Hi everybody, your real estate expert, Lance Mohr. And today, we're talking about how to
buy a house. I am going to talk about how you could get into a home in under eight hours.
So this is going to be one of my favorite videos I do. I love talking about this. I
remember when I started in real estate, one of my first buyers I've ever worked with,
we were out looking at homes. I remembered I showed him day after day after day and we
went out probably six times, spent maybe four, five hours each time looking at homes. And
I said, there's got to be a better way, I have to find a way to get people into homes
quicker. This isn't good for them. I know that they are not enjoying getting into a
car and being tied up looking all day for a house, day after day after day. So what
I did, is I went back to the office and I really started to think, what's really important
to people, what do people really want to look for, what do they need to know when finding
a home. And I thought about it for awhile, I started putting this together and I put
together a game plan that I've been using for years and it saves so many people so much
time. I remember I had a lady come into my office one time, looking for a home, with
one of her friends, the top realtor in the city for a year and a half. Within four hours,
she found her perfect home. And what it is, it's a two-step process. First I want to say,
real estate in looking for a home isn't that complicated. I think what happens is everybody
just really tends to complicate the whole process and sometimes you just need to take
a step back, take a big breath and really say it's not that hard. So here's the two-step
process that I go through. There's four questions, four; when you buy a home, you have to ask
yourself – and when I'm talking to buyers and they come into my office and we are in
our introductory, I guess session and we are talking to each other, we introduce ourselves.
We sit down and talk about what they are looking for, I always ask these four questions, and
here's what they are: what's the minimum amount of square footage you want in a home? And
they might say, well 2500 ft.². And I will say great, well let me ask you a question,
if it was 2399 ft.², would you buy it? And they will say, well yes. And I'll say okay,
what's the minimum amount of square footage that you would want? And they will say, well
2200. I'm like okay, if it's 2199 square feet, would you buy it? And they say yes, and I
say what is the bare minimum? I'm not trying to get you to look at homes in a smaller square
footage, but the MLS is very exact when you enter it, just like any website out there.
And what we need to do is we need to take what you are looking through, and you might
be saying, I want to look through at homes in this range, what you need to do, is you
need to expand it and then you need to contract it, because looking for a home is a process
of elimination. So we go to the square footage and I say what year are you looking at? Well,
I want it to be 2008 or newer. Okay, would you go to a 2007? Yes. What's the oldest home?
And then I will start going down and I will ask them, okay what area do you want to be
in? Tell me the areas that you want to be in and then they will list their areas. They
may say I want to be in these three areas, and I'll say okay great. What's your favorite
area? What's your number one, your number two and your number three? Or maybe they only
have two or they have four, but you need to put them in a list of priority. And why this
is important is because you don't want to be looking one day at your number three home
on the list in your number three area, then all of a sudden, someone is buying your home
that is in your favorite area while you were over looking at these. You don't want to do
that. And this happens all the time to people and a lot of times they might not even know
what happened. So you want to be very focused. You want to have a game plan and then I go
in and I say, well what's the maximum amount of money you want to spend? And they will
say well, we want to be at 260. And I'll say okay, if you found the perfect home in a perfect
area, it had everything you wanted in the home and it was 261, would you buy the house?
Yes. Well what's your highest price range? And they say well, 270. And I do the same
thing over and over again. I say look, it's not that I'm trying to talk you up in price
or make you buy a home smaller than you want to be in, in an area where you don't want
to be, I don't want to do this. But what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to let you look
at everything out there. You could pull up and you could say okay, I'll go up to 280,000,
I'll go down to a year built – 1995, whatever it is. I'll go down to 2000 ft.² and these
are my areas. You don't have to look at those, but I want you to know those are available
because I don't want to go out and show you a home, and this is what happens with most
people with most real estate agents, and believe me it happens over and over. And this is how
I'm able to show and find people homes in a matter of hours. So what happens is they
go to the real estate agent, and a lot of times they don't even meet the real estate
agent, they call them up online, they tell the agent what they are looking for, the agent
is all giddy and excited and they go out and meet the people at the home. And then all
of a sudden, they don't find what they want, so they go out another day then another day.
Then they start expanding their price and then they do the same thing and then they
expand their price some more and they do the same thing. And they start going to older
homes and they do the same thing. And the problem is, your perfect home in the perfect
area, you might have missed because you are like a gerbil on the treadmill; you're just
going over and over and over. So you have to have a game plan. You have to expand and
then contract. Example, when my wife and I were looking for homes, I told my wife, I
woke up one day and I said, "Hey, we're going to go buy a home today." And she said, "Fantastic,
I've been looking on the MLS; I have over 100 homes." I shouldn't say this, but I gave
her access to my MLS because we are married. And so she looked down, she had 100 homes.
I said, "No, no, no. That's not what we're doing." I went through this exact step right
here and I said okay. I said this what we're going to do. So I pulled up say, 180 homes,
I got her in front of me like all my clients I work with, I get them into my office. Because
this is a team approach; we have to be working together as a team, as partners and it is
my job to guide people and tell them what they need to do so they could make not only
an intelligent decision, but a wise decision that doesn't take a lot of their time and
their families time. So we went from 180 homes to 65 homes to 30 homes. She looked through
those 30 homes. She put them in a stack, okay now we did the four step process, now we have
to do the three critical elements. So here's the three critical elements. Number one is
you have to like the neighborhood. Look, if you don't like the neighborhood, it's non-negotiable.
Do not buy the house. You can't change your neighbors, if you don't like the neighborhood,
don't buy it. The second thing you need to do is you need to like the elevation; the
way the house looks. If you are buying new construction, first off, watch my new construction
video, but if you are buying new construction, is a completely different game but you are
going to pick your elevation. You don't need to like the house color or if you are in an
area where they have brick or citing and the citing or brick color. You don't have to like
the lawn or maybe it's all overgrown or weeds or the shrubs. You need to like the elevation;
how the home--you know the roof pitch, the gables, how it looks because you're not going
to change that. And the third thing you need to do is you have to like the floor plan.
Don't go into a home and say well, it has three bedrooms, I'll just add a bedroom over
here. Because you know what? You'll probably ruin the flow of the home, because when the
home was built, the architect built it a certain way; good or bad, they built it a certain
way. So you have to like the floor plan of the home. So what we did is this, I gave everything
to my wife and I said, "Okay, here's the thing, you're going to pick the home you like. I
have veto power. So if it isn't a home and I don't like it and there's something wrong
with it, we'll move on." She said okay. So what we did, is we got up the next day and
she wanted to go look at all these homes. And I said, "No, what we're going to do is
we're going to drive by all 15 and we're going to make sure we like the area and the way
the home looks." Because again, I don't want to go out spending all day or hours I should
say, looking at homes. And then the pictures look real pretty online and they are a great
picture from the outside and I go buy it and I don't like the area or maybe it looked good
online, but it's an ugly house or I just don't like it. So what we did, is we drove by all
those 15 homes, didn't take much time at all, not even probably an hour and a half. Then
I went back and I set up all the appointments and we narrowed it from 15 down to 5. So I
set up the appointments for the five homes. We went out to lunch then we went and looked
at those five homes. Alright, so here's what I did, is I took the four elements and I expanded
them all the way out. Alright, it was 180 homes then I was at 65, then I was at 30,
then I was at 15, then we were at 5. So we went and looked at all those. Now I knew the
bedrooms, the bathrooms, the square footage, the year built, I knew what the neighborhood
was like, I knew what it looked like outside, the elevation. Because some people, agents
have been known to do this, use old pictures when it looked a lot better. So I looked at
all that. The only thing I was going into the home, is I wanted to see the floor plan.
So we went in, the third home we walked in, I said hey this is it, we're buying this home.
Now, we finished looking at the other two homes. We were done, start to finish in less
than 5 1/2 hours. And this is how I'm able to show buyers that I work with, homes in
a matter of hours instead of weeks, months or years. Because a lot of times, was happening
is buyers are just doing it all wrong because the real estate agents are doing it wrong.
The real estate agents don't have a game plan. They are sort of like what I consider an ant
looking for food; they are all over the place, they are running all over the place and they
are driving you and your family all over the place. So if they don't have a game plan,
give them this game plan. I mean I've had people that have been looking for a year and
a half, find a home in a matter of hours. I had a couple several years ago, they came
to me. They were looking with a real estate agent for four days, they said we have to
find a home. I said I will find you one if you do exactly what I said. They came into
my office at 9 o'clock in the morning, by 3 o'clock in the afternoon, with them having
breakfast after they met me, they were in a home. They found out a home they want. They
lived in it for years. So it's about game plan, it's about doing the right thing. So
I hope this helps you. And I know this is a very, very effective way to look for a home
and it works. Now, let me just say this, different markets are different. So when we are in a
seller's market, it could be a little bit harder because inventories real low. If it's
a buyer's market or an average market, it's going to be very easy to do this. But even
when my wife and I, when we bought our home, it was a complete crazy seller's market, it
still didn't take us anytime at all. So I hope this helps. Please leave a comment. If
you like this or not or have any questions, give me a thumbs up and if you like my video,
subscribe. I wish you the best of luck and don't forget, if you have any questions, just
leave a comment below and have a wonderful day.