Living In The Greater Seattle, WA Area with Aaron Morrow Podcast

Exposing Low Down Payment Vs 20% Down Loans | Is Putting More Money Down on a Home Always Better?

February 24, 2024 Aaron Morrow Season 1 Episode 12
Exposing Low Down Payment Vs 20% Down Loans | Is Putting More Money Down on a Home Always Better?
Living In The Greater Seattle, WA Area with Aaron Morrow Podcast
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Living In The Greater Seattle, WA Area with Aaron Morrow Podcast
Exposing Low Down Payment Vs 20% Down Loans | Is Putting More Money Down on a Home Always Better?
Feb 24, 2024 Season 1 Episode 12
Aaron Morrow

Could the key to building your wealth lie in a real estate strategy that departs from the standard 20% down payment? We dissect the intricacies of real estate investment, debunking the myth that hefty down payments are the only route to homeownership. Grappling with the realities of saving in a world where real estate prices are ever-climbing, our conversation uncovers alternative pathways that offer not just hope, but tangible strategies for those who dream of buying a home. We delve into house hacking, the pros and cons of ownership versus renting, and lay out how real estate can act as a ladder for social mobility in America.

Have you ever considered that opting for a lower down payment could actually enhance your return on investment? This episode does more than just suggest—it proves, through compelling case studies, how a minimal 3.5% down payment could leave you financially ahead. We tackle the fears around mortgage insurance and share firsthand accounts from clients who've thrived under the guidance that contradicts the cash-heavy advice of some financial gurus. Whether you're a seasoned investor or a first-time buyer, the insights shared here on leveraging your down payment for a higher ROI are bound to shift your perspective on what smart home buying truly looks like.

Ending on a note that's as personal as it is professional, we highlight the irreplaceable value of relationships in the world of real estate. Drawing from two decades of industry experience, the importance of building connections with realtors, lenders, and clients alike is woven through tales of business success and fruitful partnerships. We encourage listeners to engage with real estate advisors early and often, ushering in a more accessible and supported approach to navigating the housing market. Remember, your journey towards owning a property is one we’re eager to accompany you on—so consider this your invitation to reach out and begin building that pivotal relationship today.

👋 Considering a move to Seattle, Washington or its dynamic suburbs like Tacoma, WA & Bellevue, WA? Dive deep into what living in Seattle and its neighboring areas truly feels like.

Explore through neighborhood vlog tours, and city pros and cons videos, and get unmatched insights into relocating to the Greater Seattle area! Transition confidently with guidance from a native Realtor® who's eager to help you settle in your perfect home! 🔑

Whether you are moving in 9 days or 9 months, give us a call ☎, shoot us a text 📝, or send us an email 📨 so we can help you make a smooth move to the greater Seattle, WA area!

Aaron Morrow Realtor Serving (King, Peirce, & Snohomish counties)
📱Call or Text: 206-451-3771
📨Email: aaronmorrow@livinginthegreaterseattlearea.com
📅Schedule a Zoom Call So We Can Meet "In-Person"
https://calendly.com/aaronmorrow/1-on-1-zoom-meeting

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Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Could the key to building your wealth lie in a real estate strategy that departs from the standard 20% down payment? We dissect the intricacies of real estate investment, debunking the myth that hefty down payments are the only route to homeownership. Grappling with the realities of saving in a world where real estate prices are ever-climbing, our conversation uncovers alternative pathways that offer not just hope, but tangible strategies for those who dream of buying a home. We delve into house hacking, the pros and cons of ownership versus renting, and lay out how real estate can act as a ladder for social mobility in America.

Have you ever considered that opting for a lower down payment could actually enhance your return on investment? This episode does more than just suggest—it proves, through compelling case studies, how a minimal 3.5% down payment could leave you financially ahead. We tackle the fears around mortgage insurance and share firsthand accounts from clients who've thrived under the guidance that contradicts the cash-heavy advice of some financial gurus. Whether you're a seasoned investor or a first-time buyer, the insights shared here on leveraging your down payment for a higher ROI are bound to shift your perspective on what smart home buying truly looks like.

Ending on a note that's as personal as it is professional, we highlight the irreplaceable value of relationships in the world of real estate. Drawing from two decades of industry experience, the importance of building connections with realtors, lenders, and clients alike is woven through tales of business success and fruitful partnerships. We encourage listeners to engage with real estate advisors early and often, ushering in a more accessible and supported approach to navigating the housing market. Remember, your journey towards owning a property is one we’re eager to accompany you on—so consider this your invitation to reach out and begin building that pivotal relationship today.

👋 Considering a move to Seattle, Washington or its dynamic suburbs like Tacoma, WA & Bellevue, WA? Dive deep into what living in Seattle and its neighboring areas truly feels like.

Explore through neighborhood vlog tours, and city pros and cons videos, and get unmatched insights into relocating to the Greater Seattle area! Transition confidently with guidance from a native Realtor® who's eager to help you settle in your perfect home! 🔑

Whether you are moving in 9 days or 9 months, give us a call ☎, shoot us a text 📝, or send us an email 📨 so we can help you make a smooth move to the greater Seattle, WA area!

Aaron Morrow Realtor Serving (King, Peirce, & Snohomish counties)
📱Call or Text: 206-451-3771
📨Email: aaronmorrow@livinginthegreaterseattlearea.com
📅Schedule a Zoom Call So We Can Meet "In-Person"
https://calendly.com/aaronmorrow/1-on-1-zoom-meeting

This is my Intro to every Podcast and YouTube video 

This is my Outro to every Podcast and YouTube video 

Support the Show.

Thank you for listening! Check out all of our important links here!

Speaker 1:

Hey everybody. It's Aaron Maro again, your local Rolter in the Greater Seattle area, and my co-host, brian Laflame. All of his contacts info there. You don't need the introduction. If you've watched one of these, you've watched all of them, and that's our secret.

Speaker 2:

We never say anything different.

Speaker 1:

This is just a situation in the world where we change clothes things get too.

Speaker 1:

Exactly All the same stuff, and today we're going to talk about no-to-low down payment options and a better tagline that Brian came up with Is it always better to put more money down too? Because we're not just coming after the peeps that are struggling to get into a home with little to no money down, but we're also coming after you folks that really are just hard pressed, that you think you need to be saving up for that 20% down or more to get into a house.

Speaker 2:

So we talked about house hacking. We've talked about buy versus rent. We've talked about how real estate is the way into, through and out of the middle class in America, so we talk about real estate a lot as a wealth builder as well, and so we're going to go into that. Should you be putting a bunch of money down? What does it look like if you do? Can we compare that one to another, if you put a bunch of money down or if you go with a lower down payment and then do something else with that cash that you have? So yeah, we're trying to hit it from another angle today too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no for sure for sure? No, I'm glad that we're going to be covering all this, and yeah, so, of course, if any of you have any questions at all, I'm monitoring all three of the screens in my spaceship.

Speaker 2:

So please just mess with him. I don't know. Say, try to spell chrysanthemum, a bunch in the chat and just like work it out. So Aaron keeps looking at who's chatting, or bureaucracy, which is I tried? To spend COVID learning how to spell bureaucracy, and I gave up and watch Tiger King instead.

Speaker 1:

So put it in the chat. I know I'd love to learn how to spell bureaucracy too. Yeah, I'm going to have visuals again, like last week.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, because these are complex concepts and one of the simple finding the best possible and visually is the best way to do that. So if you're not on a visual medium right now, make sure you check out the YouTube that Aaron mentioned.

Speaker 1:

Our our podcasters appreciated that. I got comments from our podcast that we verbally mentioned that and we tagged that in our podcast where they could find that. So again, quick reminder, guys, this is being for podcast listeners or anyone that's watching on multiple platforms. This, of course, is being streamed on YouTube, but it's also it's on a Tik Tok, instagram, linkedin, facebook, and I said Instagram and clapper, so I always mention clapper.

Speaker 2:

All right, guys, and we're just watching Hagenhagen, aignog and Lip Lapt and every other social media.

Speaker 1:

And any any other one that comes out that will be relevant, will start.

Speaker 2:

Aaron's top eight friends on MySpace are watching this right now.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I don't know if I have a MySpace account anymore, but it's probably owned by a bot. Now, you know so.

Speaker 2:

I bet yeah, I wonder if it's still has.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it's still you know what? Yeah, good, Well, um, yeah, let's get into some of the. If any of you have any questions, though, get into the comments section. I will be monitoring it and then again, like always, I'll drop our contact info into the chat after the live and Brian take it away. Let's get into some of these scenarios with different down payment options and all that good stuff.

Speaker 2:

So I assume you can hear me now, but I'm frozen as I tried to present, so we're just going to abide some time.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you are. Yeah, I can see you visually, you, you're looking good. Yeah, your office background is looking good, all right.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so now let me share, and we are All right, I got it ready for you to.

Speaker 1:

So what we're looking at today is we're going to look at this.

Speaker 2:

It's hard to see, but I'm going to zoom in, so don't worry about it. This is just what the whole thing looks like. We're going to look at a $500,000 purchase in and around the Seattle area and look at putting a three and a half percent down payment down with FHA or a 20 percent down payment and conventional. We're going to look what those payments look like, what the money do, what closing is, and then we're going to look at if you were to put low, more or less money down, what are the costs and benefits. So, like I said, I zoom in. This is what that looks like. Here we have a $500,000 purchase price and then we have 20 percent down and we have three and a half percent down for FHA. This isn't quite. If you're doing the math along at home and carrying the one on your abacus, this isn't quite. Three and a half percent less than 500 because the FHA has their upfront mortgage insurance premium that's financed in. So it's 300 percent. One point seven, five. These are similar rates for today, which is two, 23, 20, 24. This is not an offer to lend, so I'm not going to give you all of the disclosures that we do have in APR. And then look at the payment here. So 20 percent down on the convention alone, that's your payment, and 32, 60, three and a half percent down on a $500,000 purchase, this is your payment. Four thousand and five dollars. So it's a difference of about four hundred something bucks. We can see what our cash to close is.

Speaker 2:

Now. In this instance, what I assumed was somebody had a hundred thousand dollars and they were going to use that as a down payment, or they were not, and so you can see here the cash to close is one ten, seven sixty four, that's a hundred thousand plus some closing costs, and the payment difference, I'm sorry, is seven hundred and forty five dollars. So you're making seven hundred and forty five dollars more of a payment and be less money down, and that's when most people stop hey, it's cheaper per month. I should probably do this, Maybe, but let's take a look. So if you look here again the payment difference, you can see it's seven hundred forty five dollars more to do the three and a half percent down FHA Over the first five years. You're actually going to save thirty, seven thousand, three hundred and twenty dollars by going with twenty percent down conventional because you're paying some interest over time, but what we?

Speaker 2:

want to look at really is what will we do with that money if we didn't put it down. So remember I said we had a hundred thousand dollars. I want to take a table of what data we're using here. I looked up on Nerdwall at the average S&P return over the past five, ten and fifteen years. So we're going to go right now here fifteen returns, twelve point six percent per year.

Speaker 2:

I don't want to use these covidears of fifteen point three, six, because the stock market took off during COVID with all that government intervention. So what I did was we assumed that the money that the person who did use the FHA loan did not. They didn't put that extra sixteen and a half percent down. Instead they invested that money at this twelve point six, three percent average return over the next fifteen years and if you look at that you can see their net worth in fifteen years. If they had nothing else to it They've got.

Speaker 2:

The person who put twenty percent down has a net worth of eight hundred ninety thousand five hundred two dollars, almost entirely from equity on their house. The person who put three and a half percent down gets very similar equity position, of course, because while their house is growing at the same pace, but they just owe more on their amortization because they have a higher amount of looking. The difference here their net worth is almost $500,000 more than the person who put 20% now because they use their remaining $76,000 in the S&P index fund and this is how their wealth grew. So when we say real estate is a growth asset and it's a wealth builder, absolutely it is because the majority of the wealth came from the equity in their house over the years.

Speaker 1:

However, look at this huge All right folks, we're waiting for Brian to come back, hey. Brian we we, yeah, no, no worries. You left us on a huge cliffhanger. You said look at this huge and you cut off. So it was a good suspense. So look at this huge one, brian.

Speaker 2:

Look at this huge bar graph, this incredible difference in wealth between the person who put less put less money down invested it in the.

Speaker 2:

S&P index fund at 12.5% over the next 15 years, they got about $500,000 more in wealth. Now I wanted to make it a little bit more fair. So in order to do that, I said well, okay, you're paying $700 something a month less on this conventional loan. So while you don't have this big chunk of money the $74,000, $76,000 to put into an index fund, you do have $700 something a month that you're not paying in mortgage. So what if, instead of this big chunk over the next 15 years, 20% down person sock that money into an S&P index fund every single month? So they had they had the exact same outgo them as the lower down payment person $4,005 a month $3,200 more against 30 something mortgage and the rest was invested.

Speaker 2:

Even with that they cannot catch up. So that person, the 20%, down for 15 years, put over $700 a month into this index fund over a decade and a half, wow so. I say a lot to people when we do our real estate classes, when I'm sitting down with them and giving advice. I'm a big fan of leveraging other people's money, just a huge fan.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so so is the owner of the company. I even work, or you know. Gary Keller he's all about leveraging money too, so he's not.

Speaker 2:

I don't know why you wouldn't?

Speaker 2:

you've been set up as a debt growth society. And if you put 5% down on a house and in Seattle over the past 63 years houses have gone up 5.09%, so in the next year it goes up 5% you have doubled your money. If you put 20% down and it goes up 5%, you have a 20% return, which is great, but things bad. But you've doubled 5%, so your ROI is much higher. On the lower down payment yes, again we want to take the sword away and say the payment is higher. Of course it is. We accounted for that. Instead, you just put one chunk of money in this S&P index fund and you never touch it, you never add another dollar to it and you've got $500,000, almost about $500,000 more of net worth of a percent down person. Okay, so you put that money in, you never touch it and the 20% down person tries to catch up by the difference in monthly payment. They put $700 something a month in the S&P index fund. They still are over 300 and about $350,000 less of a net worth than the person who put 3.5% down. So we went over huge, really important numbers on rent versus on loan last week.

Speaker 2:

We've gone over house hacking before. One of the things that we strive for is to bring you relevant data, to look deeper into the information than you have looked at before, and the surface level of something is almost never exactly what it is. So when you look and say, hey, my payment's going to be lower, that means it's a better deal. I should put 20% down so I don't pay mortgage insurance. I should put 20% down. I should not do that because I'm going to pay mortgage insurance forever.

Speaker 2:

This also assumes this person has a refinance to a low rate, but that, unfortunately, is not always the case, and that's why, when we sit down with clients, aaron and I when we sit down with clients over Zoom, we go over their entire real estate picture, not just the price of the house and the mortgage industry. Those are two important things, but they're not the be all end all. We go over an entire strategy based off what their goals are for the future, so that we can build something around that. What do you guys think? Anybody in the chat think, hey, that makes sense, or hey, that doesn't make sense. Or hey, I got to go to the bathroom, or hey, my note pictures.

Speaker 1:

Chad's not too alive today just because I didn't do the whole prep it for two days, type of thing. That's on me. No, it's cool. Yeah, I mean we have some people popping in and out, but no one's. I don't know if we're going to get anyone asking me that.

Speaker 2:

So maybe we redo this in a future episode too.

Speaker 1:

I definitely think so. This is good because I really like I like this info and I think it's a good deep dive. But this is a good preview. One thing I will mention because, to riff off of what you're just talking about, I talked to a recent I always call them clients, but like long-term friends that like might eventually buy it Right Client that they've been working so hard at saving up money like super safe, super super safe.

Speaker 2:

For how long?

Speaker 1:

Years. I've been talking to them for like four or five years. They've been saving up money and they have limited income. I'm talking about like under 70k. You know, like they make decent but limited income. They've saved up even on that limited income. They've saved up over a hundred k and like I'm like like I was telling them years ago guys, let's get you in on the lowest payment possible when house prices are lower and let that equity build up. You know, but they just they weren't having it.

Speaker 1:

But now, when they're finally ready to really get into home ownership, like now, they're like, okay, our families ready and that's fine. Like their families ready, they want to get into home ownership. But they realized they wanted to get into home ownership then too, but they were just fixated on this like this Um, I'm not going to call any of the gurus out there, but we know who they are, those uh gurus that talk about zero debt and needing 20 down, on how they. They were hung up on that 20 needing 20 down, even though I told them let's get you in front of one of my lenders to have that conversation and they just weren't having it. And now they told me Aaron, we see now that we've worked so hard saving up this money over the past few you know, several years, not I, I'm. What's the difference between few and several? Right, because I'm talking about five years here.

Speaker 2:

Few is three, several is four or more, I think five. Yeah, yeah several.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, um, and yeah they. They do sort of regret now because they've seen how how the areas they're looking at now Houses, when they could have done three per you know, three and a half down or five percent down when they had the money for it, we're in the 300 k's now and now houses even though they have a hundred k now those houses are above 700. So they're just, they, they're outpaced for their, for their income, even though they were super savvy savers. Now they're like now we're stuck. What do we do like? Well, two things. Now we get yeah, one.

Speaker 2:

they missed out on really low rates and so they missed out on less expensive housing pricing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it'll probably go about 6.5 to 6.8 percent when we get the case share data next week. Uh, in 2023, even with higher interest rates. So prices continue to climb nation. Uh, so housing is not getting less expensive. Uh, unfortunately, 70 k is a really good income and in this seattle market that could be tough.

Speaker 2:

Uh, so that, and I do, I think in my first home buyer classes where I talk about um gabe, let's, let's call them rave damsie. Uh, and rave damsie, you should have 15 15. You're more to 20 down. And I do the math of if you wanted to buy a 500,000 dollar house for two with 20 down and you didn't have the money, but you could save 15 000 a year. So you Foregoed getting one latte a week and avocado toast on wednesdays, and then you got 15 grand Uh, because that's apparently what boomers think it takes to buy a house. So you can say 12 50 I'm gonna do the math really quick and and then we're just gonna have housing prices go up the normal five percent a year, so a little bit less than they average in seattle and you can say 15 000. How long it's gonna take you to get to 100 000 To get that down payment, and what will happen to housing.

Speaker 1:

Um, yeah, I can't wait to let me show I was gonna do a video on this too on my youtube play, because I think it's the Screen.

Speaker 2:

You can see it. It's crazy.

Speaker 1:

The answer is not saving the avocado toast or the saving the the starbucks.

Speaker 2:

No, are you ready? Yeah, it's gonna buckle, buckle up, buckle up your butts.

Speaker 1:

Buckle up buttercup.

Speaker 2:

All right, so we're going to do some quick math on our calculator here you can see.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let me pull up your cap. Oh wait, yeah, I threw it up there the best.

Speaker 2:

All right. So if you got a 500,000 dollar house, we just went over this 20,000 as a 100 grand. So we're going to say prices are going to go up just 5% a year and we'll do the math together on how much you're saving. So the first year you save $15,000, $1250 a month and the price went to 525. You do it again and the price goes up to 521, 21, 215.

Speaker 2:

I want to remind you guys what we've talked about in the past. This is compound appreciation. It's not 5% of 500. The second year, it's 5% of 525, which you can see now is 26,000. So you've got 30 grand in the bank for your down payment. You've got 45 grand in the bank for your down payment. You've got $60,000 in the bank for your down payment. You've been saving it for a while.

Speaker 2:

That's four years of saving. Right now you've got 75 grand in the bank. You've saved $75,000 for your down payment. 90 are almost there on your six. By your seven you've saved $105,000. So you get five for yourself. But that $500,000 house, it's just normal 5% appreciation is now 703 and 20% down is over 140,000. You just keep chasing your tail and you have left that $203,000 on the sideline of your life. You don't have it, which you would have had even if you just did the first year to save up $15,000 to do a down payment, assistance on and pay your closing costs. This is, you allow the market to pass you by and you have to live inside so you can say my rent is cheaper. Go back and look at last week's episode. Yeah, we absolutely believe that rent will be cheaper for the first few years, maybe even the first 10 years per month of purchasing.

Speaker 1:

If you don't plan on living in something in the same area for the indefinite future.

Speaker 2:

But the wealth you leave on the table is astronomical and this is. You know this. Go back to last week's episode, because we absolutely went over the math of the cost to get in, the cost to get out how much you're going to actually if you decide to sell, how much you would really come out with. And look at those numbers because obviously $200 and $1000.

Speaker 1:

And again, brian, I want you all to know, if you go, look at last week's episode. Brian was super harsh, super conservative on those numbers to be I'm not going to say pro rent, but like you had, that was very like.

Speaker 2:

We wanted to make it as pro rent as possible. Like you talked about straw manning versus steel manning or strong manning, we wanted the strongest argument for rent to see if our argument could hold up. We didn't want to. You know, some straw man you're going to your landlords are going to never fix them old and kick you out of your house and charge you $10,000 a month, like sure, there are stories like that. But we didn't. We didn't want to. We wanted to make it Exactly.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, right, yeah, for sure, for sure. So, no, yeah, I think I think that's great and I yeah. So we're just here to debunk the myth that, like saving that Starbucks coffee to try to scrounge up, you're not, folks, don't. If you're in the boat where you think you need to save up the 20% and that, strategically, will help you better for wealth management for your first home and you're not in your first home yet and you don't have other assets that you're buying through real estate, that's not, that's most likely not, the best solution to go.

Speaker 1:

And I hope your financial advisor is like, unless you've talked to your financial advisor and you have a very specific situation that we're not talking about. Most people that would not work for now. Of course, this isn't talking about all the people that have all the stocks and you know who's trading in Bitcoin and all that stuff.

Speaker 2:

And the reality is you just sit down with a lender and ask it to see. Sitting down with a lender does not mean you're buying a sitting down with a lender and speak English does not mean you're buying a house today or tomorrow. It just means you're preparing. It's the same way that you sit down with, maybe, a financial planner or you sit down with a personal trainer when you want to start to get in shape. Sitting out the personal trainer doesn't mean you're running a triathlon tomorrow or entering a weightlifting company or any of those things. It means you're starting the journey. It's the same way you're done with a lender.

Speaker 1:

I think, I think a lot of people just feel the pressure of talking to either a lender or a realtor. Because I talked to someone yesterday that I was following, I follow up with and, you know, through doing some diving into like what their credit's at and what not, it sounds like they might not be ready for either like DPA yet, based on where they think their score is.

Speaker 1:

But, then I said it sounded like they were close enough that it would be worth a conversation with a lender, but they just weren't. They're not ready to have that conversation and that's fine, but I think they're just. Some people have that pressure of feeling like either talking to a lender or a realtor is like the same pressure that people have going into a car lot or the old way of going into a cell phone store.

Speaker 2:

I used to work in the cell phone industry too.

Speaker 1:

I've never worked on a car lot, but like so I think just people don't want to be sold to you, you know? Yeah, well, where did that come from?

Speaker 2:

That was your, that was your voice, sorry, your voice. Coming back at you.

Speaker 1:

I feedback to you.

Speaker 2:

Okay, no, yeah, so yeah, I don't know, there is a real yes, if you're on a cell phone store, it's because you need a phone Almost certainly. If you're on a car lot, it's probably because you want to buy a car. If you're talking to a real state agent or a lender or a financial planner, it's because you're making a plan for your whole life. You're not doing a thing today or tomorrow and it is recommended that you meet with us before you're like I need to move now.

Speaker 1:

Now, if you're in that, position.

Speaker 2:

you absolutely have to meet with us. You got to move, but if you're not like we want to, we want to help you a year before, six months before, eight months, before I'm going to make sure that you have time to set up the plan that's right for you.

Speaker 1:

Right, yeah, no, exactly, most, most of these people that I'm referring to will. It's interesting I get off on a tangent, but some of these people like to flip it in the like to talk about the industry as a whole for people that are just listening or talking. So let's talk about, like, where people meet rotors or where rotors call them right, because a lot of people probably get calls from rotors and they're like why is this rotor calling?

Speaker 2:

me Where's this coming from?

Speaker 1:

Well, it's from the moment you sign up for clapper, you just you're divulging all your data leaks. No, just kidding. No, I'm probably going to. Clapper is going to like lower my live stream now. No, um, anyways, what was I saying?

Speaker 1:

Oh, so well, where I was getting with it is most of the time when someone fills out like a form on Facebook, like a like advertising. Usually it's an agent that has like a post or Zillow, and you're exchanging your contact information for an agent to reach out to you or said information, and usually it's like you requested a list of houses for sale or whatnot. But most of the time the fine print is you agreed to have an agent reach out to you to figure out if they can help you with anything Right. Whenever I'm doing this, it's a low pressure, just really trying to figure out if someone needs help whenever Like. So like I'm not looking for someone that, because most agents what they want to do is sift through all those leads and figure out who's ready to buy right now. Right, and that's that's true to a point. You want to figure out who you can work with right now and that's good.

Speaker 2:

But I feel like somebody has to be prioritizing Right.

Speaker 1:

Right, but I try to approach it as telling everyone honestly that, hey, there's no pressure here. I get it. A lot of people are on guard, but like I'm here to help you, like I'm a human, like let's have a connection, do you? When are you looking to buy? Is it down the road? Like there's no pressure here, how can I connect with you on a human level and help you when you're ready? And let's keep in touch and keep that dialogue going and come up with a strategy and an action plan to get you there. Because if we don't start that now, if you, you know, you clicked on the ad for some reason because you're kind of curious or interested in buying something someday, you know, let's figure out how we can better help, you know, anyway. So I thought I'd just throw that out there for some people, because I get a lot of people that are always like why is this person calling me you?

Speaker 2:

know. So yeah, but yeah, there's this fear of you know if I put my information in here or why am I getting calls?

Speaker 1:

Because I just wanted to find out about a house and I was calling me because I put my information on Zillow or Facebook and some people put your information in wrong, so there are some people in there that probably are putting other people's contact info in and there's you know, there's a bajillion things that could go wrong to you. So yeah, I mean it's, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but the reality is you find somebody who cares about you and, like Erin had said, there are realtors, our lenders, who you're a transaction to, just like in any block of life people are, can be. Find somebody that you trust, something. Maybe that's fine with you. You just want to do it, do the transaction and never hear from somebody again. There's somebody for everybody, but from a selfish standpoint, from a business building standpoint, it makes much more sense to build a relationship, a longstanding relationship.

Speaker 2:

The cost per closing is much lower from a referral from somebody who knows and trusts you than from spending a bunch of money online for a week Like we're running businesses and we have to get find our customers and we have to be able to serve people. Promise you, being in this for 20 years. It is so much more enjoyable to work with people I know and like than it is to just keep going and finding new people. Meet with us early and then meet with us as often as you like to make sure that you're ready to make. The most important decision that almost all of us make is when and how can I buy real estate, especially?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly, Exactly Well that's it, guys.

Speaker 2:

You got a lot of great fast out at you.

Speaker 1:

Looks like Brian's not here to wrap it up, but folks anyone else. If any of you have any questions, you know where to find all of our contact information. I know Brian cut out, but thanks so much for everyone showing up for another one. If you again have any questions on anything that we covered, feel free to reach out. I have all of our contact information in the chat Again, my name is Aaron Mara, local world tour in the greater Seattle area serving clients and King Pierce Antston, which counties Brian Laflame, mortgage lender here for all of Washington state, and we would be happy to help you with any of your real estate needs.

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