KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Becoming an Expert on Real Estate Pricing Strategies

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Summary:This episode is a tactical guide for real estate agents on how to master pricing strategies to win listings and sell homes faster. The host breaks down the art and science of pricing, covering topics such as using hyper-local data, understanding seller psychology, and how to present a compelling pricing plan. It provides actionable advice on how to handle pricing objections, justify your recommendations with data, and ultimately position yourself as the market expert.

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 it's becoming an expert at pricing strategies, which is basically how to price the property correctly for your client and becoming an expert at that. So I'll kick this off by explaining why this is important. I was actually telling Randy before this that I had a team member that had joined my team.

He's a newer agent, a year and a half in the business, had only done a couple transactions. And when he first got to the team, the first thing I noticed was he was really lacking confidence in himself. So the first thing that I did, the first couple days, I gave him 50 properties to run comps on, which is excessive. But I'd have him run comps and I'd let him know what he did right, what he did wrong, what he needed to fix, what he needed to tweak, what he missed. We did that over three days. He ran a ton of comps. And then by the end of that, he was like, I'm like, so what do you think? Do you feel good at pricing the property?

And my thought for doing that was when he's going to show buyers, houses or he's talking to sellers or potential clients and just want him to be able to have those conversations. And he was like, my confidence is through the roof. He's like for the first time, he had been on a really big team up in Cincinnati, but they never really showed him this. And he's like for the first time, I feel like I really have a good idea of why a property is priced the way it is. What affects those values? What I should be looking at? And then I can present that to my clients, my prospects and explain it to them in a way that makes sense. So it shot his confidence up a ton.

But also this is just so important because being an agent or being an investor, what you do for pricing, how you come up to your ARVs, how you run your comps, that's I would think probably one of the most important things you can do in this business. You can have all of the right contractors in the world. You can have all of the private money you need in the world. You can buy properties that what you think is a good discount, but everything you're basing it off is off of an ARV. It's off of a comp-driven bank. So if you've got amazing contractors, you've got the formulas down and you're like,

look, we know that we can hammer this deal out, and you've got an ARV at 500 on a house. And it's really 400, and you're buying it at 350 and your numbers made sense at the 500, but you sell it at that 400, you're shot. It's not going to go well. That's the biggest mistake I see every new investor make

and every newer agent make is they can't run these comps. So we kind of decided to do this. One of the most common questions we had received in the Facebook group and even during these meetings where how do you guys get that ARV? What do you do to run your comps? How are you confident in that? So we kind of wanted to set this up where we talked about what we look at, how we go about it, how to kind of learn from your MLS.

what special things are we looking at when we're running comps? How does every market dipper? So that was kind of the thought process behind being a pricing expert, doing that add on to that, Randy? No, I want to see visuals. Okay, cool. Well, I can share my screen. Hopefully last time I tried this, it didn't work.

It works this time. So nice. All right, let me get this. I got to move this bar. I have the technical difficulties just with this bar. There we go. I'm going to move this down. Let me move it down.

Perfect. Okay. So our MLS in Tampa is Matrix. Every city is going to be different. There's probably other cities that, I know there's other cities that use Matrix. There's, like Dayton and Ohio uses Matrix.

There's other cities that like Hurchwell is the new one in Cincinnati before it was Rappetoni. One of the best things that I can tell you is find somebody that's really good at running comps or somebody that's an experienced agent in your market or somebody at a brokerage. And I get some tips or pointers from them or take as many, like the MLS is kind of our lifeblood as agents and investors. Take as many classes as you can on this.

I think for everybody that is in a pretty decent size market, they're going to have trainings for this. So what I always do on all of my searches when I'm doing comps is I go ahead and I jump on to like just residential. this one's just going to be a quick search and I always do the map and I'll explain why here in a second so I'm going to type in the property address

this is one I've run I actually just walked it I don't know if I showed this one to Randy or not but like literally the entire roof was missing on the house and there was a dead rat in the kitchen that literally disintegrated into the floor and this guy's asking an absurd price for it

so I go over here when I'm running my comps I include all active pending, temporarily off market, canceled, withdrawn, sold, and expired. The important thing to realize when you are running comps, if it is active, you should not be using it in your comps. And I'll explain why here shortly. If it is pending, you probably shouldn't be using it in your comps. You can throw it in there as an idea, an indicator, but typically we try not to. The one thing that we're trying to use for comps, the one thing that appraisers will use is sold. Sold is what they're always going for. You typically don't want to go past six months. Most appraisers won't unless there's nothing in the area that fits like a like property, I should

say. I know some investors who don't want to go outside of three months because the market changes. So if I was running comps in December and Cincinnati, our comps in, we'll say May or April this year, December and Cincinnati was a weird anomaly. Everything sat on the market. Nothing was selling. It was rates had just kind of hit. There was a lot of fear in the market. For whatever reason, That was like the biggest blip in a really long time in Cincinnati where our house prices probably didn't reflect what they should. I had multiple listings, so I kind of knew what was going on that sat. We didn't have a lot of showings.

We had almost no interest. January calendar year turned around and like showings flooded in. We had interest. We had offers. So with that, for example, like the way I would approach that right now, if I'm running a comp for, you know, an ARB or anything really is same thing happened in California, right? So I would actually not even use comms that sold January or even February because that's when the increase in value started to happen again in California, as an example.

So if you're tuned into your market, you will know this. So by knowing that information, it will dictate how you start creating your filters. in the MLS. But if you don't know your market, then you might receive false data spitting out at you because you would probably put in the standard six months what appraisers use. And then that data is going to be a little bit confusing because you're going to have comms that are potentially 10 or 15% lower if they sold in January or February of this year. And then if you have a com from April or May and it's 10 or 15% higher for the one from

January. How do you determine the ARV? Of course, you're going to put more weight on the one that sold sooner, but those other ones can throw you off, right? So understanding your market, like the way Eric described, really can dictate how you filter it plus out. And one of the things is we still included it, and we used it as an anomaly,

so we just used it as a way to explain. So I didn't want to not include it because if an appraiser included it in his appraisal report, which he might. You know, some appraisers might not. I wanted to include it for my clients and say, here's an anomaly. This is what we'll explain to the appraiser we solved throughout all of December. But we try to always stay within six months.

And I'll explain why I hear shortly. And then this map, I didn't show this, but in Cincinnati, it's not this way. It's within. It's automatically set to a quarter mile, which I love. Like, that's my preference. And I'll show you guys something once I get out of this. And then I'll show some more once we go in there. So on this, there's so much information.

So I can do like a price range if I really want to. I can do a total bedroom, a total bathroom range. I can do acreages. I can do private pools, but I'll show you why I don't. And I try and keep it as open as I can at the beginning. And the property style, I want to go to single family. I don't want to include townhouses if I'm running. I know this is a house.

I don't want to include townhouses. I don't want to include modular homes. I don't want to include apartment buildings or duplexes or anything like that. So I'm going to go to my map search on here. And what I'm going to do, so like this is a neighborhood. and hopefully it's pretty seeable on my screen. Here's an entrance road right here, and then it kind of goes back all the way through here.

We can kind of see that it goes through here. If I really want to, if I'm having a hard time finding comps within this quarter mile, the only time that I would ever increase it is like this, and I would stay still within this neighborhood if I needed to find more comps. So, like, this is the same neighborhood. The comps are going to still be similar.

It's the same entrance and exit as all of these. other streets. There's nothing different. I actually drove the neighborhood, which you have the option to draw all you do you could draw it too. Yeah, I like to keep it like this. The Tampa one honestly is better than Cincinnati one and it tells me how far away I am. I like to keep it within a quarter mile if I can and I wouldn't want to go across the street that's a separate neighborhood so I wouldn't even include that in mind. I would just keep it to the neighborhood. I try and regulate it as the houses in this neighborhood were probably built in the same time, in a similar layout and that's how everything is,

especially if you're doing new builds nowadays. New builds are the easiest thing to come because they're all the same layout. They're all the same floor plan. And if one sells for 550, then you know your ARV is going to be around that 550. So. Yeah. So like that's,

you know, for like for me, like that's why I actually personally don't like using the radius because it can, it's going to spill over to across main streets and all of that. And it's, it's hard to control that. So then I,

I use the polygon. and I would literally just draw a square in that neighborhood. Yeah. And then I would be done. It's more work. And I was going to say the reason I like radius on this, Cincinnati's radius is a lot harder. It's a pinpoint and then you have to click it and you can only, you can't customize it. So you have to draw.

And you can't like this one, I can drag this outside circle and move it in and out. I like doing radius because I like if I'm an appraiser, I really am going to want to stay within a quarter mile. But if I have to, I'll go out half a mile. So I can sit here and say, okay, this is half a mile. radius. I know I'm not going to use anything in this right neighborhood. I want to keep everything in the left neighborhood. Well, luckily everything in this neighborhood falls within a half mile and stuff like that and then I can move it back in. So it just gives me a better idea. The closer you are to the property, appraisers are going to be more appreciative of.

So the first thing that I do when I'm running comps is I click the house and I go into the listing. And I'll show you guys something too on this here in a second. And I get an idea. There's no interior photos, just exterior. I'm going to read through the verbiage down here. This ARV has an estimated ARV of 577,600. I disagree. This is a cash-only purchase. We'd like to hear that. And I'm going to look for some stuff on the property.

I know it's a ranch from the picture. If I don't, I look forward in here. It's a three-bed, two-bath. Square feet is 1,600 square feet. And I'll show you why this is all important when I'm looking at this. You're built in 1979. So I'm trying to get as much information by looking at this MLS photo as I can. Sometimes I'll even print this off on the side.

then what I'm going to do and in Florida like just a heads up flood map is super important if a property falls in a flood map and some of your comp stole um it's something you want to check because if it falls into like a flood a e or a larger flood map the comp is not a com if yours does it or vice versa because flood insurance down here is super expensive right now and that can throw off like a lot of buyers aren't even able to finance it um so one of the cool things too I like about this one when I'm running comps I'm going to back out of this a little bit or at these zoom out so this two right here tells me that it's been listed twice recently I have been active and then I have a canceled so you actually try to list this which two canceled what I see what you're

saying that when you have when you can scroll and you see two it listed twice yeah and sometimes it'll be like a sold and then it'll be an active showing there was a flip sometimes it'll be canceled sometimes it'll be withdrawn like it just tells me what's going off the property it's a good history. So I know that this guy, he's an agent owner. He tried to list it for 374, Denesel, listed it for 350. And then if I actually look into the history of this, it's gone pending and active like four different times. So he's sitting on it. Can you show, show that? Because I think most people don't even realize that you can check the history details from the listing, right? Like, is that? Yeah. So is it, I mean, it's literally right here. Oh, it's right here. Okay. So he's had with

own conditional. He's had pendings. He's had just a whole ton of stuff. This MLS, like not to hype up Tampa, this is the best MLS to me by a mile. There's so many things that I can do with this in terms of if I go to this cloud CMA, I can get stats for the

neighborhood going back 20 years, how many listings they have within this radius search I have. It'll tell me how many listings there's been, how often they've sat. It'll give out graphs for the price increases, decreases, interest, showings, everything. But so he's withdrawn it a couple times.

He's had it go pending a couple of times. He's canceled the listing a couple of times. So that's telling me, man, I hate you using MacBook. That's telling me that he's listed too high to start with. And I've talked to him. I went and walked his house. He's stuck on that price and it's just it's not feasible. I think he's got a super high Airbnb on it for no reason.

So now when I'm running these comps, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click through these. So this is a three-bed, two-bath, 1,700 square feet, a ranch from the photo sold for 525. Let me say it's a pretty similar house. It's within 100 square feet and it's a ranch. This is a three-bed, two-bath, 1600 square feet.

This is a good comp. Like this is same bed, same baths, very close square footage and it's a ranch. I'm going to save it. It's in the neighborhood. By clicking that checkmark, I'm adding it so I can do it.

This is a canceled listing. I would not use this as a comp. You can include it, but I would not use it as a comparable. And the reason being is, an appraiser is not going to use it canceled as a comp. And most of the time, they will not give value to pending. They'll put pending inside of their report and appraiser will, but they will not give it value.

Because it hasn't sold yet. So even though it's pending, let's say it's listed at 500 and when pending within a day, maybe they're under contract for 400. The appraiser cannot use that as a value. Maybe they're going to sell it 600. He doesn't know, so he can't use it until his sells. Canceled and withdrawn, you absolutely should never use. But the pendings, let me add.

So of course, it depends who you're creating this analysis for, right? If you're creating this analysis for an appraiser, well, then, yeah, you don't need to include pendings. The only time I would include pendings if it's, of course, in my favor, meaning that I know, because I called the listing agent and I found out where it's pending at, because that dictates where the market is going, right? So my offers are coming in higher than what the salt comps are actually. showing, but the pending ones are telling me that the market is going up. And my offer is also

above the sales. Well, I need to now convince my appraiser, not convinced, but provide data to the appraiser that justifies my offer amount on my property, right? If I'm selling, let's say, an investor flip. So I would actually then, in that example, I would actually include the pending and put a no and say it's pending at this price per the conversation with the listing agent, right? So that's where I would, you know, you want to include it in that example, of course. Yeah, and you can definitely include it. And we include our pending. We just don't include it.

Like if I'm talking to a seller, I'm going to explain to them, this is pending. And appraisers maybe not going to give this as much weight. If it goes pending within a day, we like to make assumptions that it's for more. but it's not going to have the value effect that you wanted to. But I also can tell you, we use pendings a lot of times when we're talking to a potential seller to say, hey, this sold two days on market. It's pending. It was listed.

It had a contract accepted within two days. That means that your property is probably going to go through something pretty similar. Or at least we can hope. So that's what we typically use. I think we also have to put ourselves in the mind of an investor right now trying to do comps. Let's say they have access to the MLS and they could do what we. we're doing and they're trying to determine the ARV in three months, right? Yeah.

And if the pendings are telling them that the property's going to, you know, be sold in the next two weeks, $50,000 more than the sold comes, well, that might allow you to then buy the property versus not, right? So just depends what, who we're speaking to, right? In this, in this example, right? If you're talking to an appraiser, you've got to be mindful of when to show it. If you're speaking to yourself trying to make a buying decision, you better be calling the pendings to find out what's going on with the market.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That can basically tell you if you should buy it or not. Yeah, and appraisers can call pending ones, and I've had that where I've had one pinning in the neighborhood. An appraiser will call and say, are you above or below ask? So now what I typically do, I've got six checks. That's plenty. I try to have at least three comps.

That means three sold within a quarter mile or a half mile. I try to have three. An appraiser is going to require three, but I try to have three. I will say the more than merrier, but you probably don't want to go more than five or six. That's too much information. It does help. If you have like 15 that are telling you that, that's awesome. But I don't think you need to include all 15.

And we do multiple reports. So we do a custom PDF report and then I do a quick CMA. The quick CMA, when I'm gathering what I want to do for an ARV, this is my bread and butter. This is my baby. I messed up actually. Let me go back. And I was trying to get ahead too. I was like, man, like I've got it.

We're going smooth. So I always include the active property as well. And I'm going to go back here and get this started because this thing takes forever to get going. And I'll create a PDF out of it. and then I'll go back here and I'll do my quick CMA for you guys. So this is going to include the subject property, which is 1471 Palmwood. It's going to tell me everything about the property. It's a three bed, two bath, two car garage, and it does have a pool.

That's good. That's nice. It's been on for 26 days. The one that's pending is a three bed, two bath, two car garage, no pool pending at 420. It was on for five days. We'll just make an assumption that it's probably in that price range just for now. And then we have five sold. Everything over here is pretty much a three bed, two bath, two car garage.

Some of them have pools. Yes, yes, yes. And then two of them don't know and know. In Florida, pools are big swings on value. So if you don't have a pool in Florida, it does make a difference. If you don't have a pool in Florida, you're typically going to see your price. It's usually going to be, depending on the area, somewhere from 60, to 80,000 less than a house that does have a pool.

Just because it's so hot, everybody wants them. You can't really blame them. So I'm going to take this information and just, I've done this enough with these searches that I can look at it and say, okay, it's a three bed, two back, two car garage, does have a pool. We're at 1,600 square fee. All of these are built in 1970s, late 1970s, which is why we stay in the neighborhood. And I'm going to say, look, we're listening to 349.

Let's go into these solds. Those are going to be the ones I want to focus on most. This one that's actually pending is literally almost the same house. Three bed, two bath, two car garage, 1615 square feet. If we're adding the fact that ours has a pool, we can add in 80,000 to this property. And what we do when we're doing that as well, so here's this PDF. And I would do this at the same time. And I'll typically have a notepad next to me.

And the reason I'll have a notepad is because I want to click back in through these and through the actual listing, the MLS, and I want to look at what the updates look like. So this home, that's almost the same house, beautiful on the outside. We've got no pool, but we've got three-bed, two-bath, two-car garage, 1,600 square feet heated. And then we also have about 1,000 square feet that is covered patio area, because in Florida, that's what that total square foot is going to mean. And then I can tell based off of, because I'm not going to be able to find it, that I don't want to take too long.

I can tell based off of the fact that I ran this before I hadn't done this, but also that this says totally updated home and sought after neighborhood, Tameran, stepping through the front door. So they just updated this home. It has a new roof, new AC heater, new everything. So that's going to be my best comp. I'll add on the pool and we'll just, we'll say 520. We'll add 100,000.

Now, if you want to come down here, you're going to go to these solds, and you're going to confirm what I just confirmed up there. So we have one that sold without a pool. pool for 400,000. We got 100% after it's been on for eight days. It's a little bit less square footage, about 300 square feet less. These next three all have pools. All of them are in the same ballpark of square footage, 1582, 1541, 1740.

All of them are filled around the same time and all of them, again, because I've run it. But if I go back through here, all of them were updated really well. Welcome to the new home, or like they say new home, but it's just because they have updated a bunch of stuff. So all of these were recently, are recently updated. So I'm going to go back to this quick CMA. I'm going to say most of these are updated.

If you're thinking of it as an appraiser, which I know you don't have to, but you're going to put like a condition level on it. And we've got us sold for 500, 510, 525. So we're all in a range of 500 to 525. Our days on market are 62, 4, and 23. None of them, besides just the same.

one property sold for 100%. They all were a little bit below. All of them sat on the market a little bit. So that's where I'm going to get a range for my investor. And I'm going to say, hey, look, our range, and to go look at these properties, our range is probably going to be 500 to 530. It's going to kind of depend on the lot. So you want to drive by the house. We're running comps just to get us in a ballpark. You're not running comps to get an ideal like ARV for sure until you walk the property because the layout can be wonky. Your next door neighbor can have a bunch of junk outside of the house. You're just wanting to make sure I'm in the ballpark.

So 500 to 530 would be my ballpark. This 540 has an extra bathroom and it has more lost size than all of them. And it's a higher square footage than all of them. So that one is kind of an anomaly. Even if you included it, it's 540. So you might be able to push a little bit towards the 540. but it kind of offsets not having a pool, having that extra bathroom, having the larger lot size, and having the larger square feet.

So what I would do at that point is I would have a conversation with my investor, and I would say, this is where we're falling. Let's go take a look at the property. Let's see if I'm missing anything, because like I said, if there's the next door neighbors really, house is super rough, or if there's something at the property that I can't see, there's external factors,

there's external obsolescence. It could be backed up to a major road. So I just want to get us in the ballpark, say, hey, this is what it's listed at. This is what I think the ARV is. Let's go to the house and confirm that. And then in Cincinnati, a couple things that we look at. Like Florida's, we're going to look at pool.

We're going to look at water access. Are you near a beach? Are you near a canal? Those are going to be huge value gains. In Cincinnati, we're looking for basements and garages. Basements because everybody in the mid-levels, West loves their basement. We deck it out.

You have your sports teams all over it. It's a nice place to chill. It's usually a little bit colder down there. And then in the winter, it's a little bit warmer. And then the garages because that's just what people do. They spend all their time in their garage. Down here, garages, they are definitely helpful. Keep your car out of the heat and out of the rain.

So I don't know if you had anything with that. No, this one was, you know, I would say fairly simple. Those are amazing comm. which is not always that easy. Yeah, and there's ones that get, and I know we talked about this, there's ones that get really difficult and we could include those,

but I think just kind of showing like, this is our thought process to getting to it. And if I go ahead and throw in like a really crazy one where I'm like all over the place with it, those ones take, they take a really long time to comp out. So some of those will take 30 minutes to an hour. That one took me like five minutes.

And I was like, okay, I feel really comfortable about this ARV. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what when you're working with investors, you want to, it's, it's all about speed because you're submitting a lot of offers. So it's like, eventually you, you'll be able to do this fairly quick. Unless you run into some odd ones that you, at that point, you have to pick up the phone

and figure out why is it so weird. Why is this one selling so much higher than the others or this one's selling so much lower? You need to know the answer to that because the investor is going to ask you. Right? Like, wait, how about that one? This one worries me. Yeah. And aside from that, too, there's actually pockets in Cincinnati. I'm sure there'll be some in Tampa that I end up finding. There's pockets in Cincinnati that me and my investors would not touch because it was the most street-by-street comps I've ever seen in my life. Like, no rhyme or reason. Like, you'd have a $400,000 house, which in Cincinnati's a reasonably priced house.

And then the next three houses would be absolute tear-down junk drug houses. and then a $300,000 house, I'm at $150,000 just normal ranch, and we were like, we're not touching out the 10-foot pole. And I know people that investors that do well in that area, but they're also like swinging for the fences. Like some deals, they get killed and some deals they crush it, and they're okay with doing it multiple times

because they're exposing them with that volume, but I'm like, I'm good. Cool. So let me share my screen and what the California MLS has capability of. I don't know how to get rid of that thing. So here we go. So here's the California one. One thing I wanted to show first, okay, got it.

Okay, ours looks different, but ultimately has the same capabilities, right, that Eric's does. And you can always add fields to it. So you go to the residential. That's the typical one that we would use. and I open actually too many already. So let me actually go through this example first, and then I can go back and show a couple other things. So first I want to show something that's more difficult.

I have a property that we have it on the market right now. It's a townhouse as an example for $1.1 million, right? This property, actually Kevin, who's been doing open houses at this property now, a couple of times. He knows about it. It's an attached home. And this is, you know, it's been updated, not like within the last couple years, but it's been updated in the last few years. And it's got a canyon view, which goes a long way here in San Diego.

People like any type of view. Canyon is definitely pretty cool and attractive here as well as water, of course. But it's a decent home overall, right? moving ready. So this is kind of the interior, updated kitchen. Here's the view from one of the view from the bedroom, master bedroom. I'm skipping quicker, but it's in, it's in good condition overall, right? It's not fully renovated recently, but it's, it's in good condition.

I want to show the view. Oh, yeah, here we go. So you see, this is kind of the view. This is what it looks like from the back. So it's attached right here, right? And the challenge I ran into with this one is that first and foremost, what I try to do is use the map search first and only stay in that specific neighborhood, which I knew was like this was the neighborhood. So I stayed exactly in that neighborhood of this community. And I was able to draw it with a polygon right here, exactly how we were.

I want it, right? That's why I like the polygon because it only will show me what I'm drawing around. And then I went to my filters. Same thing like Eric. I would pick my actives in there. I'd pending and sold. I would skip expire to withdraw for this particular example. Pick my county. Close date on this one. And the reason I did this, here is an interesting fact. Like when there is no attached comps in the community that are recent, because as an example, if I got rid

of this date, look what happens. Hold on. Now I have 110, so that we don't, I want to go to, let's see, six months. Two. And one of them is the one that I have active, which is ours. And the other one

is this one that's sold that makes absolutely no sense. And it's one of those properties that would make your head scratch. Why did they sell for this little in comparison? And I'll show you also what that means. So when I have basically no comps to use in the same community, I still want to go back in time and just see what happened here over the last few years, if anything. So I actually then, for this particular example, I went back to all the way to in this case. In this case, When we were doing it, it was two years, basically.

And now I had four. So look what happened here in this community. In 2021, June and September, there were two pretty much same units that sold for 830 and 850. Okay. One of them even had a Kenyan view as well. And here's the kicker. The most recent comp in this community just sold for 920,000, okay, when the same units in this community, two years ago, we're selling for 850. And our market has probably gone up like 40% in San Diego.

So this made no sense when this listing agent put this property on the market. When they listed this property, oops, what happened here? I got it. When they listed this property at 799, I think it was, let me click on it. My client panicked. 799, they listed this property right now in June of this year. When others sold in the same community for 850, two years ago, this list price made no sense. And I approached the listing agent. I was like, look, man, I'm about to list my client's home. We were going to list it above a million. and how did you come up with $7.99 list price? And he, you know, I think he felt, he knew he realized that he messed up because he had so much interest.

He had over 100 people at his open house, which, yeah, it was a seller's market, but not to that degree, right? And no wonder it's sold for $120,000 more. And he maybe might look like a hero to the seller, but the reality is, I believe fully he left a lot of money on a table for this client. So I got the backstory, of course, too, from my client that there was a divorce there. So this was a bit of a rushed sale. But there was also a bit of a disservice, unfortunately, by the listing agent and how this was handled.

So now I need to gather all of this information to help myself support. Why do I believe that my price is 1.1? But now the challenge I ran into, I have no other comps to. support my 1.1 or even anything above one because this is the only recent comp which kind of stinks for me in this neighborhood. So what do we have to do in this case? Well, one of the things you could do is go and go and try to look for other attached homes in the zip code and see what else comes up and hope that it's going to be within a mile radius, the maximum, right, that appraisers would even consider. So I had that criteria.

set up right here. I went to, I opened up another search. So that's the cool thing with my RMLS. I don't know if you can do this, Eric, but like I can have literally three searches set up at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So like this is one search that you just looked at, right? Which is set up basically just for that area. So I have that. That's over here. Then I have this other search right on the left. This one is all townhome. condo, duplex, and townhome. That's what I checked off. Because I was like, I wonder what is, what has sold just in general in this zip code

within the price range of 900,000 to 1.2 with the four bedroom specifically. I want to be as close as I can to my room count. And living area, 1500 to 2,000 when my subject is around, I think, 1600. Right. So let me just see my subject. 1600, yep. So when I did that, and I went 90 days back, because again, I know the market is very different over the last three months compared to the beginning of this year. Look what just happened. In the whole zip code, attached homes, I still come back only with one

active, which is me, and that crappy comp that shouldn't even be there at 920. So I literally, through the whole zip code in the four bedroom and the square footage that I want for attached homes in this price range, nothing has sold that I can use to support my value that I want for my list price. So what would I do in this situation? So that's when I started looking at single family homes. Single family homes in this area and I draw a polygon because I want to zoom in to the area like Eric is talking about. So I kept the zip code. I kept all the active pending and sold in this case, right? I still kept my 900,000 on the low end and I kept the the high end. I left it open for this search. Still have my four and four, but I narrowed down my square footage

literally within about a hundred square feet. So I'm only at 1,500 on the low end, 1750 on the high I want to see like can I get something literally as big as my house, even though it's going to be not attached, it's going to be detached, but let's get as close as possible to at least the room count and square footage and see what I get. So I always like to start very narrow filters, and then if I don't have any, then I can expand them a little bit and start adjusting right from there. So I did that and I went to the map and I first drew the map for this. polygon right here because my subject is right here on the canyon right so I drew I drew this map knowing this is a very similar area and very little was spit out there was

literally only one two three properties right so then I went back and I drew another polygon and this is why I like the polygon because you can draw several polygons in the same map area I drew another one to see if I could get more comps to look at And then what I came up with is seven properties. So now when I'm looking at these single family homes, I'm hoping to find something very similar or a little bit more updated. That's fine to my subject property in terms of, you know, the interior.

And what I found is basically without having to go through every single one of these, this one is overpriced at 1.2. It's outdated and it's at 1.2 and it's sitting there for 55 days. But what I found is these three that caught my attention. million six million 125 million 150 okay all very recent in the last couple months which is what i want to see because the market has gone up in san diego quite a bit since the beginning of the year so i would click on this one and i would see this property look same square footage four bedroom two baths just like mine except this is detached my is attached so before i would go any deeper at the same time i

text my appraiser buddy and I said, hey, if I have same exact square footage, same exact room count, everything is the same about the property except my subject is attached and the comp is detached. How would you adjust it in this price point of 900 to a million one? He came back via text. It was really quick. He's like, it's about a 5%. 5% adjustment I would do. If I had no comps to use that were attached and I had to go to single family homes only to use as my comparables, I would deduct 5% of the value for the detached home when I'm comparing it to a single family home. I'm like, great. That's awesome. So what was I hoping for?

I was hoping to find properties that were listed hopefully above one or sold, hopefully above 1.1. So then if I deduct 5%, it will get me to what I'm looking for, and anywhere close to the million one. So then I look at this property, and I went through the photos, of course, and you might think there is a view here, but there isn't. There is roofs of houses. So this is not a canyon view like ours. So I'm looking for views.

This one doesn't have it. And this one is in worse condition. as you can tell, it's outdated. So I'm quickly doing math kind of deductions in my head. I'm like, okay, so I'm going to deduct value from this property for not being as updated as mine. I'm going to deduct value for not having a view, but I'm going to add value of 5% because it's detached.

So that's a lot that we need to do literally. And you could, of course, use your paper, but this is what's going through my head. That's why when we talk about comping, like, honestly, it's a lot is science, but a lot of it is your creative vine and art that goes into it, right? This is all going through my mind as I'm looking at this property, right? So then I'm like, okay, so if now I have this view question and not all views are made the same, right? So then I text the appraiser. I'm like, look, same scenario, identical homes, but now I have a view on the canyon and the other ones don't.

What would you do? It's like somewhere between 3 to 5%. I'm like, great. So let's, for this use of an example, let's just say we're going to use 5% to make this math easier. So in this case, million six this sold for in two days. It's outdated. So let's say our house, you know, I'm going to add, I'm going to deduct 50,000 from this one for being in worse condition than mine. But then I'm going to add 50,000 because it's basically.

basically detached. So then that cancels itself out. But then I'm going to add another $50,000 to mine because I have a view and this one doesn't. That lands me at about a million 50. So I'm getting closer to justifying my, at least my million one list price. You see you guys following what's doing. It's a lot of adjustment. Well, some notes too, like not to jump in. So when you look at these private remarks, and this is just the markets I've dealt with. So I don't know if it's the same in San Diego. But like noticing small details is huge because buyer must assume solar lease. We're in the process of finding out how much.

Most of those solar leases people don't realize are 30, 40, 50 grand. And that is like that can hurt buyers. And it's an effect on price. So like that included too when you're running your comps. Like that's going to take off the value too of yours. Good catch. Yes. So that's that would even first.

to justify probably a higher value for my house than just a million 50 now. That's awesome. That you found that here. And it's contingent on seller buying another home, which a lot of buyers are not going to be cool with that waiting, right? So there are some negative things that are also happening with this property. So then I go to the next one. I'm like, okay, million one to five, amazing.

Sold in six days. Right from the first photo, I could tell that this has been renovated. right so this one looks so much better because it's fully renovated recently modern so i would say it's superior than mine than my subject but does it have a view and when i get to the backyard it does not it's fenced in it has no view so then the same thing so then i would quickly start doing the math okay million 125 this one is in better condition right so i would say you know i will probably deduct at least 30 grand for my property because it doesn't have the same finishes like this one, right? But then this one has no, no view. I was like, okay, so if I deduct for that,

5% that will put me a what, million, million 60 without it because this one has no view. So then I'm, but then I'm going to add, hold on, now I'm doing my own math wrong. get my own so if i i'm going to do it on my calculator a million one two five so if i do five percent of that that's 56 000 so million one one two five and you deduct 56 000 that's million million sixty nine because it has no view if mine was updated to this condition it would have been worth at least somewhere around 1,070.70. But mine has a view. So now it puts me right back at 1,125.

Right. But then this one is detached. So then I have to now deduct the 5% again. Right. So it still puts me value-wise for my property somewhere around the high million, 80, million-70. If you're following just the math that I'm quickly doing. So it supports what I'm trying to, you know, my list price.

Same thing when I go to the next property. This one sold for $1.50. And, you know, I don't want to go through all the photos again because I already know. It's in really good condition. But it's same thing. It's got no view. So I would deduct again about $60K for that. But it's, it's a, what do you call it?

It's detached. So then that cancels itself out. So then I'm back to $1,150 where this one's sold for. But this one is in better condition. So even if I deduct $50,000 for my being in worst condition, that will put me at $1.1. So this supports my $1.1 list price, taking into the fact that it's also literally the similar square footage and room count.

So this is literally how I'm able to justify between these three comps, why my list price makes sense and then I'm also throwing out the 920 by showing the appraiser in the future when I have a contract I'm going to have to actually meet the appraiser and explain that this 920 comp is useless and here is why. And here's what I'm doing literally as we speak.

Anytime there's a showing schedule to look at this property guys, I'm sending an email to the agent And I'm explaining all of this saying, look, this 920 comp, here's with the story behind it, here's why this was a fire sale, this should have never happened. And here is the two that sold two years ago for 850. And since then, the market has appreciated this much. The value of homes in this area for these type of properties is 1, and here's why. And now I'm showing the single family homes that I just showed you these three.

and I'm literally explaining how I arrived at 1.1 for my property's value by telling them that I spoke to an appraiser. I deducted for 5% for this. I added 5% for that. Literally, I'm putting all of this that I just told you in an email to the agents that are about to show my property. Because if I don't do that, guess what happens? That agent is not going to do all the work I just did. They're going to quickly look at the last comp that sold and say, this seller is out of their mind. they're trying to sell it for 1.1.

The last one sold for 920. And they might not even show the property if they start looking into it. So this is how I approach difficult situations and this is like this was as difficult as it gets because one, you have a comp that makes no sense. So if you're analyzing properties, let's say, if I was to look to buy a condo in this unit

or I guess this is a condo, this townhome in this complex, and I was trying to come up with the ARV, I would literally have to dig the same way, call that agent for the 920 comp because that completely would throw me off. Be like, wait, I can't use this comp. So then I would talk to my appraiser and figure out, okay, how do I come up with an ARV for this house

before I purchase a minute and offer to buy it, right, to actually feel confident that I'm going to get, let's say, million 80 or a million 75. And quite honestly, if this was me buying this property to rehab, if my subject property is completely outdated and I needed to rehab it, I would probably conservatively set my ARV to be safe probably at about a million 50 for this property. Because, yes, an appraiser says 5%, but some people might deduct a lot more because it's attached. it's a very subjective comparison right for people some people might literally rule out looking at my property because it's attached so i would lean on a conservative side and i would probably use an arv about a million 50 with all the data i just showed you and then make my buying decision based on

that and the 920 comp i would completely throw out but i have to be prepared to justify all of this and my value later, when I'm in contract, let's say at million 50, let's say I get an offer a million 50 a month from now, I got to go and justify that and have a story about everything that I just did and present that to the appraiser. For more insights and to join the Investor Agent Nation community, visit investoragentnation.com. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast

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