Tego Venturi: Okay, let's talk insurance. I've got a couple different ways I want to take this Bill. And first off, let's just talk about we're specifically homeowners insurance. I know you know everything about insurance and everything, but we're going to talk about homeowners because that's what we do here. Sure. And the return when somebody purchases home, right, they're getting a mortgage. they're required to get insurance, right? Correct. Yeah. Now, what if they own it free and clear? Do they have to have insurance?

William Tobin: Interesting, they do not. But that's when you really want to have insurance. Because if you lose the home and you have a mortgage, most of the money is is mortgaged, you don't have a lot of equity. Right? When you own a home free and clear that home is you know, whether it's worth 100 or 500,000 or a million. That's, that's, that's actually money. That's cash. Right. And so to me, I'm more interested in homeowners insurance if I didn't have a mortgage, but it is not required.

Tego Venturi: Yeah. I can't imagine somebody's not but you know, I'm sure I'm sure it happens

William Tobin: When you see them on TV. If something burns down a lot of times and they're asking for money, because they didn't have homeowners insurance. They own the home and yeah, there's a GoFundMe page.

Tego Venturi: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. Right.

Tego Venturi: Home equity, I just want to hit real quick. Eddie, if we’ve, we’ve got a couple more minutes. There was J J the third quarter home equity numbers came out nationally and it was a record in new in New Mexico. Well, nationally what they’re saying is over, it was a Q3 19 Q3, 20 17% or $17,000 in home equity gain. And so home equity that, you know, actually money in the bank literally, or the house bank, if you will in New Mexico is actually 20,000. So it’s actually higher than the national average.

Tracy Venturi: So what we always say Tego is homeownership is for savings, right? Right. You’re, you’re saving your, for your own future by owning a home because you’re paying yourself and the home values typically go up. Yes. Some years they’ve pulled back, but that’s not the norm. If you look over a 30 or 40 year chart home ownership is the number one wealth builder for most Americans.

Tego Venturi: And, and I’ve got just one quote here. I just want to, I want to hit this guys with a Realty track, which is one of the companies that do kind of like foreclosure processing, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Realty track. And, and, and what he said was all this equity is one of the things, one of the things, and there’s a few other that will, that should prevent a huge wave of foreclosures once the government memoranda on and the cares act for Barron’s programs expire. And so what they’re saying is we’ve had this huge build in equity. Now, this is nothing like 2008, where everybody was, had squeezed the equity they could out of their home, and then prices started going down. So it’s a, it’s a good thing, at least for the housing economy. And it looks good going into the future.

Tracy Venturi: So there’s our start to 2021.

Tego Venturi: Yes.

Tracy Venturi: So Tego my topic. You have time for it.

Tego Venturi: Let’s go. I want to talk about equity. So we got, we got time. Yeah.

Tracy Venturi: I’m wanting to talk about what homeowners want in homes in 2021. That’s unexpected. What are we seeing? That’s not usual. We know people are looking at, you know, we’ve heard over and over for a few months, the home office for kids home homeschooling. Right. We know that, but you know, there’s a few things that have come up that are unexpected and one of them is swimming pools. So if you talk to any swimming pool, contractors in our area, right now, get them on the phone. If you can get them on the phone, they are booked out a year or more.

Tego Venturi: I, I heard two years from, from somebody,

Tracy Venturi: Right. And that’s because people couldn’t go to the swimming pools this summer. Right. And they were like, this is not okay. And they’re spending time at home and they’re going, okay, this is the time for us to add that pool. Other things we saw, we saw a tennis court being added. You know, another thing that’s sort of unexpected. It’s not too common here. And it’s, you know, you see them occasionally in people’s yards, but not very often. A few other things, new furniture, which is not unusual, right. You know, they’re, they’re spending more time at home. The other thing is multipurpose rooms. So they might be taking the living room and not just making it a home office or their homeschool, but they might be making a gaming area or they might be making a library, reading nook, or they, you know, a family game table. We’re seeing a lot more people playing family games, board games and things, or online gaming together when they’re in different stuff.

Tego Venturi: Hey, I just got to give a shout out for, for Jackbox games. If you guys haven’t checked out Jackbox games for, you know, playing and you can play them online via zoom. And we do that with our kids that live in Arizona and friends and family around the country. So, sorry, side note. I want to, I want to ask you something. I mean, obviously I know the answer, but I want you to answer it, which is swimming pools, tennis courts sport courts, you know, another version of like a tennis court how much value or what value do those add tools?

Tracy Venturi: It’s a really hard question.

Tego Venturi: Exactly. I want you, I want, I want you to answer that one.

Tracy Venturi: Well, the statistics come out every year. How much does value does a swimming pool adds? So, you know, a swimming pool is probably 40, 50,000 a minimum today in Albuquerque. Right. We don’t have

Tego Venturi: In ground gunnite pool. Yeah. You’re going to be

Tracy Venturi: And a little slide. Yeah. So we’re not Phoenix. We don’t have a lot of pool contractors, first of all, competing for our work. Right. They’re all booked out. Like you said, two years. So how much is it going to be worth? It’s going to add some value to your house, to the right person, somebody who really wants a pool, the way you do the whole scape around the pool. What all the rest of the outdoor living is makes a difference. Right? But it’s not going to make it equal to what you put in.

Tego Venturi: It’s not going to be a one to one return on investment from a pure economic dollars and some standpoint, but it

Tracy Venturi: Think about the family memories, the experiences, the time spent, you know, if you have family, friends that enjoy it with you, you’re making amazing memories. So you have to realize that that’s the trade-off and you know what, depending on what time of year you sell your home, a pool can actually add a little bit more value if you sell it spring time or early summer or summer, kind of it wanes as you get closer to cold weather, but the pool open with beautiful photos of it when we’re marketing your house is definitely going to help. We’ve. We’ve had winter time photos of, of pools where the grounds don’t look very well kept and the pool is covered a

Tracy Venturi: So the topics for today, yes.

Tego Venturi: Should this be the year that somebody sells their home? Tracy, that’s the topic. That’s one of them.

Tracy Venturi: So should it be, well, obviously what we always say, the first thing is, is it time for you to sell your house? Yeah. Right. I mean, the, the approach we’re taking is does the market support, is this the year you should sell your house, right? Not, you know, if you don’t need to sell your house, you don’t have a reason to sell your house. Should you sell your house? So let’s say you need to move in the next couple of years. Is it the year that you should sell your house? Well, what do you think?

Tego Venturi: I think if, if you let’s look at it from a timing, the market standpoint, right. If you’ve been waiting for home prices to be high or higher, then yeah. It’s a great time to sell. I mean, like just talked about home prices up nine, 10% versus last year. Right. however, if you’re just moving to somewhere else in town, you’re going to be paying, you know, 9%, 10% more than you did last year. So, you know, you have to balance that as part of it. When you look into the whole timing issue, now I will say this and we’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again is, you know, if you’re moving from a, let’s say sub median price, median prices around two 50 right now, if you’re selling a home in a lower price point, and you’re moving up into a higher price point, you know, lower price homes definitely went up higher in price last year, higher price homes, man. That was tough.

Tracy Venturi: So from that perspective, if you’re going to be a move up, buyer is what we call it. Yeah. It’s a great time. Yes. Right. Great time. Because you’re going to be in a great position when you sell and you’re going to be buying at a price point that hasn’t appreciated as much and taking advantage of the interest rates and rock, you know, assuming you use the loan locking in phenomenal interest rates and monthly payment for the next 30 years. Now, a lot of us say, I’m not going to be in my house for 30 years, but the analogy is you’re going to be paying to live somewhere in most cases, unless you’re moving in with mom or your children or a friend. Right. So if you’re going to have a monthly housing cost, you might as well be paying yourself instead of a landlord. So sidebar there,

Tego Venturi: I think it’s good. W why do you think Tracy, what would be another reason somebody should be thinking about selling this year? If it’s kind of been on their radar and now they’re going, you know, maybe this is a year,

Tracy Venturi: You know, I’m, I’m thinking shorter term when I answer this question. So yes, 20, 21 good time to be a seller for sure. But let’s talk about today, next week. Isn’t it right now, a good time to sell seven,

Tego Venturi: 9:00 PM.

Tracy Venturi: We put a home on the market. Today’s we put a home on the market two afternoons ago. And by that night, okay. This house is on the West side, 519,000. And by that evening, they’d already had two showings. You know, it’s the early January, not when you typically think of putting a $500,000 plus house on the market. Right. It’s not what people typically do, but there’s a lot of activity on that property. And next time we’re on the radio. We’ll probably be saying that house sold, right? Yeah. So right now is a good time because the springtime come March, April, may, there will be more homes on the market. We still won’t have enough on the market, but there will be more homes on the market competing for your buyer. So getting it on right away before the market gets hotter, I think is advantageous to sellers right now.

Tego Venturi: So if somebody’s going to sell this year, Tracy, what do you think? I mean, what are the, like, let’s say give three things that they should be thinking about. If they’re going to be selling their home this year,

Tracy Venturi: One of them would be to present it like a model home has bes

Let’s let’s talk about what we were just covering building. So we were talking about land and there’s a lot of information out there, new home construction, right? Of course we work with builders. Of course, we work with new home builders like Abrazo and bolt D and VR, Horton, and Twilight, and all the other local and national builders. And what we know is land’s hard to find. Albuquerque is landlocked. We have Indian reservations on two sides. We have a mountain on the other side going West, the only direction we still have a lot of land. We’ve got issues there as well. I mean, we can go a ways, but we’ve got volcanic land. We’ve got a scarp mints. We have individual ownership. So assembling a parcel, large enough can be difficult. We have Rio Rancho, which we a lot of land, but again, unless it’s, Amref, that’s still owns a big parcel. It’s individual owners that are all over the world that people bought the land in the 1950s and 1960s. And they’ve passed it down. So now six grandchildren, or great-grandchildren own one lot. And the lots of joining that lot are owned by other grandchildren from all over the world. Right? So putting together a big enough parcel for like a Dr. Horton or a Pulte or a big builder to do a neighborhood.

Well, and let me just add onto that. It’s not even the big builders. It’s like, if you own, let’s use rear Rancho, for example, because a lot of people own a lot in Rio Rancho, right there they’re half acres, there’s 88, 80 some thousand of them, right?

Some of them are buildable. Some of them have utilities or utilities near

The key is some of them. And so the reality is that the is not the problem.

The problem is the infrastructure, right. Is, you know, gas, electric, water, sewer roads. Yeah.

They scraped roads back in the fifties. 1950S is now like 70 years ago. But most of those grape roads, you can still see where they scraped.

Yeah. So, so that’s, that’s the challenge. And so a good buildable, I say, good, good in the sense that it has utilities it’s ready to build on, you know, or that utilities may be not be a big challenge. Like let’s say, take North Albuquerque acres. For example, too, we were just talking about, you know, those are our eight, they call them acre, but they’re 0.8, nine. And they generally have your, your electric, your gas, not always. And not always a lot of them are on propane, but then you’ve, but you know, water can be a challenge and sewer can be a challenge. A lot of those are on septic systems. There’s, septics, you know, doing a septic system, as long as you have enough land, it’s not a big deal, but it’s going to be an eight to $15,000 expense to put her in a subject

Depending on the soils and the drainage and all that. Yep. Yep.

So, so, you know, it’s, we’re we keep hearing are I keep seeing all these national stories and we’re now locally, there was a story in the journalist week about the lack of number of home from the market. And then people just go, well, let’s build some more, let’s build more. Well, it’s just not that easy, just like we were talking about it’s a two year process, if you’re going to do a subdivision, for example. Right,

Right. So let’s talk about how 2020 changed things as well. So 2020, we have all these builders that are working on subdivisions, buying the parcels, getting them zone, getting them subdivided, thinking about how they’re going to put in streets and an engineering of it. And the utilities and along comes March. And what we know is March, lot of people like us and other businesses just stopped. We didn’t know what the implications of COVID where we cut back everywhere we could, which is what builders did. We didn’t know if people were going to buy homes. So by the end of March, a lot of the developments that were coming stopped. And once the builders started to feel confident, again, that there was still demand for new homes. A lot of the government agencies were also trying to figure out how they work from home,

It is new year’s Eve or new year’s after new year’s day. If you’re listening to us, though right here on the radio is of course to go on Tracy, joining us every Saturday morning, right here on the Kiva, the Albuquerque real estate group, but you can find them to find them directly at welcomehomeabq.com. That’s welcome home, maybe Q a.com or why not pick up the phone and dial them directly this morning. They’re waiting for you. Four four eight 88 88. That’s four, four eight 88, 88, or yet one more time. The number one real estate website in the state of my spiel. Welcome home. Abq.Com. Happy new years guys, or Hey, new year. Yes. Happy new year. Happy new year

To be here on this happy new year for

All the folks that are our regulars, listening to the show and usually see us in our studio, in our office where you’re not in the office today, but this seems to be working Eddie. Are you hearing us okay. On this and clear getting microphone and you’ll look amazing too. I love the studio lighting there in the back. Absolutely amazing. Yeah. So Eddie you know, th this week we wanted to talk about, you know, what we’ve gone through this year in real estate and Albuquerque and what we see coming down the pike. I do see some, some challenges as well as some opportunities in the real estate market in Albuquerque.

Yeah. You know, obviously end of year, we always do kind of a recap and we’ll have more of that into January, but we’re also talking a little bit about what, what we expect for 2021, mostly the opportunities

There, there is. There’s like I said, some challenges, but the biggest challenge is, you know, is, is the lack of choices for, for home buyers right now, and the lack of number of homes on the market. And I want to bring you in on this conversation that he go ahead,

Which leads to one of our topics today, which is homebuilders and the lack of land for them, and what has happened, impact that even further in 2020,

There was an article in the New York not the New York times, the wall street journal, the, the better New York times the, the wall street journal about, you know, the challenge that homebuilders have, not just locally here in Albuquerque, but around the country, finding ready to build blocks. First tale, there’s a shortage. It’s not like they don’t want to build homes if they just can’t because they don’t have enough dirt to build that. Now at a, you know, the story of the local builder that then kind of fighting to get development out of the ground, you know, on the West side. And they’ve been, I don’t know, it’s been two, three years, I think, and they’ve got multi-million dollars into it and they still can’t get it done because not because the neighborhood or the community or the piece of dirt isn’t zoned for use for residential, it’s still has to go through planning and zoning to do the subdivision, all that stuff. It’s been at least two years, but I think it’s been long. I think London generally take for most people, Tracy, to get through the whole process. If you were taking a sum them on through the approval process on their own, a piece of land, how long would that generally take?

Yeah, it would take a while anyway, you know, a year, maybe more or less.

So it’s different things that he, so, so let’s say you have a piece of you have one of those 0.8, nine acre, lots in North Albuquerque acres, right? You can break ground tomorrow. Right? You can start, that’s already zoned. It’s already subdivided. It’s already to go for that. But if you are a, a land developer or a builder that is developing land for builders, and I say that wrong, no, I did say you get my point. Yeah. So if you’re either developing land to sell or developing land as the builder, you’re looking at a two year process. So, you know, you go and find you know, let’s say a five acre parcel probably on the West side. That’s basically where it is maybe Rio Rancho. You’re looking at a couple of years of, of before you’re ready to actually

Merry Christmas to everybody. And I know we do have a loyal following here, and we sure appreciate you listening as always.

Tego: One of the questions we get a lot, and I get a lot is, are we seeing 2008 all over again? Are we going to see a housing crash again? And the, and I would say the the answer is a, is a very strong, no, it’s, it’s not the same. And you said something that, that was, it was a great example of how this is different, or just one of the many examples, how this is different back in 2008, 09, 10, when we were, we’re dealing with all those short sales meaning people that had to, uh, get their home sold and have the bank take short with the, with the lender was owed on the home, the lenders weren’t in a really well working with people, they were just saying, sorry, you didn’t pay your mortgage. You know, foreclosure this time. It’s very different. There’s these forbearance programs that are available. You know, if you’re in a mortgage and you have an issue, and you’re not able to make your mortgages for financial reasons, you need to reach out to your loan servicer, and your loan servicer is basically the person you’re paying your mortgage to. Right. Right. And there’s a bunch of freedom mortgage bank of, you know, all the banks and everything and, and just reach out to them and say, Hey, I need some help here. I’ve found, you know, going on the different websites, every one of those, you know, big national mortgage servicers, they have something right on their home page or their website need help reach out here. That is very different than what was happening in 2008 and nine. So there’s a lot of workout options as they call it for people that, that, uh, aren’t able to continue in making their mortgage. Right. So, so just remember, help us available and the other thing, Tracy is we’re so different than 2008, 09, 10, because people have equity in their homes this time around way more equity in their homes. And so there’s that other option, which is sell the home, but not as a distress sale, not as a foreclosure where you give it back to the bank and have that on your credit history, ruining your credit. Um, you know, I read something the other day I was reading some stats on, you know, what’s been happening with the forbearance programs since the beginning of the pandemic. And there was a bunch back in March, April, um, right now about 50% of the people that entered those programs are now off that those programs either they’ve exited the programs, meaning they’ve started to make up their payments, they’ve refinanced and started making their payments, or they paid off the loan, which means they probably sold the home. So, you know, a good 50% of the people are in those programs have come out of those programs. So that’s a good sign going forward. The reality is we still have about, I think the, uh, and, and I, I apologize. I think the number is about 3,000,000 people in the country that are still in some form of delinquency on their mortgage. Uh, and just remember, I’m say this again is delinquency does not equal foreclosure delinquency just means people are not making their payments. That doesn’t mean it automatically equates to the home going into foreclosure. Right. Right. And, and I keep seeing that being reported as the, that one equals the other. And it just, it’s just not the case because there are so many options for, for people.

Tracy: Perfect. So new topic. Yes. So, um, we, we were talking, you know, with Eddie a while ago about what our year has been like in real estate here locally. We want to talk about trends for 2021, but let’s talk locally. We have a hard time talking about our team ourselves, right. It’s always nice when someone else gives you kudos and says, Hey, good job, guys. Um, we, during these difficult times, and it has been a difficult year for our industry and every other industry and people everywhere with the COVID situation, but we’ve been able to serve over 500 people with home buying, home selling, or investing in real estate. And we have seen quite a few investors this year. Um, so we’