 Hi, I'm Sarah Morrow, Realtor with Cell State Peak Realty. Welcome to the third episode of Property Time, where I'll be speaking with local Realtor and managing broker Brett Fells. Brett has closed several hundreds of transactions. He has an extensive investment portfolio of property, and he owns and runs two fantastic businesses, overseeing more than 20 highly effective agents across the whole front range. Brett is passionate about service, and he prioritizes agent and client satisfaction above all else. He's got tons of expert knowledge across multiple markets. He's all-heart, and I feel privileged to have him as my mentor and boss. Brett has about 14 years experience in raw land, commercial, and residential, and he works with investors. And he makes his home in Firestone. He does a fair amount of business in his neck of the woods. So today, we're going to be speaking about some advantages to heading east, where there's much new housing development going on and much more to come. Hi, Brett. Hi, how's it going? Good, thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you for the very nice introduction. My pleasure. Let's dive right into it, shall we? Awesome. So today, we're talking about Frederick Firestone, in particularly, but really that whole area. And you seem to be one of the experts. You do a ton of business out there. So are most of the homes in Frederick new? And if so, what do you think about living in a newly built area? Like, what are the advantages to that? Yeah, for sure. I guess the best way to put it in the perspective is those two towns, they kind of mingle together. So when we say Frederick Firestone, we kind of think of them as one. But they are two towns, OK? So at the end of the day, I just look at today's population of like 32,000. And these towns have been around for over 100 years. So at the turn of the century, about 20 years ago, it was about a quarter of that. So in the last 20 years, we have seen pretty heavy growth. And especially in the last seven to 10 years, we've seen substantial explosion. And it's still going on today. There's new build developments that buyers can purchase in, which is awesome. And it's just a very attractive place for developers to look at, to purchase land and to keep buying and building. So it's nice. And I don't see that part of it slowing down. But what I like about it, because I live there, and I actually live in a new build complex now, is you all kind of get to start at the same point. I absolutely love that part of it. I'll share some more financial reasons why I love it here in a bit. But the beauty of it is that I absolutely love that when you're all buying a new build and you're all buying in that complex, you're all new. And you kind of get to start at the same point. So that doesn't necessarily happen when you're buying resale. When you're buying resale, you're kind of breaking into a market. You might have neighbors that have known each other for eight to 10 years already. You're the new kid on the block. Total new kid on the block. And at the same time, it's not only hard to break into those relationships personally, but when anything goes wrong or right in a neighborhood and requires some type of neighborhood opinion and vote to it, it's a lot easier when everybody's new because you kind of are able to choose, do I want to be a leader in this situation, or do I want to just sit back and let others take it on? So if you're in the first half, if you're a leader, it's a lot, lot harder to do that in a neighborhood that's already established and kind of breaking into that that it's already established and they already kind of have their status quo going on. That makes sense. Personally, that's why I love it. So you said you're in an eight-year-old house, or you're in a one-year-old house. How new were we talking? Are you the first owner? No, so I've lived in Firestone since 2013, but I owned a resale before, and we sold that about a year and a half ago. So I live in an 18-month home now, which was a brand new home. Brand new. What do you love about it? Well, the house itself, I absolutely love it. I love, like I said, with the neighbors. Everybody's kind of meeting each other at the same time. So that's cool. The house itself is all the majors are taken care of. I absolutely love that portion of it. Usually when you're going into a house, you have this checklist when you're doing an inspection. What are the most important? And you always go to the most important, like roof, furnace, AC, all these big-ticket items. All those are new. Now, it's not that something might not go wrong with it, but there's an excellent chance that those are taken care of. Now we can concentrate how we want to customize it. Whether you do that through the building process or you have the money right away to do that afterwards, that's what I love about it. We were able to customize some of our home when we put it under contract and then do the process. But some of it we weren't. But because we didn't have to worry about all those big-ticket items, we had a lot of cash to spend afterwards to put in a deck out back, to put in some built-in shelving in the TV room. So we were really able to customize it right away, which we love. And these are high, high-efficiency homes that we're not really seeing in Longmont or Boulder anymore, of course. No, yeah. I mean, since I would say that started turning around the year 2000, anywhere. Anywhere where they started to build. Builders really started putting a lot of stock and making these homes more efficient. Oh, they're brilliant. I mean, the engineers that think of this stuff, the grade and the garage so that oil doesn't pool to, I mean, they think of everything. Insulation, everything. Oh my gosh, the Tupperware seal, like everything's so tight. Right. All right, so we kind of talked about it, but what would you tell a buyer or what do you tell your buyers who are working in living or, sorry, working and running a business in Longmont but maybe can't live in Longmont for whatever reason? What are the other advantages, advantages or benefits to your area and how do you sort of talk about schools with your wife? How do you manage the commute time? Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, I'm living proof of it. As you know, my offices are here in Longmont so, and they've been here for at least five out of the last eight years that I've lived in Firestone. So what I always recommend when you're starting a buying process and especially in today's market, what I always highly recommend is that buyer needs to be uber prepared. If they have to be ultra prepared to be competitive in this market. And one way to kind of get laser focused on what you're looking for is we use this tactic called the buyer triangle, okay? And what it is is obviously the triangle has three points and on each point you have price on one, you have location on the second and then you have amenities on the third, okay? So most of the time, unless you have unlimited amounts of money, price is always gonna be a factor, right? So price is always gonna be a driving factor. So I always look at it and go, well, if you could only have two out of three and price is one of them, what's the other driving factor to you? To me, I can get to my office in 15 minutes. I wanted a bigger home for my wife, my family. I wanted more amenities, what it came down to. So the beauty of about just pulling out that buyer's triangle and getting laser focused on what you're looking for is you get to choose then. You get to make that decision. Like is location more paramount than the amenities or do you wanna enjoy your house in this way? Exactly right. And drive. You might have a smaller house here, you might have an older home, you might have to fix up more, but guess what? I could walk to Ziggy's and get a cup of coffee, and I could walk to my office. So always start the process when you're buying with that. I mean, it couldn't be. It saves a ton of time. It couldn't be more important. And now they are telling you what they want. Yeah, that's nice. You know, we're not telling them what they want. The prepared buyer. Right, very much so. We like you guys when you're prepared. Well, thank you for that. I like the way you prioritize, you know, you can't have it all. Unfortunately, we can't always have it all. Unless you have unlimited amounts of money. Then we try to have it all. And you could probably have all three, yeah. Okay, so let's talk numbers a little bit. So let's say, you know, for example, I live in a 2,300 square foot, 1948 home here in Longmont. You, I'm sure, live in a 3,000 plus square foot, relatively brand new, you said. High efficiency sort of a place that was built very recently. So like, can you help the buyer right now who's shopping think about the appreciation of one versus the other? And how different are those numbers really? Well, to answer the second part real quick, they're not. They're really not that different. Appreciation is appreciation. Okay, so it kind of goes back to the question before is what's more important to you? Right. But when you're looking to just broadly say, is this a good time to buy? You know, is this a good buyer's market? It's my home going to appreciate here soon. This is where really you come into play. You know, you as a realtor, as a buyer, I would ask you two things. Okay, if you were my realtor, I would come to you and I would ask you two things. I would say, is this a good time to buy? Which they all do. And is my home gonna go up, right? Now you need to respond with two simple things. And you only have to look at these two things to answer their question. And it simply goes to one, let's look at supply and demand. Okay, so, and you have to get local. Guys, you have to get local. Do not listen to the national news. Every market's different. Every town around us is a little bit different. Like we just, we're analyzing town to town. That's why we're talking, yeah. You know, so every town around us. So if you're looking at national news and they're talking about a market in Florida, well guess what, it doesn't have any validity here. So you have to get local supply and demand. And when you're looking at supply and demand, typically a balanced market is somewhere around four to six months, okay, of inventory. And what that means is starting today, if nobody listed their home from here on forward, there is enough inventory for the amount of buyers that are currently out there to last four to six months. Okay, so. Currently on the market. Currently on the market, yep. So whatever's currently on the market and the amount of buyers that come in, that will basically deplete within four to six months. That's a balanced market. So right now we're about one to two months. Okay, so as you could see, it's a great time for both. Okay, sellers are selling their home quickly. They're getting the price that they want, but buyers are also buying in an appreciating market. And that's what you want. Everyone thinks. You want the win-win. Totally, everyone thinks that you need to buy low. Well guess what, when you're buying low, you're buying in a depreciating market. And that's fine. You're gonna get a good deal, but you have to wait a lot longer for it to come back and appreciate. So it all comes down to, how long do you wanna wait on your investment? How long are you willing to wait? How long are you willing to wait? Right, right. I would much rather get it on the uptick and just analyze that supply and demand. As you go. As you go, and it's all monopoly money unless you cash out anyway. You know, so at the end of the day, if I say, oh wow, I have $150,000 staring me in the face right now, do I wanna cash out? Right. Yes or no? Does it work in my other three factors or two factors? Totally, yep, and the other thing I would look at is interest rates. And these have been historically low for seven, eight, nine years now. Yeah. I mean, we've been under 4% for. A decade? Yeah, you know, close to it. So at the end of the day, it's like, don't get scared if it goes from three and a half to 3.7% You know, I mean, we are at. We're not losing a huge change here. I don't care what you go out and buy and finance. You can name anything else in the world. You might have an initial 0%, but what can you buy that is this large of an investment for under 4% interest rate? Right. At three to 5% down if you're living in it. So it's free money and everybody knows that. But they're still waiting. We all tend to watch and wait and fear. Well, I appreciate the way that you said that because I've tried to explain to my sellers and buyers that it's a win-win and that it can be good for both, mutually beneficial, but it's hard for them to see that when they're on two sides of a table in a transaction that they're trying to win the best for them. Okay, so the last thing I would ask is just, can you give us an even more concrete example of say like a family in your area that you know personally that has like quickly built up equity just by getting in when they did, just by purchasing, just by getting off the fence. We have a lot of renters in this area still. We have tons of first-time home buyers that are staying, that wanna step up to that second, third home. But again, they're waiting and seeing what's gonna happen. Yep, I mean, I'll just give you my example. I won't give you exact numbers, but... That's about your family. But I'll give you my example. So we moved to 2013 in the Firestone in 2013, and we bought a resale home, like I said. When you say resale, brand spanking new. No, no, no, it was built in 2000. Okay, right. So it hit the market again, it was already owned. Yep, exactly right. It's when you first moved to Firestone. So when I say resale, yeah, it's already been owned by someone, it's not brand new. So at that time, we bought it, and it didn't need much, but we put a little bit into it, I would say this number about $20, $25,000. I sold it six and a half years later, so the beginning of 2020, and I made a substantial six-figure profit. Wow. Okay, so anywhere eight to 12% year over year. And that was really not doing much to it. So that launched me into what I wanted to do with this new build that we bought a year and a half ago. And I will tell you some bonuses about, I don't want to steer you either way, but I will tell you some bonuses about purchasing a new construction home, especially in today's market. The biggest reason we did it is we didn't want to go out and compete, okay? So that was one big reason. So that should be one for you guys as well. You mean put your name on the wait list, get the lot, and it's yours. You might have to wait longer? Obviously you do. Depending on where it's at in the build, it might have already been started. But at the end of the day, I'm not going out there and competing against maybe three, five, some cases, 10 other buyers. You don't like the bidding wars? They're so fun. It was really hard. So you get to make a more conscious decision. So I loved that part of it, buying that new. So at the end of the day, what most people don't know is new construction, especially in appreciating markets, they build in appreciation automatically, okay? So what that means is... In the purchase price. Yeah, just over time. So if you can look at a new build complex and preferably buy within the first 60% of it being built, okay, so now you know that there's more coming, okay, behind you. And what new builds do is they might have a development that's 2,000 lots, but they're only going to release like a hundred at a time. Okay, once those hundreds go under contract at least and start the building process, they'll release another hundred or another 50. Oh, trust me. I've had plenty of clients on those wait lists. Yeah, yeah, and but every time they do, they up the price of that same model, five to $10,000, it's built in appreciation. Okay, so if you can get in, like I said, we got in probably maybe around the 50% mark, you know, it was probably like halfway done, maybe a little before it. And it's about to be built out in the next few months, you know? Like fully. Fully, yep. So in the last 18 months, it caught up and it's about to be built out. Our home in that 18 months has appreciated more than my home did in the six and a half years of my other one, okay? Wow. This is going to finish and the market itself is still appreciation. So now this neighborhood is built out, it appreciated over time, or appreciated through the build. And now we're still in an inventory market that's one to two months when I said four to six is balanced and everything else that starts to sell around it now is gonna bring it up too. So that's the huge bonus of buying a new construction right now is you kind of can see that appreciation, at least for the somewhat near future, you can kind of put a number on it almost. Got it. And a little tip, one little tip, one last tip is when you're buying new build, now is an excellent time because fourth quarter, these developers want to get things off their books. Okay, so it's kind of like a little new build tip. So you might be able to go in and I'm not saying they're gonna give you the farm, but at the end of the day, they might go, okay, well, guess what? We'll throw in an extra 10,000 of upgrades or incentives to add to that new build. They want to get things cleared. Yeah, you're not gonna see that in January. Before entering into the first quarter and bumping up again. So it's a great time to put them under contract right now is because they're looking to get them off their books too. Wow, so I can really see what you mean in terms of timing, in a way you kind of did a fix of, you flipped your own properties as a personal residence, you made a ton of money just by getting your foot in the door sooner. Building that equity, taking that money, using it for your next one, stepping up. It's brilliant, you're a genius. Thank you so much for your time today, Brett. Oh, of course, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. You're welcome, that's the property.