SELLER ACCEPTED MY OFFER - BUYING MY 6TH PROPERTY!

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here!

So, I realized it's been quite some time since I made a video standing up. But this is the perfect time to make a standing up video because I have some good news to share with you guys. Spoiler alert: I ended up getting my offer accepted!

And for those of you that saw the video I posted about two and a half, three weeks ago, the seller denied my offer. I was disappointed, and I was showing in that video how the seller should have taken my offer. I don't know why they didn't take it; that was a huge mistake. They ended up taking my offer, even though my offer was $70,000 lower than the other offer they had.

So, I'm going to be showing in this video how I got the offer accepted, the potential I saw in this place, and also why I decided to buy in the area that I bought in.

Real quick, here's a 60-second synopsis for those that didn't see the first video I posted when the sellers denied my offer. Basically, I've been looking for like three and a half months to try to buy a property, and I couldn't find anything. But this place came up; it was absolutely perfect! When I saw it in person, I ended up writing a full-price offer on it. They had seven other offers; they countered all of us, best and final. I wrote my best and final offer with what I felt the property was really worth. They ended up turning my offer down and going for an offer that was $70,000 higher than mine.

I was disappointed, but I figured, you know what? If someone's willing to pay that much more, by all means! Two and a half weeks after I did that, that offer fell through. The other backup offer they had also fell through. They came back to me, I offered basically the same price I did the first time they turned it down. I offered it again; they turned it down.

Then, I was so frustrated I made a video posting about it, and that's where we are today: they ended up taking my offer!

So, here's what ended up happening. The first time that they denied my offer, I basically explained to them how this was the best offer that they're gonna get, given that it is a sure thing. It's a guaranteed close; all they have to do is sign. And they turned it down.

What ended up happening was that I spoke with the agent, and the agent said my last buyer ended up doing like $2,000 worth of inspections on the property. They did their sewer line inspection, roof inspections, general inspection, plumbing inspection, foundation—in fact, like they did everything! They spent $2,000 doing all of these inspections that I wouldn't have to do myself. So, I said, "Send me over all of the inspections, and I will make an offer based on these inspections at a point where basically I can remove what's called the inspection contingency." So, I won't do any inspections of my own, and I will make an offer that is not going to ever be renegotiated, given all of the issues—a little minor issues with the property.

Sure enough, I get all the inspections back. There are a few little things in there that I figured, yeah, they should probably be fixed at some point in the next few months from next year. So, I made another offer on the property, and they came back saying, "Here's an appraisal that the last buyer did that shows that that appraisal came in way higher than where you're offering right now."

I explained to them, "Listen, I'm not gonna go and renegotiate. I'm not gonna give you that price and then try to renegotiate the deal by doing my own inspections. I'm literally offering you right now a price where, if you just accept it right now, you have a done deal."

Now, the issue and the leverage that I knew I had with the seller—and I definitely took a risk by doing this—was that they were now on the market for three weeks. The thing is, if they had just priced this and accepted a good offer from the very beginning, that wasn't necessarily the highest but was maybe a stronger offer in terms of like the buyers' capabilities of closing, they could have closed way higher. They could have closed significantly higher than my offer.

Not only that, but the offer that I wrote myself when I first offered was way higher than what I'm offering right now. Because I knew that to sell a place like this, the best chance that they have is to sell it in multiples within the first few days. If they don't do that, if it sits on the market for more than three weeks, all of a sudden, so many buyers out there subconsciously think, "Why has it been listed for three weeks? Why don't they have an offer on it? There must be something wrong with it."

This is how stupid it is, but as an agent, I have seen this happen so many times that I can recognize that and say to myself this is a good deal that is just psychologically turning buyers away because it fell out of escrow. That's not warranted at all; it's just a stupid psychological thing that buyers think it fell out of escrow and therefore it's a bad deal, when in reality, the buyer was just crazy to begin with.

And all of a sudden, that could be my advantage in the deal! So, I'm explaining to them that basically, my offer is the best and they should really go and take it, and again they kept turning it down.

So, we were going back and forth. One night, I think this was the day after I posted that video, we were going back and forth, and they again turned down my offer. I just kept basically resubmitting the same thing over again, and they turned it down.

Then, I literally wrote the exact same offer with just another letter explaining, "Take my offer." It's but another day, they turned it down. So, I offered in the moment. I said, "You know what? I will come up $5,000 higher right now if you can accept my offer in the next like two hours."

So, I'm waiting there; it's like 10 p.m. I'm hoping like by midnight, they're gonna take my offer, and I'll pay $5,000 more just again for the convenience of just, you know, take it! Take it; here's $5 grand extra. And sure enough, they turned it down.

I'm thinking like, "Why are they? I just gave him an extra $5 grand for nothing! All they had to do was just accept it."

At that point, I'm like, "You know what? I'm getting fed up with this." So, basically what I did is two days went by, and then I just resubmitted the original offer that I wrote that was lower, and I basically said, "You have 8 hours to take this offer. If you don't take this offer, I'm gonna withdraw the offer in writing. I'm gonna wait one week, and then the next week, I'm gonna offer $10,000 less." If they don't take that offer within 8 hours, I will take that off, and then the week after that, I'm gonna offer $10,000 less. I will continually every single week just offer $10,000 less until they take it.

And every day that they’re sitting on the market is a day that they lose their leverage. They had all the leverage for the first few days, but after that, after they fell out, after 2 weeks, all of a sudden the buyer is in the driver's position of the property, not the sellers.

So, I knew I had the upper hand, and I knew the chance of them getting that activity again and getting the price that they originally wanted was slim to none. I figured at this point I'm willing to take the risk of losing it, knowing that at the end of the day I can score basically a better deal.

After eight hours, they basically came back and said, "Okay, we'll take the offer, but how about you reduce the closing from 35 days to 25 days?" I said, "No, that offer is exactly it; take it or leave it."

So then, they came back and said, "Okay, well how about we can just renegotiate the home warranty plan? We'll take out the home warranty plan." I said, "No, it's best and final; this is it. If you ask for anything else on the deal, I'm taking it off, and I will offer $10,000 less next week."

And sure enough, they ended up taking it! When they took it, I was ecstatic because this is an offer, believe it or not—sorry sellers if you end up seeing this, I don't think you will—but the offer that was accepted was lower than the offer that I would have paid had they just accepted it when we were in multiple counter offers!

I wasn't gonna renegotiate anything anyway, so, you know, they ended up losing a little money on there, but they took the risk for a much higher offer—it didn't pay out—and that loss from that end was my gain! And they also had an appraisal, like I said, that was way higher than where I'm at a score right now where I'm supposed to close.

But here's why I saw the potential in this place. First of all, it's two miles away from the Inglewood Stadium. Now, for those of you that aren't around Los Angeles, this is the new Ram Stadium that's going up, and it's estimated that they're spending about five billion dollars building out this infrastructure for the stadium. Not only that, but a lot of investor money right now is coming in around the stadium in anticipation of this doing like really well.

So right now you're finding a lot of investor money just pouring into this entire area that's expanding outwards, and the property that I'm buying is within a two-mile radius of that. So, I should see a lot of benefit from that.

The other upside with this is that it's about a mile away from what's called the Crenshaw Plaza. Now, what this is, is this is a very old, outdated mall that no one really goes to anymore, but they're going to be undergoing a 700 million dollar renovation to revitalize the entire area. They're noticing that the demographic of that area is shifting, and it's going towards more higher-end luxury retail, fine dining, you know, living—all these extravagant things. So they're investing 700 million dollars, which is probably gonna be closer to a billion realistically by the time they're done with it, into renovating that entire structure.

But the other thing I'm looking forward to is that this property is two blocks away from what's called the Crenshaw line. Now, this is a line that goes from Los Angeles Airport all the way to what's called the Expo Line, which is Crenshaw and Exposition. The Expo Line was big for Los Angeles because it was a rail that went all the way from Santa Monica all the way to downtown Los Angeles. And now this connects Santa Monica all the way to LAX.

More downtown from LAX because basically now that the whole tram comes and could go through and connect. And what they're trying to push for at this point is to extend the Crenshaw line all the way north to West Hollywood. Now, if this happens, the entire area will explode in value because all of a sudden now you have a way to get from Los Angeles Airport all the way to Hollywood, which has never been done before for one of these rails!

Or you can take it all the way from Hollywood to Santa Monica. Hollywood sits down—like, there are so many different ways you can do this, and this property is a two-block walk to hop on the Expo Line to basically go anywhere from the beach to downtown to Hollywood to LAX, which is tremendous.

So right there, you have three major things that are gonna be bringing up this entire area over the next 10 to 20 years. Like I said, Crenshaw Line, Crenshaw Plaza, and also the Inglewood Rams stadium—all around this property. And that's why I believe that this whole area is really poised just to go up in value over time.

The second thing that I saw with this property that I can add a ton of value with is that for some reason it was inaccurately advertised as a 1-bedroom, 1-bathroom. Now, any time any sort of agents is looking for their clients, 99 percent of the time they put two bedrooms as the minimum. Anytime a buyer is looking for a duplex, 99% of the time they're gonna put in two bedrooms as the minimum.

So this property didn't even show up for probably like 90% of the people out there who would have loved this place; it just didn't even show up for them. In reality, it was really a one bedroom, one and a half bathroom, and the second bedroom was just opened up to the living room. For probably like $3,000 maximum, you could enclose the second bedroom, put a door in the hallway, and all of a sudden you can call this a two-bedroom, one and a half bathroom.

And then, if you were to ever sell it, you say, "Buyer to verify second bedroom; second bedroom could be used also as a den," whatever it might be. But the fact remains, this is a room with a closet that can be enclosed and called the second bedroom. Just by doing that, I could spend $3,000 and turn this into a two-bedroom.

Just by that, if I were to rent out the other unit, I can get a few hundred dollars more every single month. If they sold this as a two-bedroom, one and a half bathroom for each side, they would have spent maybe six, seven thousand dollars max doing this. That would have translated to probably an extra $100,000 in sales price just by doing that. That is something that I absolutely would have done if I were ever selling this place: turn it into a two-bedroom!

I mean, it's the easiest thing that you could have done, and expose it to everybody who's now looking for a two-bedroom. Because in reality—and I'll make videos about this whole thing because this is what I want to do—I’ll show you guys like this is very much a two-bedroom!

Now, the next way I can add value to this is with the garage. They have a huge oversized garage that eventually I want to save up the extra money. I want to turn this into what's called an ADU, which stands for accessory dwelling unit. This is basically where I can spend about $180,000—let's say $200,000 max—making this a legal triplex now instead of a duplex. All of a sudden, I'm going to spend $200,000, and I'm gonna get back around $1,600 to maybe $1,700 a month extra in rent.

So, I'm trading $200 grand at the very most for about $1,700 a month extra! That, to me, seems amazing. So I can add value by turning it into a two-bedroom and also someday turning the garage into another unit. Honestly, just by doing these two things, I really expect the value of this place should really be more like $1 million, $150,000—maybe $1.2 million at the very most right now. The area doesn't support anything beyond that if I were to spend like $180,000 redoing the garage.

But honestly, there's still a lot of equity to be made just by doing these few little things and waiting over time. But this is a place, like I said, I'm planning to keep this forever. I'm never gonna sell this place! This place to me is just gorgeous. I love it! Like, I'm very rarely ever just like, "Yeah, I love this place!" And now this was that place; I really, really liked it a lot!

So, I'm gonna be making for sure a few house tour videos on this, and I'll be showing you guys everything in person once I actually close, and I'll walk you guys through everything that I'm gonna be doing to it! So, you guys will see. Make sure to subscribe so you can see all of that!

But anyway, last moral of the story here is just this: Anytime you're going back and forth on an offer, if you're a buyer, stay firm! If you really feel like you know what it's worth, stay firm on your offer. That's what I did! If anything, I even got more aggressive as I had more leverage.

I understood that all of a sudden I could be more aggressive with my offer and not lose it because the sellers didn't have any other options. Because they screwed themselves by taking a high offer from the very beginning. Unfortunately, sorry sellers, but that's what ended up happening, and they ended up getting a slightly lower price at the end of the day.

I mean, it's still a fair price for everybody, but at the end of the day, it was something that I recognized—the opportunity, and I just went for it knowing that this place, honestly, was absolutely perfect.

Now, really quick, for those that watch to the very end, here's a cool offer. Now, I've been considering doing this, and I think now is the point where I should just do it! I had this idea a few weeks ago when I was talking with Evan about hosting an event in the backyard of this place where I share everything I know about real estate investing.

It would basically be an entire day seminar where I go over what I look for in properties, how to renovate properties, where I look to buy—everything about cash; like basically everything about real estate investing for an entire day in person! We basically start in the morning, like a Saturday morning, go until Saturday night in the backyard of this place I'm buying, which I thought was really cool that I can just like literally show you everyone firsthand like, "Hey, this is the place I bought, this is why I bought it," in person!

So, if you guys are interested in this, I want to keep it really small. So it's probably just going to be 15 people, and I got to cap it out of that because I've never done something like this before. I don't want too many people going to this, but I think 15 people will be a good amount.

Yes, it is gonna be a paid event, but you will have me in person at my place and Kevin in person for the entire day, really answering all of your questions one-on-one, like I said, in person. Now, typically I'm doing like $250 for 45 minutes on a coaching call, but this would be way less than that when you break it down per hour for the entire day.

So, if you guys are interested in doing this, the link is in the description. It's probably gonna be mid-October sometime. Obviously, all the information's in the description, so if you guys are interested in that—only 15 people! I've never done this before, so I hope it's good. Obviously, it will be! I'm just nervous about talking in front of groups.

But anyway, trying to get over that fear, so if you guys want to check that out, make sure to check that out! So, anyway, you guys, thank you so much for watching this video! I really appreciate it. If you guys enjoyed this, make sure to smash that like button! Also, make sure to smash that subscribe button, smash that notification bell so YouTube notifies you anytime I post a video, and also add me on Snapchat and Instagram.

I post there pretty much daily, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to be a part of it there! Lastly, I have a private Facebook group in the description for anyone who's interested in real estate investing, real estate agents, real estate wholesaling, mentoring, coaching. Real estate—you like real estate—just add yourself to the group. We're just about at 10,000 members, and that's pretty cool! It's a really supportive group, so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to just add yourself to that.

Thank you again for watching, and until next time!