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Today I want to talk about the top three biggest mistakes sellers tend to make during their transactions with the hope you’ll avoid making them yourself in your next real estate transaction.

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Here are the top three mistakes sellers make that you should avoid making during your next home sale:

1. Thinking that their home sale will be exactly like someone else’s. Here’s the thing: If you want and expect what everybody else has, you’re not differentiated. Home sales, like any other facet of business and sales, are all about differentiation. Success is founded upon being different. If you’re just another home on the market, then you’ll get just another average result. Remember, the average agent sells 3.7 homes a year; our team has sold somewhere around 330 homes this year. Doing things differently helped us succeed, and that’s why we’ve trademarked our 5-Day Blitz Program.

Buying and selling a home at the same time is tough to do. However, we help make the process easier for our clients and here’s how.

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Do you need to buy a home and sell one at the same time? Should you buy before you sell, or sell before you buy? Are these questions driving you crazy? You’re not alone.

This is a question that a lot of homeowners struggle with. When you want to buy a new home but you know you have to sell your current home in order to buy, how do you make those transactions happen concurrently?

We utilize a few different strategies. One way is through a leaseback. This is a situation where you sell your home, then rent it out from the new buyer while you purchase your new home.

With a very experienced agent, you can time both of the transactions so that your contingency release on your purchase happens after the contingency release of the buyer purchasing your current home. Therefore, if anything goes wrong with your sale, you can still back out on your purchase. To do this, you need to ensure a very fast and effective sale.

If this is a situation that you’re facing, that’s where...

Today I want to have an honest conversation with you about our current market. According to our most recent figures, it is changing.

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Today I want to have an honest and direct conversation with you about what is happening in the marketplace. Most agents are unwilling, or unable, to have this conversation because they lack the scope of being able to have as much data as we do.

The market cycle is changing. Five months ago there were about 4,200 homes on the market. Today there are 7,040. That is a huge jump.

At the same time, rates have been climbing. Depending on the loan product you are getting, your rate now could be as much as an entire point higher than it could have been five or six months ago.

We are in a vastly different environment right now where buyers have a lot more choices. This is the phase that always happens at the beginning of any market cycle shift.

Buyers and sellers are not on the same page. Since buyers are seeing all the different available places, they understand that they have a lot more options and can be pickier. In the neighborhood where I live, for example, there were zero to two properties available at any given time five months ago. Now, there are 24. That is...

There are many rules and laws about the sale of your home that we must follow. However, some are not actually rules at all.

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Sometimes, an agent may ask you to follow or implement a rule that simply doesn’t exist. Do not get me wrong. Rules are important. Yet there are many misconceptions about what is and isn’t acceptable when buying or selling real estate.

In an industry where it is very easy for people to enter with very few qualifications, many people will start talking about rules that don’t actually apply. Today I’d like to go over three examples.

1. Signs. While there are some neighborhoods that do not allow open house signs at all, for the grand majority of the area's signs are allowed and there is no restriction on how many you can use. In fact, we use 60 signs when we hold an open house. Why not use more if you can? Also, why wait until 12:55 p.m. to put out a sign when you could put out a sign earlier in the day? That will allow more people to see it and encourage them to come and visit the open house.

2. Showings. Typically, you get one showing at a time. However, private showings are not required and can even hurt you because you will not get the...

Our market has undergone some dramatic changes as of late, so today I’d like to bring you an especially important update on these conditions.

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Today I wanted to bring you a quick market update because there have been substantial changes to the marketplace.

Typically my team likes to provide you other educational material, but there’s currently nothing more important than what’s going on in our market right now. The changes we’re currently experiencing have been long-anticipated, and they’re finally here.

Roughly 60 days ago, we had about 4,500 homes on the market across San Diego County. Since that time, 1,421 new listings have come onto the MLS. This means we currently have 5,921 properties available for sale in our area.

For whatever reason, not many are talking about this major increase in inventory. My personal opinion is that this is likely because the current number of available homes is still far below what would be considered a healthy level of inventory.

Yet, if you look beyond the current state of our market and consider the trajectory of this change as part of a larger trend, this increase is certainly worthy of note. It represents a 31% rise in inventory in just 60 days.

Moving...

Today, I’ve got a challenge for you. I want you to fight against mediocrity and demand the best, instead.

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It’s time to come out and say it: You and I are in a fight against mediocrity.

Unfortunately, becoming a licensed agent requires very little effort. This results in an incredibly mediocre industry. Worse than that, the industry operates in a way that protects that mediocrity by putting out messages into the market that are against the best interest of the people we should be looking to serve.

By the way, I must admit that my own career started with mediocrity. I stumbled into the industry like everyone else. It all began back in 2005 when my dad wanted to sell a home. I got licensed so that I could help him do so and just like that, I was a real estate agent.

I started to look around to see how other agents were operating. From that, I began mimicking people who seemed successful. But things have changed since then. It used to be that an agent was at the center of their business model. They were in charge of everything. It turned them into some kind of superhero who could handle all the aspects of the transaction on their own. But, why?...

By strategically investing in real estate, you can build generational wealth. Here’s my advice about strategizing successfully.

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A lot of people have been asking us about investing in real estate.

The truth is that it can be tough. This is not the market to just go out and buy anything.

However, I’ve recently purchased a home as a long-term rental property, and I’d like to talk through what I purchased, why, and what the long-term outlook is. Follow along in the video above to see a visual representation of what I mean.

I identified an area in town where the prices had skyrocketed over the course of this market cycle. Yet there’s another, separate neighborhood which is a bit older, but it’s still a desirable area that has stayed a little bit flatter. The high-priced neighborhoods are newer, but they also carry Mello Roos. The older neighborhoods don't.

These neighborhoods are west of the 15, a great area with good schools and jobs nearby. Even though they all have access to...

Sellers need to get a full market response if they want to get “the most the market can bear.” But there’s something you should know about that promise.

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Today I want to talk about one thing that sellers really need to be after: a full market response.

What’s consistently striking to me as I travel around to train agents, as well as what I notice in the marketplace, is that real estate agents promise home sellers “the most the market will bear in the shortest amount of time.” It’s the same tired promise that’s frequently made but seldom delivered.

The traditional showing model of having private, individual appointments for buyers to come peruse your house is broken and fundamentally unable to deliver on the promise “the most the market will bear” because the market is never delivered to your home in a way where buyers are forced to compete with each other.

It’s only in understanding that what you truly need is to have a full market response in order for buyers to be forced...

Should you buy or lease your solar energy system? The answer is quite simple.

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Today I’d like to talk a little about solar power. Specifically, I want to talk about the differences between buying and leasing a system like this. The two have very different implications, especially when it comes time to sell your property. It’s amazing to me how many of us are unintentionally uninformed about things like this, but I’m here to clear the air on this topic today.

Solar companies usually have an agenda. There are ones who cater exclusively to buyers and there are those who pretty much exclusively push lease or power purchase agreements.

If you’re in the market for a solar power system, I’d advise you to buy the solar whenever possible. Understand that just because you buy the system, it doesn’t mean you have to pay it off all at once. I don’t think a lot of people know that. If you can’t afford to buy the system outright, you can likely afford to buy the system through a loan with some great terms.

When you buy the system, the whole thing is transferable to the buyer...

The new tax bill changes some things in the real estate market for buyers, sellers, and investors. There’s no need to panic about any of these changes, though.

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Today I’ve outlined key parts of the new tax bill that affect the real estate market.

...

The difference between the market’s list-to-sale price ratio and your prospective agent’s list-to-sale price ratio will let you know if that agent will net you the most money from your home sale.

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How do you pick the right agent to help you sell your home for the highest possible price?

No one ever teaches you how to interview a listing agent. What attributes actually make a difference and what’s just smoke and mirrors? Every agent claims they’re No. 1, but how can you know who to trust?

There is one number that influences everything else sellers care about in their home sale: how much money they’ll net from that sale. There are a lot of questions sellers typically ask, but they all boil down to that factor.

When picking a listing agent, then, there are two numbers you have to know: the list-to-sale price ratio for the market and the list-to-sale price ratio for your prospective agent.

"Don’t pick an agent just because they offer a discount."

Right now in San Diego County, the average list-to-sale price ratio is 97%. This means if a home is listed for $100,000, it’s selling for $97,000. Keep in mind, though, that’s just the average—there are people selling below that percentage and above it. Year to date, our brokerage’s average list-to-sale price ratio is 99.8%, which is 2.8% above the market ratio.

So, when you interview an agent and ask them...

Thanks to the support of our clients, we have recently been ranked among the top teams in the nation by The Walll Street Journal

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We at the Beer Home Team have an awesome announcement that we’re proud to say has come to be because of our clients.

The Wall Street Journal and Real Trends, the governing ranking body of our industry, have both officially announced that we have been named among the top 250 real estate teams in the country for volume sold.

Of those 250, our team ranked number of 121. But to take an even broader perspective, this means we ranked 121st out of the more than 1.2 million Realtors across the nation.

This is an incredible honor, which has come to us after we closed $151 million of real estate in the last year alone.

Part of the way we’d like to thank you, our clients, is with our Client Perks Program. We’ve rented a large storage unit which has essentially a party supply store’s worth of tables, chairs, popcorn machines, margarita makers, cornhole games, coolers, pop-up tents, and other items that you can make free use of for your parties.

Simply send us an email with details like the time of your party and what you’ll need and we’ll make the proper arrangements.

These are the kinds of items you might not necessarily want or need to own, but now you can have access to them whenever you like without the hassle of storing them yourself.

We’ve recently added some new additions to the program as well; most notably...

How will the Trump presidency affect the real estate market locally and nationally? We’ll dive into that topic today with the most important things to keep an eye on.

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What will a Trump presidency mean for the real estate market, especially here in San Diego?

For starters, interest rates went up the day he won the election and continue to rise; rates are already a half point higher than they were pre-election. They are still low by historical standards, though. We’re seeing a lot of buyers coming into the marketplace with rates this low, knowing that rates are on the rise. You can lock in a low rate for a home or an investment property to create some cash flow at a low cost.

Secondly, we’re hearing some protectionist rhetoric as far as keeping jobs in America through policy, taxing, and penalizing companies for sending jobs outside the country. Don’t get me wrong—I love that we’ll have more American jobs, we just have to understand that this rhetoric can very easily turn into inflation beyond the normal levels. We’ll be watching this very closely....

Just because we're in a hot seller's market doesn't mean every home sale is a slam dunk. In fact, there were more than 13,000 San Diego homes that failed to sell in 2016 alone.

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There is a huge misconception out there by the public that anything you put on the market will sell. In 2016, however, there were 13,472 homes that went unsold, expired, or canceled in San Diego alone.

Everyone out there who thinks that anything thrown on the market will sell is mistaken. When you look at the volume alone, that total represents $14 billion in real estate...

We are here to debunk the way everyone out there goes about figuring out what their home’s value is. The way people have been doing it is entirely broken. It all starts with the agents.

Our industry has not served you if all we are doing is peddling comparable properties; we sound like broken records. Of course, you want to see the comps so you can figure out your home’s value, but that is not the way to strategically position yourself for sale.

The way to do that is not with comps or an online evaluation, it’s with a Market Positioning Report. That’s the only way to intelligently position yourself in the market with a strategic intent of getting a negotiation advantage over the buyer by using their psychology in your favor. It’s the concept of Virtual Shelf Space™, a term we coined that illustrates the goal in trying to figure out how to use price as one of the elements to support a greater and proven process of your marketing plan.

Price can’t be the only thing you focus on. There has to be a complementary system, which includes a market positioning report that can illustrate and highlight where you should be position yourself in the market. You have to understand what things are going to look like moving forward as well. There is a lot you have to understand, including your competition, the absorption rate, the average days on market, and how to utilize your virtual shelf space.

The Market Positioning Report is something we would be happy to provide for you with no obligation. All you have to do is visit www.valuesinsandiego.com, provide your information, and we...

I want to give you a different way to think about college savings. How can you have a bunch of cash readily available for your kids' college? Here's a strategy that will help you save for a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and even a Ph.D. 

It's simple if you think about it in terms of real estate investments. If you purchase one property for each kid (and it doesn't even have to be here in San Diego County), by the time they're 18 years old and headed off to college, you would have an abundant amount of equity.

The best part is that you'll have a tenant paying the mortgage for you. The amazing thing is that we literally live in a world where if you put down 25 cents for every dollar, a bank will give you 75 cents and charge you about 3.5% on investment property interest rates. Then, you're going to have a tenant who will act and feel like the owner, when in reality, they're paying off your mortgage.

Say you bought a home worth $300,000 and you put 25% (or $75,000) down and have a tenant for 18 years. If we look at prices and values historically, over that 18 years, the value of that house is going to have doubled, roughly. Now, we're talking about a $600,000 house with a ton of the mortgage having been paid off. On the $225,000 you borrowed, you now likely only owe about $125,000. In this scenario, you'd have roughly $410,000 of equity that you...

If you’ve just moved to San Diego from a large city or a small town in Nebraska, or if you’re moving from San Diego to a different market, finding the right real estate agent is critical. Regardless of where you’re moving to or from, the way to find the right agent is to reach out to us here.

Because we’re in the unique position of being the number-one producing agency by volume in San Diego County out of all of Keller Williams, the biggest brokerage in North America, we are in a very special circle of contacts. Our network allows us to reach into any town in the United States and determine exactly who the top producer is, not just for that market or for that neighborhood, but for whatever property type or price range that fits your needs.

Our team is fortunate to be a part of Gary Keller’s Top 100 Mastermind, which is a network of the very best agents across the whole country. This allows us to make a direct referral for you so that you would be working with the person that I would personally be working with if I were moving to any one of those markets.  

If you or anybody you know is either moving to a different market or coming here from another market anywhere else in the country, just direct them our way and we’ll set them in the right direction. If you have any other questions about anything else related to real estate, don’t hesitate to reach out by phone or email. I’d be happy to help you.

Our client appreciation event is coming soon. On October 8th, we’re excited to get together with you and wanted a moment to say thank you and give you some details.

We’re heading to Temecula wine country this year. We’re in the process of renting buses, which we will deck out with food and drinks. Then, we’re going to spend time at three different wineries, where we will also be having lunch. We want to make sure you are there with us.

We’re looking to finalize all the plans soon, but we need all of your RSVPs first. We’ll be leaving here at noon on October 8th and are really hoping that you’ll be with us. To RSVP, simply reply to the original email. We hope to see you there.

If you have any other questions, give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Inventory in our market right now is very tight. There are not many homes for sale and by the time you find a home you like, there are probably a lot of other buyers interested in it already. That’s because almost every buyer in the market is simply chasing down the next house that hits Zillow, Redfin, or Trulia. You’re competing with everyone else because you are looking at the same thing everyone else is. You’re just part of the mob.

In this environment, if you’re a buyer and you want to win, you need to align yourself with a buyer specialist who can get you out ahead of a property before it’s on the market. Give the buyer specialist your parameters, and they should be able to run a full needs analysis. A good buyer specialist will then go and chase that property down, whether it’s on the market already or not.

You don’t want to work with a real estate agent who is trying to keep 10 plates spinning. Typical real estate agents handle buyers, listing appointments, marketing, and hundreds of other little details that detract their attention from your home search.

A buyer specialist only has one focus: finding you a home. They know...