00:00The days of just walking into an open house and going,
00:03I'd like to buy this.
00:04They're done, right?
00:05That's how my parents bought property.
00:07Now you have to be strategic and you have to have a plan
00:10in the way that you purchase property.
00:11However, it is still available to you.
00:15If you have a plan, real estate is accessible to anyone,
00:18no matter how much money you make.
00:20I'm Lori Levine-Harris,
00:21and I am a real estate agent and investor for a living.
00:26The biggest jump in homes for sale
00:27between a year over year is right now.
00:29Really?
00:30Yeah, things that were reported.
00:31Again, good for buyers, not great for sellers.
00:34No, no, but you know, sellers have gotten enough.
00:38You don't need anything else.
00:40I'm a woman of many careers.
00:42I studied music business in college,
00:43and then I got a scholarship to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles
00:49and went to law school, and I loved it.
00:51I met Brock my first year in practice,
00:55and I knew he was my husband from the third month of dating.
01:00As we grew our family and grew our life together,
01:03it became untenable to be a lawyer.
01:07It is time-intensive, and it is a job where you trade your time for money.
01:11We had talked about working together
01:13and me getting my real estate license for several years,
01:16and I had already known so much because we'd been investing together for the past decade.
01:21I got my license, and Brock and I took out a $300,000 business loan,
01:26and we got to work, and that's how our business started.
01:30Does anyone have any topics for our Ricky shoot?
01:33Keep all the receipts for everything you do for your home.
01:37Keep all the records.
01:38It's true.
01:39Yeah, and buyers are getting more discerning,
01:40so they want more information about the house when they sell it, right?
01:43A real estate agent is a person who represents a buyer-seller in the purchase or sale of a home,
01:52or investment property, or any piece of real property.
01:55A real estate investor is someone who is buying property themselves.
02:00We are both.
02:01I always tell people we sell houses to buy more.
02:05We do a lot of business in Silver Lake and Los Feliz.
02:08I think it helps that our office is in Silver Lake.
02:11We live in Los Feliz.
02:12We know the area intimately.
02:14If someone asked me to sell a house in Manhattan Beach,
02:17I would refer them out.
02:18I don't know anything about Manhattan Beach.
02:20I've been there once.
02:21But this, I know this area.
02:24We are going to go see a house in the Los Feliz Oaks,
02:27which is kind of the cool part of Los Feliz.
02:31It's filled with celebrities.
02:32It's hidden.
02:33It's in Griffith Park.
02:35I will walk you through how we get a home ready for sale.
02:41Hello.
02:42Welcome to our house on Cazao Place in the Los Feliz Oaks.
02:46It has four beds, three baths.
02:48This house is an escrow for $2.2 million.
02:51Welcome inside this gorgeous home.
02:54My amazing team who helps me with every single listing is sitting right here.
02:58That is Danielle.
02:59She's my listing coordinator.
03:01So she gathers all the bids, makes sure the house is painted clean.
03:05Annie and Olivia from Pride of Place Design,
03:07they are the staging company and interior designers that make the house shine.
03:12We always tell clients that staging is cheating.
03:14If you stage your home, you are going to see at least a 20% return.
03:19We always want to create an aspirational space.
03:22And we want to speak to the people that want to live in the area.
03:25So we very much look at the area.
03:26We look at who's going to probably buy the home.
03:29And we style it to show people the best possible life that they can have in that space.
03:36They're true artists.
03:37Well, we're house whispers.
03:39It's true.
03:40We are.
03:40You know, we walk in and it's about understanding what the house is asking for.
03:46So when we start in a bedroom, first thing we want to do is determine where's the bed going.
03:51It's the most important piece in the room.
03:52And we tend to look for windows, French doors or slider doors,
03:58like something that's taking you out to an outdoor space.
03:59And usually your bed wants to face that.
04:01So we chose to do that here.
04:03All of the rooms look out onto greenery.
04:07So that's something that we really wanted to highlight when we were getting the home ready for sale.
04:11Everything looks out this way.
04:13And so that was important in highlighting this because anyone who's going to live here is going to wake up,
04:18open their curtains and be stoked that they can afford this house.
04:24I love this bathroom.
04:26The tub gives me life.
04:29But something that was unique about this bathroom was quite masculine when we came to List the Home.
04:35And what Annie and Olivia did is bring a femininity to it and make it kind of everything to everyone.
04:41It could be more family.
04:42It could be more geared towards women.
04:44And that is staging and styling.
04:46We curate our books.
04:47We curate our fruits.
04:49Everything is curated.
04:51Everything is with thought.
04:52Yes.
04:52So if you go into a not great stagers home, these lemons will be plastic.
04:58There will be an orchid.
04:59We don't do an orchid.
05:01That is not allowed in a Brock and Lori listing.
05:03Something that I love about Annie and that I love about real estate is that women,
05:09in my humble opinion, run this business.
05:11And it's a balance to be able to erase all signs of life from a home.
05:17But still make it feel homey.
05:19I believe that people work with us because we make them feel confident in their real estate decisions.
05:25Because it is scary.
05:27If you don't have someone advising you and holding your hand and going like,
05:30this is a good financial decision.
05:32This is what to look out for.
05:33This is what we're doing.
05:34This is what we're doing.
05:35It really can be overwhelming.
05:37And frankly, it's so overwhelming that some people don't make this huge wealth-building,
05:42life-changing move.
05:44Real estate agenting is a commission-based job, right?
05:49We only make money if houses sell.
05:51So typically, in a sale, we make anywhere between two to five percent.
05:56On a $2 million home, let's say that that's $60,000.
05:59The most I've ever made is six figures in a single sale.
06:03So our real estate investing is separate from our business.
06:08We have a wide-ranging portfolio that is a mix of primarily multi-family,
06:15like apartment buildings.
06:16The one that we are going to see today is my favorite building ever.
06:20It's a 1920s Spanish.
06:22It is perfectly, perfectly preserved.
06:26We're going to finish restoring it, and then we are going to have it designated historic.
06:33We are standing at our triplex in Los Feliz that we just bought, and I love this building.
06:39Come on in, and we will show you what we've been up to getting this baby ready
06:44to rent to its future tenants.
06:46So what we loved about this building is that there are so many original Spanish elements.
06:52We have the MagnaSite flooring, the stained glass windows.
06:56We call it preserved by neglect.
06:58You just want something that no one has touched, that no one's renovated.
07:02What do we call a time capsule?
07:03And they're built like homes.
07:04They feel like homes.
07:05It feels like a home.
07:06They're little homes within this structure.
07:08So as an investment, you know, good buildings get good rents,
07:10get good tenants.
07:11It all kind of trickles down.
07:12Exactly.
07:12So we try to buy good stuff in good locations.
07:14We're standing in the dining room right now, and you can see the molding on the ceiling is amazing,
07:20and the walls are plastered, and then we have one-inch wood flooring.
07:24I mean, everything, the details in this room are immaculate.
07:28They just don't make them like this anymore.
07:30The use of space for this triplex is inefficient.
07:35There is a large hallway with beautiful stained glass.
07:39It's like landings.
07:40Yeah, landings, and it's just a magical space.
07:43All right, this is a great reveal through the kitchen,
07:45through this swinging butler's door, into this formal little breakfast room,
07:49in addition to the other dining room.
07:50Again, built like a home, a great art deco fixture, which was left, totally original,
07:55and into this beautiful kitchen, which hasn't been updated except by us.
07:58We put some new knobs on.
07:59We bought these O'Keeffe & Merritt stoves.
08:01There's only two stores in LA that sell and restore these, and they are fabulous.
08:07This is vintage tile.
08:10You don't really see tile made like this anymore.
08:13You can identify it as of a specific era, and that's something that we love.
08:17Where's the purple bathroom?
08:18Oh, here, here.
08:20Okay.
08:21It's original.
08:22Obviously, we're in the process of restoring it right now,
08:25but you can see this porcelain tile with these art deco kind of elements in it.
08:31We walked in, and I was like, I love this bathroom.
08:36Most of the great deals are kind of sitting there in plain sight,
08:39and people are just passing them up for whatever reason, and that was the case here.
08:42It was on the market for a year, I think.
08:44The reason I think real estate is a much better investment is it's totally unique as an asset
08:48class in that you can get loans to do it.
08:50Once we get the bank to help us buy it, we just send them a monthly payment for 30 years.
08:54And you get the benefits of ownership.
08:56You keep the appreciation.
08:58You keep the inflation-induced debt destruction.
09:01You keep the inflation of your assets.
09:03So you get all the benefits that you just pay the bank to be your burner.
09:09We decided to start making content together because we needed people to know that we had a business.
09:17I realized that our value was not in taking pictures of pretty homes.
09:21Where we shine and what differentiates us is in our knowledge about investing and
09:27making real estate feel accessible to people, and so we turned the camera on ourselves.
09:32Let's do one more of those on the same topic, we just need to keep it a little bit tighter.
09:36We need to tighten it up.
09:37All right, ready?
09:37Yes.
09:39This is kind of an obvious point, but every time a dollar changes hands in America,
09:44it gets taxed.
09:45Like, if you give it to store owner, it gets taxed.
09:47If you get it as a salary, it gets taxed.
09:48When you sell your primary residence, as a married couple, you can make $500,000 in profits tax-free.
09:56Another reason we love this business.
09:59Good? You got enough there?
10:00Okay.
10:02My hopes and dreams for our future in real estate is to empower the people who don't have
10:09that mentorship built into their community.
10:12If someone comes to me and they feel that home ownership or property ownership is out of reach,
10:18the first thing I say to them is speak to a lender, right?
10:22Talk to a lender.
10:23You might be surprised.
10:24You might be surprised.
10:25There actually might be programs to help you buy a home.
10:29And if you have a plan and you work towards that plan, you're golden.
10:34It'll happen.
10:35You're golden.
10:35We have a plan.
10:39you're golden.
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