House Einstein Podcast #124 Transcript

Cleaned from the Premiere Pro transcript export. Timestamps were removed, speaker labels were mapped where clear, line wraps were repaired, and obvious transcription errors were corrected lightly without rewriting the conversation.

Osman: After every mission, the Army asks four questions. What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? And what do we sustain or improve? That's the After Action Review, and it's the reason elite units get better every single time they go out, win or lose.

Hamish: And with that, I mean we're going if you. Okay, let's just go.

Osman: Welcome to the House Einstein podcast. And you're probably wondering why are we talking about that? And the reason is that as a learning organization, we care deeply about improving everything we do. And I first came across something very similar to the military's After Action Review, when I worked for investment companies. And the rest of the investment companies I worked for was a small, well, actually a pretty large family office. And after the deal was done, at least in play, right, like the investment had been made, we did a postmortem and the idea was to understand what we did right, what we did wrong, what can we learn from it? And it was a formal written document that the deal team put together and then later discussed. And as an analyst or associate, not a director or not a not a senior person in these companies, I was often tasked with the analytics, the task of putting a lot of this report together. And I thought it was a great idea, and I was surprised that most companies don't do something similar. So when I found out that, hey, the military does this too, I thought, hey, that's something that actually resonates really powerfully for us at House Einstein. And you know, we recently had a mission that did not go as expected. And I think it deserves an After Action Review.

Osman: Or again, what we used to call in the investment community a postmortem. And actually we should be doing this for every deal, not just the ones that are.

Hamish: That don't work.

Osman: That don't work out. We really because there's opportunities to learn from each and every transaction, each and every property. We manage each and everything we each little project.

Hamish: Every pie we've got our finger in. There's a chance to check the recipe.

Osman: Every pie we have a finger in.

Hamish: Correct? Cut to an AI image of fingers. Right? Right. Exactly. Okay.

Osman: So with that. Yeah. Welcome to the House Einstein podcast. This is House Einstein Podcast 124, and I'm your host, Osman Parvez. And with me is Hamish Crabb.

Hamish: And howdy, howdy.

Osman: Welcome to the pod.

Hamish: We're in person yet again. And this will be our default I think going forward personally, it's very nice to be face to face and I think it's easier to be more conversational. So, good to be back. Thank you for having me on the show today.

Osman: It is good to be back. And Hamish is the guy behind the scenes and setting up everything in addition to co-hosting with me. And last week we had a special pod with a guest in person. And going forward, we are likely to have more of those. But I agree that there's a very different vibe when we're in person. It's more conversational. It's less perhaps me talking and fire hosing information, and it's more of a bit of a dialogue. So I think it's a good vibe. Plus the cameras are way better. The sound quality is way better. Yeah. And hopefully that bleeds out into what the audience is enjoying as well.

Hamish: Yeah. So today's on tap. Maybe to kind of lightly intro it. Our voices might sound a little raspy, and your actual sleep quality could be blamed on this too. There are many fires currently raging across Colorado and the air quality today is abysmal. I at least have a little rasp in my throat and the drive. I live in Westminster, maybe a quick 20 minutes from Boulder, and the drive into town was depressing, to say the least.

Osman: And I would say great observation that it's the air quality as well as a little bit of sleep deprivation for me this week. So if I sound a bit like a space cadet, that's why. And hopefully we can stay on track. The mission at House Einstein is to help you make a smarter real estate decision. House Einstein is the real estate brokerage that was founded here in Boulder, Colorado in 2013. That is our sponsor for the podcast. The podcast is entertainment. If you're thinking about making a real estate decision and you are a client of the brokerage, please reach out to your House Einstein agent. If you'd like to consider becoming a client, you can find us at House Einstein. And once you've engaged a working relationship with us, then we're more than happy to advise you on your real estate situation. But otherwise, please don't make any decisions on what you hear in this pod. This is entertainment and that keeps our attorneys happy. I think we can skip the Bios. People at this point probably know who we are, but.

Hamish: If you don't, it's on our website houseeinstein.com. Right. Okay. So we're good plug for that.

Osman: We're going to try to go a little faster through the pod. So we don't bore people. And you know, things that they've heard so many times before. And let me walk through the docket today. So our closing table topic that's our core topic for the pod is all about a failed listing. And we're going to do a postmortem analysis or and After Action Review, we're going to ask ourselves the same questions that the Army asks to make, to make it simple and repeatable as a structure for an After Action Report. And then we're going to hit Tales from the Trenches. Tales from the Trenches are based on our real lived experience buying and selling real estate with clients, and often a story that, well, might surprise you. That's the point of Tales from the Trenches.

Hamish: Hopefully entertains.

Osman: Yeah.

Hamish: Hopefully.

Osman: It's it might be entertaining. Now, I can assure you that at the time this particular situation was not entertaining, but it's a little bit of a look behind the curtain and what goes on in real estate that your agent probably isn't telling you about and that you, unless you are an agent with a lot of experience, likely have not experienced yourself. And then we're going to do a little bit of a market update, because today is July 1st, and even though the data is very well, the data is very preliminary. So we're going to look at what's under contract and what's currently available. That's a good meter for the pace of the market. And it's a pretty easy and quick analysis to do for both the City of Boulder, Boulder County. And if there's time, we might do Louisville or Lafayette. Yeah, one of the L's.

Hamish: One of the L's.

Osman: And then we Hamish and I have chosen five Sales of the Week. These are notable transactions that we think illustrate a price point or a neighborhood or frankly, it's just a cool house or an interesting deal. And we want to talk about it. So we're going to cover five of those. And as a reminder, this is allowed because these transactions have closed. We are not allowed to talk about transactions that are currently on the market in a public format like this podcast. But I do write about active listings in our newsletter. You just have to sign up for that newsletter. It is a newsletter for prospective clients that doesn't actually establish a working relationship, but it's a way for you to start to get to know how we think about active listings. And perhaps it might encourage you to reach out to House Einstein the brokerage and pick a fantastic agent to represent you. And one additional caveat I'm a little late on the latest newsletter when it gets to this time of year. This is not unusual because client activity starts to get really high.

Hamish: And it has.

Osman: And so at House Einstein, we typically focus on principles rather than really hard rules. And one of those principles is that clients come first. And whether it's a real estate transaction, like just this week, there's a listing that we had two different clients initially expressed interest, and now that they both have said that they're not purchasing that house or they've checked it off their list, it's a potential investment for me as a local landlord and investor in real estate. So I'm now looking at it. But I've had to go back to one of those clients because they started asking about it again and make it really clear that you already said no on this property. If you were saying, yes, I need to stop all activity because I'm not going to compete with our clients. So clients come first is a key principle at House Einstein. And when it comes to. This podcast, podcast or the newsletter, these things get a little delayed sometimes because of client activity. And then in. So then we've got a little segment that we call Shameless Self-Promotion, usually less than a few minutes long.

Hamish: Or not 30 I think average at this rate. Yeah. What's that? It's like a minute. 30. Yeah.

Osman: It's a very short segment. And the idea of Shameless Self-Promotion is we want you to to hear about what one of our buyers or one of our sellers and see if you, as a listener, might have a good match for that. And then we've got our news stories and, boy, the news stories this week. Obviously, Hamish already mentioned the fires. And then we just had a stabbing on Pearl Street. And last night there was another sort of stabbing happening with the Democratic. The Democratic and Republican primaries that just happened in the state of Colorado. So those are our hot take stories. And then for Carve Outs. Hamish, what is the tree that fell?

Hamish: I guess you'll have to wait till the end.

Osman: You're not going to tease it at all.

Hamish: A tree fell and I share some lessons about it. I go into DIY versus paying a pro, preventative, maintenance, all sorts of things about my journey and home ownership. So okay, I've got the Poetic Tree That Fell title, but you'll have to wait till the end for the actual details.

Osman: Okay? And I'll be talking about Van Brain 2.0 and Van Brain was. Well, I guess you'll have to wait to hear what fan brain is all about, but I think it'll be entertaining for you, especially for you adventure van nerds. And I know you're out there. You're my people or I'm yours. But I think that'll be entertaining. So that's our docket for today. Thanks for joining us.

Hamish: One thing to close out. Time codes will be in the description. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll get all the links for everything. If you are listening, there will be a link to this episode on our website, which will contain continued links for all sorts of things. There's a character count on the RSS feed, and so I kind of just load it up with all the things. But if you're watching on YouTube, you've got all the links. If you're listening to it, you'll find a link to this episode on our website, and then you can navigate from there.

Osman: And where are we with transcripts? What's the latest there?

Hamish: They should all be adding I'm learning that there are two different, probably three different formats of transcripts. There's like VTT, JSON and then text and text would be like your subtitles VTT I think is like your closed captioning, which is where it's got like a bunch of time codes and it's basically impossible to read. And then JSON somewhere in the middle. If you're listening and you know about this stuff, reach out to me. It would be super helpful. But as far as it goes, Apple Podcasts has a transcript, YouTube's got the auto captioning, and then RSS feed is auto generating transcripts in a format. I'm not really sure how that's distributed.

Osman: Okay.

Hamish: So we're getting there.

Osman: All right. We're getting there. Yeah. As as with everything else, there's always a learning curve and there's constant, attitude towards improvement without, you know, we're already at a very high level, but we're working always room to make things better that, you know, there's constantly improving is something we care about.

Hamish: Incremental. Yeah.

Osman: Which is a great segue to why we're doing this postmortem. And I guess let me do the.

Hamish: The.

Osman: Background intro.

Sponsor: This podcast is sponsored by House Einstein. We serve buyers and sellers in Colorado, focusing on Boulder, Denver, and several mountain resort towns, including Breckenridge and Winter Park. Our mission is simple: help you make a smarter real estate decision. You can learn more at House Einstein or our YouTube channel, where you'll find videos on neighborhoods, specific listings, and much, much more.

Osman: I'm not going to mention the address of this property. It's likely going back on the market, and it's a listing that we took last fall, and we took it at a time period that I was not in the saddle, literally. I didn't look at this listing. It came through a friend who said he wanted to sell it. He's leaving the country and it's not in the market we spent a lot of time in. Although we cover Fort Collins, I've listed and helped clients buy homes in Fort Collins. It's not our primary market, and normally within the course of a 30 to 90 day listing period, right. If everything goes right, it shouldn't really matter because we're not in the property management business. We're in the property selling business. Although in some cases, agents, when there's nobody taking care of a home, the home is vacant end up doing a lot of property management types of things. So the long and short of this is that it was and still is an entry level home. And we did our analysis. We we made our recommendations and we expected. So the first question is what was supposed to happen. And what was supposed to happen was that it was price right. Marketed well, and it was under contract within two weeks and sold within 45 days.

Osman: That's what should have happened at the entry level of the Fort Collins market. What actually happened is that we had it on market for almost ten months, and during which time period the home was improved in terms of its marketability, some of the issues that were present in that House that I didn't know when we listed it, the, the, the smoky smell, the need for deep cleaning. I didn't realize how impaired it was by the busy roadway. Yeah. And how potentially not well functioning the association was. There were a bunch of things, but we didn't even get to the association problems. The biggest issue was it didn't show well, it smelled bad walking in and it showed really poorly. And we priced it like homes that showed well and homes that were not in compromised locations. So I am seeing you hit your mute button and I'm wondering why you're hitting your.

Hamish: Angling it. So before I move it on mute.

Osman: Got it. Yeah. So so what really happened? So let me just wrap up where we went with this after all of these months. We did. The seller did agree to cut the price pretty dramatically, but it wasn't cut deep enough. And we started to have some issues with the listing, including some petty vandalism, some property damage from association hired contractors, and it was very difficult for us to check on the property because of the hour and ten minutes of driving to go get to it. And so we would get a phone call that the lights are on, that somebody had left the lights on or left the door unlocked. And the neighbor, for some reason, wanted us to. I mean, look, if it's our listing and we can drive by it within 15 minutes, absolutely. But if it's an hour and ten or 2.5 hours round trip, roughly, it becomes very difficult to fit that in on a very short notice to go do these things. And so what became clear is, rather than it was a short listing that sold very quickly at a reasonable price, it turned into a long listing where either the market's going to come up or the seller eventually is going to capitulate on price and come down. And it at my suggestion, we terminated the listing agreement and allowed another agent who's local, who can easily get to this property and manage it to take over.

Hamish: Can be more hands on. Right?

Osman: We felt like that would serve the client better because they weren't willing to cut the price where it really needed to go. And even though they had made some improvements, they weren't ready to pay for professional staging. So we were in this position where it makes more sense for an agent that can drive to it in ten minutes to take on a long term project like this. Definitely. And inevitably, either the price is going to have to come down further or the market's going to come up, which it might if rates drop or activity picks up again. Yeah. So that's what actually happened. Why was there a difference. And this is my mistake. And I think it's really important to own. Do you want to speak to anything else. Do you want to jump in before I. Yeah I.

Hamish: You know, like, you were out of pocket. So I went and saw it. I had the conversation with the seller of like, you know, we put together staging consultation. These are things that we strongly recommend you do. You don't have to do it. But it comes with the caveat that this is a recommendation based on, you know, decades of experience and best practices that will get your house to a quicker sale and show better. And there were a few things that weren't done. The smell I'm saddened by, because I didn't pick up on that entirely at all. And that got mitigated ozone via ozone, which was nice. But yeah, I was bummed about that. They ended up adding some new carpet. I went out and reshot the photography and the marketing, which was solid, but, yeah, it's just unfortunate and it's good to be doing the postmortem, but I am kind of paying to buy the, you know, the ouch of the situation.

Osman: I mean, the key is to own the mistake, right? Or what the series of mistakes are. And absolutely reshooting it was useful. Getting the smoke smell out was useful. Putting in new carpet improved its marketability. But all of that should have been done before we actually went live. And so that's one of the mistakes. Pricing it as if it wasn't in a really compromised location was another mistake. And for me personally, I should have seen it before we went live. And because of timing and travel, you were the only one who saw it. And at the end of the day, responsibility falls to me. And whether we're when we're successful, it's absolutely a team success. When there's a failure, I think it's really important to understand who's ultimately responsible for the failure. And I'm ultimately responsible for the failure, although it's still not a failure from a listing perspective. It's going back on the market, and now it's an agent that's local and can easily keep an eye on the place, drive by it, turn off the lights, make sure that there's nothing weird going on, and possibly deal with the contractor issue that recently occurred to the garage. Yeah.

Hamish: That one was.

Osman: Where a paving contractor ran into the garage and caused damage to the garage door. So now the seller who's out of town, out of the country, has a property that needs repairs made and, yeah, needs somebody to keep an eye on how this is going on. Right. The one one of the most important things that you should understand about real estate is that it's a really bad idea to try to manage contractors remotely in any market. And I'm sorry to say this, contractors, but there are people that will take advantage of an owner because they're not present on the ground to see what's actually going on day after day. And if you're in, that's why there's this position called a buyer's or an owner's rep. When you have a major construction project whose job is simply they're disconnected from the GC, their their job is just to pay attention to materials on site and milestones and code and quality of work. That's what they're reporting on on a regular basis, with photography and videography and high end projects or commercial projects, that's what you need. And even for a small project like a new garage door, like just the time involved to do it right. I felt like we were not going to be able to handle that, and it was going to be far better to have this, this new agent take over because of their proximity.

Osman: So. So why was there this difference? I think that part of that was my lack of knowledge about the location problems, and also my confidence in the low end of the market.

Hamish: That's fair.

Osman: Because here in Boulder, at the low end of the market, presuming it's not in a compromised location, a home will typically or has major.

Hamish: Issues in the sales of week. We're going to talk about a home in a very compromised location. But there's a couple of factors. I think that.

Osman: It's priced almost $1 million below the same house. Not sorry. It's priced almost $400,000 below the exact same house in a non compromised location. So when you do the math on that, we're talking about 40% ish difference in list price because of the compromised location, even though it actually has huge investment potential. So that's a good one. We'll get to that in Sales of the Week. It illustrates this exact point. So another takeaway for me is even though this person really wanted us to list their home and is a good friend, it's it's really important to look past that as an agent to make sure you're serving the best interests of the client. And of course, we deeply appreciate their trust and we wish them the best with the sale. That's why we gave up the listing. Despite investing all of this time and energy and money, multiple visits, open houses, photography, videography, plus the budget we've spent on advertising. All of those things, not just our professional time. Yeah. And it's just it's it is significant and but it's also a decision that was based on principles. Are we serving our client to the best of our ability and their needs?

Osman: Why are we serving our client for the best of our needs, not their needs? And I think the best service to that client is if they have a local agent who can check on the place and a competent local agent, I don't think they'll do as good of a job with photography and videography and all the rest of the things we do, right? But at the same time, I feel like in this particular circumstance, it would be better if they could easily stop by the place in 10 or 15 minutes.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: What a help. Yeah.

Hamish: Like, yeah. That's especially, you know, a long listing period. Sure. But there seemed to be a continued amount of things that would happen to the property that required on person presence, insight, presence. And, you know, I think beyond just this listing, there is kind of this expectation between sellers and agents to assume kind of a property management role. And some sellers get it. Some sellers are like, this property isn't entirely my responsibility, but we've totally had some where it's like, well, I'm not there. Can you go and shovel the snow for the showing and stuff like that? And on occasion we can. But the expectation, I mean, we can't do it from like a proper property management standpoint, you know.

Osman: So in contrast, we had a listing earlier this year with a local seller and even though it was not their primary home, they weren't living there. They could easily stop by because their primary home is five minutes away. And so they were there. Mowing the lawn. Yeah, checking on the place virtually every single day. They had installed a camera on the front yard to keep an eye on who's coming and leaving. They weren't spying on people, but they wanted to make sure they understood what's going on with this vacant home. In some markets there, there's a risk of squatter showing up. It's not that common in here in Boulder, although I have heard of it happening. It's just not common.

Hamish: Have you experienced? No. Okay. Not a tales from the trench.

Osman: I have no tale from the French waters, but it's. It certainly is possible. Right. We're seeing bigger city problems here in Colorado than we used to see. And so I think the, the biggest lesson is to understand the nature of how this property is going to age and be maintained with a seller that's not local. And in this particular case, I thought, this is an easy, fast sale. We're going to price it right. Market it right. It's going to be under contract and sold in 45 days. Done. In which case it may not need constant upkeep. It may not need somebody wiping the floors and vacuuming the carpet and flushing the toilets and washing the windows and all the things to keep it in show condition, because it's going to sell so fast. And I was caught a little bit blindsided by how slowly, slowly it was. It was the pace of this listing, the people coming to see it like it was extremely slow. So that really surprised me. And here in Boulder, if it was in a good location, it would have sold very, very quickly. So it was kind of a bit of a puzzle.

Hamish: Yeah. I, I'm completely with you. I think there were some, you know, like the price we'd chosen. We recommend our price and not. I don't really want to put any blame on the seller because I'm also become good friends with them. But they were very sticky to lower the price. They also had their get my money out and be done price in their head and couldn't stomach below it. And so we were stuck between a challenging location and the seller's best price, and trying to kind of walk that line there to to make a good sale. And at the end of the day, it is the seller's decision on what they want to list at.

Osman: Yeah, I feel like we were compromised a little bit because of the loyalty and the friendship factor to not be as brutally honest as we should have been.

Hamish: And once you were and.

Osman: Yeah, once, once we finally were, they agreed to lower the price somewhat. But they we really should have gone for even.

Hamish: More and aggressively.

Osman: And early. Right. So in a downward moving market or an upward moving market, you should lead the market. And when it became clear we were in a downward moving market, we should have priced more aggressively. But the so here's the thing. We can't push a set. We can't set the lowest price. Yeah right.

Hamish: Certainly not ethically.

Osman: Well no you can't. Right. Like the seller has to agree to the marketing of the home. And that the most important component of that is the list price. And if they don't agree to it, we don't make price changes. So we're sort of handcuffed once the listing begins. So there are a lot of mistakes made. And I think one of the other things to think about is how we one of the things we need to ask ourselves when we take a listing that comes from our network and our friendship circles, is are we being compromised by the nature of that friendship to not deliver professional advice? And in this case, I feel like we were influenced to list it too high because we want him to make as much money as possible. Of course, we do that for every one of our show.

Hamish: It's like, oh, you're out of country, you know? We'll try and set you up, you know, you know.

Osman: And so, so I think we there are agents that will take on property management, and most agents will do some things that sound a lot like property management. We'll turn off the lights. We'll turn on the lights before every showing. We'll make sure the place looks good. We show up half an hour early for every list, every time there's an appointment to show the home. That's really hard to perform to. It's something that we.

Hamish: Strive.

Osman: We sometimes offer, particularly at the higher end of the market. But at the lower end of the market, there's this expectation that things sell so quickly, that level of concierge service is actually not necessary. So if you so the problem becomes do you know or do you not do you really how confident are you that things are going to sell that fast, that you don't need to have this level of upkeep and what value you put on that level of upkeep? If it's a local seller and they're doing that, that's one thing. If it's if you're out of town selling one of your homes here in Boulder, you really need to have a conversation with the listing agent about what services they're going to do to keep the home in marketing marketable condition over the entire length of the listing agreement, and for for a higher end home it can get it can get pretty complex, because you're talking about a home that needs to be professionally cleaned every week, whether or not it has had any showings. Right. So this is what I would expect. If you're trying to market a $5 million home, we need to make sure there's a house cleaner that is scheduled to be there. And while we have that house cleaner, that's not a normal service of a real estate agent to a seller, we can connect you with a house cleaning service.

Osman: But that's not part of the commission structure. That's not part of our marketing services. Yeah, it is something that needs it. We can make sure that the works being done, we can check on the place, especially if it's here in Boulder. We can check on it on a regular basis. We can turn on the lights before every showing. We can meet potential buyers at the property. But there's additional things beyond that yardwork, snow removal, regular cleanings, window cleanings. And then what happens if there's a plumbing leak? But like, do you have systems to like, is there an alarm that goes off and they make those alarms like vacant homes with an out-of-state seller or a particular niche with a unique set of problems that we did not properly address with this listing because of the expectation that it would sell very quickly, which it didn't.

Hamish: So sustain or improve. I think you covered that. I'm thinking. And listeners, you guys are getting quite the peek behind the curtain because we haven't had like a postmortem before the recording of the postmortem. The staging consultation, I think is a fairly fair way of giving you a site into what the property looks like. Say you're out of town. Should I be, like, maybe I send you that to look at. But then there's that expectation that you are pulled away from whatever you're doing.

Osman: Well, we don't normally do staging consultations unless we have the listing already. And we could have chosen to all.

Hamish: That's a fair point.

Osman: Yeah, right. So our order of operations are that we will meet with a prospective seller. We will look at their property, we will walk through our presentation of services of what we offer. And we will also of course talk about price and we'll go through the comps. And then I usually tell sellers, I pretty much always tell sellers that this price is today's price, as if you had prepped and done all the work to sell the home. If it's gonna, it's going to take 30 days, 60 days, 90 days to do all the work. And at that point, right before we go active, we need to look at the active competitors to this home. And you are invited to join us for that, for those previews, to fully understand how this home slots in among its competition, because if you don't properly price the home to its competition, all you're doing is selling other homes, right? Or you're leaving significant money on the table. And we don't want you to leave money on the table accidentally if you intentionally want to price your home low, which isn't. Which is a real listing strategy, right? Like there are people that price it high intentionally, and there's people that price it low intentionally. Those are both legitimate strategies. It should never be an accident.

Osman: And if you know it's an accident when you got nine offers that first weekend and you weren't expecting it, that's either the listing agent didn't price right or they or they did and they didn't tell you they were going to. They wanted they pushed you to a low price to get it sold fast.

Hamish: A sale of the week coming soon to a podcast near you. Yeah, we're going to be talking.

Osman: About that for sure.

Hamish: Just a showing we head over the weekend. But, I think that's a fair postmortem.

Osman: There's always room for improvement. I feel like maybe I'm being a little bit too negative on our services, but at the same time.

Hamish: I also don't want to be negative on our seller. And maybe that's the friend thing coming back.

Osman: It's not. This is it's not his. It's it's 100% our responsibility. And there are multiple off ramps during the listing period that we could have taken and we didn't. And so I think that, the compromised location sale is a unique challenge, similar to the divorcing couple sale, similar to estate sales, the higher end listing that has many competitors, like how does the failure rate on those listings is through the roof? So one of the things that's kind of funny is we don't often have failed listings. The vast majority of our listings sell sell within the range that we thought they would sell for sell within the time period we thought they would sell for. So when we get caught by surprise, like with this listing, I feel like there's a lot to unpack and think about. And one of the most important takeaways for me is to not fully commit without an off ramp. Until I personally have seen that house and thought seriously about its compromises. Right? And by the time I actually saw it, it was too late. We at that time, we had already invested a lot of resources, and I was willing to bet.

Hamish: And at that point, sunk cost kind of creepy.

Osman: And those were all sunk costs, 100% legitimate answer for saying that. I appreciate you saying that, but it's hard. Like the sunk cost fallacy affects everybody. It's really difficult to to actually properly mitigate sunk cost fallacy.

Hamish: It's right there with gambling. Like as far as kind of like I'm in so deep, you know, the next one or the next day.

Osman: We've already done a ton of the work. Yeah. And so now the risk of overpricing because of its poor location doesn't feel like a risk that I want to off ramp on, because we've already done all this work. And at that point we probably should have, like, realized that it needs to be so much lower than this price because of the compromised location.

Hamish: And maybe that's the thought trigger is like, if we're thinking to ourselves, we've already done all the work, then something else needs to give. It's like that. That's our kind of trigger to start thinking about, okay, if something's got to give, is it price or, you know, is it time to think about an off ramp.

Osman: And point of I. I agree with everything you just said and point of clarification, it's not all the work right on the buy side.

Hamish: At a fair point.

Osman: On the buy side. What I tell people is there's the property selection phase. That's phase one where we are going to look at homes and we're not just hopping in the car, right. Like I'm looking at these things online. Before we schedule the appointment to make sure you understand some of the obvious compromises. Obvious to me, maybe not obvious to you, the buyer. Phase two is negotiation. That's when you decide you want to write an offer. And now we're going through comps. We're coming up with an offer strategy and we're executing on that strategy. And in some cases, that strategy is just to get you a seat at the bidding table. And in other, other occasions, that strategy is designed to try to get to the seller's bottom line and help you decide whether or not that price is going to work out or not. We're trying to advocate for a lower offer, right? That's our preferred. But in the last 7 or 8 years, we've been in bidding war central. And so it's not uncommon that we're we're just trying to get you a seat at the table, and we're trying to discourage you from overpaying for the house. Like that's a very different mission. And then the third piece, the third stage, is, once you're under contract, we're helping you with your due diligence.

Hamish: And protecting your interest.

Osman: And protecting your earnest money. If you need to exit, we need you to exit in one of the defined off ramps in the contract. And if you do that, we can get you earnest money back. And we want you to do your thorough to diligence. And that's why we have checklists and due diligence. Kickoff call. All of its designed to hold your hand as we walk from contract date to closing date. There's all this stuff that happens on the sell side. It's a little different. A lot of our work is up front because helping a seller prepare that home based on our expertise and what sells and what doesn't sell, the work that's needed in the home is part of what we do, and we do it in a PowerPoint presentation. We bring in outside staging companies, professional photography, videography. We're trying to understand how to tell the house's story. So I would say 75% of the work is before it even hits the market. And then once it's on the market, it's I would not say it's automatic. We've got open houses, we've got marketing that we do online and offline, but we are really kind of creating the perfect I don't want to say honey trap, right, but it is like it is designed to attract a certain buyer that we think particularly fits the archetype, the.

Osman: Well, it's the archetype of the it's the it's the client type. Like in our mind, this is the kind of the most likely types of buyers, and we're making sure we're marketing to those people. Once we get an offer similar, we're negotiating. And then once we're under contract, we are helping you do helping you provide the buyer with the information they request and making sure that we're very responsive to the buyers questions and concerns and moving us along all the way to closing. If there are multiple offers, we're helping you vet.

Hamish: Avoid fair housing lawsuits.

Osman: And fair housing lawsuits. Yeah, we even if there's a single offer, we're looking at that offer carefully, making sure this is a legitimate buyer that is likely to close. And it's because it's not just about price. It's price times probability of closing representation. Representation comes into play.

Hamish: Contingencies.

Osman: Multiple offers. So there's two different scenarios right. There's the listing that's been on the market for weeks or months and has one offer to work through. But before you go under contract with that buyer, even after weeks or months, you need to make sure that this this contract process makes sense and that new agents really have no idea what they're doing with those contracts, but experienced agents have seen them enough times. We know what we're doing. So so the sell side is mostly up front, like I would say roughly 75% versus on the buy side, it's more evenly distributed, like a third, a third, a third for each of those phases.

Hamish: Yeah. Fair point okay. All right. So there's some yeah some good takeaways on that. You think so. Yeah I think so. Do you think so listener comment below.

Osman: You know what I don't want what I don't want to gloss over is the emotional side of this because it sucks. It sucks to have invested so much time in the energy and at the same time knowing the best thing for our sellers, for us to step out of the deal and find somebody local. Because of the nature of this particular market segment and the nature of the this particular listing, like it is likely going to be a longer sale process, not a fast one, unless he goes for the fire sale strategy and I don't think he will. So that's it. Just it's better for the client. And so making that decision on that principle, it was easy. But the emotional side of it, it still feels like I don't know, it's not about the price point. It's like an entry level list.

Hamish: You want the satisfaction of like finished the job, right? In a sense, it's like a yeah, if you put together like a model plane, but you don't put together like add the final piece, right, or something, you're like, oh, you know, to me at least that's kind of the feeling I get behind it.

Osman: I have a funny story that is very inappropriate for the podcast, so I will share it. Very similar concept. Let's say the deal wasn't consummated and we'll leave it at that. Got it.

Hamish: I'll try and remember that to jog your memory, right.

Osman: Don't let me forget to tell you that story.

Hamish: And offline, this is totally an aside, and I think we should move on. But, trying to get any clear answer about how that HOA or anything there worked was an uphill battle with no relent. I remember when we first listed it, I had like 4 or 5 different phone numbers that I called. Five of them didn't answer. Like, you know, nobody knew who was in charge or how anything worked.

Osman: We were just trying to get documents. And then I finally got the guy and I'm like, can you send us the docs? And his answer was, I'll do it once you're under contract. Like, like, okay, this is the president of the association or the person managing a very small hey. And it became clear that this is going to be a potential deal killer. Like, even if we got the perfect offer, this person and their responsiveness or lack thereof could tank the deal. Or the docs could be so incomplete.

Hamish: In a home sitting on the market for so long, it's pretty typical for buyers to ask for that kind of stuff before you go under contract. Or at least it's good for the listing agent to have an understanding of how the high works to talk to prospective buyers. So when you're under contract is, I think, a cop out response.

Osman: And I think that going forward, we don't go live until we have all the docs as a systems and.

Hamish: Really.

Osman: Think so. We need everything in, in a like basically. So ten years ago when the Real Estate Commission added the due diligence documents deadline, most agents had no idea what to do it do with what do you do with this? And coming from the investment banking world, this just looked like a data room. Like what we need to do is assemble a data room. With all of the due diligence documents a buyer is likely to ask for before we go live. And we're finally starting to get to that point. In fact, we have a deal right now, and I was really pleasantly surprised with the amount of information we were given. And it was clear a lot of that information was structured by the previous owner seller because it predates their ownership and it's organized by year, and that is looked exactly like a data room for an investment banking deal. And I realized, why aren't we should be doing this for every one of our listings. Day one before we go live, at least before we hit day one of the listing going live, that data room needs to be complete, and if it's not complete, we hit the pause button until it is complete. And so the problem becomes there's always this rush to go to market, right? Like dealing with it right now.

Hamish: Like what, two episodes ago? We're talking about this.

Osman: Pressure to go to market is so fierce and get the photography done, the videographer done, and the client who's been working on it for months. Once all of this done yesterday. And this is why, from a systems perspective, all of this information should be gathered well in advance, like weeks or months in advance. Not the final, the final week of the list. The previous period is about finalizing the video, the photography, the listing language and the pricing. Because we're looking so closely at the active competitors from a systems perspective, all of this stuff should be. It's like in.

Hamish: The file listing agreement signed, and in the same breath of staging consultation, we send out like a, you know, it could be anything just to get it from the seller, but like a Dropbox link or something and a checklist and it's like, here's what we need.

Osman: Sounds a lot like our next steps email, doesn't it?

Hamish: Sure does.

Osman: Yeah yeah. Systems.

Hamish: Congratulations. Your under listing agreement attached to the right. Yeah.

Osman: Right okay. All right I think that we we have hit on this pretty well. And boy, even after 23 years of this business and listing and sell by buying, buy and sell hundreds of homes, there's always something to learn.

Hamish: And it's an evolving industry. It's. Yeah, it's an evolving practice. Discipline, you know.

Osman: Well, that's the reason why they call it real estate practice. I guess.

Hamish: That's true.

Osman: Okay, let's talk about our Tales from the Trenches.

Hamish: What is next? This one. You've got it. So this is before my time. The title here for the Tales from the Trenches is third time's a third time's the charm. This is before my time. It is? Yeah.

Osman: This is before your time. So it was a table mesa listing with a three time client. And they had done a ton of work on this house, and they were very good at remodeling homes, and it looked fantastic what we. And we got a ton of interest when we went live. It was one of our first high end listing videos, and our client was thrilled with every aspect of it, and they should have been. It blew away everybody else at that, even at double the price. At that point in time. Today, we're seeing a lot of high end listings that look like what we did 7 or 8 years ago. I can't remember the exact date, but 7 or 8 years ago. That sounds about right. And now, yeah, we're seeing videography and photography that's close to that, or slightly better than that. And I'm not saying that just that, like, toot my own horn. The listing went really well, and we got multiple offers that first weekend and we might seller chose the highest price that list that offer.

Hamish: So you had your system right, just backing up like you presented your spreadsheet. Oh, you just.

Osman: Still did the spreadsheet.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: And they went with the highest price and it looked pretty good. The wire we put buyer number two. So we put the second best offer in the backup position. Nice. And the first offer was significantly higher. And the person sang a good story. But then when they went under contract, they called their architect who went and looked at this house and due to the backyard setbacks and the architects desired to build something more grandiose, the buyer decided after three days they didn't want the house and they terminated on inspection, which in the Colorado contracted by and sell, is at the buyer's sole subjective discretion. And we had not put in place any of the Carve Outs that are now typical today, because this was early in the bidding war frenzies that were happening. And today, where we put stuff in the additional provisions to try to prevent this behavior. But this person, basically just their architect, decided that the backyard setbacks were too tight based on the giant home that the buyer wanted to build, and they terminated.

Hamish: And you were given that reason and the agent shared that or.

Osman: The age the agent did share that. Yeah, that's why I know. And we moved to buyer number two. The MLS doesn't show that because we immediately went to buyer number two. There was no lag in time.

Hamish: No status change.

Osman: Now the MLS could probably say you're supposed to change the status Osman.

Hamish: But technically it never went off the market.

Osman: Technically it was never actually back on the market. It was still under contract. Would be my argument if they caught us and if they did catch us, I would pay the fine if there was a fine, because the fines are minimal.

Hamish: When you say that.

Osman: Well, they are compared to, to protecting the interests of your client. Oh yeah. Right. Like the $50 fine or $100 fine for bad behavior is worth it if you're protecting your client. Because when you go from under contract back to active, people want to know what's wrong with the house. They think the buyer bailed because of an issue with the home when there was nothing wrong with the house. Buyer number two in their contract to buy and sell, had written in some language around not objecting to certain types of issues with the home. And it was they were they said something like cosmetic or pre predisposed issues they would not object to. I can't remember the exact language. Well. After ten days, what are they doing? They immediately are trying to claw back the price. And one of the things they wanted to claw back the price on was that the roof had been partially replaced a number of years earlier, and so the shingle types were slightly different and there was a different texture or look depending like.

Hamish: Like cosmetic.

Osman: Purely cosmetic. And it really frustrated the seller. And they were like, now what? And so and I had warned them that being under contract means we have just gotten on the roller coaster, not off the roller coaster. Like we can have a little celebration. But now we're about to go up and down and on a ride all the way to closing, and we don't know how the story ends until we actually are closing. No big celebrations until you have a check in your hand because, you know, it's sort of superstitious, but there are so many exits that the buyers have. And so the buyer, despite saying they wouldn't issue an objection, issued an objection. And right at that time, a the same day we got it and my seller was pissed.

Hamish: Yeah. And you're still allowing showings.

Osman: You were still allowing showings. I got a phone call from an agent in town that I think of as a respected colleague, and she said, Osman, my client loved this house. I think they had come to the open house. I know you're under contract. They've been regretting not moving faster. Is there any way I could get this house for my client? And I said to this agent.

Hamish: You're not going to believe.

Osman: Not going to believe it, because your timing is impeccable. We just got the inspection objection. And despite promising to not play games, this buyer is playing games and wants to claw back the price. Right? Like it's it's obvious that's what they want. They regret the price. They put it under contract and they're purely just trying to claw back.

Hamish: And we see it all the time.

Osman: And this is what I told her. I told her, if you want this house, I need you to get me an ironclad contract. No exits in the next 24 hours. And if you can do that, I will do everything I can to tell buyer number two to take a hike, which means stonewalling them. We're not giving you anything.

Hamish: As per the contract.

Osman: And even rudely stonewalling. Yeah. Call the buyer's agent and say, you know, we think your buyers a jerk and we think you're a jerk and we don't care about anything you've written. We're not responding to it at all. No way. Yeah. Because you want them to terminate. So you want them because. So the buyer, the seller doesn't have any rights for termination, right? No it doesn't. So your options are what can you do? You can refuse to answer the phone calls and emails. You can you can offer them some profanity. You can insult their intelligence. You can tell them their moms bad looking, but you can't terminate the deal. They have to terminate the deal. Yeah, and they can turn. One way they can terminate is just to not respond and issue like issue A, they could rescind their inspection objection and stay in the deal or say.

Hamish: They can try to stonewall them and then they rescind the.

Osman: So we started playing chicken and the clock ran out and the deal terminated with buyer number two. But by the time we had an ironclad contract from buyer number three, and my clients had scrambled that morning to get buyer number three into the house so they could look at it one more time before they would submit this ironclad contract. And so buyer number three did what we told them to do submit a contract with very few exits, none of which were inspection related at a very fair price. And we'll give you this. We'll get you this house. So they did that. They trusted their agent who's very experienced. She trusted me. And we we went right to closing with this buyer. And I'm sure buyer number two and buyer number one were wondering what's going on. This property does not appear to be going back to market. Yeah.

Hamish: And they're like, oh, lazy listing agent. You know, I.

Osman: Got a phone call from buyer number twos. Agent. What's going on? Like, it doesn't. It doesn't look like it's going back on market. And I didn't answer I guess not part of the chicken. And buyer number three bought the house and they resold it like two years later for a very large profit, like a six figure profit, because the market was strongly moving upward and they knew what they were buying. And it was a fantastic house and they didn't play games. So the takeaway.

Hamish: The question.

Osman: Okay, go ahead.

Hamish: The buyer number two. Did you know that agent.

Osman: I don't remember who the agent was. So yeah no I don't I don't remember the name I can look it up.

Hamish: You remember the winning agent?

Osman: I remember the winning age.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Because we've done a number of deals and I think she does things ethically and she has good communication. Okay.

Hamish: So.

Osman: Yeah, I think she's a decent agent. And so, if I got another offer from her on one of our listings compared to an agent I didn't know, and the offers were otherwise the same. I would favor with this known agent because she has good client management and creativity. Right? She was able to communicate what was.

Hamish: Necessary.

Osman: And she got them in the house because she was a they were they trusted her. She was able to communicate well. I communicated what we needed to see and it all worked out so we could we I know we can get through a deal. Yeah.

Hamish: The proof is in, in the closing, right.

Osman: And in how somebody conducts themselves once you're under contract. Yeah, right. Like we have another deal. I'm not going to mention names. Not talking about much of anything, but the agent's been on vacation and boy, it has been such a, like, back and forth trying to keep this deal together around her vacation. Like we can't even pick a time to schedule a call.

Hamish: It's just the time is right now.

Osman: The time is usually right now because she's at a gas station on a road trip and I'm like, okay, we're doing the call right now. Yeah. Like we're going to practice immediacy because we can't schedule anything with this agent. So, you know, with this other one, I'm talking about the winner of this this three times, right. Third buyer. The MLS did not reflect any of that. It just looks like it had a longer than typical under contract period. But behind the scenes there were three different buyers involved in the deal.

Hamish: I liked that tale from the trench shows a good one.

Osman: I'm surprised I haven't shared it with you before. It was a super interesting deal.

Hamish: It's very similar to the one that we had a while. Well, with this, how do I the one on Valmont? It sounds a lot of similar. Yeah. With and that one. We've talked.

Osman: About multiple parties interested. And the biggest takeaway I have is that some agents really struggle with getting their client to perform to the contract. And there is the written, very clear legal performance for the contract. And then there is what I would call the norms in a transaction. And so, for example, one of the norms is submitting an inspection objection or also called the notice to correct with real issues. Right. That's the expectation of seasoned agents that you're not going to submit a laundry list of trivial issues.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: And sometimes even we fail at this because despite really strongly recommending to our client that we focus on the big issues and not submit every single thing in the inspection report, they feel otherwise.

Hamish: It is up to the client and they make.

Osman: The call. And I have to apologize when I get the angry phone call back and I have to say to the to the seller, this is me on the buy side. Dear seller Listing agent, I hear you and I absolutely agree that we've got a whole bunch of things on here that are handyman level trivial items, but I represent my buyer and this is what they care about. These are the things they want to have addressed. And we can do that by either having them fixed or we can come up with a credit or I'm happy to share my resources. I can send my handyman, okay. If you give me a $500 credit, we'll knock out half that list. So I will send my handyman as a solution because I know they can solve all those issues. Let's go to the next one. Right. Like that's the type of thing.

Hamish: Yeah. That's true.

Osman: We will do if we have a client that is insisting on submitting the laundry list.

Hamish: Well said. Okay. It's, you know, the poster, it's like, keep calm and carry on. It's like, apologize, but represent or something like that, you know.

Osman: I mean, I've had to do it. I've had to tell the other side that my client's misbehaving and they are threatening to terminate if they don't get this giant credit for something that is part and parcel of an older home. And I agree, it's ridiculous. It doesn't really matter that I think it's ridiculous. My client's going to terminate.

Hamish: My fiduciary duty.

Osman: Yeah, they're going to terminate unless we get 25 grand right now.

Hamish: I thought it was 50.

Osman: It was.

Hamish: A big.

Osman: It was a big number.

Hamish: Yeah, I think you're right. It was 25.

Osman: But it was for something that was so trivial and wrong and shocking. But at the same time, you know, I had to tell the listing agent, either we got that number or my client walks, and that was my client's decision, not mine. And I had to apologize. I said, no, I agree with you. The client's misbehaving, but that doesn't change the fact that they're going to walk. So you have a decision to make. Either we just see 25 grand or you'll get a termination notice. Your choice?

Hamish: Yep.

Osman: We got the 25 grand.

Hamish: Oh my gosh. Yeah. One of these days we'll be able to tell that story. But one of these days. This is just all a ploy to keep you listening longer. Listener. So let's move on.

Osman: All right. All right. Let's talk about the market update. And it's July 1st. Let's hit what's under contract and what's available. So this is the percentage of houses under contract. Let's start with single family detached houses in Boulder County. As of right now, there are 1203 houses on the market and under contract. What's your guess?

Hamish: 25%?

Osman: You're almost spot on. 307.

Hamish: Nice.

Osman: And let's now hit the City of Boulder.

Hamish: So this is month. Oh, we're not doing any month over month business or.

Osman: We're just doing right now.

Hamish: What.

Osman: What percentage under is under contract, which is which means 75% of inventory is available. And within that zone, you're going to see that most of the available inventories at the high end. All right. Let's talk about the City of Boulder. And I want to clarify something here. I'm using a shape layer for the City of Boulder, which is going to include little pockets of unincorporated Boulder County, but it is still more reflective of what is Boulder proper than just using Mail City or or relying on the MLS definitions, because they're really inaccurate.

Hamish: This is the people's Boulder property. This is an upper opens. The people.

Osman: There are 255 single family houses on the market, and of those 255, there are 66 under contract. So let's do the math really quick. 66 as a percentage of number 205 200 and.

Hamish: 55 I'm ballpark in like around 16.

Osman: Hang on. I got to check the math.

Hamish: Yeah. No. Yeah. You're you're.

Osman: Hang on a second.

Hamish: We got the.

Osman: Ball six out of 255. We're looking at 25.8%. So roughly the same. How much of a difference? No. Yeah. Call it 26%. All right. How about Louisville? Now, this time we can use the mail city, because when it's the mail city of Louisville, it's pretty much always in Louisville. And we're going to clear the shapefile. Yeah. That's fair. And so you're looking at a total of only 59 houses. And of the 59,22 are under contract. So 22 out of 59,37% of the inventory is under contract. And that lines up with my past experience of Louisville. Even though prices are lower in Louisville, the absorption rate is higher. Demand is higher at any given price point, so there's less inventory to choose from. And the pace of the market is faster. In Louisville, you have to be more aggressive when you see a house worth buying than you would be for most homes in Boulder. And I mean, we.

Hamish: We typically say like Boulder's quick to appreciate but kind of sticky to correct.

Osman: All real estate is sticky on the downside. Yeah, that's pretty typical. And it takes a while for people to realize the market's even moving down.

Hamish: That's true. That's actually anecdotally that's so true just from this past couple of years. Yeah.

Osman: It's the last three years the market has been moving down. And only this year I think we've sort of hit the bottom and the market's starting to move back up again and again. It's not all price points but it's been really clear at the mid to high end the entry level we're still seeing bidding wars. So why don't we go to that. I could have talked about attached dwellings but I'm going to skip it. If you are a buyer in the market and you want actual. Useful and actionable data analytics for your real estate search, reach out to your House Einstein agent and we can do it live. We can talk about your specific needs or your specific property and really get granular in a way that's that's useful to you. This junction 30,000ft analysis. Yeah. But at least this 30,000ft analysis just on absorption or the current percentage of homes under contract is, is highly accurate.

Hamish: This gives you something to go into the 4th of July barbecue with and talk about you know. Yeah yeah.

Osman: Yeah for sure I mean as a pocket you know conversation piece you can say that 75% of the inventory is sitting there. So when somebody, you know is is bemoaning that their listing isn't selling, then the answer is what? You're in the 75%. And so if you want to be in the 25% under contract first, the honeymoon period is the best time to do it. So get do all the work upfront and price it aggressively or stop. If it's been about a month and you have not gotten under contract and it's time to. Are you getting the views on your video, on your photography? Is your staging right? What's the feedback been? Have you seen the competition? And then finally, if there's nothing no other, no other levers to pull, then it's time to pull the price lever. And we have recently started bringing in an outside staging consultant to make sure we're not missing something, which has been helpful. Yeah. Okay.

Hamish: Okay. Yep.

Osman: Are you ready for sales of.

Hamish: The week? Yeah. Let's, let me get this down. All right. So.

Osman: Dear listeners, there's a chance this laptop is going to die. And if it does, we may have to truncate the pod, because a lot of this is on the podcast. And for some reason, this battery, I mean.

Hamish: You don't have the charger on you.

Osman: I do not. And Apple is like, they just increase the price of all their laptops, like 20%. It must be like, this is one way they're getting people to have to pay for it is laptops only like two years old. But maybe that's what's happening. That's asleep. Right? So typically we start high to low. We're going to do it the other way around this time. These are Sales of the Week or notable sales illustrating price points, market conditions locations 330 32nd Street. So this is a very basic Martin Acres Ranch, 1040ft², three bedroom, one bath with a one car attached garage. Long time listeners should hear right off the bat those data points and conclude. Oh, wait a minute. This is the Martin Akers index house, or it qualifies for the Martin Akers index house. If you thought that you're right, it is. And last time we did a marketing acres index update, prices were in the mid 60s. And then in 2022, it just was so crazy that I didn't even issue an update because that's what the market peaked. We saw sales that, you know, almost as high as in the nines, but prior to that year, the last median year with good data was 2021 at 652.

Osman: So now we're looking at prices that are, what, 755? This house was listed at 750. It sold for 5000 over list. There were no disclosed concessions and a conventional mortgage. So it wasn't a cash deal. Typical size lot. Great location. 32nd Street is a really good spot. You're very close to see you. This is the small but beautiful house. This is sort of the entry level home that most people would find pretty attractive in Boulder. If they can subscribe to the smallest beautiful lifestyle baseline has even smaller the neighborhood baseline. Yeah, but but in my experience, a lot of buyers will kind of turn up baseline because of the student density. And it is closer to see you. So I can see that's why I think of Martin Acres in this particular house is kind of the canary in the coal mine or the keystone data point for Boulder real estate. And this particular house is interesting because it does not have a lot of updates. If you look at the photos, you will see original window pulls. You will see original birch cabinetry in the kitchen. You will see that wall. This is super common to have been turned into shelving. I don't know if that was original or not, but you see the original vent fan, the original light fixtures in the kitchen, you see LVP flooring, but that really is not much of an update, right?

Osman: No. You do see, it's not a sliding, it's a it's a single glass door. It almost had French door. It might be, I guess you could call it French doors with one handle, not a sliding door to the, to the.

Hamish: I think you're right.

Osman: That is probably not original but is probably decades old. Like that is not a common update anytime in the last 30 years.

Hamish: Yeah. I mean you can see the mirror cabinet thing in the bathroom.

Osman: The original medicine cabinet. Yeah. The likely original tile. The vanity probably has been replaced in the bathroom, the one bathroom. So this is pretty much an original Martin Acres house. Maybe with the, you know, the back patio has a little deck on it. And I think that door was probably added at that time. It does have air conditioning. It does have a little shed. But I think this is pretty much your perfect basic Martin Acres index house, and it's sold for it was listed at 750. It was under contract pretty much immediately and the buyer paid five grand over list. Don't know if there were multiple offers or not, but usually when you see the price exceed list, there's at least the threat of multiple offers. Typical closing timeline 4046 days from beginning to end. So four days to go under contract. So roughly 40 days slightly longer than typical, but but reasonable.

Hamish: This, kind of unrelated, but we were alluding to in our postmortem discussion about a home with a compromise location. This is not that I don't think that one made it in the Sales of the Week. It was, the Moorhead home.

Osman: Oh, you're right, we talked about it, but it's not in here. We will. If there's time, we might get to it.

Hamish: There's. There's a home on Moorhead. It sold.

Osman: In the sixes. Yeah, and it would have sold in a for a million, roughly given the size plus or -50 grand from that million price point, depending on the finished quality. Inside. It looked really rough, but that's a cash cow sedan house. If you want to pull up the address while we're we're going on to the next one. That's fine.

Hamish: We're gonna find it.

Osman: The next property is 8245 Sawtooth Lane in Niwa. And this is a property type that is in very high demand. It's a large, rambling ranch. And the wave of boomers that have potential mobility issues is continuing to increase. And so they are looking for homes that are usually smaller than 4000ft², but have a reasonable bedroom and bath count and that they don't have to navigate stairs. People with forethought and planning for the future really like this type of property. Now what's a fantastic market? It's an affluent market with really good schools, a historic downtown. Fun fact it's actually not an incorporated place, although there's actually a movement to incorporate Niwot and there's a movement to fight it. But of course, because it's Boulder County, of course they're moving to fight. Well, you incorporate you you increase the tax rate to pay for the municipalities right services. Well, look at the City of Boulder, right. Like we have an incorporated place that's trying to milk us out of a $200 million bond issue to pay for all the services.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: That you can live in the county and not have to pay those taxes.

Hamish: You know what? Come on over.

Osman: Come on over. Night watch. So this is a really nice home built in the 80s. And it doesn't look like it's had much in terms of updates. Inside it looks pretty darn dated. So. But if you had a budget, let's call it 200,000 bucks to do most updates. You can do a, you can do an inexpensive kitchen. I so I have family members that have spent 250 on a kitchen or more. You can spend it. The sky's the limit okay. You can spend as much as you want.

Hamish: Especially depending on the contract.

Osman: But I could get this home looking pretty darn good for 200,000 bucks, maybe 300,000 for more luxurious finishes. You're still well under 2 million for a 4000 square foot house on three quarters of an acre of land in in a quiet part of what? Biking distance to downtown. Easily accessible to Boulder if you need to come into town. I really like what I really like this house. I think it's a great purchase for the buyer and it's not a surprise. It went under contract almost immediately, and they still negotiated a $25,000 discount from the list price. So kudos to the to the buy side agent who negotiated that because it's still they still got a little token discount. And they wrapped it up with a bow and got it closed in 30 days.

Hamish: Yeah. Attractive home I think you're right. You know, given the right updates, this is going to be a no brainer.

Osman: And we have a buyer looking for this but not in what he they have drawn the line on. What. So by the way this house did have a basement. So it is a ranch with a basement under 4000. The above grade square footage was 2600, which is perfect.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: Perfect amount of square footage. People don't really want five. People do want five and 6000 plus square foot houses. But for every buyer that wants a big house, we have three that want the modest. They want the middle bowl of porridge. Yeah. And so this is a middle bowl of porridge for most people.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: 646 Furman way is our next one. And this is what I think of as the L-shaped ranch. There's a bunch of these in this part of Table Mesa. Drive off the table. Mesa drive. This one, that's what Furman is. It's off a table. Mesa drive. It's a little lollipop. Our last one that looked exactly like this house was on Hillsdale Circle. And it was sold at a time when the market was much quieter. And I don't recall even breaking a million on the sale price. Wow. And so if I had a add a few years of appreciation, let's call it 1,000,003 today. And this one just sold for 2.1 in a location that's not as nice because it's a lollipop off a table Mesa Drive. So you're going to get more exposure to traffic noise. And if you look at it, this is almost certainly a flip. It is. Let me look at who the.

Hamish: Alley pop is a cul de sac just for the listeners. Like it's great visualization.

Osman: But yeah, you look at it from an aerial, it's, you know, it looks like a lollipop.

Hamish: Totally. I'm using that. But I was just like, oh, wait a second.

Osman: So this may not have been a flip. I mean, it was owned by a trust, but when you look at the photos and the trust acquired it, you know, a while ago, everything looks very slippery, like the paint scheme.

Hamish: That does.

Osman: The white on white cabinetry. The light fixtures are from flippers are us. Yeah. The fireplace. And then the staging matches everything. And this is very common. You see the tan, you know, the blond woods and the white outlook. The gray carpeting is the only thing that gives it away is maybe not slippery. And the gray paint, because that look is a little bit dated at this point. But everything else just screams updated for sale. Except the timeline doesn't scream that, right? They've owned it for too long for it to make sense as a flip. So I'm curious about the backstory of the house. It did have a walkout basement. Yep. And I would have encouraged my clients to not buy it because of the busyness of Table Mesa Drive being so close like I would have brought up. This is really busy. You sure you want to go see it? Yeah, because all you can do is talk yourself into this bad location. But really big lot, 11,000ft². I mean, get relative for table Mesa, right? Decent size lot.

Hamish: Oh, yeah.

Osman: And so this property was originally listed at 2.5 million. Sorry. No no, no, that's 2.2. Sorry, sorry. That's the old listing period. So it was acquired for 2.13 in August of 2022. And I guess we should look at the old photos really quick and see what it looked like back then. I'm going to flip open them really quick. Oh, it looks the same.

Hamish: Okay.

Osman: So this home in 2022 looks almost exactly the same. I'm not even sure there's any difference between 2000 and 20. So it's not a flip at least this cycle. But in 2022 when it was listed for 2.5 and it sold for 2,000,130, that may have been the flip period that all this finish was introduced.

Hamish: That's impressive that it's, you know, it was listed for 2.5 in 2022. That's kind of the froth of the market. And it still went for under.

Osman: For sure. That was a flip. So so fixed for you LLC acquired it in 2021 for 1,265,000. And they.

Hamish: Took some of these names.

Osman: And then it sold to blue Sky investments LLC in August of 2022, and then blue Sky investments in 2024 sold it to an individual, and that individual shoved it into a trust. So the 2022 purchase was when all of these finishes were installed and flipped. And this particular seller, who paid 2,000,130 for it in August of 2022, right peak market just after the peak. Yeah, they sold it for 2,000,100. So they lost $30,000 after for four years.

Hamish: Plus commissions. Yeah.

Osman: Plus commissions. And they originally had hoped. You know, this is where hope is. Your listing strategy that they could get to 2.25, which would have paid for commissions.

Hamish: That's I think all they wanted to get.

Osman: They just wanted to not have to pay. Right. Like this is the dream is you get to live in the house for free or you even make money because, hey, Boulder real estate never goes down. Never. It's a lie. Boulder real estate does go down, and especially if you pay too much for a flip in a frenzied market. And that's pretty much what they did. And they they got most of their money back. But if you know, minus commissions,

Hamish: Reasonable place to live for.

Osman: Yeah. So it's sold for hundreds. Great place to live. Okay. For table Mesa is a fantastic market. Great community. This locations busy. Listed at 2.25 in April. Sold for 2,000,001. So 150,000 below list. And again, I would have discouraged clients from seeing it because of this busy location. But some agents don't care. Or they they don't tell their client that it's a busy location and that it's compromised. And if their client comes from a, you know, a market like New York City or the Bay area. This isn't busy at all. That's true. Right. And but for the Boulder market, this is a really busy location.

Hamish: Yeah. And it's busy. It's also on the end of the busy street. Like, I think it's still kind of a main feed for Vassar, Vassar, Vassar drive.

Osman: Vassar. Vasser school. It's named after the school. But it's not just look, it's. No, it's not just Vassar Drive. It's it's on. It's just off table. Mesa drive, which means all of the in car traffic. Yeah. Okay. You're not going to get a lot of.

Hamish: Time thinking just the employees of encore. But that's not.

Osman: You will get some people that live at the top end of Astor Drive. Right. For sure. You will get Vassar Drive and the neighborhoods that feed down below it.

Hamish: But you're right. And car.

Osman: Is like.

Hamish: Everybody.

Osman: In car traffic, not just the employees. Hopefully they still retain most of their jobs, but it's also all the people that go there for recreational purposes. And the runners and the cyclists, which, you know, aren't really that big of a deal, the runners and cyclists. But you'll get a lot of.

Hamish: You'll get me in my car.

Osman: I used to do hill runs on on that he'll bike bicycle runs on that.

Hamish: To okay.

Osman: So that's that's firm and way. Let's move on to our next one, 1598 Wildwood Lane. And this is a far superior location with a home that it's interesting to contrast these two right. This is a home that's much bigger, 4127ft² compared to 2800ft² for the Furman Way house. And this house is in Devil's Thumb, which puts you into Boulders Country Club or the City of Boulders Country Club. Boulder actually has a country club, but we like to call the Devil's Thumb.

Hamish: Yeah, no City of.

Osman: Boulders Country Club because of the amenities that come with the association and the privacy, it's far less busy than further down the hill. And of course you pay a privilege for being there. And this listing was priced very reasonably at 2 million. And it attracted multiple offers, almost certainly, and sold for 2.2. So more than 10% above the list price. It makes me wonder if it was intentionally listed low because the agent that listed it isn't a local agent. They're out of Fort Collins. And do they not know? I'm not sure. Or maybe they intentionally priced it really low to get it sold fast. You know, this is one of the things I hope this was an intentional strategy, because 2 million for this House strikes me as really low, having sold quite a few homes in and in Devil's Thumb. Yeah. You know, some of these houses, when they were built, had a sunken fire pit, and I wonder if this one did and had it removed. I once had a listing that looks almost identical to this house that had a sunken fire pit, but the house had some updates, like the the kitchen was definitely updated, probably in the early 2000.

Hamish: Kind of a timeless flooring for that would.

Osman: Yeah. I mean, I'm not crazy about that dark green showing up.

Hamish: But.

Osman: They're pretty easy to get rid of it if you really don't like it. Really this this location, this size of a house? Yeah. All of this checks so many boxes. The one deficit is only three bedrooms.

Hamish: Yeah. This size isn't square footage. Not in bedroom count.

Osman: The bedroom count is sort of shy. One bedroom. But when you look at the floor plans, you realize you could add an office somewhere, maybe in the basement, make it more functional. But most people would like to see at least four bedrooms, if not five, in a house of this size. But it didn't seem to impact the sale process because yeah, 10% more than 10% over list cash deal closing pretty darn fast. 50 basically 20 days from soup to nuts on the listing. So congrats to the listing agent for for pricing it that low. I, I don't really know what else to say about it.

Hamish: It's the challenge.

Osman: Devil's thumb houses, especially in these little cul de sacs, are super attractive for a reason. And it's the neighborhood. It's the size. Is that middle bowl porridge? And yeah, the only real deficit is that bedroom count, but that's easily fixed with an partially unfinished basement.

Hamish: Yeah. I'm like, okay, it's close to the Bent Haven attached units, but I don't see that being a reason for that level of deficit in the price.

Osman: No, I don't I don't see any reason. So one of the there are reasons that prices are sometimes low in Devil's Thumb, like there is a power substation off of Wildwood Road. Yeah.

Hamish: Crazy place for one.

Osman: And there's like a strip of like six houses that are really compromised by that substation. And I would not advise buying for any reason. But this is Wildwood Lane, which is the lollipop to the southeast of that, and it steps away from Epic Trails right off of Bear Mountain Drive. It's a it's a great location.

Hamish: Yeah, tennis courts right out the street.

Osman: So even though it's dated, I would have pushed our clients to look at this one instead of Furman. And at 2.2, one five, even 200,000 over the list, this is a much better purchase than the $2.1 million purchase on Furman.

Hamish: Yep. Her degree.

Osman: Okay, let's move on to our next one and our last one. 640 Iris Avenue. And this is this is a little painful, I'm sure to the to the seller if they happen to be hearing this. But it was listed in 2023. Oh my. Yeah. Listen in 2020 3rd October for 6.5. And so they spent three years. And during the course of those three years. Let me see if they changed agents or they were were they loyal. They were not loyal. Oh no man we got the wrong house in here. It's kind of funny because the if you there is the original house in 2009 that just came up, where it was acquired for 620,000 and then scraped. You know, it's got a big lot. I mean, not giant, but 9000 square foot lot. It's north south oriented, and it's a premium neighborhood west of Broadway. It doesn't have the Newlands issues of privacy. So this is a good spot for spec homes. And that's what it looks like. Somebody built in 2025 listed it at it looks like very loyal. So kudos to the.

Hamish: They were loyal.

Osman: They were loyal to their agent. So kudos to the

Hamish: She's good.

Osman: She is good. I have no complaints about her. And she's very smart and, okay. We're not we're not here to tout her skill set, Hamish. But it did take her three years to sell it, and it was listed at 6.5 originally in October 2023. And this is where you can't tell the market is correcting. Right? So it took them a while before they finally decided to start cutting the price, which they did significantly by 2025 like they did a little bit in in in 2000. Yeah. No, they basically it was 2025 when they cut the price and they dropped it by the end of 2025 to just under 6 million. And then at the beginning of this year they, they cut it to 5.9. Then after another month, 5.8 and another month they cut it to 5.5. This is finally where they're like, we need to start cutting this price. And in June, it finally went under contract from a last list price of 5.5 and sold for 5.25. But let's talk about the house itself. Brand new construction in 2024. Gorgeous inside, reasonably sized, 5000 square foot, four bed, five bath, two car attached garage and I would call the look, the finishes, the fixtures, the layout all basically in line with this price point and the location strongly supports it.

Osman: So, you know, if you're going to cross the $5 million price point, you really want to be in a location that is well supported. We call that depth of market right in the equities markets. Like you want to see other high end homes that support this price point, before you invest 5 million bucks into the location. But awesome house and great location.

Hamish: This pricing history kind of tells the tale, right? Where it's like, okay, well list it for 6.5. No bites. Well, you know what? It's a $6.5 million home. How many buyers can there be out there the next year? Okay. You know nobody at 6.5. Let's cut it by 250. See? Okay. Nothing. Third year on. You're kind of seeing other listings are beginning to whittle down and they cut it significantly. Right. This is more than a million below initial list price.

Osman: I mean so this is where I don't think the seller was prepared for a three year listing period, because who believes that's what it's going to take. But the truth is, the ultra luxury segment sometimes goes fast, but more likely goes really slow. And so you need a plan to keep the home in show condition, and you need a plan to evaluate the competitors on a regular basis and adjust accordingly. And you also need a plan to stick with your agent for a long period of time, because it may not be the agent's fault. We know this is a high quality agent, so it's not her her issue that this took that long. It's just the market's correcting. And other homes that were more competitive may have sold. Sometimes you have to wait for the right buyer, but while you're waiting for the right buyer you have to make sure it's priced right, positioned well, and every showing looks like a museum. And for three years.

Hamish: Yeah, like an art piece. Yeah, yeah. Painful. It's, I, I would love to speak to someone. It's like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I saw it go up and I wanted it in 2023, but I knew it was going to go, you know, and they're like, yeah, I saw it when it first came out. But I waited and they found themselves with a $1.2 million discount round about.

Osman: I mean, it might be the story. We don't really know. No more than likely not. Most people don't have the patience for a three year negotiation. But that happens to you. You offer low and you wait a long time, and then you offer again, and then you wait a long time and you've anchored the seller to these lower numbers. And at some point they may decide that they, you know it. They're their will to endure.

Hamish: Yeah, literally.

Osman: Is less than your will to endure. And it might work out for you. So I don't mind low offers if they're real, if they're qualified buyers and the number is grounded in some sort of reality, and that's we don't really know the backstory. Maybe sometime we'll have that agent on and we'll see if she will share those those those stories.

Hamish: I do have a conversation that last broker opened that I went to. I forgot that I discussed with an agent there, philosophy on luxury pricing. And I've got some shares.

Osman: For.

Hamish: Say it.

Osman: What's the philosophy?

Hamish: They, I was like, so these luxury listings, do you guys kind of like, throw a number at a dartboard? And they're like, yeah, kind of. Okay.

Osman: That's a pretty funny. But I will tell you how he did it on Nantucket and how we priced high end homes.

Hamish: Yeah, because there is genuinely a strategy. But that kind of confirmed my guess for some of these agents.

Osman: I was surprised because what we would do is be in a bullpen environment and the listing agent would spitball the price, and the rest of the brokers would say, you know, if such and such homes sold for 3 million, I can see spending 3.5 because this home is better in these ways. But then there's this other listing at four. It's not quite as good as that listing at four. So yeah, 3.5 is probably a reasonable place to start. Now, the problem is, of course, you've got buyer agency agreements and you've got agents in a bullpen environment. Yeah. Discussing pricing on a listing that potentially could be compromising clients. So managing that at least having your head cognizant that you could be spitballing pricing with somebody that's representing a buyer. I mean, that's kind of a dangerous yeah, place to be, but that's how the agents would do it. They would talk about it in very qualitative terms. And that's one of the reasons I got hired, was to help quantify our analysis for our clients. Like, we're like, what dollar amount are you actually putting on these differences? But most of the agents are just spitballing.

Hamish: Yep. It's a and we talk about it. But it's a it's a signal. It's a status. It's this house is X amount. And from there we'll discuss it out in the luxury market. Right.

Osman: Yeah. The price is part of the marketing. The price is part of the presentation of this luxury home. And it would be you don't like if you saw a $2,000 Rolex. What's your conclusion?

Hamish: Wow. Lots of money for a watch.

Osman: Come on. You would conclude it's fake. Yeah, right. Like it's too cheap. Oh, I see, something's wrong.

Hamish: Yeah. I don't know the Rolex market.

Osman: Okay, well, I'm just talking about just, I don't know, luxury watches either, but the price is part of its value. Totally. And these things are called, Veblen goods, right? Where the price is sometimes inverted to the demand curve. A normal supply and demand curve, that which sets the price, that if the price goes up, the demand goes down. These Veblen goods have the opposite effect, where if the price goes high, there might be, you know, look at this Ferrari loose. That just sold out entirely in China. But everywhere else in the West, we've been panning it. You see all these, like, reviews of this Ferrari EV that are like talking about how horrible it is and how ugly it is. And meanwhile in China, they sold out instantly. And that is that is not because it's a useful vehicle. That is because it has something that like, it's the marketing that the magic of Ferrari and luxury marketing.

Hamish: Not to tangent, but I remember there's a Top Gear episode I watched forever Guy. I think it was when the LaFerrari came out and they quoted Ferrari saying, we are not interested in electric vehicles and we will never yada yada. Here we are.

Osman: All right. We are now on the Shameless Self-Promotion. Those were our Sales of the Week. And, this is just shameless, but we have this lovely family shopping in Louisville, and they're looking for a two story house with 3000, maybe 3500 to 4500ft². They would love a three car garage. They would like it to be 90 or newer, and they might do some updates, but I think they probably would prefer most of the work done. And they've got patients. They already own a home in Louisville. They've been part of the community for a long time. Once they find this home that they want to buy, they'll list and sell their other house. After they buy the new house, and they're in a good position to do that. So we've been looking for about a year and haven't found the right one, and weren't willing to jump into certain bidding wars that have happened in a few spring. Yeah, we have written a few offers, and I think that, if they found the right house, they would pull the trigger. They're not like none of my clients are the type of people that are going to pay way more than fair value. They will pay fair value, but they will make the sale process really easy for you.

Osman: So if you're thinking about selling in Louisville and you what you just heard sounds like the right fit, don't hesitate to reach out if you haven't engaged your agent. If you have engaged your agent, have them call us. I'm not trying to steal the listing. I'm trying to help my clients find the right home for their needs. So that's our client of the week in this podcast.

Hamish: Short and sweet. All right. Yeah. What's next? Awesome writing down the. Finally.

Osman: Hamish, we are on to the news.

Hamish: Yeah.

Osman: You want to talk about fires?

Hamish: Yeah. I mean, what's more to say, really, it's just it's grim. I, I wanted to put a little awareness out to it. It is convenient, I guess that or coincidental that today's some really terrible air quality. But there's the Aspen Acres fire that looks like it's going to wipe out the entire town of Beulah, which was kind of harrowing to see the town of Wright, who is also completely under evacuation. That's down in Pueblo. And typically it's kind of fun to crap on Pueblo a little bit. But yeah, I know. Shocker.

Osman: I don't know why.

Hamish: It's fun.

Osman: For you. You may regret that, Hamish. Really, if you ever go into politics, they're going to pull that sound bite on you crapping on Pueblo.

Hamish: I didn't even I just said it can be fun, but. No. These. You were up in Leadville. You saw the.

Osman: Willow Fire. We were at our smoke. The smoke had rolled in, but we didn't see any fire. And we were out that morning. There are. So this is the reality of living in the West. During a time period where things are dry, climate is changing and we see more and more fires. The pine beetle epidemic is back. There's a lot of dead timber. There's more dead timber coming. High winds and fire risk is a real thing. And it's no longer just the mountains. So if.

Hamish: There was a fire on 36 the other day.

Osman: Did you hear that? I saw that intentionally set. And they arrested the guy.

Hamish: On a different fire. But, yeah, I think or somebody else intentionally setting a fire also got arrested because Jeffco got one too.

Osman: Okay, so fire bugs are out there. Yeah, there's lightning risk. How? It's getting set. Doesn't really matter. The point is that fire risk is real. And if you're thinking about buying in Colorado, you need to understand that. And it's no longer just applicable to the mountains. So you need to have a fire evacuation plan. There's mitigation around your home. There's wildfire partners that does certification here in Boulder County in the mountains. I don't know if they do stuff in town. There are all these things you can do to improve your homes. You can harden your home to the best of your ability. But nothing is stopping a wildfire driven by 100 mile an hour winds. So sometimes all you can do is get out. And I felt like, I don't know, this real emotional like twinge of pain when I saw what was being shared on the watch app. The Watch Duty app, which is.

Hamish: Yeah, the evacuation.

Osman: Cut your fences. Yeah. For the lives of wildlife. Your your livestock are not going to get out. Cut the fences.

Hamish: Yeah I got goosebumps on that.

Osman: But like that's that is just tragic. And hopefully the loss of life will be minimal. But yeah, it's something to think about if you're buying or thinking about moving out here. Most people forget about wildfires and it is a risk and it's something to plan for. I mean, there's other climate change driven events like Asheville, North Carolina got massive flooding, right? Like and so we've seen that happening in places like it just it just takes a forethought in terms of property selection, community selection. And there's no risk free choices in life.

Hamish: There really aren't.

Osman: Life ends in death for everybody.

Hamish: Thank you. Yeah. Oh, no. On to your point. Two on, like, evacuation. The town of Beulah. There was one road out because the fire had encircled the whole town. And thinking. I was thinking about you, like, I know you've got your go bag. You've got your plans. I guess where you are, you can go up and around the mountain or down the mountain. So you've got two, two routes you can take. Push comes to shove, but even thinking of that like, okay, cut your fence and you have one route to go and thinking of how backed up that is. I went on Google Maps and there's, there's like a high school there and all sorts of things. I'm thinking that's an entire community displaced like that's insane. So yeah.

Osman: So our, our hearts go out to the victims and those struggling with the repercussions of these fires, and hopefully we get some wet weather to put them out.

Hamish: Yeah. Fingers crossed.

Osman: All right, so stabbing on Pearl Street, that's just the other dark. And I felt like mentioning that, like no community is really safe from, from random acts of violence by people that are probably mentally ill or addicted to drugs or both. And I think that our community tends to not take the risk of unhoused, mentally ill people seriously. And when we have a stabbing, it's a moment, I think, to pause and reflect on what? And I don't even know if this person's unhoused, so I shouldn't have even said that, right? But at the same time.

Hamish: Jamie's on it, though. Don't worry.

Osman: The probability okay, of that being the case is pretty high, and so many of our friends and clients have experienced people shouting at them in public places. It's just a distressing thing for everybody, and we can't solve the whole country's problems with this issue. It's a national issue. So I, I don't know, I just felt like mentioning that happened. It's real. And again, we we hope that the victim is okay. I think she got stabbed in the hand a few times.

Hamish: Yeah, I'm glad it wasn't. I mean, even the hand can go bad, but I'm glad I wasn't organized.

Osman: It wasn't for, you know what? Fatal, serious. But, yeah. I mean, your hand will never. Your body. Limbs will never be the same after they've been cut with a random knife so that into them.

Hamish: This is an individual who apparently traveled to Boulder to hurt people. 35, of Lakewood. I've got the name if we want to, but I.

Osman: Don't know, like crazy sending that stuff. How can you not argue? This person is mentally ill.

Hamish: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Especially like traveling somewhere to hurt someone. Like, come on, like a yeah, I will say like she I think shout out to the people of Boulder for I think reporting it and jumping on it quickly. The man threw his coffee. So okay I don't want to make light of the situation, but keep a hot coffee on your person for defense.

Osman: I heard it.

Hamish: Was it cold?

Osman: Okay, it was iced coffee. Now that's somewhere.

Hamish: On making light, but. Yeah.

Osman: Okay. All right.

Hamish: Well. But. Hey. Okay, no, I can't. Yeah. This is this is serious. So.

Osman: I mean, it's situational awareness first and foremost. I can't turn it off. I'm always, like, paying attention to.

Hamish: You grew up in the big city to no or no.

Osman: You didn't. You were up in rural New York. I grew up in redneck. Yeah.

Hamish: Hell, yeah.

Osman: Yeah.

Hamish: That's true. You cut your chops in the.

Osman: I was born in York City, but my parents moved out of the city when I was, like, three. Yeah, like, I definitely am not a city kid.

Hamish: You're right, you're right. Yeah. Surveillance found him, xyz, but I think. Yeah, everything to to what you were saying was.

Osman: All right. I don't know why we. I mean, it sucks that happened. It's not normally our news stories, but it just felt very poignant, like, to acknowledge that there's violence happening in our community and we can't get away from it. Which leads us to politics. And the other stabbing I promised. And who.

Hamish: Got stabbed?

Osman: Our, primary results for our county. And I, you know, I will say there was like a cartoon or something where it was a TV show growing up where people decided to create a candidate called none of the above and put that on the ballot. And none of the above was like.

Hamish: One.

Osman: The winning candidate, almost all of them. And I kind of looking at the ballot. I gotta admit, that's where I was yesterday when I was looking at these, and I'm looking at AI asking for it to give me advice on who to vote for. And there were so many of them. I'm like, I don't really want to vote for any of these candidates. And I did vote the Democratic primary even though I'm on.

Hamish: The ballot.

Osman: I can choose to vote either Republican or Democratic. But what's the point in voting for Republican candidates at all? This is we are in the lion's den, baby, and this is a democratic. State as well, and district for our ballots. So,

Hamish: I, I almost want to you see, all the people that are running uncontested, you're like, dang, I should have put my name up, you know, like, just because it'd be funny. I met one of the representatives from my area. She was like, in the neighborhood. And so that was interesting, a fun little conversation. But I, Facebook is, for whatever reason, putting, showing me these public groups like Victor Marx for Colorado and like Colorado Republicans and stuff like, it's giving me that feed. And so this morning, I woke up to a post saying that Victor Marx was a plant by the communist democratic agenda to disrupt, and then also that Scott Bottoms was the exact same thing. And those are both the governor candidates for the Republican.

Osman: I mean, the rise of the Democratic socialists is notable.

Hamish: It is.

Osman: Yeah. We have not had that in this country. Maybe. I mean, maybe ever. I don't really beyond my adult life time to see candidates that are openly democratic socialists. You can't argue with the need for socialized health care, and you can't argue that we're not getting value for our taxes. I think that a lot of very pro capitalist people, and I consider myself pro capitalist, would would push back that we are getting top quality health care, but it's health care for the few. It's not for everybody. And that's that's the part that I think the Democratic Socialists have a valid point on. And housing costs are extreme. So these are they are doing a great job, I think creating their their narrative. Yeah. And there are some of the points are valid. I just am worried about where this leads in terms of taxation and services, because government is a really poor way to deliver services. Everyone sees that.

Hamish: I I from like a because I, I think of like these new democratic socialist candidates as not establishment and you've.

Osman: Got the Democrats. Yeah. They're not.

Hamish: But I mean dude, I've dude, I've been hearing the health care for all thing from establishment Democrats forever. And so I think like at least the folks that are voting for the Democratic Socialists are like, at least we're hearing it from somebody else.

Osman: Well, I think they're saying Medicare for. All right. That's one way to get there. It's it's fascinating. That's been, I think, that Danny's charisma and ability to communicate on social media is really influential, way beyond what most people thought. And I think his influence on the party is going to continue to grow. And so there was at least one democratic socialist elected in Denver. Yeah, not in my district. So I didn't vote on that one. But I think there might have been two. We're going to find out, because I'm sure the right wing media is going to be really so to the top about it.

Hamish: That's on me. Oh, mom. Downey. He is I mean, early stages, right? He got elected this year. So he's getting a lot of really good press, creating a lot of really good press for himself. And then the New York Post is trying to do some gotchas on him. Have you seen the.

Osman: The New York Post is like the conservative Republican tabloid. That's what they do.

Hamish: He like went swimming in a public pool and they're like, mom, Danny breaks dress code to go swimming. And he was.

Osman: Like, stay out. Jumped in as part of a like a skit, like a skit or like a, like a content thing and. Yeah, yeah. No, of course, of course they are.

Hamish: But I mean, in time will tell. I, I mean, I guess to keep it, like, whatever, but, I went fairly moderate on my, my ballot this year because after the conversation with Tara and talking with you and everything is, I can see kind of the need. Personally, I'm generally fairly left, but I think in moderation, like it needs to be incremental steps to whatever end. But, this knee jerk back and forth is, I think, really damaging to a lot of people and kind of like the economy as.

Osman: A whole. I mean, my bigger concern is that Phil Weiser as governor, he's already a very vocal critic of the Trump administration, which a lot of people want.

Hamish: I know.

Osman: And which puts us in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. That's right. Yeah. We've already been penalized pretty heavily by this administration for being a blue state, and it's going to potentially get worse. So that's a.

Hamish: Serious worry of mine too.

Osman: So I would have preferred somebody to be more moderate as governor. And that's likely who's going to get elected because he's the Democratic nominee. Yeah. And we're in a Democratic state. So the odds of our state electing a Republican governor, I don't think are very high. So I'm worried about, yeah, the future impact on our state for going hard left.

Hamish: Have you seen it? I don't have like a, it's for what it's worth, I think it's dang depressing that we have people running on opposing the administration, and we have a worry about.

Osman: As opposed to, like, voting as running on what they actually stand for, just their stand. Their run is to fight Trump.

Hamish: Yeah. That and then also, that we are worried about these people getting elected because of punitive action from the administration. Like that's these are unfortunate realities.

Osman: I don't know if most Democrats are worried about that. No, certainly don't think the progressives are worried about it. I think that the more moderate Democrats that are seeing what's happening and the actual impact of.

Hamish: The punitive action, the.

Osman: Getting penalized for electing social Democrats and progressives is a real possibility.

Hamish: Did you see and we're getting into speculation because I haven't verified this article. But there was one where like broke out disaster aid by state affiliation. And like blue states are not getting nearly as much aid as red states for.

Osman: It's going to move us along the lines of civil war as our country continues to fracture along these lines. It's deeply concerning.

Hamish: Yeah. So yeah I'm with you.

Osman: Okay. Great. We're talking about national politics and our state primaries. Yeah. Great. That'll be the sound bite. I'm sure somebody years from now is going to pull out some random thing. We said.

Hamish: Our concern was concern. I feel like that's a safe stance to.

Osman: Take hot takes on the news. We covered it. Let's talk about Carve Outs and let's wrap up this pod. What do you say?

Hamish: Yeah, I think so. If you're a listener and you're have been a listener for a long time, you're probably like, this is insane. We're an hour 46 in. We're not even gonna, I think, be close to the two hour, 2.5 hour mark.

Osman: That's great. But I probably it short and sweet.

Hamish: Probably jinxed it. So my carve out is the tree that fell. And the last no storm we had was a wet, heavy snowstorm. And I was woken up at like 4 a.m. by a decently sized branch falling on the house, and I got up immediately. Me and the cat alerted and we went into guard mode. At 4:00.

Osman: In the morning, cats got a guard mode. Yeah, he.

Hamish: He was ready to mess up whatever.

Osman: Mr..

Hamish: Balls, his guard.

Osman: Told me about guard.

Hamish: Mode threatening. He's got both his paws right next to each other. And he said, very proper. His guard mode is I think he's getting ready for, like, a debate. He's going to mouth the threat away. Yeah. Anyhow, go outside and it doesn't look like, you know, it's caved in the roof or anything. And just two days ago, I got a ladder and got up and I was cleaning out the gutters. And finally I was able to, like, assess to see if there was much damage or anything and something I think that we've talked a few times about, like, where does it make sense to pay for the work to be done and where doesn't it? And gutters, for me at least, is something that I'm still willing to to do myself. And, my gutters need cleaning like five times a year. I don't understand what's going on, but they are always clogging. So, I got up there and yeah, that branch had hit and knocked over, like, knocked to the gutter loose, like pulled, pulled a few screws out and everything. And I was able to refashioned stuff.

Osman: Why are you not installing gutter guards?

Hamish: I don't know why not. I really don't I there was some reason I had eons ago, but I don't remember at all. Do you have cutter codes? I do, okay.

Osman: And I've installed them on rental houses because it just saves so much time to to install these things. And you can buy in Costco sells. You're kidding. Like they're stainless with a strip of adhesive? Yeah. And you get up there, you clean the gutters, and it takes you like it. Just you cut it and you just. It's adhesive. Oh my God. And it's. And they haven't flown off the rental house yet. Okay. That was like eight years ago. We put these things on. We haven't had to go back and clean. So. And our existing house has got like, a, it's like a little curved piece of mesh that the previous owner installed. Not as much of a fan, because the birds keep trying to get in there and nest under it. But either way, the gutter guard solution is you don't have to buy the don't don't buy. I'm going to be careful here, okay? Because I don't want to get sued. But there's a company called Gutter Helmet and they are so crazy overpriced. In my experience, they're.

Hamish: Like a premium plus.

Osman: Like, you go through the Costco line and they try to get you on their way out and they're like, okay, we do this. And then you get a quote from them and it's insane. And you know, the quote takes such a long time to tell you the price. Like, they've got a book and they want to walk you through about how these devils are made by like, you know, they're handmade and gold tinted or whatever. Not like there's all this cell and all you want is the price. It's a small family company. You know, founded by people that give back to the community. And everything is made in the USA and all these things, and that's all great, but what's the price going to be? And you finally get to the price and it's like, oh my God.

Hamish: It's a new roof. Like.

Osman: Right, right. It is. And then meanwhile you can just you can go to the other island, Costco, and buy a box of the strips that are pre-made when he's already on it. And you literally are just cutting the length.

Hamish: That's perfect.

Osman: And they're they're so easy to just don't fall off the roof when you stall it.

Hamish: Yeah. And I this is my first time on the roof after getting the solar panel. So I learned where I can get up and the easiest ways and stuff. So yeah, that's my carve out is really just, a little bit of seasonal maintenance and repairing this gutter.

Osman: Five times a year you've been cleaning your gutters.

Hamish: Dang near. Yeah. It's like you, you know, you're like, okay, fall, okay, spring. And then sprinkle in 2 or 3 more extra months because it'll rain in a little overflow over the gutters. And I'm like, great. Again.

Osman: It's such an adult carve out mission. So I'm so impressed with how non silly your carve out is. So like.

Hamish: Diving or. Anything like.

Osman: You for somebody your age. I was expecting very. Yeah.

Hamish: This one was like oh every time because I've got security cameras now and I can just see the gutters overflowing. It really bothers me. It's like one of those OCD things, like the gutters have to flow, so. All right.

Osman: Yeah, well, my carve out is going to be a little bit more immature. Maybe. Where do I even start with the story? So I was up in Leadville and Leo was running the Leadville heavy half, and my in-laws were up there and we were sharing a place, and they told me they're buying a car. And it's been a multi-year journey to make a decision to buy a car. And the dealer getting, you know, I thought, okay, I looked it up while he's talking. And I'm like, all right, let me see where else you could have bought the car because it's a brand new car. And I was surprised. I think they're paying a little more than they should, but whatever. They had already given the deposit for the car. It's a local dealer, and I happened to go on a Facebook marketplace and, was shocked to see a van, a brand new sprinter van pop up. And for years.

Hamish: That's such a price, right, that you're like.

Osman: So for years, many years. Okay, I've been tracking sprinter prices because, I'm a car guy and I want. And when I built my van, the all wheel drive sprinter didn't exist. It was only a real wheel drive. And part of the reason I built my van with four wheel drive and all the other things we did with it, was because there wasn't a four wheel drive version of a camper van and at any sort of reasonable price, and that van's now getting older and starting to see some issues. And I think it's reaching the point where, like thinking about selling it and this brand new sprinter popped up on the Facebook marketplace at a price that was way below I imagine. So I messaged the seller and I said, what's the catch?

Hamish: Is that what your opener? Yeah.

Osman: So out the door is this price? What's the catch? And he's like, there's no catch. It's like, what are you talking about? So we had a back and forth on Saturday night. And basically the story is that this is extra allocation for the dealership. It's a really big high volume dealer. And they've gotten marching orders to clear the left over 2025.

Hamish: And it's 2025 sprinter.

Osman: It's a it's brand new.

Hamish: Dude.

Osman: And it's 28% below MSRP. And typically you only see a small discount from. And there have been periods where it's above MSP and a two year wait for these vans. Yeah. And so I was just stunned. But part of the deal was having to get cash to the dealer fast, like they need money by the end of the month which was yesterday.

Hamish: Okay.

Osman: And so that's a really fast turnaround.

Hamish: And if you I know you vet but that feels like a ride.

Osman: Yeah. So this is the parallel is just like in real estate. If it's a really good deal sometimes you have to move fast and you have to get your head around whether you have to get your head around basic due diligence very quickly. In real estate, at least, there's contingencies in the contract you can exit from. I bought a van, I had to send them the money, and I had to verify that this dealership is legitimate. I had to verify the wiring instructions in a very short period of time. But it did did reflect my experiences in real estate as well. That deals if they're available, you have to move fast, and it's sort of like, do you want a really good deal or do you want the right house for your family? And usually there's not a lot of Venn diagram overlap. A really good deal is probably not the best living situation. It's been on the market a long time. The seller grossly overpriced it and now they've capitulated. So you have to move fast or they've priced it really low to begin with. Like we saw with this bidding war on on Wildwood Lane. Oh yeah. Where it ended up 200,000 over the list price. And it's an out of town listing agent that looks like they either intentionally or accidentally priced it too low. They spitball at 2 million when it when if you understand that neighborhood.

Hamish: It's clearly more.

Osman: That house is when you see the far lesser quality house selling for 2.1. It's a no brainer, right. Because these are just cosmetics that make that $2.1 million house what it is. So you got to move fast when there's a deal on the market like that. And I had to move fast. And so the idea is we will pick up the sprinter and sell the adventure van we have. So if you're in the market for a four wheel drive, lifted camper van with a top that goes up and down and a modular interior so you can put for adults in it and two mountain bikes. Or you could put two adults in pretty much all the camping gear you can imagine. Or you could build in a third bent row bench and a folding couch and have an upstairs and a downstairs. It's like a multi floor apartment. Yeah. And it's only got 50,000 miles.

Hamish: On tires like.

Osman: Brand new coach BF Goodrich Co three or on it Co two not.

Hamish: Oh yeah it's tires there.

Osman: Yeah they're great tires.

Hamish: I.

Osman: Love the chaos.

Hamish: What's the you've got like the back hatch. Like swing out. There's like a locker on the back. Yeah. It's got.

Osman: It's got all the Illumina goodies. It's got the box in the back, the luminous the back bumper. And it's got the you joint front bumper and the U joint four wheel drive conversion. And the Colorado camper van camper top loaded.

Hamish: The thing is.

Osman: Full synthetic oil changes since I've had it at like 11,000, had 18,000 miles on it. So it only has 50 now. And it's pretty well vetted. So if you're looking for that sort of thing, reach out.

Hamish: Yeah. All right. The sprinter is the appeal for those like the stand up height. Is that the.

Osman: So I don't need it's bare bones cargo van. We're gonna put in a bed and there's no we're not going to put in a pop top. I'm getting older. So climbing into a tall adventure van is not really my forte anymore. So. Yeah. No, it's it's a little lower to the ground. It's all wheel drive. And we'll we'll probably use some local van builders like Titan. Vans is one of the local ones. Actually. They used to be right around the corner from here.

Hamish: There's one up in Loveland. I think.

Osman: That's Colorado camper van probably.

Hamish: Yeah. So that'll be sweet. And better mileage and Mercedes badge and all the things.

Osman: So the Mercedes badge I don't really care personally about. But if I'm gonna use this van as more of a daily or if I needed to take it into town, it fits into a regular parking space. The new one, and it's got that Benz badge on the front. So if I have to take it to a showing, it doesn't look out of place in luxury real estate here in Boulder. Okay.

Hamish: Five design. Yeah. Carry on everyone.

Osman: Thank you so much for joining us at the House Einstein Podcast. You've squandered almost two full hours with us today, which we so deeply appreciate. We read your comments, we see your emails and read those as well. We can't respond to everything. But I so deeply appreciate our listeners and viewers, and thank you for joining us on the journey. If you are interested in House Einstein's services as a brokerage, you can visit us at houseeinstein.com. You can sign up for our newsletter. We are all over social media. We are also on YouTube. We're also on LinkedIn.

Hamish: X blue Sky. We're not on Rumble.

Osman: And if you want to reach me, my phone number is still on our website. You can find me and actually call me and I love I would love to hear from you. Don't hesitate. And we are now starting to see some interest in a guest list forming for the podcast. And if that interests you, reach out and call. We might work it out. It might be fun. Yeah. If it's not fun, we're not going to do it. That's the bottom line. That's always the intention for the.

Hamish: Podcast principle clients. First, is it fun?

Osman: They're not opposed.

Hamish: No.

Osman: That those those two are not opposed. Where we find ourselves sometimes conflicted is clients first or business development. And it's always clients first. Right. Or it's Osman's personal investment portfolio, or it's my clients that want to buy a house with your family. Yeah, the client's buying the house for their family. Come before my increasing my investment portfolio. Right. I'm not going to compete with my clients. So that's a general rule we follow. But typically the rules aren't, you know, as you know, they're not. There's the conflicts are pretty easy to manage if you start from a place of principle.

Hamish: Okay. Thank you, thank you listeners.

Osman: We'll catch you next time.