, if you're telling me we have to list it the second week of December,

like just let's not even do it. let's just wait. Let's please just wait because you're not going to be satisfied. You're going to get offers that you are not going to be probably thrilled about and then you're going to have to settle. And that won't be a good feeling, right? And I also understand that they have holding costs. So that comes into the conversation like, okay, can you take on additional, you know, three grand of holding costs for the extra month, right? So I am sensitive to what their experience. because I also understand it. So if you're an agent working with investors,

just keep that in mind and mention it in your conversation because that's all they're thinking about, right? Every day cost of money, every day cost of money, right? So then risk reward, like, I mean, do you want to gamble and list it right now and sell it? Or you hope that in January, the market will go up. And I just talk from experience, from stats, and I say, look, I can't guarantee you,

you, the market will be healthy in January. What I can tell you that the last two January's, it was February, March, it was. Can I guarantee you that? No. But based on just previous two years, I'm telling you that advice from that, right? So I always want to cover my bases and not talk in definites, right? Like, I know something that no one else does. And I'm some fortune teller. Like, I'm not. And I can't guarantee you anything. Everything I tell you is based on the market knowledge that I have. Right. And I'm understanding what the market was doing then. And that's why I tell them in the fourth quarter, if you put it on a market, you're going to just get less people looking at your property, period. Now, doesn't mean we won't get offers,

right? And you don't need to take the offers, but just no. And I told this seller in particular, I was like, so, are you okay with this plan? I was like, if you are, then here is where it's going to help me negotiating. So I was like, if we're going to get a couple offers on the property in December and when we list it, then if the buyer's agents think that, you know, and they're convinced that, you know, they're going to potentially get a deal, right, for their clients. And then I don't want to play bowl negotiating, right? when I counter them, I want to be able to tell those buyers agents, hey, by the way, like, here is the number they want.

If you guys can't get it, that's okay, because we're going to take it off the market and we're going to come back in January. And you're going to see it go off the market. I'm being honest. That gives me leverage in negotiating. If I have the permission from the seller to say that based on their strategy that they approve. And that's huge. If I can actually use that as leverage and negotiating in December, it could actually get those buyers that thought they might get a deal, but they love this house so much, convince themselves to go up to our number, 20, 30 grand, whatever it is, right? And yes, I'm talking about Southern California, Pablo.

So that's the way I'm approaching it with my investor clients. Now, another thing I would add is I have some notes here. Now, if market is trending downward, right? And I've had, well, maybe before I go into that, is there anything you would add to that strategy or what do you tell your investor clients? Is this very similar? Is there anything you would add to that before I kind of jump into topic on this?

I mean, ideally we wouldn't list in December, but there's been plenty of times where that's when the project gets done. We always tried to time it that if we knew we were listing a property, like if the scope of work led us to being listed in November, December, we always kind of took that for account. Higher days on market would sit a little bit longer. Speaking in terms of Cincinnati, that market right now, even if you list stuff, as long as it's priced well, it's still moving. And Tampa, it's already slowed down, so it's not going to be that much of a difference. So my client that I'm listing their home in a week and a half, I told him, I said, you know, it's really not going to make a difference with the holidays. Like our days on market are going to be there.

We're still going to have people shopping. It is slower, but to have that off market wait 30, 40 days, list it and then wait another 60, 70 days, because that's the average days on market in that area. It doesn't make sense. Let's get it on now. Let's get eyes on it. And I did have one investor that, like, I worked with a lot. And he truthfully was just like, it doesn't matter.

I don't care. whatever the timing is, I don't care. Like the market, it's done. I don't want to have holding costs, list it. If it's meant to move, it'll move, and buyers will be out. So I think there's different ways to kind of look at, at least seasonally. If you're talking about like a seasonal buyer's market. So like there's different kind of ways.

I just always will have the discussion if they are listing near a holiday or a seasonal downtime. Hey, just expect our days on markets be a little bit longer. We're going to have to put a little bit more into this. but I will also speak on just personal experience. November and December are our busiest months every single year. I don't know why, but if like I just track my business, November and December always are the highest closing months. Going back to seven years I've been doing this.

I can't explain it. I don't know if it's just like, but buyers and sellers, like we, there's a lot of stuff that we've been able to do. So, you know, I think there's. You said closing months. That means that those properties went on a contract, September. I mean, October, November, which could make sense. Yeah, usually October, November.

Yeah, that would make sense. How many go pending in December, that would be, that probably would be different. Yeah, it's a little bit slower. We've got, at least as of right now, like, we're probably looking at having five to seven go pending in December, which is like busier than usual, but it's still slower than our normal months. So, yeah, and that, I know we talked about this before, but that reflects in the sole data like if you pull up tampa sold data january is the lowest month consistently for the past five years which means every december there's less pendings um for that so perfect okay so then another thing that

i want to cover in the you know when i deal with investors in a in a in a market that's trending downward right so like this was conversations i had with my clients a year ago and a previous year many times because things were absolutely going downwards. Right now in San Diego, I feel like we're pretty even. I think what helped us is when interest rate went down by a percent in September, that kind of leveled off the market a bit. And now inventory is dropping because of November, December, that usually is the case in San Diego. So we might not see much of a dip in prices in this fourth quarter. But I can tell you a year ago and a year of price. I had conversations with some saying, look, if you're going to list this property,

you're probably going to lose X amount of money because I want to just be honest with them. And I ask them to be honest with me. And I say, look, what are you into this for? Like, just be honest. Like, how much are you into it? Like, if we sell it at this number that the market is telling us this is worth, are you in a hole? And if they're like, yeah, Randy, I might be losing 50K or 40K. I'm like, okay, that's quite.

a bit of money, right, to lose, which is not unheard of in San Diego when you're trying to make, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70,000 as a profit on flips that you're buying for 7,800,000, right? So I've had investors lose money like that, right? So when we have that conversation, I say, look, I mean, of course we can list it, right? It's just know that this is probably the reality that we're going to be faced with this in this fourth quarter. change in your favor in the beginning of the year. And it did the last two years. I was like, but in the meantime, we have a couple options. We can list it and test the market, right? Most likely, you're not going to be thrilled, right, based on what the comms that we have. Or maybe consider

renting it. Look into renting it. So as things were trending downward a year ago in the year prior, and we were starting to have these conversations already, let's say, in September, because I knew they were going to finish the rehab sometime in November, I was like, look, you might want to start already looking into what it would look like as a long-term rental. What would it look like as a short-term rental if your local laws allow it? And then what would it look like as a midterm rental, right? And I would help my investor clients with this. And I'm going to share the links that I use for doing some of this research for them. So for long-term rental, I use. I use, you know, rental meter I don't know if any of you have heard of rental meter but I use

rental meter to give me a basis for long-term rental income right potential for that property for short-term rental I get a quick gauge with air DNA dot co okay and then for midterm rental I get a gauge with this one furnished find dot com, see what's on the market, you know, in that particular area and what's the price points, right? Or housestay.com. So the difference between short-term rental and midterm rental, short-term rental is for anything under 30 days. Mid-term rentals for anything 30 days and more, right? So your typical client for mid-term rental is going to be like, I forget who was speaking earlier. I think Clara, maybe.

about, you know, renting it to nursing, nurses, right? That's a very typical midterm rental client, right? Nurses, military, right? Corporate relocations sometimes need a property for, you know, that's furnished for a few months, right? So those are, that's the type of clientele that you're dealing with. And there's a lot of those in a lot of different cities, especially the major ones.

but those are furnished, midterm rental furnished. So once we know those numbers and we can kind of go over that together with the investor, he can make an educated decision. You know what? Maybe I will, you know, if I finish this rehab in October, instead of trying to go on the market in the fourth quarter, that's trending down and it's losing steam and it's losing value. And people and agents are dropping prices left and right.

Like it did happen again, a year ago in the fourth quarter and two years prior. if that's happening in your market in this fourth quarter, then they might want to consider just renting it, right? And then they can reconsider putting it back on a market in the spring if they see that things are picking up again, right? But at least they're not bleeding money as they wait, okay? Because the decision they have to make is if you were to rent it, let's say the short-term rental works out,

in that area, right? And even if they do short-term rental, his holding costs, you know, the investors holding costs, and the holding costs are not going to be based on their current hard money loan or private money loan, which is always going to be more expensive. I want them to make the calculation usually based on potentially a 30-year loan, right? So that means if they're going to decide that they might hold on to the property for a few months, for a year, we don't know, right? they have to go into it as if they might have to hold on to it for a longer. So then they would refinance with someone like Addison, right, to a investment buy and hold rental.

And then they would actually rent the property that way. But then so when I tell them to analyze the numbers, I'm asking them to talk to their lender first, see what that mortgage payment would be, taxes and insurance, compare it to the short-term rental income, in this case, if that's allowed and it looks favorable in this area. And where does that put you monthly? And even if that means they might still lose money, let's say $500 a month, they would have to put out of pocket every single month if they did a short-term rental on the property. Then I would ask them to do the math. All right. So you're losing $500 a month. We don't know for how long. It could be for three months. It could be for a year. It could be for two years.

We don't know, right, until the market picks up again, right? How long will that, will it take you to have that total be 50,000 if that's what we're anticipating you would lose if you were to list the property today? So you just take 50,000 divided by 500, 100 months, 100 months divided by 12. years. It would take this investor eight years to lose the same equivalent amount of money if they were to list it in this downward market today. Versus renting it out, writing it out, we don't know for how long, spending $500 a month, let's just say, in a perfect scenario, if they rent it short term or midterm, whatever the numbers tell them, right? I personally would choose that if that was my house, right? Instead of taking a big,

hit, I would rather go to rent around, kind of put a bit of a band-aid on the situation instead of bleed out 50K. Now, everyone's going to be different, right? Some investors might say, you know what, Randy, I just want to just move on. I want to cut my losses and this was a terrible rehab and I got caught in the market and I just want to get out of it. I don't want to have a rental. That might be the case. And some are able to absorb a loss of 30, 40, 50, thousand. I've been there. I've lost money on flips. And it was a decision we made at that point that it was the best decision, right? Because we didn't know what the future will hold, right? But these are the real conversations I'm having with investors, you know, in the buyer's market,

where the market is trending now downward, right? Which I know in Florida, in many places it is. And investors are caught at us. There's quite a bit of investment. that are now caught in this dilemma of what to do. Do I hold on to it? Do I sell it and just bleed all this money now? Or do I kind of extend the bleeding over a couple years, right? So that's the way I approach that conversation. Anything you would add to that, Eric?

No, I think it all makes sense. Like, I just think those are numbers you kind of want to pull. And I know we've talked about it before, but as the market starts to slow down, I would have multiple exit strategies on every deal. So you don't want to buy a property where there's only one strategy. And if that doesn't work, then you're in a bad situation. If you can have a couple, whether it's listing it, whether it's short-term rental, mid-term rental, pad split, whatever it is, you want to make sure that you have other options

to look into. Yeah. And Pablo, thanks, Pablo. gave another recommendation. He said he used rentometer, but then switch to rentcast.io, which has much better reports. So there you go. So you can also use rentcast.io. And I'm assuming, Pablo, is that mainly for long-term rental projections? And you can unmute yourself, feel free if you want. Yeah, this is for long term. Long-term. Long-term. term tenant. Okay, got it. Cool. Yeah, because Pablo, don't you have a property? Is that you? You have a

property in Florida? Yeah, I have close to Orlando. But I... Yeah. Okay. And you're holding on to it or no? I forget. Well, I still stuck in repairs. I messed some stuff with permits. Got it. Okay. Yeah. So, now I remember. So Pavel and I had had some tough conversations as well about his situation. But anyway, he's decided to do the repairs. And hopefully by the time that's done, the market will kind of pick up again, hopefully here in Florida. Now, another thing I go into, we talked about refinancing, right, into a long-term 30-year loan. But once you decide that you're going to potentially hold on to it, another thing that I tell my investor clients to look into is ADU, laws. So that's what it's, we call that in San Diego ADU accessory dwelling units, right? Because there is a

big push and that started, gosh, probably now five, six years ago in Southern California and actually all through California, where they made the permitting process for ADUs very easy and cost effective because they wanted, you know, more housing, right? There's just not enough housing. So something to look into where if you decide that that's the decision you got to make and hold on to it and do a rental with it then at the same time check with the city will go online see what the ad loop ad you laws are in your area because you might be able to add an additional unit and it could turn into a cash cow if you hold on to it long term so there potentially could be a situation where you turn a really really bad situation in this case what i was saying you know our example losing 50k

to holding onto it and turning it later into a nicely cash flow property because maybe you can add a unit in the back, add a 2-1 and bring a pretty significant amount of money. So anyway, so those would be things that I would recommend for investors in this type of a market. And I'm open to questions, ideas, suggestions, and Eric, you know, whatever you want to add to it. I know I talk too much. So I'll let you talk. No, you're totally good. I think it was all good information.

And hopefully I don't start to break up and go on through a dead zone. The face is kind of a breaking up face. Am I breaking up? No, you're not breaking up. But if you can go on camera, because we're recording this and then using it for clips,

that would be helpful. Yeah, I'm not going to have the background in there. So I'm on the move. Oh, got it. Got it. But yeah, so I, you know, I think that's all like really good information and I just think it comes down to, you know, ideally you're going to look at all the different opportunities and everybody's going to have a snapshot of Katie. So she'll be in the clip as well. But there's all different kind of ways we can look into it.

But I think there's a difference in between like a seasonal slowdown and a traditional buyer's market. And at least in most parts of the country, it's just a seasonal slowdown. even in Tampa, we're still seeing a good amount of properties get listed. And I've got some glare there too. We're still seeing stuff move. We're still seeing it's a seller's market by the statistics. By the way, things are moving. Our sales to price ratio is still 95 to 97%.

So we're probably a ways off speaking just from an actual buyer's market. But what me and Randy are talking about is kind of a normal slowdown of the season. it does happen. What could happen down the road is an actual buyer's market where instead of, you know, us talking about 5% off of list price or 10% off list price, we could be a lot more. So I think you just kind of have to see what's going on in the market, always plan for it, prep for what's happening, have as many tools available and really prepare yourself for

changes. But keep a close watch on it. As an agent, as an investor, as both, you. should be studying the market, you should be knowing what's going on locally, you should be looking around to see, you know, does affordability make sense, but also picking up new strategies, I think one of the things we just recently learned about was Pad Split and Tampa being a great strategy. So you can rent by room and it can be, you know, $300 a room a week. So if you have an bedroom home, I know somebody down here that's making $2,400 a week off of that. And they

are the ones that manage us. So those kinds of things, having those different strategies, having those different options are going to be what kind of sets you apart. Because if you set yourself up that you're pigeonholing yourself into a deal and it only works as a flip and then the market slips a little bit or if the numbers were tight to begin with, then it can really cause problems overall. Yeah, totally. Well, and I guess I would add is, you know, I don't know, you know when i was doing a lot of flips in southern california yeah we will look at days on market for a traditional seller being let's say you know whatever time period it was let's say it was 60 days like you're saying it is here that that's the normal market right well i don't have 60 days

as an as an investor like i'm not going to make my decision of buying a property based on the fact that i'm going to have to hold on to this thing 60 days so what do i do is i'm i'm going to buy it at a lower price. So when I go to sell it, I'm below what things are selling for. So I do get all the attention and put it on the contract in two weeks. Right. And if most investors don't put their properties on their contract on in two weeks, I'm just telling you right, they freak out, right? They start freaking out. Even though we could tell them, look, this is just the market we're in. We're kind of in this even market. It's only a 60 day, you know, typical days on market. It's 60 days, they don't want to hear it. They're like, I need to sell it now. What's that price?

Right. And if again, if that price means they lose money, then you can keep waiting 30, 60, 90 days, and maybe you'll get your price. Or you might have to start thinking about alternatives, kind of like what Eric is saying and get creative. And I love what you're saying with, you know, room renting. That's actually becoming a bit of a niche of itself now. Now, of course, look into your your local guidelines around it as well because every one of these has guidelines to some extent. So just don't get caught, you know, then with getting fined. But ultimately, I just want you as an investor, if you're listening, take this into account. If you're buying rehabs, you know, I know we're past that time, but if you bought a rehab in

August, September and you know that you were going to go on the market, in the fourth quarter, you have to take these things into account we're talking about and not get mad if it's not selling, right? And patience is key, even if it means you're going to have and the financing costs that you're going to have every single day. But that's the reality. And that's the way we want to be educating our investors. If I'm the realtor working with investors, those are the same exact conversations I'm having with them. So if you're an agent that wants to speak the investor's language, this is the stuff you need to like wrap your head around and be able to communicate and openly talk about with them. And then value your you for bringing in different points of view

where I can tell you the regular traditional agents that don't think this way, right? They'll just be like, oh yeah, like, let's be fine. Let's just list it out whatever. Like, well, yes, there's truth to that. It's just investors, they think different. man. Every day it's so costly. I would add in, I would add into like one thing for me is just like, and I see this all the time is if the market is starting to slow down, you need to change how you're underwriting deals. And a lot of investors don't do that. So as the market starts to slow down, they don't make adjustments on their numbers. Like, you know, if the market's starting to slow down, your holding costs should be going up because if you're really buying into a buyer's market,

then you're going to be holding the properties for longer than, you know, if your days on market are higher. If we're, if you're buying into a buyer's market, we've talked about this, Randy, but, you know,

lower your value by five to 10% on the ARB. Like, build that in. If a deal still makes sense and works on a conservative number, your worst cases, you might buy less deals, but the deals you do buy might be significantly better. That's a lot better than what I've seen locally where some investors,

like I know one investor, and one of my groups has. He bought, he's got 11 flips listed on the market right now. And like, they are sitting and he's an agent. He's very smart. He's a very intelligent guy.

And I'm, I'm sure he bought him. He even says, like, look, I've got enough room where if I have to, I can start to like buy or saley.

Like, I can just reduce the price quite a bit and still have a good situation. But he built that cushion in there, but he's still got holding costs on 11 properties because stuff takes longer to sell. So change your underwriting, change how you're looking at things.

kind of accommodate for that. There's nothing wrong with underwriting, instead of underwriting 20 deals to get one, maybe you have to underwrite 50 before you get one, but that's a lot better than losing everything on one deal and then you're out of the business. Yeah. Yeah, we kind of got into the buying strategy,

which is a whole not a topic in itself, but I agree. Like right now, I'll finish with this. We, meaning my partner, back in Southern California and Jeff Fallon knows them all. I think he left already. But we looked at the fourth quarter as like our buying season, man. We were like, this is our time. This is where we shine. This is where we get the best deals because a lot of agents are asleep at the wheel. And some sellers, they still have to sell for different reasons, tax reasons, many reasons. They might have to sell by the end

the year and we we cleaned house like our fourth quarter was always heavy heavy on purchase because we did not let go of the gas pedal man we actually you know pressed on so i know we kind of that's a conversation about purchasing which i think is also timely so think about that uh you know for those investors are maybe a bit in a dumps because they have properties on the market and they're not getting great offers that doesn't necessarily mean they should stop looking at other opportunities, right? Because that opportunity that they buy maybe in December could be the one that bails them out from losing on the one that they're in now, right? So that was always a conversation I would always have with investors and I still do like, this is the season for you guys. So keep looking right now

because there's a lot of sellers that are willing to make deals. And I share this on the beginning, of this, we got for these, you know, granted, this is two retail buyers that are buying properties that need work, quite a bit of work, and they feel comfortable with it, but we negotiated $40,000 credit for 35 and $40,000 credits on these right now. And they try to, you know, threaten us, oh, my seller is going to cancel and this and that. And then we're just going to relist it. And guess what? They started playing ball because the seller probably decided like, you know what, I don't want to come back in January.

I want to sell it now. And they took our credit request of $35,000, you know, eventually. It took us two weeks of negotiating, but then we got him back to the number our clients needed. And that's what happens a lot in the fourth quarter on the purchase side. So for more insights and to join the. investor agent nation community visit investor agent nation.com. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a five-star rating to help Randy and Eric continue delivering valuable content that resonates with you. Thanks for listening to the investor agent nation podcast.