Read my blog

Jon sump, as you know, with The Home Brokerage. For a long time, we've been doing these videos about just educating you and things like that, but I'd just given it a lot of thought and we're going to be starting doing these rants on a regular basis because I believe you deserve to know the truth about all the things that go on behind the scenes so that you can choose who you work with a little bit better. Okay?
In this particular episode we're going to do here is choosing the right lender. Making sure you ... you know, you got to be careful about choosing them. They're not all created equal. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, I have a transaction going right now that is just a pain in the butt because the buyer chose number one, a part-time agent that has a day job during the day. We can't get ahold of him at all during the day because he still has a day job. When I do finally get him to call me back in the evening, we discuss what the problems were, but now he can't do anything about it because everybody's closed. He's got to wait till the following evening to hopefully get ahold of someone. So now we're another whole day and a half away from when the problems are starting. It just compounds the problem.
That's number one. But now that agent that's part-time that doesn't understand this chose to send his buyers to an out of town lender all the way down in LA. Well should that matter? Well, theoretically, no. I've done business with out of town lenders that are great, with a gal in a San Diego. Perfect transaction, went super smooth, but she was professional. You don't know [inaudible 00:01:59] professional if you just talked to on the phone or on the internet.
So this lender in the middle of the transaction, there's timeframes for everything. He chose to pause the appraisal process because of a loan on a property here in the area from the county that he wasn't familiar with. Instead of calling me or having the realtor call me, they paused the process without telling anyone. So what does that, what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is my client is in the process of moving out of the house. Yeah. Getting all her stuff packed up, ready to go. Meanwhile, these guys over here are just dilly-dallying literally. I had to contact them to find out what the holdup was and then come to find out it was something stupid that they could have solved with a phone call to me.
Long story short, we're supposed to close escrow on it tomorrow, but we can't because of all this hangups that's going on with this appraisal.
So how do we go from not ordering appraisal on the first week to now here we are in the fourth week, literally. 31, 30-day escrow, 30th day is tomorrow, we still don't have the appraisal done. So now the escrow's going to have to be extended, which is going to cause my client more money for the next month's payment in the home. I mean, this all adds up and so my client is ready to cancel the deal, has told me that it's up to me to cancel it or not. Meanwhile, we've got all this other stuff going on.
Please. When you're looking to hire a realtor and a lender, make sure they're, number one, not part-time. Number two, if they're in the area, that's even better because guys like me, they're on it and then they're going to hustle for you. I'll go to their office if I have to to get things done and hold their hand and make sure they do their job.
So you've got to make sure you choose the right people. It matters. The part-time guy that's working all day can't service you. The people that are out of the area that don't understand the loans and everything that's in our area can't service you as well as like, my lender. We started an escrow after we put this, the one we're talking about, I started another escrow after this one was put together that we're already ready to close before this one is. My lender can close deals in 21 days. That's a complete transaction. I don't care if it's a house or duplex, triplex, what? He can close them in 21 days. This isn't a commercial for my lender, it's a commercial for you to understand you need to know who you're getting with.
If this has been helpful for you or your friends or you know somebody that needs to hear it, please like and share it. Check out our YouTube channel and make it a great day. Bye bye.

Hey everybody, Jon Sump here with The Home Brokerage bringing you another market update. This one for the market, I have the market updates through October 19th, all the numbers up until that point. It's what we're going to be talking about.
So you're going to see right here in this slide that the solds were up just about 2% from last year and only about half a percent higher than last month for the number of homes sold. And this is as always the Stockton and Lodi area. The inventory though a little bit lower by about 22% versus last year. Okay? So our inventory is even less than what it has been, which is the biggest issue in our market right now, which is keeping it a seller's market because the inventory is so low. The number of properties that went under contract, it was increased though by 11%, so less inventory, more sells, same amount of sells, but actual pendings went up, sells, barely went up, inventory dropped. So that's why we're still in a seller's market. \.
You'll notice in this next slide right here that the average sold price per square foot is basically neutral, but it dropped from like $210 a foot to $206 from last month to this month through October.
In this slide here, you're going to see that with the days on the market, a little bit of a downward trend for the last three months. We've dropped down to about 30 days, 31 days on the market is what we're averaging right now on the homes that do sell. With that said, it depends on your realtor and it depends on your home. The homes in the higher price ranges, they're taking a little bit longer to sell. There's not that many people that can afford them, number one. Number two, I just put a home into contract myself this week in the $500s. It took us about 45-ish days, I don't have the number in front of me, but the 45-ish days to sell it. However, a home I just put on the market on Friday at $309, we got two offers in two days, and we sold it on the third day. So put it into contract. So it depends on the price range, where you're at and how you market the home, but the average is 31 days right now.
If you check out this next slide, we're doing right here, you'll see that the average sales price is about neutral compared with the October of this year and even October of last year. It's about neutral. It only went up about 1% of the houses the for sale. The sold price was up about 2% from the previous month and down though about 5% from last year. The median sold price is appreciating. It's about 7.7% up is what the sold price is doing.
The actual months of inventory. It tells us how, whether we are a seller's market or a buyer's market or a neutral market. And just so you remember, a buyer's market's around five or six months or more of inventory. A neutral market is about three to four months of inventory, and a seller's market is one to three months of inventory. Right now we're at 1.9 as of mid-November months of inventory, which is really low, which is why we're selling everything and in the market there's only 1.9 months of inventory available. Super low inventory.
So hopefully this has been helpful for you. If it has been helpful for you or you know somebody that needs this information, please share it with them. As always, like, share. If this is YouTube, subscribe and if it's not YouTube, check out our YouTube channel up here. There's a lot of information to develop you. As always, make it a great day. Bye bye.

Hey, everybody, Jon Sump here with The Home Brokerage bringing you our Thought of the Week for Thursdays, which right now is our home selling process and tips that we have for you regarding that process. So you've had your house, you've gone through all the steps, you met with the realtor, you've established the price on your home, you've got your home ready to sell, you've got the home actually on the market and accessible to the market, and now you're getting offers on the property. What should you do? Just take the first one? Take the highest one? What should you do?
Well, it all depends on your situation, but what I recommend you do is, if you're getting offers right away, give yourself a little bit of time. Don't just jump on the first offer if you don't have to. If you can give yourself a week or so to get multiple offers, is even better, but if not, when you're not in the market that's going to support multiple offers, and what you really want to look at when you get an offer are more than just the price, but the terms. The terms are really important here. Price, because a lot of times there's strategies people use where they'll just come in and write a really high offer price, getting you to accept it, and then after they do their inspections and things like that, they come back and try to beat you up on the price to get it down lower.
So you want to look at a couple issues. One, does your agent know the other agent that's presenting the offer? If they do, ask them their opinion on how that agent does business. I keep an extensive log of everybody that I do business with and how they usually operate so that the next time I'm dealing with them I kind of have an idea for that. The other part of it is, what lender are they using? Are they using a local reputable lender or the lender that's going to be a little bit more difficult to deal with? Are they going to be actually able to close the deal? So there's a lot of things like that you want to look at. Are the asking for a lot of stuff up front? Are they asking for credits? So look at all of it and weigh the pros and cons of all of it because sometimes a done deal is better than the highest price.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me. As always, check out our YouTube channel and if you liked this, please share it and like it. Make it a great day. Thanks. Bye-bye.

Hey, everybody, Jon Sump here with The Home Brokerage, again. With our home buying process, step-by-step tips for you in this home buying process. So, this part of the process, you've already met with your realtor, you've met with a lender, you're pre-approved. You've already looked at homes. The next step is writing the offer. And just to give you a few tips and tricks on writing the offer, today.
What you've really got to look at when you're writing the offer is, depending on what you're buying, if you're buying a single family home, which is what we'll do today, when you're buying a home, you don't want to go in there and write an offer so low that it's going to upset the seller. Because it'll just shut down all communication. When you're writing an offer, and especially if you're needing to get a seller credit, where the seller actually pays for some of your closing costs, you've got to keep that in mind. Because if you go with a low offer and a seller credit, that means that offer is even lower by the percentage of the credit, which could be, in some cases, quite a bit of money.
You want to make sure you write the offer of what is fair for the home, but at the same time, getting you the best you can get. You go in there with a super low-ball offer, in 99% of the time, never going to work, and it's going to piss everybody off. So, write the offer at a place that is a little bit lower than the asking, unless there's a lot of offers on it. If there's offers on the table, you want to write the offer as high as you are comfortable with, period. If it's a fast moving market, you've got to write them as high as you're comfortable with. Even if you go over the asking price. In some markets that we just are coming out right now, we had to write a lot of offers over the asking price, especially if you're asking for seller credit. But if you're not asking for seller credit, you still don't want to go in with a super low-ball offer.
Now, if the house has been on the market for a long period of time, I mean, six months, a year, something like that, then yes, by all means, write a lower offer. But if it's new to the market, within 30 to 60 days or less, you don't want to go in with a super low-ball offer. Most of the time, you don't want to go more than like two to 3% lower. Much more than that, really offensive to most home sellers.
When you're writing that offer, keep things in mind. It's never going to work unless it's a win-win for everybody, for you and the seller. See? Keep that in mind. When you go in, also, if you're going to be asking for a lot of things to be done, you don't want to ask for a lower price, and everything to be done, and all this stuff. It's never going to come together. It's going to be a big hassle of a transaction. So just keep these things in mind. Think about fairness to both sides. That's how we write offers here, and we get all of our offers through. Keep that in mind next time you're getting ready to write that offer.
Thanks. Hopefully, this has been helpful, and if it has, please like and share it. You don't know who's looking to buy a house today. And, as always, check out our YouTube channel, and make it a great day.