RE: Real Estate Podcast

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (00:00)
don't fall in love with the pictures. Pictures are marketing. Can make a house that is marginal at best look like a mansion.

and a well-styled mansion and you walk in it's a

Ben Harang (00:08)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (00:26)
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the R.E. Real Estate Podcast. I'm Clint Galliano and with me is Ben Harang How you doing, Ben?

Ben Harang (00:37)
Clint I'm doing terrific today. Weather's nice, a little warm and foggy for this time of the year, but that's okay. Life is good. How you doing today?

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (00:48)
doing wonderful man. I'm enjoying the nice weather. It is a little humid and warm right now, but they say we got some cold comings. I'd love to see more cold. I even heard that there might even be some snow coming after the first of the year.

Ben Harang (01:04)
I hope not. I had enough of that earlier this year.

Once about every 10 years is plenty enough for me.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (01:10)
I you man, I enjoyed it myself so I'm good with it. I just wish that everybody could learn how to drive in it. Hey, what we talking about today Ben?

Ben Harang (01:16)
Yeah, good luck with that.

Hi Clint. Today we're talking about actually house hunting. We, so the last episode we did, we talked about getting our finances in order. got all that done. The boring parts over. Now the fun begins. so it's things to do when you are going to look at a house. and how do you, how do you find it? There's a,

There's that website out there that everybody goes to by default that has dated information, wrong information, shows property that's active that is either under contract or closed. So you've found your agent that you want to deal with, stick with them. They can set up the search for you with your parameters based on your budget. You get involved into the MLS search rather than

a website that aggregates all the information and doesn't do a very good job of it. And then you can find the actual houses that you're looking for, set those up, and go see them. So that's kind of where we are in the process. We did all the preliminary work. Now it's to find the houses, and once we find them, the agents...

makes the appointments and you get to go see the houses. So I think Clint's gonna talk a little bit about actually, what do you do when you see a house?

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (02:41)
Alright, so before we talk about that, we're going to talk about the home search. You know, kind of filtering the noise. first segment, our first part of it is you kind of want to do that wish list reality check. And we talked about that when we were talking about the buyer consultation is your wants versus your needs.

define the non-negotiables, know, three bedrooms, specific school district, versus the nice-to-haves, granite countertops, pools, know, space to park a 40-foot RV, things like that. And then the other thing is the 80-20 rule. You're likely going to find a home that meets 80 % of your criteria.

Finding 100 % is most likely going to require that you build it yourself or have unlimited budget ⁓ to get there.

Ben Harang (03:36)
And even if you build it yourself,

even if you build it yourself, you're not going to to a hundred percent.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (03:41)
Yeah, because you're going to move in and you're going to say, boy, I wish I wouldn't have did this like this.

Ben Harang (03:44)
Yep.

Yeah. And no doubt about it. No doubt about it. ⁓ huh. And I've talked to people that built multimillion dollar homes and they still second gets themselves wish they had done something different. So, getting 80 % right is a big deal. So just keep that in mind.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (03:49)
and that's speaking from experience.

All right,

so that's your wish list, know, the things that we're going to be looking for and kind of the expectation is that you find what mostly fits your criteria. And again, we want to hit the needs and get as many of the wants as we can. Next, we're going to talk about our tools. So apps versus the MLS. They're public apps that people use.

Ben Harang (04:19)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (04:31)
There's zillowrealtor.com. Some people use Redfin. They don't have a big showing in our market. I don't think that they are able to access our data. That may be why. But they've got a good user experience. They're great for

Ben Harang (04:42)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (04:54)
if you can't get to sleep and you just scroll through and it's kind of almost like being on TikTok. There was a SNL skit about four or five years ago called Zillow Porn, where they just sit there and going through the scrolling through the houses on the Zillow app. then, ooh, I like this one. Right? Yeah.

Ben Harang (05:14)
If that doesn't put you to sleep, nothing will.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (05:19)
Well, you know, and so they're looking at it, you know, and kind of the basis of the skit was, was scrolling through and they say, ooh, I like this one. And then they accidentally hit contact an agent and this crotchety old lady real estate agent calls him up at, you know, 1130 at night saying, hey, you're interested in this house. You know, and so those are some of the risks of that.

Ben Harang (05:35)
Yeah

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (05:49)
And like we've talked before, basically when you do that, for the most part, your information is being sold to the highest bidder ⁓ for who to work with. You're not actually contacting the listing agent through those apps. The other option is the MLS, or multiple listing service. Now, we kind of have two options.

Ben Harang (05:57)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (06:11)
typically can send searches and set up automated searches through the MLS portal that sends out to our clients where we can dial in a search to show properties that match our clients criteria. The other option is we also have an app where clients can, we can set up searches for them. They have to opt in to receive the results.

They can also do their own searching. The app is very similar to Zillow's app. The good thing is though is that when they want to know information about a property, that request comes to us instead of some random agent that they don't know who they are.

Ben Harang (06:53)
Yeah,

if you're doing the Zillow or realtor.com search and you find something, get the address, get the MLS number and do not press contact an agent. You already have an agent, you committed to them, they committed to you, get the information and send it to them. They can have access to all of the information.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (07:13)
And like Ben mentioned earlier, a lot of these apps don't necessarily have the latest updates. Some are better than others, but a lot of them will show a home is active and it's not necessarily active. It may be under contract. It may have already been sold and it just got orphaned or whatever, but they still displaying and they don't, they don't have a big incentive to fix it because if it causes

Ben Harang (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (07:40)
some unknowing consumer to click on a contact an agent, then that's potentially some money they can make off of the agent that's paying for that lead that they just provided them.

Ben Harang (07:52)
And we as agents have no control over what's done after the information leaves us and gets to the other websites. So if it's wrong on the other websites, we can't do anything about it.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (08:05)
Yeah, and just a kind of quick sidebar on how that works. We put our information into the MLS. That's the system that we use to aggregate all of our listings and stuff. That is syndicated to all these other consumer focused websites and everything. And so like Ben said, they sometimes receive the information wrong or they're mismapped.

so that the wrong information goes into the wrong field so it gives the impression that it's something and that it's not something else. A big one is the square footage of the house where they'll show the living area as the total square footage will display as living area. So you might think you're looking at a 3,000 square foot house and they've only got 1,200 square foot of living area. Those types of things. So those are things that you got to watch out for.

Ben Harang (08:54)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (08:59)
So next is we talked about the tools, we've talked about the wish list. Next is location logic. So don't just look at the house, look at the life, look at everything around it. Maybe drive the commute during rush hour. Visit the neighborhood at night. Check out how close you are to grocery stores and parks. Kind of give yourself an opportunity to either an opportunity

to either fall in love with the neighborhood or to realize that, hey, this isn't as convenient as I thought it was, no matter how much I like the house. So key takeaway is don't fall in love with the pictures. Pictures are marketing. The house is a product, all right? Can make a house that is marginal at best look like a mansion.

Ben Harang (09:34)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (09:51)
and a well-styled mansion and you walk in and it's a shack. So be careful with that.

Ben Harang (09:51)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

If I have anything to do with it, I want it to represent the house that's there. I don't want people to be surprised how nice it is. I'll be surprised that it's not nicer than it is. Because if we oversell it, they get disappointed when they walk in. And if we undersell it, they may not show up. They may not be interested in seeing it. So it's always my goal with the photographer. And they're always pushing it back, pushing back on me because they want it to make it look as nice as they can.

And my response, wanted to show, I want to show what it is. What's in all.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (10:28)
Yeah, you want it to be just nice

enough to get consumers' attention, and this is talking as listing agents. You want it to be just nice enough to get the consumers' attentions to want to go look at it, but not too nice to where they're disappointed when they walk in the door.

Ben Harang (10:33)
Yeah.

Exactly,

All right, so

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (10:48)
Okay,

that pretty much wraps up the home search. From there, you kind of want to, after having searches and kind of, you kind of want to get four or five houses that you think you like the most. And at that point, you transition into touring homes. And Ben, I'm gonna let you talk about

Ben Harang (11:11)
All right, before we get into that, Clint said something about the ride around at night in the neighborhood. My response to people when they ask me if it's a safe neighborhood, federal law prohibits us from redlining. We can't tell people they should live here and not there or vice versa. So I tell them, set an alarm for two o'clock in the morning, get in your vehicle and go ride around the neighborhood because you're going to spend more time in that house at night than you will during the day.

and just ride around and see what you see and see what you hear. If everybody's locked up tight and it's all quiet, or if you have people all out and about on the street or whatever you see, and you need to be comfortable with whatever you see. But that's absolutely good advice. All right. So now we're going to talk about what do we do when we actually looking at the houses. We have five houses to look at. We have a

15 to 30 minute window. So we don't have a lot of time to dilly dally around. And it's almost like speed dating. We want to get in and get out and get to the next one. So you can see as many objectively as you can in a short period of time.

You want to look for some red flags. There's smells, there's water and foundation. The smells are mildew, pet odors can be dealt with, but just if it has a strange smell, it might be something going on. Water residue, look at the ceilings, look at the floors, there's stains on the ceiling, if there's a powdery substance on a tile floor.

Might be indication of of water Foundations There'll be cracks in the sheet rock where in south, Louisiana things move But if you have them diagonally at the window and the door frames, it might be an indication of something a little more serious Not necessarily a deal killer, but it's something to be looked at ⁓ This is a big one go ahead Clint

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (13:06)
Another thing you want

to watch out for is sticking doors.

Ben Harang (13:11)
Right, if the door is open and closed, easy.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (13:14)
Or

don't stay open.

Ben Harang (13:16)
don't stay open or if you look at them and it has a 45 degree angle cut off the top of one of them, so it doesn't stick. That's a, you might, you might have a problem, but you want to look at it, at it objectively. You don't want to fall in love with the last coat of paint, which is a saying that people say people buy the last coat of paint. And that's a problem. If you buy the last coat of paint, you need to look past that. so etiquette and privacy all comes, also comes into play. You are.

going into somebody else's house. If giving you the key to go in the house, take care of it. Be careful. it's a good idea, especially if it's muddy outside, take your shoes off, leave them outside. Don't track mud throughout their house. They, they set it up hopefully for you to it to be as pleasant of an experience as you, as you can. so respect, respect their house. also,

And this is has to do with technology. Expect whatever you say in that house or walking up to the front porch to be on audio and video recorded. So I tell people, let's just talk about the house. This is the kitchen. There's a living room. There's a dining room. have ceramic tile floors. We just talk about the facts of the house. We don't talk about negotiating strategies or how much we think it's worth or why we want to buy it or why we don't don't want it. We don't.

We don't get into any opinions about it. We just look at the house. And then check out the floor plan. Does the floor plan work for you? If you're for a split floor plan, is this, does it have everything on one side of the house or carport versus garage, whatever you want. So I'll make sure it, it, matches your, your needs and wants list.

So when you, when you get back to that house, have this or that focus on the things you need to look at when you're looking at the house and then you can, you can move on to the next one. And a pet peeve of mine is people put monuments to their family on the walls with pictures and stuff. If that's up there, don't look at that. Look at the house. You're not buying those pictures. You're not buying their furniture. look at the house, get in.

See what you need to see and move on to the next one. you're respecting, you're getting five families out of their house if you're looking at five of them. So be respectful of the time you told them you were gonna be there and run as close to on time as you can.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (15:44)
And so when you're actually looking at the house, if you're going to be bringing your furniture into this house, if you buy it, and this is a tip that Ben had a client that did this, and I think it's a wonderful tip if you're planning on using your existing furniture, is do a cutout of the footprint of your furniture on some large format craft paper. Roll it up and keep it in your car.

Ben Harang (15:59)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (16:11)
and then lay it out so that you can see if your furniture will fit in the space that you want to put it in. It doesn't have to be big, it's just a footprint that you lay out on the floor to make sure that what you have will fit. And then Ben was talking about family pictures and stuff. We had that exact same thing happen on a showing I did last week where we walked in the house and it...

Ben Harang (16:17)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (16:37)
We could tell that somebody lived there for a long time and decided a refrigerator had graduation cards and family pictures and stuff all stuck to it with magnets. And he glanced at it and then he did a double take and this was my client. And he says, huh, that's my uncle right there. I wonder who that is that lived here.

Ben Harang (16:55)
and that that.

That's why you don't do that. Cause they get, then they become obsessed with figuring out the unknown about who lives in it. They forget to look at the house.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (17:00)
Exactly.

and have that connection

exactly, exactly.

Ben Harang (17:08)
So I think I might've beat up, talking about beat a dead horse, declutter and depersonalize. Well, think we've done that in the past. That's two of the biggest things you can do to get a house ready. But I'm off of that.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (17:19)
And the big

thing, and you said this earlier, is you want to make sure that the house flows. The same client, another house we looked at, you walk in and you've got this room that it's maybe six foot wide and 10 foot long that

There's, it's not real clear what you can do with it. It just kind of, you walk in on one end of it and walk to the left and then it opens up into a combo dining and kitchen area that also has a hall in the middle of it going to the rest of the house. And you know, it's like, what do you do with that space?

Ben Harang (17:56)
Sometimes the space is almost unusable. ⁓ It's like, do you do with this?

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (17:59)
Exactly.

That's the same question the client asks. says, what do you do with this space? He says, anything you try and do is going to make it awkward.

Ben Harang (18:05)
Mm-hmm.

Right, right, especially a pass through like that. I've seen bedrooms where you go from one bedroom to the next bedroom to a bathroom and it just, that gets real awkward. But it works for some people, but if it works for you, you just need to know that on the front end, if you're willing to accept that.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (18:25)
All right, well, so to recap, refine your search criteria so you aren't overwhelmed. It's a lot easier to look through 10, 15, 20 houses rather than 800. Trust the MLS data over third-party apps. ⁓ And I'd say MLS and our agent site, because it's basically the same thing.

Ben Harang (18:43)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (18:52)
When touring, look past the staging and keep your poker face on until you're in the car. And I want to add to that and that that's an important one. We've even got it listed in our buyer representation agreement to be aware and to, know, because anything you say can and will be used against you in a negotiation for the purchase of that home.

Ben Harang (19:16)
It's amazing just what a small kernel of knowledge can turn a negotiation into your favor or against you. Just be real careful. I tell people, if you and me against the world, you talk to anybody else about real estate, they will use it against you. If somebody asks you about real estate, ask them about the weather. Change the subject.

when you're active in the market.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (19:44)
All right, homework time. So if you're looking for homes, you're on the hunt for a house. Next time you drive through a neighborhood you like, stop the car and listen. Is it quiet? Is it busy? Do your recon. See if it's something you feel you could live in day in, day out. And to add to that, like Ben said, go ahead and...

Ben Harang (19:46)
Here we go.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (20:09)
Take a drive out there in the middle of the morning, know, two o'clock in the morning and see what's going on. That'll give you a really good idea of what happens in that neighborhood. All right. On our next episode, we're going to get a little bit technical. We're going to dive into the Louisiana Residential Purchase Agreement. We're going to break down the specific timelines, deposits, and legal contingencies unique to our state.

Ben Harang (20:13)
Mm-hmm.

And we, we also just, they just released in the last month, the 2026 version of the Louisiana real estate sales contract. so there's some changes, some editorial and some significant. so we'll, we'll kind of hit the highlights about that. That's, that's hot off the press.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (20:54)
All right, another one in the can.

Ben Harang (20:57)
All right. Enjoy it, Clint.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (21:00)
Alright, remember to like, share, subscribe, comment, send all your friends and them. You can go to rerealestatepodcast.com where you can find a link to our YouTube channel and you can also find Ben and I's agent websites. You can also find our episodes and all of the episodes that we've done. So look forward to doing this again.

Ben Harang (21:25)
All right. Enjoy the Clint. See y'all later.

Clint C. Galliano, REALTOR® (21:27)
Same

here, man. Have a good one.