Sean Fuentes Reveals 3 Essential Strategies for Today’s Realtors

Michael Stansbury (00:02.496)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m Mike Stansbury. My guest today is Sean Fuentes at Austin, Texas. Sean, how are you sir?

Sean Fuentes (00:23.863)
I am doing fantastic. Fantastic. Great to be here.

Michael Stansbury (00:26.9)
I love it. We’re going to get into Sean’s story and how he’s helping people in Austin, Texas. But first, at Investor Fuel, the sponsor of this podcast, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs 2 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. Sean, so tell me this. Before we get into what you’re doing now, what’s your origin story? How did you get on this yellow brick road of real estate?

What was the pivot point? What were you doing beforehand and why?

Sean Fuentes (01:00.543)
You know, it’s a, I’ll make a long story short and it’s kind of, you know, magical, right? My dad is from McAllen, Texas and my grandmother at the time used to see this. I’m originally from El Paso. She used to see this fortune teller, just a lady, neighborhood lady. And I went, we went down there for my grandma’s birthday and I met this person. I still remember her.

And later she told, and I was still like in high school. Later she told somebody that, that I was going to build houses, that I was going to be in real estate. And like, you know, I didn’t think much of it. It was told to me. I moved to Austin. I was in construction, then a bartender a little bit and then came here for school. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out for me. I wasn’t dedicated at the time. But then I got into land survey. I did 10 years as a land surveyor.

I thought I was going to get my numbers, my RPLS numbers, and it’s just the dot com boom kind of happened or bust happened. I stayed through it and then we went into the real estate market crash of 2008 to 2011. During, I think it was 2006, I saw infomercial for flipping houses. Went down to some building downtown Austin, they went through it and I was like, I could do this.

I mean, I got a background. know enough about construction to be dangerous, right? I know enough to like, okay, I don’t have the tools. Let’s call the professional application. And then I thought, all right, I’m gonna buy a flip out. So I bought one. was more not a, wasn’t a, don’t define a flip house. Like a flip house is like you’re going down to the studs. I bought an updater. That makes sense? Like, that’s how I.

Michael Stansbury (02:50.72)
Yes. Yes.

Sean Fuentes (02:53.386)
With my clients, when they’re like, I want a flip house. I’m like, no, you want an update. Flip house, you wouldn’t even walk into, right? You would smell all of that would have you run it. Right. So anyway, um, so I started that in 2006. I bought a house and back then, I don’t know if you know anything about the early 2000, they were just giving money away. You know, the ninja loan, no income job or assets was alone. I tried to get it in Texas. They wouldn’t allow it. Comp controller was like, having that. was like, give me 500,000. Just give it to me.

Michael Stansbury (02:58.316)
Yes.

Sean Fuentes (03:23.762)
I’ll get this thing going. Anyways, so bought the flip house. Then six months later, my realtor at the time was like, hey, you want to buy another one? I was like, sure, I bought it. Then I had these two houses. I didn’t really know what to do at that point. The crash happened around 2015. I was like, I got into transportation out of surveying and I was like, you know what? Everybody’s been telling me to become a realtor. So I’m just going to do it. Got my license in 2016.

There’s a story there, but I won’t tell it. And then, I told my wife when we sold both of those houses and I told my wife when, we bought the new home, cause we sold the two to buy a brand new construction home that the day after we closed, I was going to put in my two weeks and go full-time real estate. So Sunday we closed on Friday, Sunday. She’s like, what are you doing? I’m like, right. My two weeks. She’s like, we just bought this house. my gosh. And I’m like, don’t worry. It’ll be fine.

I always bet on myself, right? If I’m gonna lose money, it’s on myself, right? So, and I never look back. I think the average lifespan of an agent is three years, coming up on 10 years. So I’ve been doing pretty good.

Michael Stansbury (04:24.235)
Right.

Michael Stansbury (04:37.174)
Yes sir you are and just for a little context, can you speak to, I know what Memphis’ market has done as far as the contraction of realtors is concerned. How’s it look like in Austin or in your MLS? Does it look like there was a contraction in last two or three years?

Sean Fuentes (04:52.551)
I think so. I haven’t gotten the numbers out for this year yet, but I rely on somebody else for that. But in 2023, in October, there was 19,000 agents in Austin. Only 9,000 of them had done one transaction. So I don’t know how you go 10 months without bringing in any money. Like I’m sure some of those agents, it’s cyclical, they were just like, oh, I’m taking a break, but.

half the agents and often. So what that made me realize was that half the agents and often were part time, the majority. You there’s probably some brokers that don’t do deals anymore, you know, that type of thing. But of that 9,000, what 300 of them maybe, you know, so the chunk of those people that weren’t doing business were had other jobs. And so they were, and this is a plus and a minus and positives and negatives to this. So I think half the agents, some of them have started to like, I’m not going to renew it.

You know, we’ve reached the part of this cycle where it’s a skills market and you either have the skill or you don’t. it’s, and Austin’s been so real estate heavy these last few 10 years or so that everybody knows what’s happening. You know, everybody knows an agent or at least they know of somebody that knows an agent, you know, a lender, you know, those types of things. So it’s not, it’s not hard to find us.

Find out there, but getting back to your question, which was the the state of Austin, correct? I read the realtors in Austin. Yeah, so I think we’ve lost some. Yeah, we’ve lost some ranks, but I think the you know there are still people like last year. We’ll get into this more, but in my opinion, the United States, other 49 states are having.

Michael Stansbury (06:31.98)
Right. Yeah. So if you give us. Yeah.

Sean Fuentes (06:50.276)
They’re just starting Austin’s 2024. What could save them would be rates. Because looking at 2023, when I looked at 2023, the rest of America was kind of stuck in 2022. And now Austin’s price point shot way up real quickly. so I think we’re just having agents that were part-timers that just aren’t doing it anymore. Now, they may still keep that license active, just in case.

something happens, but they’re not, they’re just not actually, they’re not active in trying to find business, trying to close business. If it falls in their lap, do it, but they’re not actually out there working as a professional. And I’m not saying part-timers can’t be professionals, but they’re part-time for a reason.

Michael Stansbury (07:35.096)
Yes, so that.

But yeah, but you said like there was a moment in time for the whole market as a whole where people, there was just so much business that, you know, your cousin got your real estate license and he did well for six months just by having the availability to be an agent. But that is long gone and it’s a skills, you know, so, you know, see a couple of things and I don’t know this to be 100 % true, but we locally have an

Sean Fuentes (07:56.523)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (08:07.02)
have had an aging, very much an aging, the, like if you want to call them boomers or whatever, but they’re now exiting the market and retiring at a level because, and they were, you know, they were a big chunk of the business. I think while, you know, I’m, there’s, think there’s just opportunity there for people that would, with the skills to market their services to people in a way that’s professional. And I can also tell, it’s just based on my Instagram feed, which I don’t get on, used to me, my Instagram feed was just full of.

a real of new rally who is real estate run or seen this person before their talented on instagram but i don’t know if they’re talented anywhere in the capacity of getting getting real business some of them are great and then some of them are just kind of they just know how to and and look great on the on the socials but i think

Sean Fuentes (08:53.184)
I agree with you that there’s getting business, there’s closing business. And most buyers and sellers want to close business with a

Michael Stansbury (08:57.782)
Right, absolutely.

Michael Stansbury (09:03.756)
That’s right. So, so you talked about your, and I, your flipping house or your, I love how you made that distinction. There’s a flipping houses and there’s updating houses. some people call it a whole tailing or, and just reselling. Cause I mean, I, I honestly, I do a lot of that in my market. I just find a house, get it under value and just go in there and paint and carpet or new flooring. And it’s a beauty. love doing.

Sean Fuentes (09:28.257)
Yeah, new countertops if it needs an AC, put it in a new roof. don’t know, roofs aren’t sexy until it’s raining. Then roofs become real sexy when there’s a storm coming around.

Michael Stansbury (09:40.704)
It’s real sexy when you got a brown, yeah, that’s right. People love it. Do you still do a little bit of that in your market or do stick strictly to helping buyers and sellers? Tell me what that looks like.

Sean Fuentes (09:54.429)
I, if I meet a wholesaler that will send me homes, I sign up because the wholesalers have a market in off and it’s, it’s, it’s cyclical as well. guarantee you wholesalers were having a tough time in 2020 through 2021 because anything on the MLS was selling fast. I mean, really fast. So you didn’t, you were losing money if you went to, I don’t want to say you were losing money if you went to a wholesale.

you were probably losing time was the biggest thing. so there, you know, it’s just like being an agent. There’s good times. There’s lean times. gotta, you know, you just gotta plan for a flat line. And when it’s up and down, you’re going to be good. So yeah, I like dealing with wholesalers because they know a lot about some things that agents don’t run into all the time. Like let’s say you have,

Grandma, great grandmother bought it. Parents owned it. And now the parents are the CCL4 kids. And it’s just been kind of, know, the parents went through probate, but the kids did. And so now you’ve got to go through probate. There’s not a lot of agents that there are. Well, there are a lot of agents that do know about probate, but most of them don’t. They don’t know what that entails. They don’t know that, you know, the buyer could get the seller.

could write in there, write in the contract that it’s subject to being probate, can get an attorney to kind of give you like a, I forgot what it’s called, but like a power of attorney to sign a contract so that you can sell it. You all those little details, wholesalers know about. A lot of agents know about it. And that’s okay. So I always want to be, I kind of look at it this way. people say, well, where do you buy and sell them? Like where are my clients?

You know, I go from Georgetown, which is hour and a half from here to from where I live an hour to, you know, New Braunfels, which is a good, could be an hour, you know, depending on traffic or East, West, wherever they want to go is where I want to go. And it’s not so much, it is about servicing my clients, but also getting to know those markets. So instead of somebody says, Hey, what do think of the market? Well, I just sold a house in Georgetown and I sold one in.

Sean Fuentes (12:15.963)
the middle of Austin and then I sold one South. So doing all my research for that, I might not know exactly everything, but I got a pretty good idea of what’s happening in all three of those areas.

Michael Stansbury (12:26.892)
Wow, okay, I like it. So in Austin, in Austin, Texas, it’s not just Austin, so it’s a big city. Memphis is a, Metro is about 800,000. What is Austin as far as Metro and all the other little streaming counties?

Sean Fuentes (12:40.638)
my god. Well, I don’t know our population. I think it’s just over a million, something like that. But I will say this. Okay, this is how I describe Austin’s population. Like, if somebody tells you they’re from New York, right? They’re from New York. What does that mean? Like, if you’re from New York, you say, what part? Where are from? You know?

Michael Stansbury (12:49.944)
You can throw spaghetti at it.

Sean Fuentes (13:08.766)
Because they know New York is just this arbitrary place. So Dallas is the same way. I’m from Dallas. Oh, OK. Are you from Plano? Are you actually from Denton? Houston, the same way. Are you from Katy? Are you from Spring? It takes an hour and a half, three hours to drive across Houston and traffic. So Austin’s getting that way. When they go somewhere, they’re not saying, oh, I’m from Round Rock. I live in Georgetown. Georgetown, Washington, where do you live?

So they’re just using this huge thing. Now, one of the things that’s different and specifically with New York is the actual downtown is not huge. It’s decent stuff, but it doesn’t compare to New York or even Dallas or Houston. It’s decent stuff. And it’s been that way on purpose. When I moved here in 92, this thing was big town politics in a small town. So we don’t have a

Michael Stansbury (13:46.359)
Right.

Sean Fuentes (14:04.06)
We certainly have enough people here to support a professional anything team. We just got a soccer team a couple of years back, but they don’t want anything. When I say they, the politicians don’t want anything to outshine the University of Texas, the Longhorns. They want the Longhorns to be, and you’re in Memphis. don’t know, how close are you to the Vols? Are you a Vols fan?

Michael Stansbury (14:21.068)
They want the longhorns to have that feeling.

Michael Stansbury (14:30.038)
No, actually, so Tennessee being a long state, like that could be, that’s just basically on the other side of the world. That’s kind of like, you know, Al Paso, right? Or, you know, something, you know, it’s got, it’s a long distance, but no, I’m, we’re West Tennessee, not, well, West Tennessee, we do have a lot of people that are root for the other UT. And then, but we have the, the SEC is well represented in our town. So you get people.

Sean Fuentes (14:35.786)
okay.

Yeah.

Sean Fuentes (14:57.605)
I bet.

Michael Stansbury (14:58.836)
every SEC school like that roots because I actually went to school at the University of Arkansas. So yeah, so we’re big. We love Texas. No, we yeah, but we have a lot of Ole Miss, Mississippi State, UT, Vanderbilt, Georgia. We got the whole spectrum here, the whole spectrum. So and it’s fun. It makes it fun. But let me ask you this, Sean, what’s that? Go ahead.

Sean Fuentes (15:10.209)
I know.

Sean Fuentes (15:19.831)
Yeah, amazing.

It should be in it. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, you know, my I’m a I’m a passionate fan about my football teams and professional college, but my fandom only goes so far. Like, I’m not so much of a fan that we need to get in a fight over it. Maybe you maybe you do, but not you specifically the royal you. But I’m just like, know, my team wins the national championship or the Super Bowl. You know what I’m doing on Monday? I’m going to work. That’s it. I don’t get.

Michael Stansbury (15:27.542)
I want to ask about

Michael Stansbury (15:32.397)
Yep.

Michael Stansbury (15:47.128)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Stansbury (15:52.791)
Right?

Sean Fuentes (15:54.006)
I get to celebrate and I’m happy, but I still gotta go to work. I didn’t get any of that money. I got nothing other than my team won.

Michael Stansbury (16:01.592)
right. That’s right I used to be to my wife when we got married I used to be able to watch a full- regular season baseball game for three and a half hours and she was like what do you such a waste of time I was like we talk about. The best now I don’t think I’ve watched a full baseball game in years I keep up with it but I’m not as- like the passion I’m still interested in it but-

Sean Fuentes (16:27.37)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (16:28.44)
I definitely reordered my loves in my life. So I’m with you on that.

Sean Fuentes (16:35.765)
come October, come October, every pitch counts. Every pitch counts, you know. June, July, pitch kinda counts, you know. But yeah, in October, I’m like, that’s when I really love baseball. And who doesn’t, know, if you’re a baseball player, well, October.

Michael Stansbury (16:42.764)
Yes, yes.

Michael Stansbury (16:49.752)
China.

Michael Stansbury (16:55.998)
Yeah, it’s very romantic, especially at that time of year. start getting, even if you’re out of it, you can get the storylines pretty quickly. The young kids, all that stuff. And I do love the storytelling when it comes to specifically baseball. That’s just romantic. But let’s talk, again, let’s center this around what you’re doing today. you’ve been a realtor, you have some equity in the business now, and you’ve seen some different

Sean Fuentes (17:05.437)
Yeah, yeah, you can catch up.

Sean Fuentes (17:19.037)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (17:25.716)
cycles but specifically today you know what is you know how are you different from the other average the other realtors in your market how are you helping your clients the best now

Sean Fuentes (17:38.994)
You know, this is a great question. I’m glad I’m glad you asked it. And really what it is about right now is pricing. Because we’ve moved from a seller’s market into a heavy buyer’s market. There’s still some places that the inventory is lower than six months. So a healthy market is six months of inventory. And so what that means is you have 10 buyers and 10 sellers, right? So there’s nobody really has an advantage.

A buyer’s market would be you have more than six In seller’s market, you would have less than six months of inventory. In some areas, we still have like four or five months, which would suggest a huge seller’s market. But when we look at days on the a seller’s market with four months of inventory, 30 days, that house should be gone easily. And we’re still seeing like 90.

100 days for those that only have four months of inventory. So heavy buyers market in Austin. We were in a seller’s market from about 2012 to 2020. Well, no, till 20. We were in a seller’s market from 2012 till today. And so back in 2020, I developed a different pricing model. So essentially what was happening was

Michael Stansbury (18:37.004)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Fuentes (19:06.224)
a house would get listed at any price, but let’s just say listed at 500 and listed on Thursday. On Monday, they had an offer somewhere in the 610, 620. It just depended on how nice the house was. And so I realized that my clients were just getting dusted. They weren’t even close. And I was like, OK, why aren’t they getting close? And so I had to reevaluate why.

What was I doing to guide my clients to this point of, you know, you know, that they’re $100,000 off the actual sale price. And back then in Texas, we still have it. It’s called the appraisal addendum. What that is, it’s three boxes. But back then everybody wanted, all the sellers wanted box one, which basically said that you cannot leave the deal if the appraisal comes back short.

So you list at 500, you get contracted under let’s say 600. The appraisal comes back at 550. The buyer is bringing 50,000 to put in the seller’s pocket to buy the house. Doesn’t go towards their loan, doesn’t go towards their down payment. It just goes towards closing the deal and that’s it. Well, you know, who wants to sign that? Nobody wants to sign that, right? So I said, okay, I’ve got to develop a system that allows my client to sign that document.

with some reasonable confidence that we’re going to appraise for that. And so the way that I did that was I still do it. I stopped doing it for a little while because it wasn’t necessary. But now that we’re in a buyer’s market, so back then it was going like this and now it’s going like this. So we’ve got to get the sellers to understand it’s going like this. It’s really simple. I would find all the properties that were pending, pending sale. So pending sale is they were on the market.

They accepted a contract and now they’re in the process of closing it. The lender is doing all of their things. And I would call the agent, like Michael, hey, this John Fuentes, the XP. So congratulations on, you know, 123 Banana Street going under contract. Look, I’m trying to price a home.

Sean Fuentes (21:19.637)
would really help me, did you guys get, go under contract at list, above list, or below list? Back then, I always knew it was never gonna be below list. But using it now could be below list. And then they would say, a little above or a little below, or they would just come out and say, hey, we’re listed at five, we’re at 620. And so that bit of information is extremely valuable.

Because now I had these because you couldn’t go more than 15 days in the past to try to start to price these homes. And so what I would do is I would go 15 days, an idea of where it was at, and then I’d start plugging in. And I’m going like this because I would create a Google Google sheet that I would send to my clients a link. They open this up. Here’s what we’re doing. These people, these agents usually took about eight hours to price. Took about eight hours for the.

all the agents to respond to least enough of them so that I could get it. And I’d start plugging in the for sale. When you have the sale price, well, you know the price, but you know, the days I want you, everything else kind of falls in the place. And so now when you’re doing an average and a mean, that’s what you want to do. It’s all going to be high. But if you have a similar property listed at 500, what’s the likelihood that it could close at six 10 pretty in this market, pretty, pretty, pretty good. And so then I’ve got this new CMA.

built off the future, not the past. So it’s built off the future, what’s coming. And then I say to my clients, look, we know via all this data, right, that this house could close for 610, easy. But even better, it will appraise for 610. So now you can check box one, knowing that if you don’t win, likely somebody’s coming with cash to close the deal, not going towards their loan.

And so all my clients, once I explained it to them, and I would go through it a little bit further with the spreadsheet and all of that, they get it. Some of them got it right off the bat and we’d get under contract quickly. Some of them didn’t. We’d lose another deal. they’d say, OK, we understand now. Then they’d start bidding where we didn’t win every single one of them because some people would go over, right, over where we thought it should be. But it was OK because my clients were able to walk away.

Sean Fuentes (23:40.328)
They never were like, ah, the climate was just like, they never got hung up on one property that they, that they didn’t get. Cause they knew whoever got it was coming out of pocket to close the deal, whatever it was. And then, you know, the second or third time we would get it. And then there’s a lot of agents that they weren’t well, there were no agents that were doing this. I can’t, I can’t say 100%, but the agents that I talked to, they just had clients that were just like big, bit higher, a bit higher, a bit higher.

Michael Stansbury (23:40.952)
Thank

Sean Fuentes (24:09.427)
There were escalator clauses. Escalator clause would be like, OK, listed for five. My client will pay $5,000 over any offer you get up to a certain amount. And so just goes up till they hit that ceiling. And then if somebody else had an escalation clause that was higher, they would win. mean, was just, it was nice. But that’s it. It’s all pricing.

Michael Stansbury (24:34.424)
Well, Sean, yeah, it sounds like to me that you came up with something that is unique because you took all the emotion out of it. You said, hey, here’s how I’m going to help you the most. This is why I’m a professional. You didn’t say this is why I’m professional, but what oozed out of that whole presentation was, hey, I’m here to help you, but there’s data and then there’s future data, and here’s how we capture it, and here’s how we use it.

The reason why the clients I think loved it and you didn’t say that I’m just thinking through as a client that well I guess because you took all the emotion out of it and you you know it because people and that’s why they have auctions live auctions is it because people You know they end up looking at somebody and they’re like, don’t like the way that person looks or whatever reason No, and that and that is in sometimes

Sean Fuentes (25:25.53)
I hate that person. He’s not, he or she’s not getting it.

Michael Stansbury (25:32.546)
you know when i’m selling a house you better bet i’m selling an emotion i want you to look i want the wife to just fall in love with this house and tell turn to the husband and say i’ve got to have this house do whatever you can so but in the opposite situation why she would protect you know your capital investment and you’re saying and being saying and something that’s exactly you know what your superpower is shown so congratulations that’s a really you’re really helpful on the people out there in in austin

Let me ask you this because we’re running up on the time allotment, but where can people find out more about you and about what you’re doing in Austin? Where can they find you on all the social, Sean?

Sean Fuentes (26:10.628)
You know what? I’m a big Twitter guy, Or X. Trooper91 is my handle there. I wasn’t in the military. My high school was the Eastwood Troopers. And so Trooper91, so I have a lot of MAGA people contacting me. I’m a GDI. I don’t know if you remember GDI. You know what that is? I am a goddamn independent, right? So don’t go, I just in real estate, in real estate, like I gotta figure out who.

Michael Stansbury (26:15.82)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (26:34.52)
You

You really? didn’t see- Right.

Sean Fuentes (26:40.054)
Like I have one vote. So Trump won. Great. How can I leverage what Trump is doing to help me make money? You know, Biden won. Great. How can I leverage if Kamala would have won? How can I leverage what Kamala is doing to help me make money? That’s it, you know. So Facebook is just John Fuentes. I’m getting a lot of this. Same thing with LinkedIn. Those are my three biggest ones. Facebook, Instagram is John.

Michael Stansbury (26:47.592)
Exactly.

Michael Stansbury (26:52.78)
Yeah. You got it. Exactly.

Sean Fuentes (27:08.56)
Seanhomes.com or Sean sells homes. Email Sean.Quintus.Exprealty.com. That’s the one right there. You send me something there, you’re gonna get a reply. I’d give you my phone number, if you go to any one of those things, you’ll have my phone number.

Michael Stansbury (27:23.032)
going to get to your end. Well folks, it. Well guys, all that information will be in the show notes below. Sean, thank you for being part of the Real Estate Pros Podcast folks. You know what to do if you are moving to Austin or if you’re local in Austin and you need somebody that’s got that kind of expertise that we just laid out. Contact Sean.

and he’ll help you. So folks again, thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time on the Real Estate Pros Podcast. Sean, thanks for being a guest on the show, sir.

Sean Fuentes (27:55.054)
Thank you, Michael. Look forward to doing it again. Take care.

Michael Stansbury (27:58.232)
Alright, goodnight everybody.