RE: Real Estate Podcast - Video

Clint C. Galliano (00:33)
Hey, Ben, how you doing?

Ben Harang (00:36)
Clint, I'm doing terrific, man. How you doing?

Clint C. Galliano (00:39)
I'm doing wonderful.

Ben Harang (00:40)
Good, the sun's shining, it's cold outside. Life is good.

Clint C. Galliano (00:45)
Yeah, so it's a little overcast over here, though I haven't been outside the door since this morning, but it was cold and life is good.

Ben Harang (00:55)
Well, it's sunshine in here in Thibodaux and it's cold. So what we talking about today?

Clint C. Galliano (01:05)
We are talking about home search and touring homes.

Ben Harang (01:11)
All right.

Clint C. Galliano (01:13)
helping

the buyers find their dream home to purchase.

Ben Harang (01:17)
That's what it's all about. Something they can get excited about. In the market we're in now, we don't need to run out and see a house five minutes after it gets listed. You know, we'll be looking online. You'll be getting emails as a buyer. You may find something on your own, but wherever they come from, the prudent thing to do would be make a list of the houses you want to see.

and schedule them. Give yourself two or three hours to take a look at them, minimize the distractions, and go find the house that you want to buy. And after you look at them, can, they're fresh in your mind and you can talk about the pros and cons and we can go over the pros and cons with you about which one to us.

seem to fit your criteria. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're not, but you ultimately would need to make that decision as a buyer. And that probably gives you a pretty good chance of buying a house.

Clint C. Galliano (02:26)
Yeah, so we start out, like we mentioned, the talking about the buyer consultation. That's where we kind of gather criteria for what you're looking for in a home. Sometimes buyers I've worked with, they know exactly what they want, exactly what they're looking for. Sometimes...

and say, okay, well, what are we trying to find? And they say, a house. And they hadn't really thought much further than that. They just want to buy a house. So that's part of trying to figure out exactly what they're looking for and whether they want a split floor plan, a brick house, a slab foundation, you know, whether they want a workshop or a fenced yard or, know,

Ben Harang (02:56)
You

Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano (03:19)
various different options that are available as far as what may fit their desires. So once we have those criteria, we'll set up searches. Buyers usually have their preferred methods for looking at things and pretty much everything's done online. These days everybody's got a favorite

app to use. We've got our own apps that you can use. Those communicate directly to us when you want to go look at something. We also can set up searches through the MLS and you can go and indicate if you like a property or not.

that helps us also and also notifies you when properties that meet the search criteria become available. Of course, you can do the same thing in the apps and the commercial apps in addition to our apps.

But so that's kind of how the search process goes. And it's not ideal to schedule or want to schedule 20 homes in a day. Ideally, five homes at a time.

to go look at and better yet, put together a list of 20 homes you like and then screen through it and decide on where you want to live, what features the homes have and pick your top five because those are likely gonna be the one you ultimately choose to buy is likely gonna be in that top five.

Ben Harang (05:16)
Yeah, there are people that some buyers just like to go see houses and they're just shoppers rather than buyers. So to buy a house, you need to be motivated to go see a house. It is an inconvenience to the sellers.

to open their house to you. So I try to be considerate of their time and schedule it as close as I can to the time we'll actually be there with some overlap, because we never know how long it'll take to see a house. But if we make an appointment to go see some houses, we need to go see the houses on the list that we told people we were going to go see and just not stop at the second one.

because that's the one you want. I think you're doing yourself an injustice by not seeing the ones you picked out. There might be the fourth or fifth one might be the one for you when you think the second one is without seeing all five of them or four of them. But it's just common courtesy for the people that are allowing us to go in their house to see it on the potential that you might be interested in buying it.

the more courteous we can be to them, the better the transaction would go on whichever house you decide to try to buy, assuming it's one of those.

Clint C. Galliano (06:45)
Ben actually touches on another point, know, kind of moving on to the touring. When we find that the houses you want to go see, we have to request an appointment to go see it. In addition to that, when we're looking at multiple homes,

we need to schedule those appointments in a convenient time frame and a convenient route that makes it easier to, because I've had some buyers that want to look at houses between Chauvin and Chackbay

And so it, you know, you're not going to say, okay, well, I'm gonna go look at Chackbay and then go to Donaldsonville and then go to Chauvin and then go to Morgan City, you know, for the same client. That's probably a six hour trip doing all of that with the showing.

Ben Harang (07:45)
And those people,

they're really not ready to buy a house because they don't even know where they want to live.

Clint C. Galliano (07:52)
Well, or they're

looking for a specific thing and they found houses that meet the criteria that are important. They just happen to be in what we consider to be disparate locations. Because I did have one client that was like that. Ultimately, they did buy in Morgan City. But we drove around a little bit to look at various houses. But.

Ben Harang (08:04)
Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Clint C. Galliano (08:18)
Ultimately, we want to try and be respectful of your time and the seller's time and try and schedule in the showings in a most efficient manner, taking into account travel time between showings, giving enough time to go through the house. I've had

You know, some showings that you walk in, you look around and 10, 15 minutes. Okay, yeah, this isn't it. This is enough. Let's go to the next one. But I've scheduled 45 minutes at that showing because I've also had some where they sit there and they pontificate on the possibilities of what could be done at that house and what furniture is gonna go where.

Ben Harang (09:09)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano (09:10)
You know, so I try and accommodate that and we may take a slightly longer route or we may sit out front for a little while to wait till the next showing time or we'll reach out to the listing agent and say, hey, you know, here's the situation. We finished up early at the last showing. Is it okay to go early to the next one?

Ben Harang (09:31)
Right.

Clint C. Galliano (09:32)
but

we never go and walk in early to a showing when we've got it scheduled for 30, 45 minutes later.

Ben Harang (09:40)
Right. Again, be respectful. The way I try to schedule them, depending on where they are, is I'll schedule them for a 30-minute viewing plus a 15-minute overlap, and then I'll account for a drive time between them as best I can to view the...

the next one. So they end up being about 45 minutes apart, but I do try to overlap them. if we run in earlier, running late from house to house, we're still within the window that we set up. Cause the better the is done on that day.

You don't want to frustrate the seller who's riding around on a call with three kids because they move in and you're an hour late or you're 30 minutes early and they're not ready to leave the house yet. You know, you don't want to frustrate them and then expect them to look favorably on an offer you make. They might take it out on the offer. So the better we treat people, the better off both sides are.

Clint C. Galliano (10:36)
and a dog.

Ben Harang (11:04)
So I had one yesterday, just little anecdotal. We were about 15 minutes early and I tried to schedule it 15 minutes before the appointment time with the buyer to give me a chance to walk in and set up the house to see it. And I was a little early, the buyer was a little early. So I just called the agent and said, look, we're early. I know we set for 1 30 or whatever the time was.

I can go look at houses, I can ride around, look at a new construction and look at a few things in the meantime. If we can't get in, but if we can get in, we can go early. And he said, I don't know, but I'll find out. And about three minutes later, he sent a text. He said, y'all can go. And we showed up and we got there probably 10 minutes early, but it didn't inconvenience anybody. And we were still able to get in a little early.

So just being considerate goes a long way.

Clint C. Galliano (12:07)
Definitely. So another thing to consider when we're out touring homes is that almost everybody has a ring camera or an Arlo system or some type of video surveillance. And in our buyer representation agreement, we've got

statement in there that advises about video surveillance and so I'm making a point to cover that to and to discuss the potential risk of basically talking about anything in front of any type of video surveillance and you're not always going to see it either so we generally don't talk

about anything about thoughts on the home or...

your likes or anything like that or even the condition or content of the home while we're on the premises. We wait to discuss it once we're away from the home. A, because that erodes our negotiating position. It takes away from it.

And we want to try and avoid that. want to be in the strongest negotiating position that we can be. Again, getting back to like what Ben said, you know, we want the seller to look favorably on our offer. And if something is said jokingly or what have you, or even an earnest statement that the seller looks at it and

takes it in a way that either offends them or makes them think that, say, look at it on the amount of an offer, saying, I love this house. I'd pay anything for it, then good chance on writing a lower than list price offer on that house.

Ben Harang (14:27)
Right. I tell people whether or not we've been recorded, we just assume everything we say is audio and video recorded at the house. And anything we say at the house is going to be used against us.

So we walk around and we, we acknowledge we, we, we saw the kitchen. saw the three bedrooms, two bathrooms. Where's that second bath or it's around the corner over here. We go see the house. it's on a slab. see nine foot ceilings. We see the fireplace. We see just the nuts and bolts about the house, but don't say anything like I need to buy this house because my mama lives across the street.

Like, and I had that happen that they bought the house across the street from the wife's mother and the seller didn't know who it was until after we closed. And I don't think we would have gotten that house for the price we got. We got it for, had that information been out there. So it just, any nugget of information that can be used against you will be used against you.

in the negotiation process and we, Clint and I keep harping on setting yourself up to be in the best negotiating posture possible. And sometimes it's the need or the desire to be in a certain house outweighs the price of the house. We get caught up on the price a lot, but sometimes somebody wants to spend the last years of

their parents life across the street from them. And it's worth a few more dollars to them to be able to do that, as opposed to living across town from them for less money. So that's why buyer consultation is important, to see what the motivation is on what's driving them to buy a house so we understand, so we can help them meet that need and hopefully find something.

and get them in the house so everybody can move on with their life.

Clint C. Galliano (16:50)
think we've done some solid coverage here.

Ben Harang (16:54)
Okay.

Clint C. Galliano (16:56)
Is there anything else you want to add?

Ben Harang (17:00)
No, I just go back to that buyer consultation. It's new in our market and how important it really is to for the agent, whatever agent you choose to work with to be able to understand the driving force, your needs, wants and desires on the house so they can help you find the house and cut through the mud.

and hopefully get you to the closing table in a timely manner.

Clint C. Galliano (17:37)
deal.

All right, looks like we got another one in the can here.

Ben Harang (17:45)
All right.

That's always a good thing.

Clint C. Galliano (17:49)
always. I want to remind everybody if this is your first time hearing us, you can go to rerealestatepodcast.com and subscribe on pretty much all the platforms. Or your favorite podcast app, just search for us. We're in there.

Ben Harang (17:50)
there.

Clint C. Galliano (18:14)
And if you've got any questions or topics you'd like to see covered, send us an email, comment on our YouTube channel.

Watch the episodes, watch the videos. You can listen to us in audio.

whatever you want. We'd love to have some questions to answer. We're trying to answer as many questions as we've been asked so far covering it in our topics and material. So send us more.

Ben Harang (18:51)
And we have a couple of more on the buyer side and then we'll start a series on the seller side on how to get a house ready to put on the market through the closing. So it's been interesting and fun doing this with you Clint, so I appreciate you willing to do it and I look forward to doing more of it.

Clint C. Galliano (19:15)
Yes, sir.

Ben Harang (19:18)
All right. We all have a great day.

Clint C. Galliano (19:21)
from two Louisiana real estate agents. Have a good one.