Dan: Hello. This is Dan Stratford again with C1 Partners and we are here again with Bryan Schroeder who is the owner/operator of FasterHouse Real Estate out of St. Louis. One of their specialties is helping people sell a home in an emergency situation, something’s come up where they need to sell the house quickly. We’re going to talk today about the types of situations that Bryan’s company’s dealt with and helped people. Bryan, what are some reasons you’ve run into where someone approaches you and they have to sell their house quickly?
Bryan: That does happen pretty regularly, Dan. Give you just a couple of examples. One happened, a situation happened recently where a gentleman’s dad had passed away and this gentleman was actually in Florida and he came up to St. Louis for the funeral and literally while … a couple of days after the funeral he was ready to go so he called me about the house. We went over and looked at it and we worked out a deal and literally bought the house within a few days and he went back to Florida and that was kind of a done deal for him. He was just one of those people that was ready to go and get it done really quick. That’s one example. Another one that happens fairly regularly is when somebody is, their parents are in a nursing home, and nursing homes unfortunately can eat up a lot of money if somebody is in a nursing home over a period of time, and they quite often are in there and they just aren’t ready to sell the house or the kids aren’t ready to sell the house for whatever reason and they start eating away at that cash available so the nursing home is actually looking for assets before they get put on Medicaid. So they have to sell their house in order to pay the nursing home. I have that happen pretty regularly. As a matter of fact we are in pretty well contact with most of the nursing homes around the St. Louis area because they know when some of their customers are needing cash they give us a call to help liquidate that house because they have to get it liquidated before they get on Medicaid. Those are just a couple examples.
Dan: One thing I like about your company is if we go to your website FasterHouse.com we will see testimonials of your clients. How do you handle maybe the presumption or the belief that gosh if I sell my house fast I might be getting ripped off or taken advantage of? I know you have great testimonials on your website, but when someone’s worried about that how do you alleviate their fears in that area?
Brian: That’s a great question, Dan. I think a couple things, one is we’ve been around for a long time. We’ve been around for over ten years, and we have an office right here in town. Anybody can stop by and visit us at any time. We’re also members of the Better Business Bureau and we have an A+ rating. Been members at least eight-ten years. I’m not exactly sure how long and in good standing. I always recommend people too to if they’re concerned I give them some of the people that I work with in the real estate business primarily our title company I think is a good one for them to just get somebody that’s in the business kind of a third party type person to get a good reference from. I do that pretty regular. I just give them the contact over at our title company that they could check in with, and the other thing I’d kind of recommend is whenever you’re doing something like this trying to sell your house quick for cash is to get two or three or four bids. Don’t just take the first one and work with reputable companies. They’ve got a website. Got an office. Maybe they’re in the phone book not just a sign you see along the road or a little ad in the classified section of the yellow pages, or the newspaper or something; but work with people that have been around a little while and get more than one bid.
Dan: That’s great. I really appreciate your approach in that and it’s one thing I’ve enjoyed about your company is you seem like a company of integrity. A couple quick questions I had; explain how much you think someone would save or have you seen people save by selling through you versus going the traditional route when it comes to real estate fees and closing costs and those things associated with a typical situation where they’re selling a house.
Bryan: If they call me directly rather than going through a traditional real estate agent, they’re not going to have to pay any real estate commissions which typically in the St. Louis area these days are six to seven percent. If you’re on a $100,000 house are $6,000-$7,000. If it’s a $200,000 house it could be $12,000-$14000, and then if you sell the house directly to us we pretty much pay for all closing costs which closing costs aren’t that expensive here in the St. Louis area. It’s just a few hundred dollars, but that can definitely save them also. The big thing that really, I think the big savings that we provide is we make it easy and convenient and really save them on the time of putting a … first of all cleaning a house up, putting it on the market, and then just waiting around for buyers to come. We kind of take that uncertainty away where we just give them an offer where a price that we can close next week or we can close in three months whenever you’re ready. Some of the sellers have to do a little work to the house or get some items out of the house or whatever before they’re ready to go so they might want to wait two months; but some people are ready to go and they want to close next week and we are in a position where we can do that. We can close either way and there’s no … Really taking away the uncertainty of the house selling process is what we do.
Dan: That’s great. That’s all the time we have for today, Bryan. I appreciate your time and your expertise. It’s just invaluable and for more information again you can visit FasterHouse.com. You can also call them at 314.926.0660. Again, that’s FasterHouse.com, or 314.926.0660. Thanks a lot, Bryan. You have a great day.
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