Season 4, EP. 8 – Podcast Transcript: The Lost Interview – Letters, Prayers, and Property: The Unconventional Approach to Winning Bids

NOTE: This transcript was automatically processed using artificial intelligence and may or may not be 100% accurate.

[** COMMENTS **]
We found the infamous lost episode interview with Kelly Marie and Pippin Galloway form the meaningful moves team at Coldwell Banker Apex. We thought this interview was lost to the world forever when the hard drive we stored it on crashed right after the interview, but recently, I stumbled on a backup in a cloud storage service. The interview may be a bit dated, but the content is really good and relavent even today, especially if your thinking of selling you home yourself or if you are a first time home buyer. WIthout further adou, here is the episode.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

[** COMMENTS **]
We found the infamous lost episode interview with Kelly Marie and Pippin Galloway form the meaningful moves team at Coldwell Banker Apex. We thought this interview was lost to the world forever when the hard drive we stored it on crashed right after the interview, but recently, I stumbled on a backup in a cloud storage service. The interview may be a bit dated, but the content is really good and relavent even today, especially if your thinking of selling you home yourself or if you are a first time home buyer. WIthout further adou, here is the episode.

[Brian]
Welcome to the House Fluid Inspections Podcast, where we hope you enjoy stress-free home buying, home selling, and home ownership. I’m your host, Brian Botch, and I’m joined today by Kelly Lamont. Hi, Kelly, how are you today?

Still swell. Still swell. Well, all right, fair enough.

We’re joined today by Pippin and Kelly Marie. They’re with the Meaningful Moves team at Coldwell Banker Apex here in McKinney, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, guys.

[Pippin]
Thank you.

[Brian]
So Pippin, Kelly Marie, tell me a little bit about how you guys teamed up. How did you end up as a team here?

[Kelly Marie]
Well, I’ll tell the story. So Pippin and I, we attended church together. We still attend church together.

And we knew of one another, but we didn’t hang out with each other. So we kind of hung out in some circles of friends that overlapped and whatnot. And Pippin had been doing real estate for a couple of years.

And it was getting crazy. So this was like back in 2008.

[Pippin]
It was right before the market crashed. So it was those two or three years right before it crashed. And it was just crazy.

[Kelly Marie]
And one afternoon, we were picking up our kids at Mother’s Day out. And she ran me down in the parking lot and said, Hey, I heard that you were thinking about getting into real estate. And we had a couple hour long conversation.

You know, the next was, I guess, a match made in heaven, because we had people tell us don’t do this. It never lasts for people who are not either a married couple or a mother daughter or, you know, some sort of relative. And we did it against all odds.

And here we are.

[Pippin]
Almost 15. Yeah, 14, 15 years later. Wow.

[Brian]
Yeah, that’s amazing. And so you guys started around the 2008 time. So you’ve seen pretty much every type of market there is to see.

That’s right.

[Pippin]
I definitely know that the pendulum swings back and forth no matter what.

[Brian]
Yeah, absolutely. One thing we’re seeing in this market is at least from our side, from the inspection side, we’re doing a lot of inspections where people are actually selling their homes themselves. They’re not using an agent.

It’s a, you know, like a for sale by owner type situation. And we’re seeing more and more of those. They’re ticking up.

What are you guys seeing from your side? Is that a trend? And why is that good, bad or indifferent?

[Kelly Marie]
Well, anytime that we’re sitting in a seller’s market, that is something that you’re going to see because people are like, you know what, we’ll just cut out the middleman. We’ll just do this ourself. Right.

And you know, what else you’re going to see, you’re going to see a lot of like the open door, the brokerages where they’re kind of, you know, they discount. Yeah, they’re a discount brokerage. They their whole claim to fame is that they’re going to make it real simple for the seller.

They’re going to come in, they’re going to swoop in, they’re going to buy it for them. And then they’ll list it when it’s, you know, good for them right after they move out or whatever. What we strive to educate people on is it’s if it says it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.

So if you think that you’re going to get out from underneath something at a discount, it is never the case. Typically, you know, when you’re selling your home, you’re going to pay a buyer’s agent 3% and the listing agent 3%. So a total of 6%.

And a lot of times with these brokerages, they’ll come in and they make it sound like it’s going to be a lot less than that. But in actuality, if you read the fine print, they’re actually giving them about 12%. And let’s face it, these brokerages, what their whole claim to fame is, is that they come in and they buy these houses, they make it convenient, right for the seller to walk away.

Yeah, there is a convenience charge. And they turn around and ultimately they flip the house because they’re in it to make a profit, right? That’s their whole deal.

They’re making a profit in this. So in some instances, say, for example, where maybe you have somebody who, you know, the house is theirs due to a death in the family, and it was willed to them, or, you know, it’s kind of like the whole model of the we buy ugly houses. That is their model.

That’s how they do their business. You know, and what we feel like the people that we’re dealing with, they’re there to make the most out of the sale of their home. And that is where we feel like we bring that to the table to our clients.

There’s so much more that goes into selling a house than literally just like the offer or just the sell, right? I mean, there’s a whole backstory that has to go on with it preparing the house. We know all the vendors, we know the good people that are going to come in and are going to inspect the home and help ready the home.

We do free home staging. We just we have a lot of contacts in our back pocket that can help people prepare their home for sale so that they can maximize and get their biggest return on investment.

[Pippin]
I think a big thing that you need to if you go back to the for sale by owner. Legally, you are in a legal contract. And we understand that we are not lawyers, but we have been schooled and especially with CBA Apex.

Our broker is extremely strict about following the rules and the guidelines because you are entering into a contract. And we all know and you probably have seen it on the inspection side too. People do sue one another and there are things that happen and we guide on that, especially when it comes to for sale by owners.

And listen, sometimes for sale by owners work. We’ve seen it, you know, especially like it’s family members or if it’s a good friend and a good friend and they’re switching homes, there are times. But for the most part, if you’re actually going to put it out there to a market of people that you do not know, it behooves you to have somebody on your side who is working just for you.

You have to be able to navigate who the lender is, what all the fine print is, all the other things that go into the minutia of a contract. And that’s where we come in and that is what you pay us for. Kelly Marie and I also, we’re very big on working with our clients and helping our clients.

And if we buy and sell together, we are willing to talk negotiations on our commission by 1%. It’s something we do because we value you also. Just like you value us, we value you.

So we believe in communication and working together. And I think besides our home staging, which we’re both, we are very good at, if I do want to pat myself on the back, we are good at it. I think we offer a huge, huge incentive in that part.

[Brian]
Well, and something you said, Pippin, I mean, if I was selling my house as a for sale by owner, right? The one thing I can’t imagine trying to sort through are all the offers coming in, because the best offer isn’t always necessarily the highest price offer.

[Pippin]
A lot of times it’s not.

[Brian]
Yeah. And just knowing, hey, this offer, the financing’s more solid or this offers better because they’re willing to do this or that or the other thing, that would be so hard. I can’t even imagine having no experience in trying to weigh through that.

[Kelly Marie]
It is hard and it’s hard on both sides of it. So my background before getting into real estate was I was an allocation specialist at JCPenney headquarters. So I had more of a number cruncher background, retail background, because really as a seller, you want to know what is my bottom line?

What am I going to get out of this deal, right? What is the sales price? Who’s paying for title policy?

Who’s paying for home warranty? Like Pippin said, we are very good at communication. We pick up the phone and we call those lenders.

We want to know, we ask the questions, because in this market, it’s really easy to provide a straight contract, but really it is a contingent offer, but they didn’t say contingent on that because they’re going to play the dates on the whole financing contingency and they don’t have to disclose that it is a contingency if they feel like the dates are going to jive with their timeline.

[Brian]
So contingency meaning I can’t buy your house until I sell mine?

[Kelly Marie]
Correct.

[Brian]
Correct.

[Kelly Marie]
And so a lot of times, and listen, sometimes we can play that game too if we’re representing a buyer, if it’s advantageous for that buyer, and we know that we’re going to protect them, but we look at dates, right? So if they’re going to get their house all squared away before we’ve got to close on this other house or before the timeline lines up and it’s safe to do so, we may put forth a regular offer as well. But when we’re representing a seller, we want to make sure that we are digging in and talking to these lenders and making sure, because we’ve had situations arise where we call the lender and they say, oh no, this is definitely a contingent offer, but the agent didn’t present it that way to us.

And if we would have just taken it, again, as just a homeowner looking at it, we wouldn’t think to ask those questions.

[Pippin]
Well, and fair to a buyer’s agent, if you are playing within your third-party financing dates and you back out, you have the right to back out. Now, it’s shady, but it happens. Agents are protecting who they’re working for.

And so if I don’t ask those questions, they’re not going to tell me. But if I know to ask the questions, then we get into a conversation that’s a lot more honest. And so that’s another way that we help.

The other issue that we see a lot is our appraisals. An appraisal is just what is your home worth? What does the bank think your home is worth?

And if you’re selling your house at 250, but you have an offer in at 265, will that home appraise at 265? If it does not appraise at 265, who is going to bring the cash difference? Because the bank will not pay that.

So a buyer has to have that cash to make up the difference. And that does not include your closing costs. It does not include your down payment.

This is extra. And so explaining that to a first-time home buyer is also very difficult because they’re the first time they’re doing this and you have to really spell it out, write it out, show them the difference, and then explain to them you need this much extra cash.

[Kelly Marie]
It all really just goes back to communication. We really school our buyers as well as our sellers. And we are helping close deals.

We just had another deal close yesterday where we found out through the neighbor that in our offer that we presented, it was not all cash, but we found out through the neighbor that there were other offers which we knew, but some of those were cash offers. And how did our people win the bid against a cash offer? And I can tell you a lot of that is communication.

I mean, we had several offers on this Anna house and a couple of those offers that came in, the agents never even called us. The offer just appeared in our inbox. And we are, I mean, we obviously don’t make the decision, right?

The seller makes the decision. But when we go back to that seller and we say, hey, here’s all the offers, these three people over here, these agents, they reached out to us. They called us.

They told us about their buyers. They wrote letters about their buyers. They’re giving us a backstory about their buyers and why these buyers want this house so badly.

These other three people, we just have the offer. We haven’t spoken to them. We know nothing about them.

And again, those things all add up, you know, and we do that. We sit down, we write the letters for our buyers. I mean, I’ve sat down and creep people’s Facebook pictures and posted those inside the letters and really try to tell a story so that the seller is connected to that buyer.

[Pippin]
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we just closed last month, a first time home buyer at a 275 price point, which is not easy to do.

So it can be done, but it helps when you’re working with somebody who truly cares. And we do truly care. This may be getting really political, but we do also pray over our clients.

And then communication and knowledge. It’s important.

[Brian]
Yeah. Nice. So you guys said something that is really interesting to me.

It’s something I’d actually never heard of till about three or four years ago. And that’s the letter that people write. Right.

And so tell me about that. How important is that? And it’s something literally I’d never heard of till about three years ago.

[Kelly Marie]
So it’s really funny because, again, when you’re in real estate, it depends on what side of the table you’re on.

[Brian]
Right.

[Kelly Marie]
So when we represent a seller, we tell the seller from the beginning, we ask them, we say, do you want to read the letters? Should they come? Or do you want to just keep this straight business?

Sure. Okay. Because some people will react with their heart.

They may walk away from some money if they’re reacting with their heart. Or is this truly business? So we usually ask our sellers, what do you want right from the very beginning?

If they want to read the letters, we will provide the letters. Okay. When we represent a buyer in a seller’s market like we’re in right now, we always write the letters.

And we let them know, hey, there’s a chance that these letters might not get read because that’s what we do when we’re representing the seller. Right. But on the buyer side, we do everything that we can to make that transaction personal, to make that buyer feel like somebody versus just numbers on a piece of paper.

[Pippin]
But that also comes into, Kelly Marie, when we, both of us do this. We pick up the phone and we’re like, hi, Mr. Seller’s agent.

[Kelly Marie]
Yes.

[Pippin]
My buyer is awesome. Oh my gosh, you should see them. They have, you know, this is the first time they have worked so hard.

They have saved this much money by themselves. Nobody has given them a thing. They are so cute.

They are hoping to start their family here. I tell them all about them. So we’re already giving them the letter just by talking to them.

The letter just reinforces what we’re saying. And we’ve won, that’s how I won the one I was just telling you about. And then in February, we had a couple come from California.

And they were, when I say older couple, they just had older kids. They were in their mid-30s buying their first home. And they had saved $100,000.

And that’s a big deal. And so I was explaining to the seller’s agent why we should have this house in Frisco with a pool. And I had her write a letter.

I added two. We put pictures, the whole nine yards. And they had owned that home the entire time.

And they loved that. And we did win that offer. Out of 26 offers, we won.

And they live in it and it’s awesome. And that was in February, right at the height of it. It was crazy then, but it just took off after that.

So it does matter. It really does matter.

[Kelly Lamont]
So it sounds to me like what you two are saying is that you’re valuing the intrinsic value of the home alongside the monetary value of the home. And that’s something that many agents may not necessarily recognize.

[Pippin]
Correct. So if you look at that, that’s right. If you look at the Anna Home that we just went under contract on yesterday, we had nine offers.

Three of them, I told them, don’t bother because they told me the list price that they were going to come in at. And I just was you’re already too low. We had two really strong offers that were very similar to each other.

One of them was an investor for cash. The other one was a person living with an autistic son. And when you looked at them, and yes, money does matter, but they were very, very similar.

Our sellers chose the family and they chose the story. A lot of people do.

[Kelly Marie]
Well, and most people, their home is so much more than just brick and mortar. We always say it’s kind of like our tagline, a home is so much more than a home. It’s where families are made and memories are made and families are raised and whatnot.

And so people care about who that next buyer is and how important that house is to that buyer. So if you can relay that information, that message to the seller, then it just kind of gives your person a little bit of a leg up.

[Pippin]
Well, and that’s why we’re called the Meaningful Moves team. We really do put meaning into, yeah, we care.

[Kelly Lamont]
Yeah, it’s like I’ve noticed just, I live relatively close by your offices. And I’ve noticed in my area of the neighborhood, all the kids, all the families that have kids that were near to my age have all moved out and there’s new families coming in. So it’s like the next cyclist is starting to happen.

Totally.

[Pippin]
I’m seeing that in my neighborhood too. It’s crazy. Yeah, us too.

[Kelly Lamont]
Yeah.

[Brian]
One more question, guys. And then actually not one more, two more questions, but I want to get this one in. One of the things we are seeing people getting inspections, even though the sellers have waived or the buyers and sellers, I guess, have waived their option period, but they’re getting the inspection anyway, because they want, rightfully so, right?

Okay. We’re buying this, what are we buying? What are you guys seeing and how are option periods inspections?

You talked about appraisals a little bit, but the other things around a transaction, how are those things being affected right now?

[Kelly Marie]
I can talk a little bit about that because I have personal experience with this. So I listed my house in December and thank goodness I was under contract and moved before the crazy really took part right in February. But at the end of the year, I went under contract and I accepted a buyer who gave, they offered no option.

And honestly, we had never seen that.

[Pippin]
Never.

[Kelly Marie]
It’s the first time we had ever seen an offer come through in our almost 15 years where they were like, we’re just not going to do an option. And I thought, how does that work? I mean, if you have no option, then you can’t back out due to the unrestricted right, because you don’t own the unrestricted right to back out now, right?

[Brian]
Right. Yeah.

[Kelly Marie]
But we all know too, that there are many other backouts for a buyer. There are other ways that they can back out of a contract. So what ended up happening with me was I accepted their offer with no option.

And then I scratched my head a little bit when I saw the inspection come through, because I’m like, wait, why are you doing an inspection? You don’t have an option. But obviously they want to, to your point, you don’t want to buy a house that’s falling in, right?

You want to make sure that you want to know what’s going on with it. And so they did. And they did come forth with a repair amendment.

And I thought, well, that’s odd. Now I am obviously an agent, right? I’m in the industry.

My husband has been a project manager for a very prominent builder for 23 years in the area. And I did end up, I did do just because I felt like it was the ethical right thing to do. I did negotiate repairs and I did pretty much every repair that they asked for.

That’s just me. I have since found out that technically in that scenario, the seller does not have to do anything. That’s right.

They do not have to do anything. Could the buyer choose another way to back out of that contract? They could.

They could back out of that contract using another route. But to answer the question, a seller in that scenario, they don’t have to do any repairs.

[Pippin]
Again, it comes down to communication. I know I sound like a broken record, but we school our sellers before we even list. Listen, any buyer with a good buyer’s agent does not matter.

They are going to do an inspection because they need to know that the foundation is okay, that the HVAC is not 35 years old and hanging on by tape.

[Brian]
That never happens.

[Pippin]
Right.

[Brian]
Exactly.

[Pippin]
And so I school them like, listen, if there is something crazy, it doesn’t matter who’s buying your house. You want to fix it for them. It’s the right thing to do.

And there have been times where we’ve been like, no, we’re not because this was an actual great inspection and we’re not going to fix the caulking around the shower. But if it is something big, so if you school and talk and communicate and everybody goes in with clear eyes, people are not shocked and scared when they’re like, wait, they want $5,000 in closing costs to cover repairs. And I’m like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can negotiate this.

Let’s look at big stuff. And it does help to have a builder. We can call him and kind of get some quotes that are pretty accurate and give a number.

But it just comes down to communication and then just realizing to what we also tell everybody, whether we’re the buyer’s agent or the seller’s agent, it takes four parties working together to make a smooth transaction. That’s the buyer, the buyer’s agent, the seller and the seller’s agent. If we can all four work together, because our goal is the same, we want to close this house.

And if we can work together, realizing we do this as a group effort, then it’s usually pretty smooth. And so for the most part, I feel like we do very well in that. And we do have smooth transactions.

Every transaction is different. That’s something else we’ve learned. And every person and personality is different.

But stay calm. We figure it out. Doesn’t mean we don’t have hiccups, but we we keep them as smooth and our bumps as smooth as possible.

[Kelly Marie]
And you know, something that you mentioned in talking about inspections. One of the things that we love about working with you is that you provide a very detailed inspection, not only with pictures, with PDFs, but also with videos where you show, hey, here’s your drippy faucet. Hey, here’s this, here’s that.

And one of the things that we try to have every seller do is get the home inspection before you list the house. That way, it’s not a surprise. And we feel again, back to our broken record of communication, it is really paramount.

That is what makes everything go smooth. And if your seller is not caught off guard, and also it gives them a good advantage too, because if you do have another inspector that comes in who maybe is not as savvy as you or doesn’t know what they’re talking about, which listen, in sellers markets, you see a lot of bad home inspectors and you see a lot of bad agents. They just want to get in for the money.

They think we’re going to get in while the getting’s good. And they really muddy the waters for the rest of us that are trying to do an upstanding job.

[Brian]
They do. And they undercut the market.

[Kelly Marie]
A hundred percent. Absolutely. But that is something that we really ask our sellers to do before they list their house.

And then that way, when the repairs do come, they already know what to expect. They already know what this is going to cost them.

[Brian]
Um, what is, I guess, the best advice you could give to somebody right now? If somebody was trying to buy a home right now, yeah.

[Kelly Marie]
If there was just one thing, it would be to call Kelly Marie and Pippin Galloway.

[Pippin]
I’m laughing. Okay. In all seriousness, that is serious, but in all seriousness, we tell our buyers and our sellers all the time, they’ll say, Oh, I hate to bother you with this dumb question.

And what we tell them all the time, knowledge is power. The more, you know, the better it is. And so that is my number one.

If you want to buy a house in this market, ask, don’t be afraid to ask. Nothing is too dumb. Nothing is too little.

Knowledge is power. And the more, you know, the more, um, the right, more ready you are to buy.

[Brian]
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks guys. How can, uh, how can people get ahold of you?

[Kelly Marie]
They can email us at info at meaningful moves.com. They can call us, they can Google us. I mean, we’re everywhere.

[Pippin]
Or just call the McKinney Coldwell Banker Apex office and they will put you in touch with us. Okay.

[Brian]
Very good. And you guys are, you guys do Facebook, Instagram, all of it.

[Pippin]
Yep. We’re everywhere folks.

[Kelly Lamont]
Any last words, Kelly? No, no. I just, I really enjoyed the conversation.

It was really good.

[Brian]
Thank y’all for having us.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)