All Forum Posts by: Henry Lazerow

I am an experienced realtor have sold a bit over $55 million and can first hand tell you the optimal price for sellers ALWAYS comes first week. Sounds like it was priced perfectly to get full ask first day, now saying that I would still keep it up 2 or 3 days to see if get higher offers if there was enough showing requests. The worst thing is to not get offers first week and then you only get low ball junkier offers with a listing that ends up selling at a net lower price to seller then if was priced correctly initially.  

With the commission rule change it is just a formality in buyer agency contracts. I have not seen a single house or 2-4 unit where the seller does not pay buyers agent commission at least in my market of Chicago. So nothing at all to worry about there.

Just RUN this buyer is obviously not a real buyer and just hoping to flip the contract, will weasel out at some point most likely.

Even a non refundable earnest can be bs if he just extends attorney review once it’s tied up FYI. Attorney within review period can cancel out non refundable earnest, seen it done.

Just keep it for a year or two even if slight negative cash flow or extra living expense. If it’s in San Diego it will appreciate and you should for sure be in the green in future. 

Chicago has low rise non-elevator building condos in class A areas at .8-1.2 ratios of rent to purchase, pretty solid for true 700+ credit type tenant areas. I always tell clients avoid anything with elevators as HOA gets too high.

That may depend on your location. In Chicago the worst building are the elevator high rises mostly owner occupants who pay huge HOA $600-1200 and still have barely any reserves for their size, they tend to be politically far left with anti landlord rules in their HOA docs and a very poorly run HOA. The low rise non elevator buildings are often mostly investor owned have lower HOA usually $200-300 and tend to be much better managed as intelligent investors own them. I have sold several of these to BP users and they can work great.

@Jay Hinrichs
Who are Jerry and Sean Cohen in Chicago, what did they do? 

Yeah always need vet people very well. I prefer all my non direct ownership investments just being in index funds as can’t get scammed that way. 

Neither really cash flow in 2025 without a value add, some cheap houses might on paper but not in real life. You can still cash flow on 4 units if know what your doing and do a value add to boost rents. 4 units are scalable and rents grow overtime pretty fast as 4x, it’s how I got started. 

Previously with conventional financing you could only buy a condo for investment in which the HOA was under 50% investors and would end up needing a costlier DSCR loan instead to close the deal. Now the rules have changed where that only applies if your lender underwrites it as a full condo review, you can avoid this by putting 25% down. We have a lot of condos in Chicago that work well for investors, specifically the low rise no-elevator buildings with low HOA´s. Thought might be helpful for other BP members nationwide!

I meant sold over 50 or 100 million total in their history as an agent not per a year. 

Anyone else find it mind boggling how many realtors are unresponsive and take multiple calls to actually get a response lately? For example you request a showing and they just never respond. You email some questions about lease end dates they never respond, basic info they should already know or easily be able to get from the seller. It seems to have gotten worse in 2025, guessing a lot of these agents are doing this part time now that the market has slowed. I am seeing this issue most commonly with the solo non-team agents and many of the elderly agents also, maybe a slow year makes them feel like they are already retired. 

Be very careful who you hire to sell your properties! Go with agents who have sold 50+ or even 100+ million and have teammates to quickly respond. I have been working with a teammate for a few years now and feel it works very well to be able to schedule/respond quickly to both buyers and sellers. You are better off even going with Redfin then some of these agents :X