Selling a House for Top Dollar with Mindy Jensen #162

sell for her clients, but she is an investor herself. Specifically, she has this effective way of flipping properties and we'll actually we'll get into that here in a little bit. But Mindy she works at Bigger Pockets dot com where she helps investors learn the proper ways to invest in real estate, and she also co hosts the podcast Bigger Pockets Money. And so today we'll spend the majority of our time though, it's talking through the ways that our

listeners can sell their homes for the most money possible. Mindy, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you guys today. I love real estate. So hit me all right, hit me with your best shot, don't just hit me. Great song too, By the way, Mindy, also, you wrote a book like this is how Much you Love real Estate? You wrote a book called How to

Sell Your Home. And if our listeners stay tuned till the end of the show, we're going to give away ten physical copies autograph of your book. So that's so awesome. Stay tuned for that. By the way, the first thing that we lead off, the first question that we lead off asking people is about craft beer. Because Matt and I drinking craft beer on the show. It's really important to us. Today on the show, we're drinking a beer called Slamming at the Club by Casa agree a Specialty ales,

and I know you love craft beer as well. What's your splurgs? What's your craft beer equivalent? As you're saving money and being intentional as you save for the future, what are you willing to spend a little bit more on right now? Well, it is absolutely a splurge. It is literally the dumbest thing you could spend money on. It is a car. On the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, one of the questions we ask of all of our

guests is what is your biggest money mistake? And most people have some version of I bought a brand new car. I don't actually buy new cars. I bought a used car back when I was in high school a thousand years ago. I had a friend who worked at the accurate dealership and I was picking up up after work and I walk in and I'm like, oh my god, what is that? What is that car? That's the most beautiful car I've ever seen in my life. He's like, oh, that's the new NSX. Like wow, that is amazing. How

much is it? He's like sixty dollars. I'm like, well, that's not going to be my car was in high school. Yeah, there was a lot of There was a lot of money back then. It's a lot of bunny now, but it was even more back then. So fast forward like ten years. This car came with this coffee table book instead of a sales brusher because it was sixty dollars. And I found copy of that coffee table book at

a thrift store. So I bought it, thinking something, I'm going to own an NFX, and I packed it up and moved it every time we moved, because, as you alluded to in your introduction, I do live in flipping, which means I move every two or three years, so I'm packing up things a lot. We started talking, my husband. I started talking. I'm like, you know, I would really like to own one of these cars now that we're

financially independent, you know, let's let's look at them. And we found one and it costs forty thousand dollars, which is that is an absurd amount of money to spend on an old hunt Yeah, old Unda. I've got a friend who has one too. He's like, yeah, I got an old Honda. When I went to get license plates for it, she's looking. She's like, is this thousand dollars?

I said, that'lls like, why would you pay so much for? Well, you and you and your husband you're both into cars, right, You guys are both kind of car nerds to a certain extent. I know, I know your husband, Carl, he really wants a Tesla M right. Yes, he is a supercar nerd. I am not so much. But I was always really really excited about this car. So he bought it.

He drove it home from Wisconsin is where we found it, and I started driving it to work when it was nice outside and you know, it wasn't gonna rain or hail or snow or whatever, and I felt so awesome in this car. It's like who I feel like, it's not you know, I'm driving down everybody's looking at you, Like as you drive down the road in an NSX, people will come up next to you, like the passenger is hanging out of his car with his camera, like

taking pictures of your car. And it was a perfect specimen. It was like the most beautiful type of this car.

And then I was driving down the expressway and there's this guy in this super jecta pickup truck and he starts coming over and I'm like, no, no, don't hit me, don't hit me, and I'm hugging my horn and he finally like sees me at the last minute, and that kind of flipped a switch in my head, like you're sitting on a pile of forty dollars driving down the road and you could get into a car accident and ruin it. So I said to Carl, maybe we should

sell this car. He's like, yeah, I've been thinking about that for about six months now, and uh, yeah, we should sell it. And then I swear the next day a house came on the market that we wanted to buy and we needed to close really quickly, and we're like, let's sell the car so we can buy a house. So for you, it was a car. You know, I feel like a lot of people do have that car storage old. That's sure something that I feel like you have.

I I kind of have that story of spending I don't know, maybe more money on a vehicle than I had ever really wanted to. But you're always pretty good about finding those deals, spending a bare minimum amount that kind of get you there. Right. I tried, but sometimes it bit me. Sometimes I did go too cheap with car purchases, that's for sure. Oh I've been there too, Jill. Right. Oh, man, like the eight beater, I've I've done that and it

didn't last me very long. No, it doesn't. Well man, do you like he alluded to, you are financially independent. You're known online sometimes as and that's because of your goal that you and your husband Carl, that you had to reach financial independence in fifteen days or less. And you know that was a while ago. But where did you guys get that that crazy goal? And actually, like,

how how's it going? Because you don't get to talk to folks every day who are financially independent it's going perfect. Thanks to have a nice day now. So Carl was a software developer. He loves computers almost as much as he loves cars, and he loves programming computers. He was I was a stay at home mom, and he was having a really, really bad day. It turns out there was a bug in the code that he was writing. And the code that he was writing was for blood

bank software. So if you have surgery and you need units of blood, this software would choose the unit that matches with your body, blood type and all this stuff so that you don't die, because if you get a different unit of blood it's like not compatible in your body's like no, we're just going to die instead of

you know, figuring it out or whatever. Obviously I am not a blood person, but having this code that could kill somebody really gave him a lot of stress, which is kind of the dumbest thing I think I've ever said. Writing code that could kill somebody. The code that could kill somebody was killing him. Yes, So spoiler alert, he didn't write the code, and it turns out there wasn't a bug, but for about a week, his whole team

didn't know that. So he just had all this stress and anxiety, and he finally sat down at his computer and he just banged out how do I retire early? And this little website that probably you've maybe you've not heard of, it's called Mr Money Mustache popped up and he's reading through. He's like, no way, and he keeps reading. He's like, this guy's selling something. What is he selling? So he keeps reading, he keeps reading. He's like, wait

a second, this is just a math problem. This guy is laying it out and he laid out the four percent rule in a way that Carl had never seen before. He's like, oh my god, we could retire really soon. And he comes running down the stairs. It's like, hey, hey, we can retire in about three years or six years or whatever it was. And I'm like, okay, great, because I knew how stressed he was about his job. And he's like, and I'm going to start a blog about it.

I'm like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of it, because why would you Why would you blog about that? He only knew of Mr Money Mustache and uh get rich Slowly at the time, but he decided he wanted to start a blog about it. We figured out our current net worth, we projected how long it would take us to get to our desired net worth of one million dollars in investable assets. Uh, he thought it would be about fifteen hundred days. So he was like, well,

that's the name of our our blog. Great, good luck with the blog. I thought he was going to run out of things to write about, and he cranks it out all the time. So yeah, that's how fifteen hundred days came to be. And that goal mindy of something specific like days, I gotta imagine that was like a driving force the whole time. That being the blog name, that being kind of the time period that you guys

have picked out. That had to be really really helpful in kind of nudging you at the times where you probably wanted to kind of bow out or stop socking away as much money as you were and maybe starts spending more today. Did that kind of specific timeframe? Was that a big boost in helping you guys continue to

attack that goal? You know, I'd love to agree with you because that sounds way better than saying we're just really cheap and we didn't spend a lot of money, And we both knew that you needed to invest, so we did. And he's a tech guy, so he would invest in things that he knew about. He was having a problem at work one day, a different problem, and he's like, oh, man, I don't know how to do this. And his seat mate said, oh, you should google it. And he's like, what this is way a long time ago,

like you should look it up in Google. And Carl's like, what is that? So this guy shows him and Carl types in his question and there's his answer. He's like, oh my god, what is this? What is this amazing thing called Google? And when they went public, they did this like Dutch auction thing, and he like bid on stock and they're like, okay, everybody bid this much or this is the average of everybody's bid or whatever the stock price is going to be this. So he bought

a ton of it. And then Facebook came out and he bought a ton of that. And you know, we've had some duds too, but we've had some really great products. And once Apple came out with the iPod, all you see everywhere you go is white headphones. Everything else was black headphones, but Apple has white headphones. You see white headphones and everybody's ears. You're like, Oh, that may be a thing, you know, that might be a good stuck Like, I think that's gonna be something I don't I don't know,

just a hunch. Well maybe I have a quick follow up though. So we're talking about financial independence. So for you guys, like obviously, besides you being able to kind of buy the card your dreams for a short period of time, they're right, how did financial independence change how you guys live? Because of all the folks we've talked to who are financially independent, I feel like y'all are

maybe what I would call the most normal. Like you've got a couple of kids, you live in Colorado, Like the kids go to school, you're still doing weird stuff to make money, which we're gonna talk about a second. You guys still live like a super normal life. You haven't bought in like your own island or anything like that. But but yeah, so how have you realized that financial independence? Like? What has that changed? So the biggest change is that Carl doesn't have to go to a job that he hates.

And I think in fire financial independence retire early most people focus on the R E. And you know, I gotta get to financial dependence so I can quit my job, so I can quit my job, And that's what he did. But we were financially independent for a while before he took the leak, before he actually quit his job, because he had a really good paying job. He was making six figures, he could work from home. Why would you

walk away from that? And he didn't know what he wanted to do after he quit his job, so he just stay for a little bit longer. And then I got the job that I have now, working at Bigger Pockets. I love my job. I've never had a job that I love more. So it was okay for him to leave because we sort of had a cushion. I don't really feel like I'm working because I get to talk about real estate all day long. I get to talk about money all day long. I don't have to work there.

I get to work there. I love going to work. I feel guilty when I go to work. You know, I'll be leaving the house and the girls are fighting with each other and Carl's like wrangling them, and I'm like, see, I'm gonna go have a good time at the office, you know. But I really enjoy what I do. I love everybody that I work with. It's just a really great experience. So he gets to run his own life.

You know, he works at we have partnered with that very little known blogger Mr money Mustache on a coworking space in our town of long Mont. But it's not really a job, Like he just really enjoys talking to people. Yeah, he's just hanging out and like he works on the blog, he's We just bought a house. Oh, this is a good segue. We just bought a dumpy house that we're fixing up. So perfect segue. Let's get into that. So you guys are still normal people despite having a chief

financial independence. But you guys are still doing live in flips and and we really want to talk a lot about selling a home man because you literally wrote the book on that. But I'm really really interested in how you guys have used the live in flip strategy to help build some of that well, to help you a chief financial independence. So can you first share with our listeners what a live in house flip is? Okay, So a flip is when you take an ugly house and

you make it look beautiful and you sell it. A live in flip is when you buy an ugly house, you move into it as your primary residence while you fix it up. You have to live there for well, you don't have to. But I lived there for two years, and then when I go to sell it, I pay zero dollars in capital gains taxes because it was my primary residents. I lived there for two years and I pay zero, zero capital gains taxes up to five hundred thousand dollars um because of the section exclusion in the

United States text Code. So I've never hit that five hundred thousand dollars. I'm really excited about this house, not yet, not yet. The house that we just moved from. We bought four a hundred and seventy six thousand dollars. We put about a hundred thousand dollars into it, and I could list it today and sell it tomorrow for five five I could list it and sell it a little bit longer for probably five seventy five or six hundred

thousand dollars because I've lived in it. Yeah, because I lived in it, because I you know, I did all the I didn't do all the renovations myself. And when I say I, I mean my husband and I we did hire some people, like we put a second story on. That's a lot of work that you're going to do on the side with kids asking for dinner like it's a time to eat. It's like, no, I gotta, I gotta add the second story to the house. I'll be

done in in six months. Yeah. Yeah, So um an air fire and chicken nuggets are your best friend as a live in flipping mom. So that brings us to another question about it. Well, and first I want to say on the tax thing, you said up to five thousand dollars tax free in profit from the living flips, and if you're a single individual, that's two fifty dollars. Because if you live in a home for two years

and you sell it, you're not taxed on the gains. Right, But if you live in it for less than two years, then it's not technically a living flip. It's just a flip, and you're gonna pay tax on the profit that you make from selling out house. Right, Yes, ish if you own the home for less than a year, even if you're living in it. I believe it's Texas regular income if you sell it after living there for one year but not living there for two years. I think it's

tax as long term capital gains, which I believes. But if this affects you, please talk to your c p. A. Okay, all right, that's good stuff. Oh it's great advice. Well, I want to know more about, like, what was the hardest part of living in the home while you're actually working on it, right, because obviously you weren't in its while that second story was being put on. Right. Oh, yes, I was. Are you serious? Okay, Well, first of all,

I want to know about that. But I mean, the reason why I asked this is because we added onto our home, my wife and I and our kids. We lived through a home renovation and man, it was one of the hardest things we've ever done. So we've always lived in our flips because we're cheap and we're not going to pay rent at one place, or you know, pay a mortgage in one place and pay a mortgage

in another place. We could just live there. We chose to live in flip in Colorado in the winter time because that's when the construction workers were available, so that was freezing cold. Um, it's out for everybody. I can sit here and make it sound really, really awesome, because when I cash a check for a hundred thousand dollars, that makes me happy. Not every flip is going to give you a hundred thousand dollars in profit. But once once you sell it, it's really easy to be like, oh,

that wasn't so bad. It's like old birth. You have a baby and you're like, oh, my goodness, it hurts so much to have a baby, and then once the baby comes out, you're like, oh, I love this baby. I can totally do it again. So you just forget about the pain. But it is a mess, like it is, Oh, plan to be out of the house during drywall day and hire somebody to come and clean it for you

when you're done, because that's the messiest part. But you know, when you you pull the dry wall down to you know, do whatever you're doing behind the walls, you still have outer walls, so it's not like the whole house is ripped apart and there's varying levels of living flipping. You can do just a cosmetic flip right now. The house that we're in, Oh my goodness, we got such a smoking hot deal on it, but it's basically cosmetic. I

have an ugly kitchen, but I can use it. Like the cabinets still holds stuff and the all the appliances are new, but the cabinets are really ugly. The countertop is this white tile countertop, and I've been living in my house, my other house for about five years now with the solid surface countertops, so having a tile countertop and like, wow, why did they ever do these? Like

all the grout gets all dirty and growth. Of course it's it's it's the worst well many, I mean, that's something that we haven't really talked about on the show much, is living flips. But I love it because I think there are a lot of people that after hearing you know how you do it and the money that can be made from it. Men, living flips are just an awesome way to go for a lot of people, especially if you're okay dealing with the mess while you're doing it.

So yeah, I love hearing that party story. But you really really want to get into selling a home and helping people figure out how to do that, especially considering this is Erring in February. A lot of people are

thinking about selling their homes. So we're going to get into that right after the break, all right, We're back from the break and we're talking with Mindy Jensen about selling your house for top dollar and Joel, like you mentioned, I think a lot of folks are considering selling their house. It's kind of at the beginning of the year, the ramping up. It's about to be spring. So maybe that's our question for you next, is when is the best

time to sell a house? You know, we've seen the stories about how the spring season it seems to be the hottest time to sell the houses that start, and it's starting earlier. Maybe I don't know. I've seen stories about spring housing sing season starting in January this year because there's so much pent up demand. Yeah, so okay, maybe you remember back in two thousand and eight there were there was this housing crash because people were losing

their jobs. They weren't buying and selling houses. When you're not buying and selling existing houses, you're not building new houses. So there is this huge glut of people who want to move but can't because there's nothing on the market where they want to move, but they can't because they don't have a job. And now they finally have a job, and all these people want to move. I've seen the last three four what years, awes, so probably the last four years. Every spring, and I live in Colorado where

spring selling season starts in February. Every spring, there is just this mad rush of people to put their house on the market so that they can go find another house. So the best time of the year to sell is during the spring selling season because that's when the most people are looking. So, you know, economic basic law of supply and demand. The most people are looking, the more demand there will be for your property. I just helped

somebody buy a house. We closed on December. There were no other offers on this property because nobody is looking between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Like that's the worst time to try and sell a house. But now is the best time to try and sell a house. If you have a house to sell, you need to get it on the market as soon as you can, and you need to have it looking as good as possible now. If it needs a brand new kitchen and a brand new bathroom and all the things that it needs, it can

still be clean. Obviously, the nicest house is going to sell for the top dollar, But the cleanest house is going to sell before the dirty house, and it's going to sell for more money than the dirty house will. So the best time to sell is in the spring. You want to know what it is you're selling for. If you've got a job transfer, you kind of don't have a lot of leverage selling your property. If you have a new baby on the way and you're living in a one bedroom condo, you kind of don't have

a lot of leverage. But if you just want to sell because you're sick of living here, you know, oh, maybe we want a bigger house, you have a lot more leverage and you can be more choosy with with what offer you accept. Yeah, so so you say leverage, What do you mean by that? Is it just kind of like you said, is it being picky about about the offers and just waiting longer? Or or yeah, what do you what do you mean by that? Yeah? Well, so let's let's use the one where you have a

baby on the way. You have a one bedroom condo, you feel like it's not big enough for you. You You need to buy a new house. You moving with a three week old baby is a terrible idea. Ask me, I've done that twice, stupid. Um. So you want to move before the baby comes so you feel more pressured to accept whatever offers out there. So that's really what I mean by leverage. Whereas, when if you decide, you know, oh, I'm going to sell my house I'm sick of it.

When somebody comes in with a really crappy offer, you can be like, no, I'm not going to accept that, and you can either pull it off the market or figure it out wait for a better offer. Well, in your opinion, mindy, what are the biggest differences between selling an owner occupied property, like it's my personal home, I live in it, versus an investment property that someone selling. Oh so, Well, an owner occupied property, you have more

control over what the property looks like. Obviously, if you're trying to get top dollar for it, you're gonna make it look as nice as possible. You're not going to leave dirty dishes in the sink and crumbs on the floor. Whereas if you're selling, you might surprise you a filthy animal. Okay,

everybody else listening would not do that. Don't be like Joel. So, if you're trying to sell an investment property that has tenants in it, it's not going to show as nice because your tenants are probably not going to care about the appearance as much as you are. So you know, it's kind of a what should you do? Should you wait until the tenants are out and then try to sell it, but then you're not so you're not getting rental income from that during the time that there's no

tenants in there. Or do you try and sell it with tenants in there and just say, hey, there's tenants. Sorry. You know that's uh, that's a bit of a gamble there. When you're selling a house that you flipped, especially if you haven't lived there, you want to stage the house. You want to have really nice furniture in there and make it look as nice as possible because you are

trying to get the highest dollar for that. Gotcha? Well, so many So let's say someone has decided that they want to go ahead and sell their home, like you mentioned, to have it clean right step one? You laugh, you laugh, But that become a real estate agent and you will walk into these homes. Did they did they not know I was coming today? But on that note, right, what are some of the other things that need to be done to the physical house, to the property in order

to get it ready for the listing? Okay, so if you are listening to the show something's wrong with your house. The door knob doesn't open right, or you have to like lift up the sliding glass door to get it to close, or like whatever. Fix that that's gonna show up in the home inspection. The buyer is going to discover it at some point. Fix those weird little things

that you know you should be doing. You know how you have that window that like doesn't close quite all the way and you have to hit it from the outside. Like fix all those things, because that's just gonna cost you money later when you're listing your house. There's this thing called a material defect. Material defect can also be

pronounced very expensive to fix. You need to disclose those if you know or if you should have known, Like the roof is leaking, there's black mold in the root in the attic, you should have known that there's black mold. Get up there and look at it. You should fix that or disclose that. That's an issue. If you don't and the buyer can prove that you knew about it and didn't disclose, they can sue you, and they they'll probably win, which is kind of a scary thing. I

probably kind of derailed this show there. But you know, fix the little things. The broken tile in the kitchen, replace the tile, put linoleum in, fix that one tile. You know, make the house look as nice as possible, because you're going to get lowbald on the offer price. If you don't, well, I think you're Yeah, you're completely

right on that. And I think one of the things that we have a problem with a humans, it's like, we look at our house and it's harder to see the faults, and so we almost maybe even need a friend to come in and pick our house apart to a certain extent, so that we know what to fix, right, can't they can't that be helpful? Yes, an honest friend Exactly. You don't want some yes man friend, but you want somebody to come in and be like, hey, it smells like you have a petting zoo in your house. I'm sorry.

If you have a cat of the time, it smells like you have a cat in your house. Yeah, I'm probably not gonna buy your house if you have a cat. Exactly. If you have you know your buyer might have allergies. If you have a dog, oh my goodness, please don't leave your dog at your house during a showing, have a neighbor come over and walk the dog or take them to their house, or even board the dog, especially if you're first listing the house. I went into a house.

You knock on the door and you hear these dogs bark, and you're like, what is going on here? You open the door. Five of the biggest dogs I have ever seen, like it behind a baby gate in the master bedroom, and all I can think of is they're going to knock down that gate and come attack me. We didn't even go in, Like, don't have animals in your house when you're trying to sell the house. And if you do clean the litter box every day, like wipe up after the dog, you know, pick everything up. Just the

cleanest house is going to sell. The nicest smelling house is gonna sell. And you can tell when there is like those little glade plugins, you can tell when that's covering up the smell of a dog. So so when we're talking about getting these repairs done right, you have your picky friend come in and be like, yo, your house is not up the snuff and eat some work. Do you have any suggestions, any guidelines on how people should go about thinking about doing repairs themselves or hiring

someone to do them. Should they be kind of trying to tackle the little stuff on their own and and saving that money for the bigger things that might be wrong with your house? Or what do you think how should we handle that? Well, let's look at what's really wrong with your house. If your paint needs touched up. Anybody can paint. You can get a pap brush and a count to paint, and you know, touch up the little spots that your kids knocked into. Anybody can clean,

anybody can back you. There's things that you should do yourself. If you have a leaky faucet, you should call a plumber. If you have you know, you want to change out all the electrical fixtures, like all the light fixtures because they're old and brass and kind of outdated. Have those ready, but call it professional and you know, spend the money on that. Now. I am a big d I Y person, and I would say that electricity isn't that hard. But the time to learn how to wire a house is

not when you're going to sell it. Maybe on your own time and your own property. I'm watching those YouTube videos trying to become an amateur electrician. I think I got this. That's probably not gonna work out. I'm recording this in my office where I just installed six can lights all by my big girl self. That's totally impressive. I've personally, I've never installed electrical for me. It just

totally scares me. Like we've talked about this before on the show, because I have not sat down and actually learned it. But I think once you know what, you know it and you can feel confident. But I lack that confidence right now. Well, I will invite you over because I have a lot of electricity work to do in my house, So come over any time and I will rearrange my rehab schedule to do lights, outlets or whatever.

But I will say I should caveat this with My father in law is an electrician, so he has shown me how to do things. He showed he showed Carl how to do things, and then Carl showed me how to do things. Step number one, turn off the electricity at the breaker. The real question is is how come you are the one doing all the electrical work and it's not Carl. He's the one that's got the electrician heritage. So well, because I was thinking a YouTube video for

bigger pockets doing it for work. Well, so I have a related question them and you real quick. So, I mean we're talking about repairs, right, like the things that you need to get your your house basically up to up to par. When does it make sense or does it ever make sense to make improvements on the property just for resale? Like you know, you hear people doing that where they've had the worst countertops for the twenty years that they lived there, or or even just a

few years. But then right before they sell it, you know, they go through all these small renovations to get it ready for the listing. Does that ever make sense to go ahead and do those things? Yes? Would you like me to elaborate? Of course, please please. So you walk into a house and it's got a decent layout. You like the kitchen, you like the bathrooms, but you cannot get over the fact that every single wall is painted

fluorescent orange. If you're selling this property, your agents should come in and tell you you have to repaint all of this. Nobody's going to buy this house in this fluorescent orange. You can actually get a really big discount on a property just because they didn't paint. What what about those bigger improvements like potentially remodeling a bathroom or or completely redoing a kitchen. Oftentimes, you know what you

read is your return dollar for dollar. It's not going to make enough of a difference, right Like you're you're making sixty cents on the dollar when you renovate a kitchen, or seventy cents on the dollar when you renovate a bathroom. So does it ever make sense to do a bigger remodel like that before you sell the house. I think it makes sense if you are doing the work yourself. So we just did a bathroom here in the house.

It cost us a thousand dollars. We pulled out I don't know why they do this, but in Colorado they carpet the bathrooms were disgusting. So we pulled out the carpet, We pulled off the wallpaper. We put a new vanity, a new toilet, tiled the floors, painted the walls, and then behind the toilet and vanity, we put this kind of like ship lap board up. All of the materials were a thousand dollars plus. You know, time, I don't think about the time. I know a lot of people

are like, oh, you need to pay yourself. Well, I just remodeled the bathroom for a thousand dollars. I don't what to put, like my time into it is different if you are getting ready to sell your house, a carpeted bathroom versus a tile bathroom. The tile bathroom is going to make the house sell faster. I'm gonna look at that carpet and think that's disgusting. It's got mold, it's got you're in stains, Like, there's a lot of disgustingness in a bathroom. I wanted to be crisp and clean,

and that's what the new one looks like. So if you're doing the work yourself, you should absolutely consider doing that before you put the house on the market. But again going back to your why are you selling it? Because you've got a baby coming, you really don't have time to put that work into it. It took us a whole week. But Karl doesn't have a job, so, and I say that lovingly. He is retired, but I sometimes call him unemployed. I'm sure he loves that too, right,

He's like, do you that make you feel bad? He's like, no, I don't care. Well, I mean we're talking about, you know, being able to get a lot of money from selling your home, and so one of the ways that you might be able to save money when it comes to selling your house is to do a for sale by owner. And so we're gonna get to vats uh and a few other things right after the break. All right, we're back from the break. We're talking with our good friend Mindy Jensen about how to sell a home and get

top dollar for that home. And maybe we just talked about how somebody's house their property, it's all set up and ready to go, hopefully now they've made the repairs, they've decluttered, they've cleaned it. So let's get into who is going to sell the house. So what's your take? How do you feel about selling a home by owner? Should fizbo be a legit consideration or is that just like a stupid move for people? Yes to both that

all the above Joel's favorite dancer. So, I am a licensed real estate agent in the state of Colorado, and if you'd like to buy a home, give me a call. But I also wasn't a licensed real estate agent in any state, and I did sell my house for sale by owner, and a lot of people want to put the time in to sell their house by themselves. They want to saved the commission. Uh, it is a violation of the Sherman Anti Trust to say that the going

rate is whatever. But typically a real estate commission goes for between two and a half and three percent per side. So there's the selling agent and the buying agent. So around five and a half or five to six percent of the sales price goes to the real estate agents. So some people look at that and they think, oh my goodness, I'm going to sell my house for four hundred thousand dollars. I have to give somebody twenty to two thousand dollars to do this. I'll just do it myself.

I understand that I was in that same boat. And if you're willing to put in the work, you're willing to do the showings, you're willing to do the advertising, you're willing to you know, accept the contract and read through all the stipulations and all of that, then FSBO is a really valid way to sell your house. If you're not willing to do that, if you don't have the time to do that, you're too busy, you don't feel comfortable doing that, you should use a real estate agent.

The eye buying is not something that I really have a lot of experience with. This is your like your Zillos and your open doors and that kind of thing where somebody will you list. You say I want to sell my house. They say, hey, will buy your house.

Here's the price will give you. And they say, you know, we'll give you four thousand dollars for your house, minus a ten percent commission minus these repairs are going to cost twar so minus that, minus minus this, minus this, and in the end you typically end up with less money in your pocket than if you went with the traditional agent or you sold it for sale by owner. It all goes back to your why why are you

selling the house? Are you selling it because you need to get out of it right away, or are you selling it because you're sick of it. When you list with a traditional real estate agent, they put it on the MLS or the Multiple Listing service. It makes it available in a database to every real estate agent. So if you're looking to get the most eyeballs on your property, that's the way to go. But when you do that, you're you know, you're giving up five to six percent

of the sales price. If you want to go for sale by owner, you can list the property you plan to sign in your front yard, you have an open house yourself, you can start marketing the property and it doesn't start counting days on market, which is an indicator of how long the house has been for sale when it's on the MLS. As soon as you put it

on the market, that's one day on market. And the MLS seems to be one of the most important things when you're listening at home right that's where all the agents go in order to know how which homes to show to their clients. So how important is it to be on the MLS. And if you are attempting to do for sale by owner, is there a way that those people can get their home on the MLS? Yes, there is, joll Yeah. Being on the MLS is where

all the agents go. Um, that's where I go when somebody calls me up and says, hey, I want to look for a property, Let me go to the MLS. Let me show you all the poties that are listed right now, and I get them a list based on their sales price or how many bedrooms they want or whatever. I can send them a list and they go through it and they're like, oh, I want to see these three houses. I don't have the time to knock on everybody's door in the city that we're looking at to

see if they're interested in selling their house. I don't have time to drive around and look for for sale by owner signs, and I don't go on Craigslist and all those other ways to find for sale by owner properties. I go to the MLS because that's where the majority of the properties are. I want to say, but it kind of sounds like I'm just making that up, so I'll just say homes are on the MLS. If you want the most eyeballs on your property, you want to be on the MLS. There is a way to have

your cake and eat it too. You can be for sale by owner with a flat fee MLS listing service. So you pay a real estate agent a flat fee thousand dollars to put your property on the MLS. They don't take care of showings, they don't care take care of negotiations, they don't take care of anything. All they do is listed on the MLS for you, So you get all the eyeballs. But you're still just doing all

the showings yourself. Remember I said that it's two and a half to three percent per side approximately, So if you're not offering the buyer's agent some sort of incentive to sell your house, they may not show it. I think this is kind of a jerky move. You should show the house that your clients want to see, and legally you're supposed to show the house that your clients want to see, regardless of the remuneration to yourself. But there's no law that says what order you have to

show houses in. So the house that offers, you know, one percent selling commission, it's probably gonna get shown last, if at all. If you know the oh, that's like the FISBO route right for see by owner. If you know that that's not going to work out for you, You've got a full time job, you don't have a lot of time to devote to the move. It sounds like maybe going with a real estate agent that that might make the most sense, But how do you go

about finding the right one? Like what questions should you be asking specific agents when you're when you're interviewing them. Essentially, you should interview your agent and you should interview a lot of agents. You shouldn't just like drive past somebody's sign and be like, oh, I've seen that before. I'll call that person. You should absolutely question your agents. What would you list my property at? If they answer that over the phone, I'd be really leering. You need to

come and see my house. You need to see all of these amazing improvements that I've done. You need to see the house itself, walk the house, you know, smell the house, listen to the house, and be in the house in order to give me a price. How did you come up with that price? Oh, I really think that this price will work. A property doesn't sell for what you think it's worth. Of property cells based on comps, and a comp is a comparable property located near the

property that you're trying to sell. Similar in bedrooms and bathrooms, and you know, so similar in layout, similar in condition. That's a comparable that has sold recently. So if you can if your agent, your potential agent says, oh, I can get you four hundred thousand dollars because I just know that the market's going up, so I know we can get this. Well, why do you know that? Show me proof that that's what can happen because that's what

the appraisers are going by. When you get a loan from a bank, they don't just give you a giant pile of cash. They make sure that the property that you're buying is worth that much money. So they're going to send an appraiser out. If the appraisal comes back low, they're not going to give you a loan. Let's say you have the property under contract for four hundred thousand dollars and the appraisal comes back at three. The bank is not going to give you a loan for four

hundred thousand. They're going to give you a loan for three seventy five. And you have to come up with the difference. You have to ask the seller to drop the price or you have to walk away. So I think asking the agent how they came to the price that they came with is a good a good first step.

When you know, if everybody's saying, oh, i'll listen for three seventy five and this agent says i'll listen for four hundred, A lot of times agents will say that to get the listing, and then when it doesn't sell, they're like, oh, you should drop the price. At three seventy five. Well, by that time, you've already got the days on market, your listing is considered stale, you've dropped the price, so you start to look a little desperate. So you definitely want to know how they came about

that price before you sign a paper with them. You want to know how they communicate. You want somebody who communicates the way that you communicate. And if all you want to do is have phone calls, you don't want an agent who text you and emails you, and that's you know, this valid. However you want to communicate is valid. But you need to find somebody who communicates the way

that you can communicate. How long have you been an agent, You could be very experienced, be part of a team, and then you're never going to actually work with Mindy Jensen the agent. You're going to work with one of her underlings because Mindy is so busy she can't work with you. If you want to work with Mindy, you want to make sure that you want to work with Mindy. If you don't care, if you just want her name

on your sign you know, and that's fine too. If you just got your license, that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't know anything. I've been buying and selling real estate personally for twenty two years, but I have been a licensed agent for six years. So when I first got my license, I still knew a lot more than a lot of agents who had been doing it for a while, just because I had the personal experience. So

having a newbie agent isn't necessarily a bad thing. You just need to know that that's what you're getting into. That's a great advice for picking the right agent. Maybe that's a lot of stuff to a lot of check marks. I think people can then look to to hit in order to make sure that the person they're hiring to do this really really important job that could potentially save or cost them in the tens of thousands of dollar range, to make sure they're getting the right person on their side.

So I think that's some great stuff I want to talk about, like market conditions for a second. To me personally, I'm not currently planning on selling any of the homes that my primary or any of my rental properties anytime soon, but I guess I have this question for you, like should I be considering selling something because when the market conditions are ripe for a seller. Should somebody that hasn't thought about selling home maybe start to consider selling based

on market conditions alone? Like, what do you think about that? Wow, that's a really interesting conundrum because I do believe that with uh not getting too political, we have an unstable political climate in Washington, and that can affect the housing market. That can affect the general economy of the United States. At this time that we're recording, we have some issues with Iran right now, and that could affect you know,

the economy and the general market, the world market. If you want to sell, maybe now's a great time to sell. But why do you want to sell? You just said you're not interested in selling. Why would you sell? Why would you move to a new market? I personally have moved. This is my home, so to me, it's not a big deal to move. But I'm also not gosh, well, what do flips of every two years? You can rack a lot of them up. But like, I wouldn't necessarily

just say move for the sake of moving. If you want to move to a new school district, if you want to move to a bigger home or a smaller home, now certainly a good time to start thinking about selling. But you know, if you're not thinking about selling, if it's not in your plans, then you don't have to, you know, except the first offer that comes your way. You don't have to accept an offer that you don't like.

I don't know. You can always put your house on zillo, make me move, Carl put Carl put our house on Zillo, make me move at six dollars and somebody reached out to him, I'm moving to Longmont and I need a house. Can I buy yours? And like, no, we don't have any place to move to. I think that's a great

way to think about it. Like if you put it this just astronomical price on something like Zillo, make me move, and someone is willing to pay that price, something that's you know, above normal market conditions, and you're like, I'd be happy to sell it if I was able to get that much, but it's just not likely. Then I

think that's a reason to sell potentially. But yeah, I mean, I just think it's interesting that with these conditions where there is just this incredibly low supply, rates are so low, especially when we're talking about the cheaper homes, the starter homes, there's just not enough of them out there for buyers, and so the prices have just gotten jacked up in a big way. And it will be interesting to see what happens over the next few years, because I have

a feeling that's not sustainable. I completely agree. And it goes back to two thousand eight and two thousand nine and two builders stopped building houses. They went out of business, and they didn't come back when the market changed, and now there's a favorable housing market, the builders have found

new jobs and they didn't come back. There's a builder, a couple of builders in my area that will give you a job, train, you pay you while you're being trained, and then you have to sign like a one or two year contract with them to work for them building houses. But they'll teach you framing and electric and plumbing and roofing and like all the things that go into being a home builder because they can't find anybody to hire.

So it's not sustainable to have these these starter homes growing up so crazy, but there were so many homes that weren't being built. Now that everybody has jobs again and every the economy is humming along, there's no place to buy, so you pay more because that's the only house is there, and you pay more in order to get the house. And the homes that are currently being

built seemed to be in the higher end. The all the apartments and and I want to say all, but most of the homes and apartments that are currently being built are on the more expensive side. And that's just because there's more incentive right now, especially in this economy, to provide those types of housing, and so there's just not much in the low end. And because of that, it's really jack those prices up a great deal, right, And I mean, how much does it cost to frame

a wall? You can buy like you order the framed wall from the wall framing company or whatever. It comes to you. It's a twenty by four wall already framed out. You just slap it together, you slip it's pennies more. It's like printing a T shirt. It costs twenty dollars to print one T shirt, but to print twenty T shirts, it's like print fifty T shirts. It's like twenty eight dollars. It's the all the setup and all the you know,

all of that. So once you get people to crank out a house, I will pay more are for a five bedroom house, then I will a two bedroom house. But the builder doesn't cost it doesn't cost that much more to build a five bedroom house versus a two bedroom house. So why would I Why would I build these little houses that I'm not making much money on when I could build these big houses that I make a ton of money on. Yeah, so true. Mendy, Hey,

this has been a fantastic conversation. I think our listeners are going to get a lot out of this, especially the ones who are actually considering selling their home. And again, we're gonna give away a bunch of copies of your book, How to Sell Your Home, which is essentially, I mean, it's a guide and it'll take our listeners step by step through the entire process of you know, thinking through why it is that you're selling, you know, through the

entire process. We touched on a lot of those topics, but there is way more to it than what we just discussed. And Mandy, we mentioned the podcast that you host. Where specifically can folks find you online? I am all over Bigger Pockets dot com. I'm the community manager there, so I am all over the forums. You can if you are not a member of Bigger Pockets and want to join. I will be your first colleague. I am also on every social media platform except for TikTok because

I don't understand that one yet. Um, and I am dollars can teach you that one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I am at Mindy at b P M I N dy y A t b P awesome. Well yeah, people can find you there and Mindy seriously awesome hanging out with you. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us today. Oh I'm so excited to be on how to Money. This is like this is a bucket checklist item right, bucket list checklist items. And I love talking about real estate.

So if somebody has a question about real estate, please email me Mindy at Bigger Pockets dot com. Awesome, all right, Well, thanks so much, Mindy. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. All right, Joel Man, what a fantastic conversation we had with Mindy. She had a lot of great advice on just some of the practical steps that we need to take before we sell our home. So on that note, or maybe not on that note, I don't know what you're gonna say, but what is

your big takeaway? From our conversation with Mindy Man, I think the thing that struck me the most was when she said, something is wrong with your house. And I think there are so many of us, truly who have this kind of pollyanna ish view towards our home. In our eyes, someone would walk in and point a couple of things out, and we might get frustrated or annoyed that someone would think that those things are wrong with

our home. What are you talking about? My home is great and and maybe some of us don't have that view. Maybe maybe we can see all the flaws in our home very clearly, but I think you need to look at your home with a very critical eye before you

do sell it. So, yeah, anything that you can do with obviously just the easy things painting and cleaning, but then on top of that, all those little things that might seem insignificant that you can fix, that you can take care of on the front end before people come to take a look at your home while they're considering the price that they're going to offer. Even just a door knob fix or making sure that window closes properly, right, those are kind of the little things that can make

a big impact, and they can stick in a buyer's mind. So, yeah, something is wrong with your house. Find out what it is and get it fixed so that you can make top dollar for your house. That's what stuck out to me. What Mindy said, Nice man, Well, okay, so what I'm gonna share is actually really similar to that. But it doesn't have to do with your specific house or you know, like features of your house, but it has to do with what's in your house, that being your pets. Mindy mentioned.

Just you know, whether you have a cat or whether you have a dog, you probably don't notice the smell. And I will say from personal experience for years having a big old Great Dane, you get used to the smell. But it's not until you don't have a pet that you realize, oh man, it smells really fresh and clean in here. Um. And so you know, even the smallest animals can have a lingering smell. Get those goldfish and hamsters out too, dude, Seriously, hamsters, actually hamsters and gerbils

and rabbits. The goldfish, they don't really smell, right, I don't know. Then it kind of like smell like seaweed. Yeah, probably like wetness. And get me more out of there too. But either way, I think just kind of keeping your pets in mind. You know, she mentioned definitely not having them,

they're like have a friend walk them. I think even maybe a step beyond that, if you know you're gonna have a string or a series of showings, maybe for one week where you're gonna hit it real hard, see if a friend could hang onto your dog for that week, maybe your your parents, maybe you're in laws, Maybe they can watch the dog. Maybe they can take the cats to where you can almost get a like a fresh

restart on your home. I was really thinking about that when she was kind of talking through that, And I know I'm much more sensitive to the smell of animals now that I don't personally have a pet. And so there are a lot of folks out there, obviously who do have pets, But there are a lot of folks who don't have pets and who don't want pets and who do not like the way that they smell. Yeah, and that could really be make or break. I mean, some buyers might say this smells like an animal, and

I don't want it. And even if you know you're completely used to it, there are a lot of people that aren't, and so yeah, that's definitely something to be aware of. A good point. All right, Matt, what were your thoughts on the beer that we had on the show today? We had a beer that our friend Josh gave us from Casa Agrea out in California. This one was called Slamming at the Club and it was a clean cut American logger. Is what it said. It's gut

this like sweet punk rock candas. Yeah. So the reason it's called Slaming at the Club this is, like I was reading the label, it's kind of an homage tribute to nardcore punk rock, which is a specific type of punk rock that originated in southern California. I gotta be honest, I'm reading some of the bands that they have listed on here. Read some of them. They're so good. I don't know any of them. But it's before a time

as well. All right, then I feel better. Yeah, there's one call Oh gosh, I can't even read some of you can't read. You can't read some of them. Fistfight on Ecstasy is one of them, which is that's one of the more tame ones. Yeah, all right, I'll name that one. But yeah, this one's called slamming at the club. It was a logger, and you know what, the sort

of style that we have often. But like I've mentioned before, the more often that I drink some of these just well crafted loggers, the more I appreciate them because I see what loggers are actually supposed to taste like. They're not flavorless and they're not totally skunky. It's this nice blend of a clean drinking, crisp beer that has all that nice beer flavor but without that that cruddy aftertaste that you can kind of come to expect from some

of the mass produced loggers out there. Yeah. I mean, I think clean and crisp are the two words that described this and that describe any really well made lagger. But the folks at Costa agree to they really know what they're doing. I feel like every we've had a bunch of different beer styles by that brewer at this point, and everyone that they've made just is on point. The flavors are beautiful, and this was no exception. This was

a great lagger from them. I really enjoyed it, and so yeah, big thanks to our buddy Josh for sending this one our way. Thanks Josh. All right, Matt, and let's get around to that giveaway. Mindy is generously giving away ten copies of her book How To Sell Your Home. And if you want to be entered into this giveaway, all you have to do is review our show. So if you haven't left a review for us, we'd really

appreciate it. All you gotta do is go to Apple Podcasts at click five stars preferably and say something nice about the show and what you've learned. Or you can also, if you're not an Apple person like me, go to stitcher dot com. You can leave a review there and then shoot us an email at how to Money Pod at gmail dot com. Let us know the screen name that you've left the review under. And if you've already left a review in the past, just send us an email let us know that you want to be entered

into this giveaway, and you can be entered into. Yeah, man, that's right. And so folks listening, if you want to be or in, you have until Friday at noon. Make sure you get that email into us by Friday at noon. That'll be when we close that giveaway and choose the names Angel. We'll have our show notes up on our site like we normally do at how to money dot com, and I think that's going to be at Man. So until next time, best friends out, Best Friends Out,