This week’s meeting at eReal Estate Corp. consisted of several topics such as how meeting with clients has changed due to COVID-19 and what the new norm is, how to stay ahead of the curve with pricing your listings, discussion on how cities are now operating when issuing permits, information about buying real estate in Mexico and sales data on our local real estate market. The information in this post will be beneficial for both real estate professionals and the general public so let’s dive in!
– Virtual Meetings: What Is Appropriate?
As we all know, COVID-19 has changed our business practice when interacting with clients. As real estate professionals, we naturally participate in important meetings where a face to face conversations are almost necessary rather than a video call. So we need to make decisions on what face to face meetings are necessary now and which are not.
If you’re an agent or broker reading this, we urge you to consider how much virtual meetings will be used in the future in our business, even post COVID-19. Generally today, agents and brokers are working from home in their favorite sweats and t-shirt and may not be prepared for a spontaneous meeting with a client where you need to physically be there. Point being, stay sharp and ready at all times to help buyers and sellers, you never know when they may need you.
At this point in the discussion, we had a moment of positive perspective. Dean introduced the idea of setting up virtual listing presentations with property owners. The benefit of this would be that we can meet with more people in a shorter amount of time since it would be done remotely.
– Stay Ahead of the Curve When Pricing Listings
When we list a property for sale, we always consider the local competing listings. Why will a buyer pick your listing versus another similar property? Price has a lot, if not everything, to do with it.
Let’s use the example of a current office listing in North Redondo Beach to elaborate. This property is brand new and offered at $1,685,000. There is another brand new home in the same neighborhood offered at $1,695,000. Our client is currently motivated and wants to create more activity by reducing the price. If the competing property drops the price to $1,599,000 before we do, we are now in a position to possibly to drop our price even lower then that because our listing was priced lower to begin with. However, by us dropping our price to $1,599,00 first (which we did) we are now the ones setting the market price with more control, rather than the competing listing. This is what we mean by staying either ahead or behind the curve when pricing your listings.
Of course other factors are to be considered, all sellers are in different situations. Talk with your client about the importance of being ahead of the curve on pricing. Research your competition and talk with client about their importance/motivation of selling. This will help guide client on how aggressive to be on their pricing.
– City Governments Have Adapted to COVID-19 When Issuing Permits. Who Benefits the Most From This?
As a company we are very involved in new construction projects, flips and other projects where we need to deal with city permits. We have noticed that city governments are now executing the permit process virtually. They are reviewing plans through email and inspecting properties via Zoom or Facetime.
The question arises, how good or bad is this for both the city and the property owners? The advantage would be that cities can be more efficient in reviewing more projects and issuing more permits considering it is all being done remotely, but is quality being sacrificed? Will the property owner, contractors and developers get away with cutting corners more easily than before? Or not.
Only time will tell, more on this later…
– How To Buy Real Estate in Mexico
Some of our team members took an educational tour down to Mexico to meet with a realtor in Los Gaviotos to find out the process of buying real estate in Mexico as a U.S. Citizen. Here’s what they learned:
- You need to own a Trust in Mexico (via Mexican Attorney).
- The Trust buys and owns the real estate on your behalf for 50 years, then you renew.
- It costs approximately $5,000 US Dollars to set up the trust, $500-$1,000 a year to keep and another $5,000 for every renewal.
- Some benefits are that property taxes and utility costs are very low compared to the U.S.
– Local Real Estate Stats for September 2020
- Manhattan Beach: 53 Sales $2.9MM Average Sales Price
- Hermosa Beach: 12 Sales $2.15MM Average Sales Price
- Redondo Beach: 47 Sales $1.58MM Average Sales Price
- Torrance: 96 Sales $959K Average Sales Price.
- El Segundo: 11 Sales $1.897MM Average Sales Price
Thank you for reading through our discussion at eReal Estate Corp. for this week. We hope you found the information beneficial.