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All Forum Posts by: Lee Self

Lee Self has started 2 posts and replied 16 times.

Post: Do I Misunderstand the Role of My Realtor?

Lee SelfPosted
  • Columbus, OH
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 7

Again, I don't want him to go through and analyze every property for me. Not by a long shot. Not at all. I expected him to throw out some ideas. "Hey, you might want to check out this neighborhood then, it's really up and coming" or "It's going to be hard to find a 2 bedroom at that price point in this neighborhood" or something along those lines.

I'm trying to say that I don't expect him to do EVERYTHING, I expect him to contribute SOMETHING. 

Post: Do I Misunderstand the Role of My Realtor?

Lee SelfPosted
  • Columbus, OH
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 7

And if he IS going to give me only partial service because it's a small deal, I circle back to the question of why I need him and why he's getting a commission on the deal if he isn't  bringing anything helpful to the table.

Post: Do I Misunderstand the Role of My Realtor?

Lee SelfPosted
  • Columbus, OH
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 7

I think there might be some misunderstandings about some of what I've said. Let me clarify some things:

1) I'm not expecting the real estate agent to find the homes for me. Rather, I would expect him to throw out some suggestions. (Hey, I saw this property and think it might be a fit for you, etc.) while I ALSO am looking for deals.

2) When I tell you the criteria I gave the agent, I am HUGELY summarizing. We spent nearly a half hour discussing what I'm looking for and I'm trying to condense that into a single post. I did give him specific zip codes, sizes, number of bedrooms, price range, etc.

3) I don't want the agent to decide the price. I gave him the exact price that I wanted to get it for, both if the seller paid closing costs and if they didn't. I was hoping for negotiation strategy from him. I don't know where to start an offer on a house to leave appropriate room for negotiation because I don't know how hard the other side will negotiate. I understand that the realtor doesn't either, but he's handled A LOT more than the zero negotiations that I have for real estate, and I would think has some idea based on neighborhood, square feet, price, time on the market, etc. to determine where we should start.

4) I understand that a realtor who deals in large homes might not give me the same attention because I have such a small deal. That's exactly why I came to him for a referral to an agent who handles deals of this size. He decided to take it on himself, so yes, I do expect to get full service from him. 

I'm just trying to understand the value added by the real estate agent since they make a decent chunk of change on these deals. If he's adding me to an automated listings system based on basic criteria, I can do that myself. If his only advice on negotiating is to just not throw out my final price as the first offer, that isn't telling me anything I don't already know. If we are standing in a property that we've planned to see for a week and he has no further information or insight beyond what's on the listing sheet, then he isn't bringing any new information to the table. If his job is just to guide me through the steps and make sure all the boxes get checked, I could just have my attorney do that.

I'm not trying to knock the job of realtors, I'm just trying to understand what they are bringing to the table.

Post: Do I Misunderstand the Role of My Realtor?

Lee SelfPosted
  • Columbus, OH
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 7

So I'm about to make an offer on my first deal and I'm very excited. I asked a friend of mine who is a realtor in my market to assist me, or to refer me to someone who would handle a deal of this smaller size (it's currently priced at $48k, and my friend typically sells $300k+ homes). He was more than willing to help me out himself, and about a week ago we got to work.

I have to confess that I either had a serious misunderstanding about the role of a realtor, or else the size of the deal is making my friend not put much effort into this. To start with, I told my friend what I was looking for:

A condo or single family home that needed cosmetic work but was otherwise solid and in a decent neighborhood. Monthly rent at least 1% of purchase price. I also gave him my budget.

I guess what I was anticipating was that the realtor would assist me in combing through listings to find solid possibilities. Instead, he signed me up for his listing service and told me to let him know when I found something I liked and we would tour it. When we did tour properties, he had no insights on them whatsoever. As an example, we were viewing a condo in a very upscale part of the city, but the condo community itself was very low price. I asked him why these condos would be so inexpensive compared to everything else for miles around, and his response was "Well, it could be because of a lot of things....like square feet." These condos were almost 1300 sq ft, which is larger than almost all of the other condos in the area. 

So as far as locating properties, I felt like I could've just done fine on my own looking at listings through redfin or realtor.com and setting up showings. He wasn't helping me search and couldn't tell me anything useful about what I was seeing.

Now we are about to make an offer. I've gone over my numbers with my friend on why I like the deal, and exactly what I would like to get it for. In the same email, I asked how we should determine what our first offer will be. His only response was a single sentence, "We determine the initial offer based on where we want to end up while leaving room for some negotiation."

Well, thank you for that definition of negotiation. Again, I could have reached that conclusion totally on my own. Is where I want to end up reasonable? How do we determine how much room to leave for negotiation? What are strategies for feeling out the other side to see how desperate they are to sell? These were questions that I had hoped someone with decades of experience in this real estate market could provide me insights to.

Am I just expecting too much from my realtor? I certainly don't expect him to do all the work. I've crunched my own numbers, determined my own budget, and determined very particular criteria for what I'm looking for. I expected to comb through the listings, and expected both of us to come to the table with some options. I expected that based on his experience and my criteria, we could put our heads together and find the right option. I expected that based on my budget and his negotiating experience, we would determine the correct price to buy it and the right negotiating strategy. Instead, I feel like he's just a gatekeeper of sorts: just an extra official step I need to go through to close the deal without bringing anything really concrete to the table.

Post: New and Seeking Advice

Lee SelfPosted
  • Columbus, OH
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 7

Hey guys! Just stumbled on the podcast last week and am about 15 episodes in so far. As the forums are frequently mentioned, I thought I'd throw my situation out there and see what peoples' thoughts are.

I'm 27 years old and living in Columbus, Ohio. At 22 I started a company that ended up very successful and I sold it in 2015. Since then, I've been enjoying the fruits of my labor but I want to take some of my payout (that comes to be in monthly installments), and start putting it into real estate. I'll have $4,000 a month that I can invest starting next month, but at the moment I have little liquid capital. My thought is to save this money and buy a rental property every 6 months for the next 2 1/2-3 years (at which time the payments run out), and then use the income from those 5-6 properties to keep expanding every year or so.

Are there any improvements I can make to this plan to either make it more realistic or more efficient? I have a great head of numbers, fiddling with spreadsheets is a big hobby of mine, business is a serious game that I'm seriously addicted to, and I could sell snow to an Eskimo. I will say, though, that I don't like cold-calling sales and I'm looking to develop a stable backbone to my financial life. 

Post: Going out to Columbus. Recommendations?

Lee SelfPosted
  • Columbus, OH
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 7

Columbus is an AMAZING city and I love living here. The nicest neighborhoods to live in close to downtown are definitely: Short North (consisting of Victorian Village, Italian Village, and Harrison West), German Village, Bexley, and Grandview. Heading more out into the suburbs, the nicest neighborhoods are Dublin, Worthington, Clintonville, and New Albany. However, if you want my advice, look at up and coming neighborhoods like Olde Towne East and Marion Village. Olde Towne East is especially amazing because it was the old rich neighborhood around 1880-1900 but was largely abandoned during the urban flight. The result is a transitional neighborhood full of stunning homes waiting for a rehab. 

You'll find a lot of quality bars downtown and most especially in the Short North. I highly recommend Denmark or Mouton if you want a higher end, more professional crowd. Local Bar is good if you want that dive bar experience.