SignalsAZ.com Prescott News Podcast - Navigating the 2026 Real Estate Landscape with Ronnie DeBenedetta

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

Send us a text and chime in!In this episode of Signals AZ, we sit down with Ronnie DeBenedetta of Realty Executives Arizona Territory. With nearly a decade of experience and a team that closes approximately 100 homes a year, Ronnie explains why he focuses on being a "relationship builder" rather than just a "transactional" agent.We dive deep into the current market state, debunking myths about "buyer" vs. "seller" markets and discussing how the days of overpaying cash buyers from California have changed.#realestate #realtor #prescottvalley #prescott #arizona #northernarizona #homesforsell #realestatemarket #2026 #housingcrash Check out the CAST11.com Website at: https://CAST11.com Follow the CAST11 Podcast Network on Facebook at: https://Facebook.com/CAST11AZFollow Cast11 Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/cast11_podcast_network

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Signals AZ, the Signals News podcast. I am here with Ronnie D. Benedetto, the man, the myth, the legend. I don't know about any of that. Realty executives. Tell me a little bit about what you do. I sell real estate. I make dreams come true. I make people homeowners. I allow them to build generational wealth for their families. I love how you continued because you say I sell real estate. How many realtors are in? Our area? Last time I checked about 2,500, about 2,500 in this area. And yeah, some show up and they sell homes. Are there 2,500 homes for sale right now? There are about 13 homes for sale. So my team is closing about 100 homes a year. So there's a lot of people out there that are struggling and just not

doing it. So a lot of those, I would think 2,500 realtors, why are you different? We are relationship based. We're not transactional based. After being in the business almost 10 years, I am more of a, like I said, relationship builder. It is not about the transaction. It's about what happens after the transaction. I host happy hours. I host movie events. I get face to face with my clients after we're done. When we're in the process, it's a lot of fun. We get pretty close. We laugh, we giggle, we cry. we negotiate, we do all of the things. And then I see a lot of people at the end, high-five your client and say, you know, call me when you want to sell. Here's your fancy dormad. Here's your keys. See you later. Here's your wine and your bottle opener. And I'll see you when you're ready to go. My whole business is referral-based. So it is coming from past clients, current clients, VIPs. It's coming from the people that I want to do life with. And when you're a client,

you're kind of stuck with me for life. You're answering my questions for I even get to ask them because I was going to say, doesn't everyone say that we're all about relationships? It's not about the transaction. And I was going to ask, you know, how do you do that? But I just did all the things. I'm trying to make your job easy, which is what I do in my real estate business. I'm just going to take all the thinking away. Tell me about, because this story, you know, you're telling me about one of your clients, 75 years old. this just explains the story perfectly. What happened?

She wanted to buy a house down in Phoenix. She was in Phoenix, moved up here, and now it's time for her to either have a second home or move back down to Phoenix and closer to her family. And she was going to be a cash purchaser. But realizing that taking the money out of her investment accounts was going to cost her too much. She was either going to pay penalties or taxes. It was going to cost her too much. So talking to her financial advisor, it was actually more advantageous for her to be a borrower. So we switched from a cash purchase to lending.

And the process is quite crazy. They sent her a whole bunch of stuff that she needed to download through a portal. She needed to upload through a portal. 75 years old, she didn't even know what her passwords were. I was in her house last night until about 9 o'clock figuring these things out. So we can get everything to the lender. everything to the new tract. Time is of the essence with our contracts. We have deadlines. And if we don't meet them, we lose money. Well, and I would think especially with, you said, 13 homes on the

market right now. 1300. Oh, 300. I was like 1300. My gosh. I sold that many in January. I was like, that doesn't make sense. So, but with 1,300 homes still, I mean, that is, you see something, you better grab it. You better move quick. People keep saying that we're in a buyer's market and they ask all the time, are we in a buyer's market or a seller's market? And My answer is yes. So a lot of that depends on what you're selling and how you price it. If we're living in the conversations that we had in 2020 and 2021, we're educating people a little differently now.

We're not in that market anymore. The times where the crazy California buyers were coming in with pockets full of money and overpaying for houses and driving up the real estate prices, those days are gone. We don't have those people anymore. Again, answer my questions. I was going to ask, you know your job better than I do. I'm starting to believe this. I don't know my job better than your job, though. What was that? Yeah. I was because I was going to ask, what has happened to change things? Because it was, it was such a thing where houses on the market, somebody better grab it. And there's 20 people standing in line and they're all making offers and they've all got cash in their pockets. That's what happened, right? And when that happens, you really have to be creative and put your buyers in a position where they can beat out a cash offer. We work with some great lenders out here. And the first question I ask my lender is, how much money does my buyer have to put down to get what we call it is an appraisal waiver? Now, the appraisal waiver means that we don't have to do an appraisal.

So it doesn't, it doesn't create a risk that a cash buyer would also not have. So going to the table, all we have to do is beat out the cash buyer with price. We don't necessarily have to beat them out with terms and qualifying. So our contingencies come down quite a bit from there. So there are times where I've gone in and actually beat out a cash buyer being just a little bit more in value than they were. And we've just got tools to kind of beat that. But yeah, to answer your question, the market has softened a little bit. The interest rates have come up a little bit. And there's a lot of talks in the news right now about whether the interest rates are going to come crashing down. We're looking to get rid of the Fed chair. Is that going to happen? And if that happens, what's going on? I think a lot of people

are listening and they're waiting for the result. Without the result, they don't know what they're doing. They're twiddling thumbs waiting for the prices to come down. At one point, we were as high as 7%, 7 and a quarter. We're now just teetering around 6. Depending on where you go, it's 5.99, 6 in a quarter. As soon as we see a 5 in front of those interest rates, I think we're going to have a buying frenzy again. So we're at 1,300 in inventory. We'll probably fall to about 8 or 900, and then we're going to have bidding wars again. Yeah, because how many of us were sitting on our homes going, if I sold right now, do you know how much money I would make? But then all of us were going, but where would we live?

Exactly. Because we don't want to move out of Prescott. Well, and the trick is if you are sitting in a home right now that you financed in 2020 or 2021, and you've got a 3.5% interest. And the next house you go to requires financing, your interest has almost doubled. Yeah. So you can't really trade across the market, upsize a house because in upsizing a house right now, you're upsizing your mortgage. We got very lucky we bought when it was at 3%. And, but at the time, everybody I think was tempted. Like, let's sell. Should we sell? What do we? Absolutely. And then you're selling your 3% mortgage and you're sitting out of the market going,

I'm going to wait for it to slow down. I'm going to wait for it to crash and I'm going to come in and get this great deal. People have been waiting about five years now. And it's not happening. and the appreciation is still happening naturally. There are some tricks, and what's happening right now, what's real trendy in the real estate community, is asking the seller to contribute to buying down your interest rate. Okay. And you would know.

You saw the blank. I saw the look. I saw the look. Like, how does that happen? We can still get you at 4%. If we're sitting at 6%, we got to buy you down almost two points. It's pretty expensive to do that.

So where we are in, as people call it, a buyer's market, We have two ways to negotiate. We can either negotiate on price to get the purchase price down, or we leave the price alone, and we ask the seller for concessions. What that means is we're going to ask them to contribute $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 to buying down your interest rate to make your monthly payment a little bit more comfortable. Does everybody know how to do this? The smart ones do.

You're a smart one. You got it. Excellent. I also work with a great team of people. I've got great lenders that can explain this so much better than I can. I stay in my real estate lane. I make those connections. The lender steps in and explains all of this stuff to you with Zoom calls, with graphics, with face-to-face, whatever you need, they will line up and get ready to do it.

Awesome. So are you seeing still the trends of, you know, Californians moving? Where are you seeing kind of that big influx of people coming in? We still have quite a few Californians moving. our market here, if you're not moving across it, across the market, it is contingent on what's going on in the national market. So when California's real estate market slows down a little bit, our purchases slow down a little bit. Okay. Because those were the people that were feeding our market.

Now, with that said, we've got an aging community. There's a lot more younger here now than there used to be, but I think the average age here is in the 60, 61, 62. Most of these people are buying their forever home. And in that Forever Home, sometimes they need to downsize. Sometimes they realize they need to upsize. We've got people that they've got family in another state that are moving in with them. They need caregivers. They need drivers.

They need shoppers. They need family members living with them. And sometimes they're moving up and down from the market. But we do have a lot of new families moving in as well, which is great. Prescott Valley is a big community for young families. And you mentioned your one gal that's, you know, moving to Phoenix. Do you see a lot of that or is it more people that are, you know, when they're selling, they're looking for something else in, you know, in Prescott.

Do you see people that are moving? A lot of times people are just moving across the market here or moving into the market for the first time. Once in a while again, because we've got a little bit of an aging community, they want to be closer to family. Some of them are just down in Phoenix. Some of them are going back to the East Coast. Some of them are moving into a guest house on a family's property somewhere. I've got a couple right now moving from Phoenix to San Diego to go help out some families. family. So they're selling their house and moving in with them. So you're helping people even

outside of Prescott? We have a national network. I have a national network of referral partners. I have referred to agents in Florida, New York, California, all over the place. So if somebody needs a local resource or a resource outside of the area, it's what we do. We're connectors. Like I said, we're relationship builders. And sometimes that means connecting people. And I just think it's awesome that you talk the talk, but you're walking the walk. I am walking the walk. every day. How do people get a hold of you? Call me. You can call me. You can email me, all my stuff. 928-533-4709. You can email me directly at Ronnie sells Prescott, Prescott at gmail.com. Prescott. Prescott. I have a friend born and raised here, and she says Prescott.

Which is funny, because you do have people. Some people are like, I refuse. I refuse to say Prescott. We were getting off a plane yesterday and the lady's like, you'll be landing in Prescott. And I was like, it's Prescott. And I was like, we pronounce it wrong. And we get mad at everybody else who pronounces it right. Phonetically. Absolutely. I'm watching football, Dallas Cowboys.

And they say, and Prescott did this. And I want to call the TV channel and say, you're saying it wrong. I do it all the time. I'm on Doc Prescott. Depending upon what type of seat, whatever Doc Prescott shows up, that's how we're going to Yeah, I'm not offended by it. But again, I've been here 10 years. I feel like I'm a native already. But I say Prescott. But when I spell my address and I say Ronnie sells Prescott at Gmail. I have to say Prescott. And then people will correct me. Because if I say Prescott,

they're spelling it with a K and an I and a double T. They're like, we try to drive here and Google Maps wouldn't take me to Prescott. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. Well, thank you so much for coming in. and chatting with us and educating us, it really matters who you call. Absolutely. And as you can tell, I love talking about real estate. So you've got my number, you've got my email address. If you want to talk real estate, just call me.

Well, and even if you're moving somewhere else. Absolutely. Or you have a friend that wants to move here. Like, I can imagine you picking them up from like the airport and driving them around. I've done that. I bet. And I've picked them up at the Phoenix airport and brought them up the hill and dropped them back off. So it's a lot of fun.

We get to meet different people every day. Everybody's situation is a little different and it's fun. Well, I'm going to give out your, so you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to link the website for you, but it's reality executives.com. And you are the Arizona Territory Willis Street. It's on Willis Street. 203 West Willis. It is.

That's a new location, right? New location for us. We just rebranded. We were at a brokerage. And this was just a better fit for us. us better fit for brokers, better fit for location, better fit for technology. A lot of the things that we were looking for just works better. We're right downtown, right between farm provisions and Rosati's right on Willis. So we walk out the front door. Go over. Left or right. We've got great food.

Can people just walk right in and see you guys? Awesome. Great location. Great, great team. Like you've got just the best people around you. So again, if they want to call you, tell them your number one more time. Nine to eight, five three three, four, seven. or Ronnie sells Prescott at gmail.com. Prescott. Ronnie, thank you so much for coming in. I would love to have you back sometime. Let me know when.

All right. We'll see you guys soon. Thank you.