“The One (Real Estate Market) That Got Away”… In this week’s episode of “The St. George Real Estate Morning Drive” Jeremy Larkin hosts home value expert Carl Wright joins to discuss avoiding “home value heart break!” 🏦 💔 in the shifting St. George Real estate market. After 7 years of boom prices and inventory are shifting. Both home sellers and buyers alike can avoid losing thousands on this show!

Below is the actual St. George Real Estate Morning Drive show, hosted by St. George Real Estate Agent Jeremy Larkin, word for word! Enjoy and please share if you find it valuable! 

Jeremy Larkin and The Larkin Group @ Keller Williams Realty can be reached by calling 435-767-9821, or emailing sales@gostgeorge.com.

Craig: Let’s join Jeremy Larkin and the St. George Real Estate Morning Show.
Jeremy: Got it, man. Hey, good morning. We have got Craig Bennett who is our guest. That is kind of fun this morning. Right? A little variety. We went for the big dogs. We brought Craig in all the way from Parowan this morning.
Craig: I do not know about big dogs, but –
Jeremy: That is pretty good, man. Hey, good morning to everybody out there. Jeremy Larkin, host of the St. George Real Estate Morning Drive. I have got Carl Wright in studio with me this morning.
Carl: Good morning, everyone.
Jeremy: I love it. Man, we like having Carl here. You know what is fun, Carl? When I told Jesse yesterday that you were coming, he was oh, I love it when Carl comes in.
Carl: Well, thank you for having me. I love being on the show. It is always awesome. Thank you.
Jesse: We get educated when you are one.
Jeremy: We do get educated. We do get educated. So hey, we are going to have such a great time today. We are going to talk about the one that got away. Carl, did you ever have, with all due respect to your good wife, was there one that got away when you were about 14 years old? The early crush.
Carl: No, well, we will just say no on that one.
Jeremy: Yeah, listen I really appreciate you taking the wise response. We are going to talk about the one that got away today. A lot of people have the one that got away. We are talking about the real estate market that got away.
Carl: This is a good topic.
Jeremy: So we are going to have some fun with that today. I was just on my way in here. Is your calendar every day? I think it is. Is it just blown up?
Carl: It is insane. My wife asked me this morning. She said hey can we sit down for a minute and talk about a few things that we need to go over. I said okay, here is my schedule. Seven o’clock I have got a conference call. Seven-thirty, I have got to take my kid to school. Eight o’clock, I got to go pull my comparables. Eight-thirty, I have got the radio show. Then I have got inspections until two. Then I have got back to the office. Baseball game is at 5:30. Baseball game is at 7:30. I can probably fit you in about 9:30 tonight. Does that sound alright?
Jeremy: This is so funny.
Carl: I know I am not unique to this craziness. I call this the tornado of life right now that I am in.
Jeremy: Man, you know what is funny? I love that. Listen, any of our listeners out there and any of our Facebook Live, by the way we are on Facebook Live. Facebook dot com slash Jeremy Larkin or we are on YouTube Live. It is kind of fun. We are over at Go St. George TV. G-O-S-T George TV. And we broadcast YouTube live mainly so that YouTube file exists when we are done with the show. There are not a lot of YouTube Live people out there at this point. I think there will be. I think there will be eventually. But the Facebook Live, Facebook dot com slash Jeremy Larkin. I want you to comment. If you are listening and you have got a crazy, bingo, the comments are coming in. Drew is amazing over at Guild. He says that sounds like my day. I was just having this conversation on the way in here. I looked at my day and I said holy crap. This is stupid. Including bathing a dog I plugged into the calendar. Is that rad?
Carl: Oh, that is awesome.
Jeremy: I am headed to San Diego this weekend. I am actually going down to spend some time with some friends and meet with a company that does all of our video marketing. I am going to go spend some time with Frank Clessits down in San Diego and spend a day in his office and see what he is doing. This is a guy who is like cutting edge. People pay them a lot of money to produce their video marketing that they send out to their client base. It is this, I am looking at it, Carl, get ready for it. It is get the kids out to school. Get ready for the radio show. Do the radio show. Have my morning meetings. Get ready for the lunch huddle because see our team, you know we meet every Thursday. Have lunch and training with the team. I have got a cool guy in town who is really crushing it in real estate. He is going to come in and ask us a little bit about how we operate as a team.
Carl: Awesome.
Jeremy: How we have culture. We are going to talk about that. And then it just goes crazy from there. And then at 7:45, there is a dog washing. It is crazy.
Carl: Good for you. You just make time for your dog.
Jeremy: It is nutty. It is not even mine. It is Kayla’s dog. But it is a dog, but she is essentially my dog. She is like my dog, and then Jesse is going to take the dog.
Jesse: Yep.
Jeremy: Thank you, Jesse, this weekend.
Carl: Oh, what a good friend.
Jeremy: Jesse is an unbelievable dog sitter by the way.
Carl: I have got two, Jesse. I might hit you up later on.
Jeremy: Yeah. Do you really?
Carl: I do.
Jeremy: Dude, we will dog sit for you, too.
Carl: Really? Two shepoos. Have you ever seen a shepoo?
Jeremy: I love a shepoo.
Carl: Yeah, they are the greatest dogs ever.
Jeremy: Absolutely.
Jesse: (Indiscernible)
Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, we will dog sit. We will dog sit. We had Robert’s dog in recently. So Carl, I am glad to know you told your wife that 9:30pm was when you were fitting her in because I am feeling a lot less guilty this morning about my day.
Carl: Well, I am sorry to my wife because this is a crazy time. When you coach youth sports, it is just what happens. She is a great support, and the time that we get to, it is from 9:30 till 11:30 that we get to talk and catch up on the day.
Jeremy: You go to bed when? How late?
Carl: I am usually in bed by 10:30.
Jeremy: That is not terrible.
Carl: Not too bad.
Jeremy: It is not terrible. I do not know. When do you get up in the morning? That is what I want to know.
Carl: I am usually up at 6:30-7.
Jeremy: Yeah, okay, so you are getting some rest. All right. Let’s talk about this this morning. We are going to have some fun. So Carl Wright is, and I said here on our Facebook page, and if you just picked up the show, I am Jeremy Larkin, host of the St. George Real Estate Morning Drive. Carl is a good friend of ours. Maybe more importantly than anything. And he is, I said, a home value expert, and the reason I said that, I think you understand why I said this on Facebook. People hear appraisal or they hear mortgage, and they kind of tune out because it is such a, what is the word, it is such a proper term. Really you are an expert at studying home values.
Carl: Yes.
Jeremy: That is what you get paid to do.
Carl: Yes. That is right.
Jeremy: They have done now 23 million appraisals here in Washington County. No, what is the latest number? What is the latest number? I always ask.
Carl: I do not know. We opened our office in 2008 and since then we have added five appraisers. So there are five appraisers in our office, including Salt Lake. So between everybody we have done about 21,000 valuations.
Jeremy: By the way, what is your wife’s name?
Carl: Danielle.
Jeremy: Danielle. Is she listening?
Carl: Probably.
Jeremy: Danielle, here is the deal. The 21,000 appraisals is part of the reason he is not going to be able to talk to you until 9:30 tonight. And the deal is he is, here is the great news. He has blocked 9:30 to 9:40 for you. Okay? And then he has got to catch up on ESPN Sports Center. 21,000.
Carl: It is a lot. Now, granted –
Jeremy: Appraisals, man.
Carl: — you have got to keep in mind that is spread across the board. We have a wonderful staff at R1 Appraisals that allows us to do that many appraisals, and it keeps us, we have got awesome employees and awesome appraisers that take pride in what they do.
Jeremy: Yeah, and you do how many people now, total in your firm?
Carl: We have 14 employees.
Jeremy: Gosh, I love it. I love it. I love these guys, and we have trust with them. Carl is, the thing is he is actually handsome. So he is great for the Facebook Live. He has got a face for radio.
Carl: Did you notice I shaved my beard?
Jeremy: I thought you were feeling kind of –
Jesse: He has gotten more views than you have ever gotten.
Jeremy: I know. I know, man. I have got a little scrub going on here. So 21,000 appraisals, and here is what this means, and this is really interesting. I had a conversation with a client this week. We met with him. It is the one that you did the desktop for. Thank you.
Carl: Yeah.
Jeremy: And I am going to explain, I want to talk today about what that is.
Carl: Okay.
Jeremy: And the value that people could derive from that by the way.
Carl: Great.
Jeremy: Unless you are like hey, I do not want that business.
Carl: No, I think that is great.
Jeremy: Because I think it is a –
Carl: It is a great tool. A desktop appraisal, let’s just hit on it real quick. A desktop appraisal is a real quick tool to give you an idea of what your home is worth. We do not come to the property. We do not inspect the property, so we make some assumptions about your condition and quality and the upgrades that you have done. And we will use as many means as we can to gather information about your property like using the County records, an expired MLS listing or things like that that will help us get an idea of what your house is, the square footage and all of that stuff.
Jeremy: Right.
Carl: And then we do a valuation and give you an approximate range of value based on the research that we have done.
Jeremey: And this is kind of fun. So this week we have a client, I should have invited him to listen this morning. They had their home For Sale By Owner on Zillow. Right? And they are good friends. This is going to be very typical as we talk about a shifting market, the one that could get away from people. This is really typical in this kind of market. They were trying For Sale By Owner, but it was not happening. They said, Jeremy, we will just call you in two weeks. And they called me in two weeks just like they said they would. Will you come out and look at the home? I sent Carl because the home was a unique home in a unique neighborhood where no two homes were kind of the same. So I sent him their Zillow listing. Right?
Carl: Yep.
Jeremy: And said I need a desktop appraisal. By the way, we do not always do this, but I paid for it on behalf of the client just because I thought let’s just show up prepared because I want to speak to why I would do that. Because you know what a lot of sellers are thinking. Why would you need an appraisal? Don’t you know the value?
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: So we will get to this. I just sent him the Zillow link and said I need a desktop appraisal. It costs half a regular appraisal. Right?
Carl: Yep.
Jeremy: It is about half of a regular appraisal. He has all the square footage, assuming it is correct. He has 30 photos of the home that they took. It is plenty for him to give a value range, and he is very legal. He follows all of his legal parameters as a licensed appraiser. There is a good disclaimer that says this is not a full appraisal. It is a value range. But here is why. If Carl has done 21,000 appraisals, if an appraiser has done 10,000 appraisals, and I have done 3 or 4,000 market evaluations is what we call it in our world. CMAs, comparative market analysis. He actually has an advantage on me. And he has an advantage because, number one, he went to school only to study homes and prices. Right?
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: I went to learn, and I am more of a marketer. Right? So my expertise is in helping the client get the value out of the home. But what people fail to understand, and Jesse knows this, standing here in the studio, when you hire us to sell your home, you are not hiring us to choose the price. This is really confusing for sellers. Isn’t it, Carl?
Carl: It is.
Jeremy: Well, I need an agent who will pick the price. We do not pick the price. The market determines the price. You are hiring us to get the price to get the juice out of the lemon for you.
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: Right.
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: We do not produce lemons. We produce juice. We produce lemonade actually. And so the reason I brought him in on this was I had an opinion. They had their own opinion, and I said let’s bring in a scientist. I call appraisers scientists and real estate agents artists. By the way, that is how I do it with my clients.
Carl: Okay.
Jeremy: I bring my artistry which is, I have this feel for what buyers are doing and why they are doing it and what they are thinking about. Carl has a scientific background and that is why we do a desktop appraisal. So I want to encourage people. We did not get him on here to sell it, but I am going to sell some desktop appraisals. If you are thinking about selling your home or if you are just morbidly curious about doing something much better than a Zillow estimate, I would reach out to Carl. We will give you his contact info today. Say hey, I need a desktop appraisal. Can I just email you a Dropbox link, a Google link?
Carl: Yep.
Jeremy: Drew asked what do you guys charge for a desktop appraisal?
Carl: $200.
Jeremy: Two hundred bucks versus a typical appraisal anymore is four to four-fifty. Six?
Carl: If you are getting a mortgage, you are going to be up to $600 because of the, yeah, anyway. $600. $200 it gives you a pretty good range. Like you said, we are following what we are governed by, the USPAP guidelines. It is a full appraisal, but it is a range of value. So depending on the upgrades and things like that, the updates that you have done to your house, I am obviously not in it to, I have not felt it. I have not measured. I am making some assumptions about the property. So until we come and do a full appraisal, we cannot give you a specific number.
Jeremy: I am going to give you a range.
Carl: I will give you a range. Right.
Jeremy: How come we think the market might get away from a couple of people right now? What is going on?
Carl: Well, it is an interesting market that we are going on. Thank you for your compliments. We are, in a way, scientists. We look at not only, or more appropriately valuation experts. We not only look at the way houses that have sold, we look at market trends to determine what the market is currently doing. I spoke with a lady yesterday that wants to put her house up for sale. She is from Ogden. She does not know this market.
Jeremy: Ogden, former armpit of the state, and now one of the coolest places in the state. Right?
Carl: Now one of the coolest places. Yeah. Ogden is awesome.
Jeremy: Anyway, just had to insert that. It is a cool place now.
Carl: It is. But she was not familiar with our market. She wanted to know some specific things, and so I was able to help her understand that what she is hearing on the news may not completely be accurate that we are in an increasing market, that it is a seller’s market, etc., etc.
Jeremy: It is booming, man. It is crazy. Right?
Carl: And it is. The market is still good. It is a good time to sell. It is a good time to buy. Interest rates have come down, which increases buying power, etc. So here is something, Jeremy. I gave you a sheet right there. I did a comparison from last year to this year. The first quarter of last year compared to the first quarter of this year. There are 4% more homes on the market right now in the greater St. George area than there were this time last year. 4%, which means, so the average sales price of those homes was $388,000 last year.
Jeremy: Got it.
Carl: This year is $390,000.
Jeremy: Which you would think well, things are going up.
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: Right.
Carl: Not enough to say yeah, we are increasing. $2000 over 380 is less than 1%. So we are stable. However, when you look at the percentage homes that are currently on the market, what does that tell you?
Jeremy: The percentage of homes that are currently on the market that tells us that it is going to be pushing prices the other direction.
Carl: Correct. Correct. So we are in a market where if you are not aggressively trying to sell your home and you are not competitive, like we talked about last time, you are going to be chasing that ball down the driveway, and you are never going to get caught up.
Jeremy: You are kicking the ball around with your siblings and it starts rolling down the hill, you have to get in front of that ball.
Carl: You have got to get in front of that ball. You have got to get in front of that ball. Which like we talked about the last time I was on, it may require a 3-5% decrease in your list price right now.
Jeremy: Yep. Oh man, but hey listen, I need this much. Right? But I want this much. But my neighbor said this much. But hey, Carl, I sold my home in another market, and none of that matters, does it?
Carl: Right. It does not matter. It does not matter. We are a very specific market here in St. George. There are a lot of factors that go into it. A lot of unique homes here in St. George. So it is awesome when you can get a third-party valuation that is independent of you, your feelings, what your neighbor said, what your real estate agent has said, that can give you sometimes, do we dare say the hard truth about your home?
Jeremy: Yep. Yeah because it is very emotional for folks. I had a really pretty serious debate with a client this week. I said we have to take the emotions out of it, and he said, how? This is my home. It is emotional. But that does not matter.
Carl: Yeah.
Jeremy: And that sounds really coarse, okay, but you are hiring us to do a job. And the job is to help you sell your home. If they are hiring us to sell a home, right? And so, we can get philosophical about how sad it is that they wanted 495 and now the house is 450. Right? But here is the crazy part. Carl, if we had told people three years ago that their home was going to go up 15, 20% in the next three years, if we had told, how many homes would they have gone and bought if they knew that was going to happen?
Carl: Yeah. (Indiscernible)
Jeremy: A ton.
Carl: Yeah.
Jeremy: So isn’t it funny how we were, if we had told people that their home values would go up 15 or 20%, they would have said are you serious. This is great news. Yet, now that it has gone up 15 or 20%, but we find out it is not quite worth what we thought it was, we do not know how to deal with it.
Carl: Right. It is an emotional thing.
Jeremy: It is very emotional.
Carl: We experienced this in 2008. 2009, 2010 and finally hit the bottom in 2011, and it was a hard thing to deal with. As an appraiser, we do not like to report market shifts, but we have to. Market shifts are an essential part. The market is never, it is either going, it is stable, but there is always a slight increase or a slight decrease.
Jeremy: Yeah, it is never stable stable.
Carl: It is never stable stable, but within 5%, we call it stable market. It is either going up or going down. And so we have to report those market trends accurately and this is one of the tools that we use to help us report that.
Jeremy: So this is interesting. This data you shared with me is single-family specifically. Is this correct?
Carl: That is correct.
Jeremy: The reason I asked that I was looking at, so every day, if we are trying to stay on top of the market, most of us are trying to stay on top of the market, we have what is called a hot sheet. Right?
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: And the hot sheet, we have explained to our listeners is for real estate agents, it shows us what, all the homes that are newly listed, homes that have recently sold, price reductions, right. Now this is kind of interesting. If I go back 30 days, this is literally, I am just saying is today the fourth? Today is the fourth. All right. Run a quick search on the hot sheet. In the last 30 days in Washington County, and this is where we talk about the one that got away. If people are thinking about selling their home, okay, and they want to sell at the top, right, or close to the top, as I called it on the last show, the Seinfeld effect. Right? They went out on top. 561 price changes in the last 30 days in the MLS. Now when we say price changes, there might have been 30 or 40 of those that were like typos, so they were not all reductions. But I would say wouldn’t you guess that 500 of those 561 were price reductions?
Carl: Usually you do not increase the price when you put a home on the market.
Jeremy: You will have a few things where they said 395,999 and they meant to say something else. Right? Well, it is supposed to be 389. But you are talking 500 property owners reduced the price of their listing in the last 30 days. This is indicative, not that the market is falling, but that people have, first of all, been asking just too much for their property. Do you believe that folks are going to look back in 24 months and go, dang it, I really should have just sold that?
Carl: Oh yeah, I see it all the time. I see it all the time where you just, everybody wants to get top dollar for their property and rightly so. But I think sellers have to be honest with themselves. Do I really want to sell this property? Or I do just want to make some money? And so, I think you have to weigh some of your motivations.
Jeremy: Yeah, which is the well, should I sell now? You just nailed it. Well maybe. How many appraisals right now, so when somebody goes to purchase a home and they are getting a loan, they have to get an appraisal. So we always help our sellers understand that we have to sell the home to the buyer and then it has to be sold to the appraiser, and we do not really sell to the appraiser but meaning it has to appraise at least at the contract price. And then there is actually a third sale that takes place which is kind of fun, and this sale is the buyer has to get from writing the contract and all of that initial excitement, what we also know as the honeymoon phase, the first date phase, the oh man, I went out with Carl Wright. I remember all the girls used to say back in the 90s. I think I am in love, they said. But once they got to know Carl, they found out that he was actually a regular human being and he was fallible, but there is a honeymoon phase for buyers. So first sale is to the buyer, the second sale is the home has to appraise, and the third sale is the buyer has to stay in the contract to close. Because buyers get cold feet, and since we are having fun talking about dating, you want to go ahead and check out my profile over – I am kidding. While we are talking about data, this is really fun, the challenge with homes is that, Carl, do new listings hit the market every day?
Carl: Yeah, almost every day.
Jeremy: New competitors, right?
Carl: New competitors every day.
Jeremy: So if I am out there showing my wares, I have to understand that there are other people hopping into the pool every day. Aren’t there?
Carl: Right. Every day. And there are more people hopping into the market and less people buying right now.
Jeremy: Right? Which is going to put a downward pressure on values. Give us, we have got about 2 minutes, give us your biggest takeaway as a guy who is with a company doing how many appraisals will you guys do this next month?
Carl: I do not know. Between Salt Lake and here, we will probably do between 250 and 300 appraisals.
Jeremy: Okay, 300 homes. They are going to do an appraisal on. What is your biggest takeaway right now for home buyers, home sellers?
Carl: There is a lot of inventory right now, so buyers are, there is a lot of inventory. They have a lot of –
Jeremy: There are more options.
Carl: If we are using the dating –
Jeremy: Let’s stay there, man.
Carl: There are a lot of fish in the sea right now to choose from.
Jeremy: And this show is sponsored by Match dot com, by the way.
Carl: So there are a lot of selections out there especially if you are in the $500-750,000 range. If you are in that range, there is a lot of inventory to choose from right now. So if you are serious about selling, you may look at not only the closed sales, but also the active listings that you are competing against. Be honest with my house is, how does my house stack up to these other houses?
Jeremy: When you pull on Bluff Street down here and you pull out and head down to the R1 office, you are actually looking ahead. You are not watching behind you. Because if you watch behind you very long, you are going to hit a car –
Carl: Right.
Jeremy: And a curb and maybe you will drive through the front of a pharmacy like somebody did recently to our good friend that we love. Brad Stapley. So crazy.
Carl: It was crazy. Last thing, I do not want to be a dooms-dayer.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Carl: We are in a good market. I feel like we have been really negative about what we have done today, but this is a good market.
Jeremy: It is an incredible market.
Carl: Interest rates are good. It is a great time to sell, and this weather we have experienced, people love St. George and people are going to continue to buy in St. George, and we love southern Utah.
Jeremy: And here is my final thought on that to cap it. The reason we say the one that got away is it is actually such a great time. Values are so much higher than we ever thought. Ten years ago we said they would never go back here.
Carl: I remember.
Jeremy: And yet, a lot of folks are going to miss out. Buyers might miss out. Thank you so much, Carl, for coming on. Carl, best phone number for you?
Carl: Thanks for having me. 435-627-0019 is the office.
Jeremy: 627-0019 or look up R as in the letter, the number, the letter R, the number one. R1.
Carl: R1 Appraisals.
Jeremy: Appraisals. Thank you so much.
Carl: Thank you for having me.
Jeremy: Let’s go sell some homes today.
Carl: I appreciate you, Jeremy.
Jeremy: There you go.
Carl: Thank you.
Jeremy: All right.