Templar Real Estate Radio Show Transcripts 8-28-2021

Templar Real Estate Radio Show for August 28, 2021

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The following program was paid for by Templar Real Estate. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of the staff and management of WMTR. As always, it is advisable to consult a professional before making a major decision.

It’s time now for the Templar Real Estate Talk Show. Here’s your host for the program, Joseph J. Zoppi.

Joseph J. Zoppi:

Hello. Welcome to the Templar Real Estate Talk Show. My name is Joseph J. Zoppi, a real estate investor, consumer advocate, author, and managing partner of Templar Real Estate Enterprises. You could reach us at templarcashforhouses.com. That’s T-E-M-P-L-A-Rcashforhouses.com, or you could call us at 973-240-8593, and we could answer any questions you may have, or you could email us from our website as well on any questions or if you want a certain topic discussed on this radio show.

For first time listeners, my company is a real estate investment firm. We buy houses for cash, we purchase apartment buildings, we do joint ventures with other real estate investors, we loan money for rehabs and provide transactional and gap funding as well. We work with individuals that want to invest with us in single family houses up to apartment buildings. We do not speculate and we’re very protective of our money and our investors’ money. We’re not a brokerage and I’m not a real estate agent, but I have individuals on staff that are agents that could sell your house through the Traditional Multiple Listing Service. This show is going to go over everything there is about real estate and those things that impact real estate. We’ll talk about our rehabs and some of our investments. We’ll talk about what went well, what did not go well, and how we learned from it. We’ll talk about the economy and interest rates. We’ll discuss trends in the real estate market. Real estate is one of your biggest investments, so it’s important you know as much as possible about it.

I’m going to provide you with my opinion, it’s only my opinion. I ask everyone to do lots of research, whether you’re going to work with us or any other company or any other contractor, I always ask you make sure you so a lot of research, make sure you look at the Better Because Bureau, see what their reviews are of the articular company. Is the company certified or registered with the Better Because Bureau? These are all things that you could look at as well as references. Again, with the reference, make sure very, very, very important with references, just because someone else likes that person doesn’t mean you’ll like that person. I always say sometimes you see your friend, spouse, you go, “I don’t know how they got together because I couldn’t do it.” So Remember that. So that’s the spouse example. So always think about that because you have some individuals there together and you’re like, you scratch your head and you say, “I couldn’t do it.” The same thing with contractors, you might like a contractor, someone else may not. So you got to really be very specific when you ask the questions about using someone else’s service or anything associated with that.

To my favorite listeners, I’d like to do a special shout out as always to Paulette of Famous Crossing Guard from Livingston, as well as Tim from Cedar Grove, as well as Janet and John, I’d like to say hi, they’re new listener so I like to say hi, welcome aboard guys, hopefully you enjoy it. Also like to thank my private investors that help Templar be even more successful and more profitable. It’s a win-win situation for both us and our investors. So we’re always very happy to work with individuals that want to invest with us.

A couple other things I want to say, so we’re very unapologetic about how good we feel we are and how passionate we are about our company. We think we’re the best around and we work extremely, extremely hard to ensure that our clients are number one. They’re always taken care of and we do whatever we need to, to ensure that they’re happy and they’re successful at the net result of the transaction. That’s extremely, extremely important to us. So whether it’s our investors, our clients or our staff, we strive. And as one of the leaders of this organization, we strive to the nth degree to make sure that we’re providing the best service and we’re always on top of it. Again, providing great service is one thing, but also communicating. That’s extremely important, that’s probably more important than, you know, you have to set clear expectations and communicate constantly. That’s probably the biggest thing is that we always, always, always work to ensure that we’re on top of our communication and the staff is always responding to our clients’ needs and our investors’ needs. It’s that simple.

Also, I continue to have private discussions on investing in real estate. And that’s more from an educational perspective. It’s not based on a particular deal we have, it’s more of an educational so we do a lot of one-on-ones also with individuals that want to invest in multifamily and single family houses. So, you know, if you are interested, please give us a call, we could set up a session, we’d be more than happy to.

Again, if you need to sell your house fast or even if you don’t need to sell it fast, if you just need to sell your house, please give us a call. Again, we buy houses in New Jersey, that’s everywhere. So again, I have individuals that always call us and say, “Well, I see your website and it says ‘We buy houses in New Jersey,’ it says, ‘but’ and then there’s always the but, do you buy houses in Lyndhurst?” I go, “Yes, we buy houses in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, definitely. We buy houses in Piscataway, New Jersey. We buy houses in North Jersey. We buy houses in Paramus.” So we buy houses wherever in New Jersey. We just bought a house in Long Branch New Jersey. So, we buy it throughout the state, and we’d be more than happy to go wherever we need to. We have two offices, one in Parsippany and one in Princeton, but we cover the entire state. So, again, if you need for us to buy your house or you want to sell for cash, we will do it. Also, if you’re just selling a house in New Jersey, you want to give us a call, call Templar, be more than happy to jump on a call with you, visit you, and we could sell through the traditional MLS or we could just buy it outright.

A couple other things I’d like to talk about today, I’ve been bringing it up lately, I’m going to continue to bring it up, about mortgage forbearance that’s ending as well as the eviction moratorium. So in New Jersey, it’s going to end at the end of the year, and we’ll see what happens after that. You know, the government, you have all these programs for giving out money to help renters and also landlords, but as the government always does, government passes all these different programs but you can’t get the money. So they make the bureaucracy really hard and really tough, and as a result of it, you can’t get the money. So from a percentage perspective, it’s really low throughout the nation in terms of helping the renters as well as the landlords and it’s just, you know, government, I’m just always against the government with all this bureaucracy and everything else that’s associated with it. They make things very, very difficult for people. They pass these laws and they pass these programs and everyone is cheering it but then you can’t get the money. I know people that have kids with special ed needs, and they have a problem getting the services, the bureaucracy and the people just don’t want to give it. These people and their kids need it. Those individuals that are well educated keep fighting for it, whereas the ones that are not as educated give up and give up quickly and they say, “Okay, I guess I can’t.” That’s a major problem. I’ve had this issue and I always complain about the government because of these types of things. It’s ridiculous.

Couple other things, I want to talk about contractors and vendors. So, something happened, just very recently I’ve been venting about my contractors making some mistakes, but one of my contractors for HVAC, which stands for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, he just did a horrendous job. It reminds me of something that we normally do, and we did it a couple months ago, three months ago, where every year we review all our contractors, all our vendors we use, and we base it on quality price, meeting our overall needs, and then we rank them and say, “Yeah, should we keep them or not?” And most of them we do keep, the majority of what we do, probably 90, 90-something percent. But there’s a few sometimes that fall out. They’re not meeting the needs that we want, so on so forth. So we look at other places, there’s always another contractor around. Two big contract contractors, don’t think too much with that. Because they always think, “Well, I’ll get another client,” but getting another customer costs money. And if you have someone that you like, they give lots of references. So people are sometimes short sighted, well, with my HVAC guy, he had canceled six times, and then every time he went up for a couple of days, then he canceled, then he went up, and my guys usually never do that. So that already got under my skin. And the next thing is they started running ductwork and the ductwork was horrendous. It was just, it was like Mickey Mouse did it or someone, it was really bad. And I’m looking at this, I’m like, “I can’t believe this.” He said he was going to fix it, this was a couple days ago, and then I got a call from one of my guys saying, “Jo, it’s still unworkable. I can’t close up the ductwork and make it look good.” It’s just because the ductwork is so bad that when you box it in or cover it with their drywall, the ceiling is going to be so low. It’s just going to be horrendous.

So I started looking for another HVAC guy. I have one house going on that starting to do in Denville. So originally, I had one quoted out, and now I’m looking for someone else. So I had two people take a look at the house, and the one guy that came today, I said, “Can you take a look at my other house in Long Valley?” And he said, “Sure.” And he said, “Jo, this is just a butcher job.” I said, “Yeah, I know. It’s a butcher job.” And he’s like, “Well, you know, has flex doc here, and it should have been — it could have just had the one pipe come down insulated in. I said, “Yeah, I figured that.” You know, I don’t know everything about HVAC or electricity or plumbing but I know enough. I could spot certain things, definitely. I can’t spot the pure technical side always, but I know with the way certain things need to be done and when they not done the right way, and this one was just really bad. So he looked at it, he said, “Jo,” I don’t even know how to quote it out, he said it would have to be TNM. So what TNM is time and materials. I said, “Okay, give me a price on time materials for it.” I had contacted my original HVAC guys, I said, “Listen, I got someone going there. It’s really lousy. The one job you’re supposed to do I’m putting on hold.” And this one, he says, “Well, I’ll come out there.” I said, “Yeah, come out on Monday, we’ll go over it, but it’s just horrendous.” And I says, “You’ve been with me for three and a half years.” I says, “I really don’t complain much, I complain on a few things. Relatively speaking, I’m satisfied with your work and the price, but this was just a monkey show.” And he said, “Yeah, Joe, I’ll be there.” And that’s the thing. He knows, I says, “Listen, if I don’t say anything, that’s even worse,” because that means it’s gone. But to be honest, right now I think I’m just going to do these two houses that I have contracted with them and move on, unfortunately. So we’ll see, but I’m just totally dissatisfied. He changed his mind too many times and canceled on me and canceled on me and canceled on me. So, that doesn’t go well with me. You know, I expect certain things, they expect certain things, I deliver on them. So I expect the same thing on the flip side.

So another thing, I was looking at house a couple days ago, and came into the house, it’s a ranch, needed work, pretty standard and stuff. There was like three dogs in there. I like dogs, they’re all jumping on top of me and stuff, so I don’t mind that. As long as they don’t bite me and take some chunk out of me, I’m pretty cool with that. So they’re running around, the guy’s yelling at them, the dogs aren’t listening. I’m looking at it, taking pictures, looking at everything and, you know, that stuff doesn’t really bother me. But we are going down in the basement and he said, “Well, there’s some mold down there.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And when I walked on the carpet, it was just soaked with water. And, you know, he told me, he said, “Jo, I think the gutters were clogged possibly.” That much water, there is no way. And I said, “Okay,” and he said, “Well, I just got the foundation fixed.” I’m like, “Really? Well, this doesn’t look good. I’m gone. I don’t know.” I’m just saying to myself it’s just not right. And then I looked over and one was just all mold on it, all mold plus some other spots. I was like, “Holy mackerel, the guy’s living in this house and it’s just really bad.” And I’m looking at it, I saw some vertical cracks on the wall.

So there’s a couple things, one thing is there’s two different types of cracks – vertical cracks and horizontal cracks. Vertical cracks, they’re repaired fairly quickly. You know, you should fix them sooner than later so they don’t turn into a bigger issue and become a major structural issue. So that’s the first thing. Horizontal cracks, usually, now that’s where the walls start — there’s some, we’ll say, direct issues with poor drainage, soil pressure, things like that, where things are starting to separate. Horizontal cracks are a lot worse, for the most part, than vertical cracks. So you’ll see a lot of times vertical cracks, you’ll see it go along the seams from some bricks or cinder blocks, so on so forth. Again, for the most part, it’s not too bad. Once you start getting into horizontal cracks, that’s where you start worrying more about some major issues. So I didn’t see any horizontal cracks, but I wasn’t sure where the water was coming from, if it was coming through the slab or where, but there was some major issues with it. The prices that he said that investors were giving him were crazy prices. I was like, I’m definitely not doing it for that price in terms of buying it. So what I’ll probably do is whoever buys it, I’ll make sure I know who that person is and I’ll sell some of my houses to them to fix up, because they’re paying way more than is reasonable, and that’s also if they stay in business, which is more like the case because I priced that out at could be up of $50,000 in terms of problems with that. So my difference in price was like 50,000, at least, if not more. So that’s a big, big difference. We’ll see but some of these people are just buying houses and saying, “I can just fix it and that’s it,” and that’s not the case, especially with something as bad as that, there was a lot of water in there. And it wasn’t really visible where that water was coming from. And if he had foundation, corrections in the foundation, and waters come in like that, that’s a real problem.

So let me close out right now, we’ll be right back. My number is 973-240-8593. Again, 973-240-8593 or templarcashforhouses.com. Thank you.

Joseph J. Zoppi:

Hello, welcome back to the Templar Real Estate talk show. This is Joseph J. Zoppi, managing partner of Templar Real Estate Enterprises. You could reach us at 973-240-8593, again, that’s 973-240-8593 or templarcashforhouses.com, that’s T-E-M-P-L-A-Rcashforhouses.com, that’s one word.

So, I only have a few minutes left for this show so I’ll just go over a couple things. I’ve talked about this a couple times about rent, so rents soaring throughout the country. Right now Core Logics, which does the statistics and things like that for real estate as well some other areas, they had a update and they said the national year over year increase for May was 6.6%. That’s up from 1.7 in May of last year. Also, rents in Phoenix have gone up the most, which is where there’s tons of expansion down there. And those rents were up 14%. Tucson was the second highest and had about 11%. And then Las Vegas was I think third, around 11, a little less than 11% year over year increase. And it’s just going up everywhere, even on lower income type houses, it’s proximately about 4.6%, so it’s going up everywhere.

Now, [inaudible 00:24:09] have said it before to a Mastermind, and we go over trends throughout the country so I’m hearing what’s going on also. And this one woman was speaking, and she’s out of Arizona, which is, you know, we’re Phoenix and the other one on Tucson is, and she said that getting rents are cheaper down there than they are up here. So she had someone leave one of her rentals and she raised it $400 and she got someone within two days. So it’s crazy where the rents are going and that’s going to add to inflation. It’s just one thing after another, that’s why I keep talking about inflation because these are the things that are going to impact us a year from now. I think everyone needs to be wary of that, no matter what the government says about, well, it’s transitory or so on so forth, they’re praying that it’s transitory. We’ll put it that. But I do not think that’s the case, it’s just I do not. So, you know, there was an individual, is a billionaire, what they call bond king, that that’s his term, you know, Jeffrey Gundlach. I was reading an article that he spoke about a couple things, about the economy and stuff. And he said that with what’s going on through government intervention, it’s very, very hard to figure out what’s going on or what’s going to happen as a result of it. Well, he knows probably what’s going to happen, but it’s very, very difficult to. You know, he says the punchbowl is very deep and it’s spiked pretty heavy with 100% liquor. And once the party ends, the hangover is going to be in the form of a sharp drop in economic growth. That’s what I believe. And, you know, when you pump money in and you keep pumping it, you know, it’s artificial. And you have all this money that’s coming in, you have people that aren’t working, and they’re trading stock and the stocks going up, they don’t need to work and they’re getting unemployment.

We have right now 10 million jobs I think that are open right now, but people don’t want to go back to work. And this gentleman, he described it, he says it’s like a waterbed. He says, “You push on one side, the other side goes up and weird things happen. You can’t really compare it to a particular time previously.” So you’re pushing on this waterbed and it’s reacting, and you’re not really sure what’s going to happen or how it’s going to react. I think that’s a pretty good example or analogy to this. And he said the same thing with the unemployment, said, “You know, it’s really fascinating and it’s kind of seminal to the screwed up nature of the economy.” And that’s exactly the same thing and that’s something I’ve been talking about for so long. And, you know, the issue is, is you know what makes it so funny is that government right now is saying that and they’re praying that inflation is going to be transitory. But we have, relatively speaking, a lot of high unemployment to some extent and you have individuals that are home, and then you have the specific party in power right now is saying, “Well, you got to pay more money to get individuals to work. You’re not paying enough.” so then that’s going to add to inflation. So they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth, so this is just ridiculous. And then now this individual also said, you know, like I’ve been saying, wait till the eviction moratorium ends. He says all the consequences associated with that, he thinks rents are going to go way up and I think so too, I think they’re going to go up even more. So you’re going to have employment in terms of individuals wanting to be paid more money. You have rent going up.

We have issues right now with oil and the price of it. Biden administration is pushing on OPEC to raise their output. I don’t know if they’re going to do that. And then we have issues with supply chain. Toyota has, I don’t know how many thousands of cars they can’t put on the lot because there’s no chips or computer chips in China. China, I don’t think they’re giving them up too easily. So, you know, we have some major issues. And even though we have all this money coming in, there’s going to be a problem one of these days.

So unfortunately, I got to it out. Thank you very much. One last thing I’d like to say, and what Gundlach also said, it says, “The officials” and this is so perfect “The officials have a tiger by the tail, and for now they are not getting clawed or mauled by the tiger. But once they let go of the tail of the tiger, they’re going to likely get mauled. And that’s what’s going to happen. And I think that is perfect. That is a perfect statement.

So I got to close out now. Again, I numbers 973-240-8593 or templarcashforhouses.com. Again, if you need to sell your house fast for cash, please give us a call. If you need to sell through the Traditional Multiple Listing Service, we’d be more than happy to help you. Take care, everyone. God bless you and your family. Thank you again. Bye.

The preceding program was paid for by Templar Real Estate. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the staff and management of WMTR. As always, it is advisable to consult a professional before making a major decision.

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