HOMEBUYING 101: Choosing A Realtor & Lender

Ever notice how the pros make everything look easy? That’s because they have guides who know all the shortcuts. In this episode, David Sidoni reveals why finding your own real estate “unicorn” – an experienced, caring guide – is the game-changer most first-time buyers miss. Learn why choosing the right team early unlocks hidden paths to homeownership and saves you thousands, even if you think you’re not ready to buy.

Quote: “Finding and working all your options – that’s the best play to success. And the right people, they have your best interests at heart, and your ‘best interest’ – that’s a phrase that unicorn-type realtors and lenders don’t take lightly.”

Highlights:

Could starting with a pre-qualification actually limit your homebuying options? Discover why David recommends finding your “unicorn” realtor before talking to lenders.
What if everything you’ve read online about the first steps to buying a home is backward? Learn why the conventional wisdom about starting with a mortgage pre-qualification might be selling you short.
Is your real estate agent just a “door opener”? Uncover the crucial differences between order-taking agents and true professional guides who can reveal paths to homeownership you didn’t know existed.
How much training do real estate agents actually receive? (Spoiler: It’s less than your barber!) Find out why choosing experienced representation is more important than you think.
What’s the real reason most online advice tells you to get pre-qualified first? David exposes how “big mortgage” tries to capture buyers early and potentially limits their options.
Could you be closer to homeownership than you think? Learn why 72% of David’s listeners who thought they were 12-18 months away from buying were actually under contract in just over 3 months.

Referenced Episodes:

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David Sidoni, the “How to Buy a Home Guy,” is a seasoned real estate professional and consumer advocate with over 18 years of experience helping first-time homebuyers navigate the real estate market. His podcast, “How to Buy a Home,” is a trusted resource for anyone looking to buy their first home. It offers expert advice, actionable tips, and inspiring stories from real first-time homebuyers. With a focus on making the home-buying process accessible and understandable, David breaks down complex topics into easy-to-follow steps, covering everything from budgeting and financing to finding the right home and making an offer.

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HOMEBUYING 101: Choosing A Realtor & Lender | STEP 2

Are you ready for step two? Step one was to decide. In that, we talked a little bit about how beneficial it is for you to choose your real estate team early, so you don’t have to do all the research on your own. That leads us to the question, “I’m a brand-new home buyer, so how do I pick the best realtor and lender?” That’s step two. Let’s do this.

This is a crucial step, step 2 in the 10 steps that every first-time home buyer has to know. If you’re here for the first time and you want to know who I am and why I’m doing this, jump back a couple of episodes. You can get the introduction to these 10 steps in episode 301. That’s Homebuying 101. You want to make sure you do this in sequence.

If you are hoping to get all 10 steps in 5-minute chunks, that’s not how I roll. I’m not saying there aren’t people out there trying to tell you how to buy a home like that in five-minute chunks. Can you listen to that and buy a home? Sure. Should you? No. Getting educated and confident in the process is not as hard as you might think, but it does deserve some respect.

I won’t be dropping some get-rich-quick scheme here, but don’t stress about it. Becoming completely informed is not insurmountable and not overwhelming. We’re going to tackle that head-on with step two, Finding Your Guides. I’m going to lay out the best tips to help you get yourself the best of the best. I’m going to teach you how to find what I call a unicorn real estate support team.

Right off the bat, if you’re freaking out because it sounds expensive, I’m going to get into that later on in the episode. Know this. Even after the National Association of Realtors Lawsuit that happened in 2024 and the changes in the industry, most buyer representation fees are paid in full or paid in a large portion by the seller.

The rules and the logistics of how these fees are technically paid changed quite a bit here in 2024, but after several months of data, we’re still seeing that, for the most part, the seller paying for these fees is unchanged. It’s still happening like it’s been done in the past. More on that later. Strap in and get ready to binge.

Finding your guides and choosing your team is not an online shopping expedition. You’re not served well if you approach this like you’re deal shopping online, comparing sneakers or handbags on Amazon. I know some people will say, “It’s like car shopping.” It’s a lot different than that. The good news is that with buying a home, unlike car shopping, you get to choose the salesperson who’s helping you.

Picking Your Guides

This is a big, if not the biggest, part of the homebuying process. You can probably tell if you look at the runtime of this episode, but hang with me, that this is the most important step. I want to make sure that you got everything right when it comes to this. Picking your guides is the most important step. You read it correctly. It is more important than getting the best interest rate, choosing the right neighborhood, or knowing everything about your home inspection.

Assembling your real estate support team and doing it early means that you’re working with the best of the best in your area to give you Yoda-like guidance in all those things with rates, neighborhoods, inspections, and anything else that you can think about that you’re going to be facing in the homebuying process. Choosing your guides affects every other aspect of your homebuying process. Even more importantly, it affects everything about your homebuying planning and your strategy formation leading up to the day that you’re ready to go out and go home shopping.

This is uber important, and I want you to do it right. We’ve done step one. You’ve decided, and you believe. Let’s get you with the right experts. This step in your journey, when you do this step right, you’re going to find out that it will put you miles ahead of how most people attack buying a home. If you’ve done any research already, you probably noticed that most people don’t say, “Pick a team first.” That’s everyone online and IRL. It doesn’t matter if it’s your parents, Google, YouTube, or pretty much anything else you read or listen to.

The Myth Of Starting With Pre-Qualification

They all tell you the very first thing that you need to do when you’re getting into this whole, “Can I buy a home? Should I buy a home?” process is to go out and get pre-qualified to find out how much home you can buy, and then get your pre-approval for a loan. That is a move that you can do, but that is 1000000% not your best move. If I could change anything about what I see with the information that’s out there for you regarding the homebuying process, it would be changing this myth.

Getting pre-qualified is a step in buying a home. Eventually, you all need to get pre-qualified for a home loan, which gives you an overview of what you can afford. That leads you to the next step, which is getting pre-approved for the actual loan. That’s an involved step. It takes getting all your finances together. Everybody has to do it. This is an important and mandatory step.

The narrative that dominates everywhere out in the ether, which is that your first step is getting pre-qualified to find out how much you can buy, and that is the only and must-do first step, is the lenders in big mortgage attempting to capture you as a client. That’s what the people in the industry say about you. They’re trying to “capture you”. It sucks.

Where are the professionals out there? Not trying to capture people, but trying to educate you, help you strategize, or help you create a plan. Maybe instead of capturing you with the most rudimentary part of the planning so that they can get paid quickly with the least amount of effort, they work on the other stuff. Maybe they will tell you the truth.

They explain you will need to know your numbers to make a plan, but there are, depending on each individual, hundreds if not thousands of ways to get different numbers that might work for you, each individual first-time home buyer. It’s not an equation with one answer based on what you plug in, but the lenders in big mortgage know that, and they know that’s what people gravitate to. They know that that’s what people want when they’re starting their education.

The question, “What can I afford?” is not a question with one answer. An experienced team can show you all the hundreds or thousands of different solutions based on your own personal equation. This incorrect narrative exists because that’s what the whole real estate system wants. They want to turn them and burn them fast. Why? It’s because they get paid fast.

That’s why these ten steps that the first-time home buyers helped create with me, based on what they wanted and all my years of experience, don’t start with getting pre-qualified first. That’s sales. That’s not education in the process. That doesn’t empower you. That doesn’t help you overcome the confusion and move forward confidently.

Your best step one, we covered that. It’s decide and believe. Step two, we make sure you find the right guides. This will make sure that you avoid getting captured. I swear to God, that’s the lingo that I hear all the time. Capture buyers. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? It’s like they’re thinking all about you. Unfortunately, too many people get clickbaited into the wrong first step, and then they get horrible information and even worse service.

There are tens of thousands of people who make inquiries to a lender every single year. The lender punches in their numbers, and they tell the buyer that they’re approved for $50,000 or $100,000 less than what they want or what they need. Do you know what happens then? The buyers get discouraged, and they stop. They say, “I can’t do this yet.”

Avoid Order-Taker Lenders

First up, for everyone who does that, bad lender. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. There are dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of different ways for you to get your loan. Giving you that stock one answer is one of those ways. You shouldn’t base your entire decision on that one answer. It’s a big factory system. The automated lenders are not skilled or experienced enough to be aware of, let alone articulate, all of the options to each individual buyer.

Choosing your guides affects every aspect of your homebuying process, from strategy formation to the day you’re ready to go home shopping.

The other thing that infuriates me is too many mortgage so-called professionals. They present the results of an inquiry to you like it was a yes or no answer, like a green light or a red light, when they should be presenting any inquiry as something that looks more like a starting line. To buyers out there, you shouldn’t be seeking a yes or a no. You should be seeking a starting line to get planning with solutions, creative advice, guidance, and a roadmap of what to do as you move forward. You’re going to get several different green lights as you go down the line. You choose the best one for your individual situation.

When you’re starting with the real step one, the decided mindset that we talked about, you’re going to know in three seconds when you talk to people out there if you’re talking to an order-taker lender or a door-opener realtor. That’s my term, not theirs. Order takers and door openers are salespeople looking to pay their bills as quickly as they can with your purchase.
What you’re looking for to make this planning a win for you is experienced professional guidance from what I call unicorn advocates. Those are empathetic pros with expertise as well, people who will spend the time listening to you and think that you’re valuable. They will then use their expertise that they have with you, your goals, your dreams, and your strategies to help you mold that custom bespoke plan for you. They’re your guides, not just your service providers.

What you’re looking for are passionate experts, ready to hear everything about you and your personal goals. They will help you establish where you are exactly in the process, and then they’re going to help you nurture your individual plan. They will lay out your path to your most efficient and custom-tailored personal journey that takes into account everything in your life, not just your bank account.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to start with who not to hire. It’s time to spill the beans on the horrible service that first-time home buyers are being served up by the order takers and the door openers. It’s bean spilling time on the order takers and the door openers. With the lenders, you want to avoid those that punch in a few of your numbers without even asking all the details about you way more than your numbers.

Homebuying entails a whole bunch of aspects of your life for several years. How can they get you the best personal plan if they don’t know the person, the people, your pets, or the fact that your jacked-up free little sister is going to couch surf at your new place once you own a home? If they casually take your simple numeric information without asking you tons about your personal and long-term financial goals that are going to work with this purchase, that’s an order taker.

If they offer you little education on the process and don’t break it down for you in layman’s terms, that’s an order taker. If they’re an online lender, that’s an order taker. Online lenders are total order takers. Friends don’t let friends use online lenders. Rocket Mortgage, Zillow Home Loans, LendingTree, and Better Mortgage are online lenders that know what they’re doing. They exist to tease you with a tasty-looking rate and then capture you, and then sell you a loan product as quickly as possible most of the time with the gigantic bait-and-switch with no regard to go deep with you, work a plan, and find out all the other options that will suit your plan better.

Here’s the kicker when you’re deciding on a local lender versus an online lender. A local professional lender that builds their business through client recommendations, word of mouth, and referrals from all of the stoked clients they’ve worked with is going to give you ten times the service of an online lender who gets their clients through ads that that dude doesn’t even pay for. The company does. The cool thing is, usually, it’s almost the exact same cost to you.

Why would you pay an order taker who’s going to give you the minimum amount of service and try to turn and burn you as fast as they can when for the same price, you can go out and get an advocate, a strategist, or a professional who’s going to help you plan, not execute, and it’s going to be no extra cost to you? That’s why I emphasize that this episode is so important, which is about choosing your guides. That’s a little lender side note.

If you’re new to the game, the next thing I’m going to tell you, you’re going to think that I am bonkers for saying this. I’m not selling loans. A low interest rate is not the only variable when it comes to how much your payment will be. Buyers, especially first-time home buyers, put way too much emphasis on shopping for the interest rate. It sounds crazy, but it’s true.

There are a bazillion different variables that might change things. A good lender is going to help you through all those different variables that will affect your total overall housing affordability. In fact, I have seen this more times than I care to think about. Choosing a lender based on the rate, I’ve seen it cost people tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars because they weren’t getting the service. They were chasing a number.

Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. I’m not saying, “You get what you pay for. Pay more. Hire the best. Pay a percentage point higher.” As the dude who’s dedicated the middle-aged years of my life to this, I have seen thousands of people get burned chasing a rate with a lender. There are dozens of ways that planning and working strategically with a qualified lender will save you way more than a quarter of a point difference. Bet on that.

One of the reasons why is that online lenders do the minimum. They might lure you in with a rate that’s skewed, clickbait, and then rip you off because you can end up getting horrendous service. You’re then stuck in the deal, and you’ve got to close on it. It’s truly the trickiest of clickbait. When you shop at the rate it, it is truly like clicking on the first result of a Google search. The ones at the top are the ones that are the ads. I said it before. Friends don’t let friends use online lenders.

Don’t Settle For A Door-Opener

I’m going to get deeper into the lender details later on in the episode, but for now, let’s jump ahead to the door-opener realtors that you want to avoid. We’re still in the what not to do section. The door-opener realtors don’t know jack cheese about selling homes. They have no clue how to help you with your overall vision. They don’t know how to help you strategize so that the homes that you’re looking at fit not just into something you can afford, but into your dreams and your family goals, both personal and financial. I keep saying that. Why? It’s because it’s important.

You might be thinking, “This sounds terrible. There can’t be that many realtors out there who don’t put my needs first. Wouldn’t that be a great way to build a business? Why would they do it another way?” Getting a real estate license is way too easy. Unfortunately, that means there are more unskilled realtors than good ones. How do I know that? For decades, the National Association of Realtors has been reporting that 87% of realtors quit in less than the first five years on the job. Get this stack. In 2024, 47% of realtors did not sell 1 home.

You need to work with a guide who works with you on your financial and homebuying strategy from start to finish, not someone you pick up at the end when you find a house on Zillow to open the door for you. Don’t be fooled by a super-responsive door opener when you click on something on Zillow or on another online site. The truth is, maybe you’re their only client.

The fact that at the drop of a hat they’re willing to show you a home when you text them or email them even though you guys have never met doesn’t mean that they can help you purchase that home. They’re a door opener. If you can’t tell the difference between a unicorn and a door opener, unfortunately, you’re going to risk getting screwed worse than you can ever imagine.

This is where door openers cause, and I have seen this, all those apocalyptic epic horror stories, whether it’s YouTube comments, Reddit, or whatever. Most of the time, it’s because they’re working with a door opener. Instead of order takers and door openers, you’re looking for the best guides ever. You’re looking for Yoda, experienced in all kinds of housing markets and with all kinds of different first-time home buyers, and someone with the patience to make you go to Dagobah and learn the ways of the force before you jump on that X-Wing and make a huge mistake.

You don’t have to settle for a door opener. You can get a Sherpa or Dumbledore with wisdom mixed with the care and concern of Hagrid, minus all the scary pet spiders. Most of the time, this is something that you can get for around the same price, for the worst or the best. Why wouldn’t you pick the best representative for you? Do not skimp on the experience and character of your guide. These real estate guides are going to be your trusted source. They’re going to be part of your killer support team.

Getting a real estate license is too easy, which unfortunately means there are more unskilled realtors than skilled ones.

The right ones know exactly where you are on the Chutes and Ladders game board. They know how to use it like the magic map in Harry Potter. I seriously mixed the metaphors there. I went from Star Wars to Harry Potter, and then I threw in an old episode, the Chutes and Ladders thing. That’s from episode 164, a great one to read if you’re getting started.

Find A Real Estate Unicorn (Not A Troll With A Key)

How do you discover these magical guides? How do you discover these magical guides? Do you have to answer riddles from a troll under a bridge? What do you look for, the power of the force or the dark arts? No. I’m done. Let’s get real. Your guides should have power that is magical, but the incredible supernatural force that they have is called experience. It’s combined with the actual care, empathy, and concern for you, the first-time home buyer.

This is someone who not only has your best interests at heart. Due to their training and experience in the entire homebuying process, they can reveal to you exactly where you are on that starting board of buying a home. Instead of trying to shove you into the first thing you can buy, they’re going to give you specific steps, tips, tricks, and things that will help you find the ladders of shortcuts on the Chutes and the Ladders board and make sure you avoid the nasty chutes that, unfortunately, are pretty much invisible to most buyers if you don’t know they exist.

If you haven’t checked out 164, you must think I am way nerdier and weirder than I am, which is tough because I’m pretty nerdy and weird. It’s a metaphor. The thing is, we all start at different places on the game board of buying a home. Everybody thinks that we all start at the bottom of the Chutes and Ladders board at the beginning. The real magic of your guides is knowing exactly where you are on the board. Each of us is on the 100,000 different squares on the Chutes and Ladders board.

Unicorns nurture you on the journey and help you make the best move for you whenever and however. That’s going to get you the best deal, unless you choose to ignore them completely, jump in your X-Wing, kiss your sister, and then have your dad cut off your hand. I’m doing all this with love, and I say this with even more love. Most home buyers focus way too much on trying to figure out for themselves all the tricks and hacks to get a great interest rate. They do a ton of research on how to get a killer deal on a home, whether it’s in their home search or their negotiations.

Not too many gurus are out there saying what I’m saying and telling you, “You don’t have to do this on your own. I’m going to sit here, wait for you, and let you do all the work, and then jump in and help you buy the home.” Choosing the right support team is the biggest part of the homebuying process. You should put ten times the emphasis on this step than you put on all the rest.

To do this best for you, you will need a superior advocate to guide you through all the options, help you work a plan, and create a strategy to get there, and then you can utilize all their tips, tricks, and hacks. I told you in the introduction episode of these ten steps that it’s freaking ugly out there for first-time home buyers. That sucks, and it’s not your fault.

Remember, I was so fed up that I quit my brokerage at 49 years old. I’d rather give back here in my middle age years to give some of you guys a fighting chance in what is a fixed game. In my career, I saw so many buyers get hosed. Getting royally shafted with realtors and lenders jacking up the deals and leaving them high and dry. Either they were part-time professionals doing the job of a realtor or a lender as a hobby, or they were part of the giant turn-and-burn machine that is real estate, which offers the lowest level of customer service to the people who need the highest.

It sucks. I hate being lumped in with used car salespeople and lawyers sometimes, but it’s a reputation that’s earned. I completely understand why people are skeptical. Not some, but most people in this misleading and greedy industry straight-up are not qualified to help you, a first-time home buyer, in all the complexities of buying a house.

We’ve got 3 million real estate agents and less than 1 million homes for sale. How does that math work? We’ve got three million experienced working professionals, if it’s only that many to work with. Most of the industry wants you to figure this all out on your own. They want you to think that everyone’s at the bottom of the Chutes and Ladders board, or they want you to figure out where you are on the game board yourself and do all the work yourself, and then when you’re up near the top, they’re going to close the deal for you.

If you’re sitting there going, “Why? That sounds so lame,” you’re right. It’s because realtors and lenders don’t get paid until you hit the last, end top square, and you buy a house. They would rather that you fall down the chutes on your own and eventually figure out a way to get to the top so that they can make an easy paycheck in the least amount of time possible. They don’t get paid until the end.

The other side of it is that the whole industry tosses you to new agents all the time. The newbies use you as their on-the-job training. You think you’ve got a license agent who knows what they’re doing, but you have a so-called professional. The big leagues pass you off to them. They completely ignore first-time home buyers. They treat you like complete garbage because you are the stepping stone for most of the people in the industry to learn how to be good at their job.

I did an entire manifesto rant about this in one of my very early episodes. It’s episode number five, The Biggest Dirty Little Secret in Real Estate. If you want to get to know me better and learn why I started this show, go back to number five and knock yourself out. It’s my origin story. I dropped a lot of truth bombs in there. As the show grew, people all over the United States and Canada heard my old man freak out.

They then started asking, “How do we find the best of the best? I’m starting to see what you’re saying. There are too many realtors and lenders.” Way back in the early years, I said, “When you find one, it’s like a unicorn,” and it stuck. If you fast forward to now, I have this incredible stable of unicorns. If you want, I will pass on that information to anyone who will ask for it.

Episode 229 breaks down the unicorn difference. You’d be shocked if you knew how little training realtors and lenders receive. The requirements in California to get a cosmetology or a barbering license are 1,000 to 2,000 hours with years of apprenticeship. To be a realtor, it’s 135 hours, and that’s open-book testing for those 135 hours. You should be able to do it in twenty. In fact, you can skip that completely and walk in, take the test, and become a licensed realtor. No apprenticeship. That’s it. What happens next? The brokers say, “Welcome to real estate. Go out and sell homes.”

The Real Estate Industry’s Dirty Secret: You’re The Training Ground

This is what the industry has decided that all you lowly first-time home buyers deserve. I’m serious about this. I know this sounds harsh, but this is the truth. That’s why I want to protect you. The real estate industry uses that sales factory approach. They assume that rookie agents are going to sell maybe 2 or 3 homes to their relatives, and then they’re going to quit.

The average realtor in America made $46,000 in 2024. That’s all 10 99 income. After taxes, it’s about $37,000. Since they’re a new agent, they have to pay their broker 50%. An average realtor makes a grand net total of $18,500 a year. Maybe that’s why only 13% stay on the job for more than 5 years. What sucks is the industry knows this and they do nothing to change it. In fact, they purposely lean into this system because it makes them more money. They’re thrusting untrained people on you, the first-time home buyers, to be your so-called guides in the biggest financial transaction of your life, all because it makes them more money.

The new agents pay the higher fees to the brokers, so the brokers would rather churn and burn a turnstile of agents like they want to turn and burn a turnstile of buyers. The more profitable newbie agents, they bring them in and out of the brokers all the time, too. They pass the putrid service that they give to you with zero regard for what you are getting as a first-time home buyer.

The training is pathetic for these new agents. That means you’ve got an untrained, inexperienced person who’s never gone through the complexities of the first-time homebuying purchase. They haven’t gone through credit scores, loan requirements, down payment options, creative types of loans, inspections, repair, negotiations, appraisals, and most importantly, “When should I back out of this deal?”

This is the stuff that I understand you, as a first-time home buyer, probably assume every licensed realtor knows about. I’m pulling back the curtain, and I’m telling you they don’t. I wish it were different, but that’s the way it goes. You’re captured and handed off to these untrained, inexperienced representatives so the companies can make more money.

Choosing your team is far more crucial than the rest of the research you need to do. Most of the real estate industry is unqualified to take care of you.

Your #1 Job: Pick The Right Guide, Not The Flashiest House

To protect yourself, you have to research and dig deep to find competent, ethical, and compassionate representation, way more than you need to research all the rest of the stuff. Unfortunately, that includes passing on using your sister or your cousin who got their license. Family is family, but the sad truth about the way things work is that their training on how to help you plan and then complete and buy a home is worse than the kids selling retail in the mall. For you younger people out there, a mall is like Amazon IRL.

This is a big deal for you. You should understand the way the system works and how many so-called professional realtors and lenders are woefully underqualified to be your guides. The sad reality is that choosing your team ends up being way more crucial than the rest of the research you have to do. Most of the real estate industry is unqualified to take care of you.

I’m going to do a little side note here for the record. I’ve said this numerous times since 2019. As the revolution for the How to Buy a Homies grows and the public discovers the truth of the real estate industry, I am pretty darn sure the National Association of Realtors is going to hunt me down. For those of you tuning in, if I die in my sleep, trust no one and avenge me. Who knows?

Maybe they’ll change things, but for now, this insider hack is here. I’m going to keep fighting the good fight while I can.

I can give you general guidelines, but each of you is different. The way to beat the system that they set up is to get your personal and creative solutions, which can end up being pretty complex depending on your personal situation. That’s why you need a guide, not even the almighty Google is going to be able to help you understand and know all the options of your flowchart.

With a true guide in your realtor and your lender, you should be given action steps, things to help you create a buying plan. That opens up your options. Options is my favorite word for first-time home buyers. Only experienced guides can lay out all your options and show you everything that fits with your personal goals. Knowing your options is the golden ticket.

When you find someone who understands all the options, they’re going to make sure you buy the home the right way at the right time for you, not the right time for the realtor or the lender to make a sale so they can pay their own bills. These beautiful buying options shape all of your buying potential. More importantly, your guides, when they’re revealing the options to you, will make sure that you avoid getting screwed or make a major mistake. You can be warned about all those chutes so you don’t slide down the board. When you need to do that, you lose your entire deposit with a deal.

Start With A Unicorn Realtor—Not A Lender

Let’s get into how to get your guides. We know what not to look for. How do you get them? The step to getting your guides starts like this. Get a unicorn realtor first. They’re going to help you find your unicorn mortgage broker, and then your unicorn support team is formed. That’s the step in that order. Realtor first, and then talk to a lender.

I realize this is the exact opposite of what 99% of what you find online tells you. I’m very well aware of that. If you’ve researched buying a home online already, I know what you’re thinking. You’re like, “Everybody says to go to a lender and get the prequalification first.” If you’ve talked to other people in real life, whether it be your friends or your parents, or if you looked on YouTube or Reddit, everyone is going to tell you, “Go talk to a mortgage person to find out how much home you can buy.” There’s a reason for that. It’s because they want to suck you in, take you down the rabbit hole of shopping interest rates, and then get you to choose a lender.

I even mentioned it in the decide step. This is big mortgage looking to capture you and sell you. I’m keenly aware that this is what’s being told to you. With humility, I’m telling you that as a revolutionary and a passionate believer in what I’m doing, the way it’s working is that you’ve been disrespected and not properly informed on the most advantageous ways to buy your first home.
For most of you out there, there is a much better way to do this than what they tell you online, on YouTube, or from your friends or family. I know my advice goes against what everybody says, but the best way to do it is realtor first, get recommendations from some of the lenders they know, and then get a team. If you want to check up on me, feel free to peruse all of my content to verify. My intentions are pure.

I’ve put out thousands of hours for free educational content for first-time home buyers. Compare that to the others. How much do they explain about the entire homebuying process? I don’t ask anyone to pay for anything. I spit the knowledge in the microphone and drop truth bombs because I’m sick of it. You deserve real information, not a sales pitch.

In this system, this is the little-known path to homeownership. It works. There are over 70 interview episodes in the back catalog of the show with real people like you who found their dream homes working this way, by finding their guides, getting a realtor first, and then talking to their lenders. Their stories are incredible., I’ve got examples all over the map, literally. I’ve got examples all over North America.

The interviews and stories go from $200,000 buyers to $2 million buyers. Some of them are making $65,000 or $75,000 a year with no savings, and couples that are making $300,000 a year who are looking to maximize their options. Some of the people were the very first people in their family to ever buy a home. Before they got their unicorn real estate support team, they had no idea that there was a path for them to be the first. You can read the stories of the people who got the right experienced guides that helped them overcome the myths. They bought homes with student loan debt or other debt, no savings, zero down payments, self-employed income, or low credit scores, and tons of other red light items.

The reason why I’ve done so many interviews is that I want you to understand how many different options there are when it comes to buying a home. The reason why I’ve done so many interviews here on the show is to help enlighten you and show you all the different options. There are tons of different stories. They are endless.

There are a bunch of single women who bought a home. There are some younger Gen Z people as young as nineteen years old. There are lots of Millennials in there, and even a Gen Xer or two. Some of those Gen Xers learned about using their 401(k) with no penalty and no taxable event. Some of them decided that there was another way to diversify their retirement portfolio by not pulling from their 401(k), but reducing the current contributions they were making so that the new mortgage payments would feel easier. There are young couples in there who were struggling to save a 20% down payment because they were paying their high and rising rents, and they found out they had options.

There was one homie, with the help of their unicorn real estate support team, who discovered a whole new town was way more affordable. She’s in her dream home. Another one was stationed in Germany, but wanted to get started on the process. When they got hooked up with the right support team, they did a ton of the work for buying their home all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

One of my favorites was Brian and Diana as well. They were complaining about their rent to their friends at a holiday party, so they reached out to me. We got them with the right team, and they were in a home in a matter of months by spring. There’s another great one with my two dudes from Vegas. I love these guys. One of them was the doctor in the relationship. He realized that he was trying to do this way too much on his own, over-analyzing and researching on Google.

It took him a little bit of time, but one day, he woke up and realized that he was doing exactly what his patients do; the patients will spend all their time on WebMD and tell him how to do his job. Instead of trying to learn how to doctor himself, he focused on finding the right guides. When they talked to a unicorn team, you guessed it. They bought a home in weeks, not months. They had $300,000 in student loans.

Why is starting with your unicorn realtor and not a lender or pre-approval the way that all these people got their happy ending? It’s simple. Interviewing and hiring a unicorn realtor is the step that you should be focusing on ten times more than researching, interest rates, or shopping for homes online. When you interview and hire them, that unicorn realtor is going to have several relationships with a bunch of trusted local lenders.

Your goal with guides is to get an entire team of professionals working together, all supporting your best interests. For the realtors who vet local lenders, the other thing they’re going to have that the online people don’t is intimate knowledge of all the local programs. That can make a huge difference in you buying a home because each state, each county, and sometimes even each city offers different credits or even full down payment assistance to buyers.

A team that works together is invested in your success because it contributes to the growth of their business, which means they’ll have your back. That’s the key to getting your keys.

Plus, there is that invaluable and priceless bonus when you have a full team working for you that has already worked together and together grown their business. When their clients are wildly thrilled with their process, you get an experienced all-star squad that works as a unit to help you achieve your goals instead of individual people out there trying to show you different things, 1 on the real estate side and 1 on the lending side. When you’ve got a team working together like that, that’s where they can go deep with you for 12 to 18 months before you’re even ready to start looking at homes. They can give you the plans on your credit score, your debt, and your savings.

Don’t Start With The Rate: Build Your Home-Buying Dream Team First

I know that everybody out there, all the advice you’re getting is telling you to go get a mortgage person, get a good rate, and see where you’re at. I can’t emphasize this enough. This is backwards. The bait-and-switch system that has been formed using rates always comes with a lack of service. Those people who are advertising to you in that way and telling you, “This is the way to do it,” are selling something. They’re not tied to the success of the team. They’re only looking to get a sale. A team that’s working together is tied to your success for the growth of their business, which means they’re going to have your back. That is the key to getting your keys.

Once you get your unicorn realtor, and then you want to figure out how to do things with the unicorn lender, there’s more information for you. I’ve been doing this since 2019. I have tons of stuff on lenders all the way back to episode eleven. That goes into the details of the perils of online lenders. Even back then, friends didn’t let friends use online lenders.

Episode sixteen talks about a mortgage broker versus a bank. Episode 32 talks about VA loans. Getting the best rate is still something you can do with your unicorn team. I talk about it in episode 66 and in episode 261. There’s another cool episode, episode 153, that talks about getting a loan right out of college. This is the guy who’s still in college who got approved for a loan without two years of employment. 192 explains why Google sometimes sucks. In episode 242, I took a bunch of audience lender questions, and I gave the answers right on the episode.

Some of you out there might be thinking, “I want to start with a realtor, but I don’t even know which of these cities, counties, or states I want to live in.” We can still start with that, get you some financial stuff started. I found a couple of unicorn lenders that work in most of the country. I’m not affiliated with them. I don’t get any kickbacks. That is nothing I do here.

These are people whom I found who work relationally. They work the same way. They’re vetted professionals I can offer you as a recommendation. You can interview them and see what they have to offer. Most importantly, you can get your process started and try to get things clearer and more in focus. These nationwide unicorn lenders have been working directly with the unicorn realtors to get results. Once again, we have another team working for you.

Know this. I’m an open book. I’m giving all this away for free because it’s high time you got the truth on how to do this right for you. I gladly say you can go out there and take all the lessons you find here on the show or on YouTube, and you can go get your own unicorn team. I don’t care how you do it as long as you get it done.

In fact, I hear all the time from a bunch of readers for the very first time when they send me a photo of them standing in front of their new home, thanking me for all the help. They understood the game and how to play it. That’s rad. Those pictures still hang on my wall. This revolution is about education and protection for all first-time home buyers, no matter how you achieve it. Your guides are massively important. It’s not your research or your knowledge of every little step of the process. Your guides are key.

Don’t grab two separate individuals who don’t present a united front for you. You don’t have to do all this on your own. You won’t get the best results if that’s how you do it. If you try to do all the research yourself, and then, when you finally think you’re ready, you go out and hire an order-taker lender and a door-opener realtor, you’re leaving so much planning expertise on the table. You could have that. It won’t cost you anything not to get a guide while you’re working your strategy, even if you’re a year or two out. They’re going to work with you. No one gets paid until the closing.

The way it works is that most of the time, it’s going to be the same fee as the person who turns and burns you in a couple of weeks. Don’t leave it on the table. You can get so much more service when you start way before you think you’re ready with the unicorn realtor first who can help you build an experienced power squad. You’re going to have your own true advocates fighting for you. The How to Buy a Home revolution is a space for first-time home buyers to get educated and get empowered, and then it’s up to you what you want to do next.

Now that you know how it works, you can learn and shop for yourself, or we can provide you with a unicorn team to make sure that you get the service you deserve. You can ask me for a unicorn realtor, and then I’ll send you to a unicorn lender to help you create your personal plan. If you don’t know exactly where you’re going to land, then you could start with the financial side. We can recommend one of the unicorn lenders that will give you a plan, not just take your order. Your journey is up to you. My only goal is that you start earlier than you think you do and that you do it right.

This is going to sound different than everything else that you hear online. Everything out there is the opposite of what I say. I say this with love. They’re wrong. Can you buy a home that way? You can, but should you? It’s simply not the best way for you to buy a home. I implore you. Don’t waste your valuable planning and strategy time.

All that time when you’re creating what you need to do to buy a home, don’t waste it. Don’t over-research, and don’t look at interest rates. Most importantly, don’t do what most of the internet tells you. They’re trying to sell you something. It’s not the most efficient way for you to do this. It’s not going to give you the happy ending that you’re looking for.

Find out where you are on the Chutes and Ladders board, and then get the team to make sure that you avoid all those chutes. Every year, there are between 1 million to 2 million first-time home buyers in the United States. Even the most well-educated of them need a quality team to close the transaction. You’ve got to have them.

Why not get ten times the service you get with unicorn guides, whether you find them yourself or you ask for help here? With the pricing of the lenders, most of the time, the fees are pretty much the same for a low-order taker as they are with the long-term planning and guidance that a unicorn lender is going to give you. Not to mention the fact that they’re going to be working directly with the unicorn realtor.

In step one, I explained how it’s the same exponential value for the cost of a unicorn realtor as well. Why would you settle for someone at the end of the process to turn and burn it with you when you could get a year’s worth of guidance for the same price? Each year, millions of people like you enter into battle. Some have guides that are veteran warriors, but way too many people end up hiring inexperienced or uncaring representation that usually ends up finding more landmines on the battlefield than victories.

Look how long this episode is. I wish I could produce a five-minute how-to YouTube video on how to buy a home on your own. I get it. I use those all the time. Every time I can’t figure something out on my computer, I watch a video, and there’s some thirteen-year-old girl somewhere who shows me how to resize my screen or use my Adobe correctly. I wish that I could create a simple and clear video like that, but there are too many options, and options are good.

My best advice is to learn. Research on your own. Get to know how everything works in the real estate process. The sooner that you get a quality team willing to work with you way ahead of the process, I guarantee you the better end result you’re going to get. Finding and working all your options is the best path to success. The right people have your best interests at heart. Your best interest is a phrase that unicorn-type realtors and lenders don’t take lightly.

With that in mind, take note of this. Never think that you’re wasting someone’s time. Never think it’s too early to call. If they don’t want to work with you for free for months, then maybe you are wasting their time. That also means they don’t have your best interests at heart. I understand that doing all the research yourself has worked for you in the past. I do the same thing.

The fact that I’m old doesn’t mean that I don’t Google the heck out of everything like Millennials and Gen Z. You will realize what a research nerd I am when you read my market updates with all the math and the data I drop in those episodes. I nerd out there so hard that even my engineer friends tell me, “Relax.” When you’re buying a home, it’s wise to humble yourself. Not sometimes, but all the time. It’s wise to humble yourself and realize that this is a complex and, most importantly, wildly individual process.

The integrity of the team you choose will not only make you feel better emotionally throughout the journey, but it will also spare you from scrambling—or worse, from the horror stories.

They haven’t made enough pages on the internet to properly lay out everyone’s individual custom, best buying technique. That’s how many different options and techniques there are, which means this is going to take expertise beyond your world-renowned researching online skills. Overanalyzing for buying a home is not a badge of honor in this journey.

It can be a costly mistake. The best guys know this. When you reach out to them, they’re not thinking that you’re wasting their time, even if you feel completely clueless. A true professional understands that this is a journey. It’s not a single one-time purchase. We get it. I don’t think I can emphasize this enough. We would so much rather chat with you years out than you calling us at the last minute for two reasons.

Number one, it gets done so much better. You have so many more options, and you end up doing the best thing for you and your life for the rest of your life. Secondly, the mad scramble that happens when someone calls me and they need to buy a house in 30 days, and we could have done a bunch of stuff to make it way easier for the last 12 months, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to help them finish, close, and buy a home, but it means that work is difficult.

Also, unfortunately, it usually means they’re not getting the best purchase they could make. The integrity of the team that you choose is not only going to make you emotionally feel better throughout the journey, but it’s going to spare you the scrambling, or worse, spare you the horror stories. Ultimately, most of the time, it’s going to save you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Why Timing The Market Isn’t As Important As Timing Your Planning

As we head into 2025, I also want to offer this piece of guidance. For some of you out there, you’re going to feel like these experienced unicorns are maybe starting to move too fast. You’re like, “Sidoni said we’re going to move at our own pace. What’s going on here?” There’s a simple explanation for that. Every single time I hand someone the keys to their home, they say this, “Sidoni, if I knew what it took to pull this off, I would’ve done this 1 year or 2 years ago and stopped wasting all that rent.”

Since 2019, I’ve been helping tens of thousands of people through the show. I ran the stats because I was so curious if everyone else felt like all my buyers who told me, “I should have done this sooner.” Get this. Since 2019, 72% of the people who reached out to How to Buy a Home and said they were 12 to 18 months from buying a home ended up under contract in 3.2 months, getting the keys in 4.2 months.

They thought 12 to 18 months, and they were under contract in 3.2 months. What does that tell you if 72% of the people did that? Most people, especially people who are reading this, are more ready than they think they are. Perhaps that’s you. In 2025, that means your best move is to get going as soon as you can. I see it all the time. A lot of you are probably way more ready than you know, but you haven’t talked to the right professional yet.

If that’s you, because of the window of opportunity that’s here at the beginning of 2025, don’t feel pressured when the unicorns tell you that now is a good time to buy. They didn’t say it first. I did. In 2024, I told you the best time to buy would be now. As I record this, it’s going to be the best time to buy, September, October, November, and December of 2024, for the next few years. That means that you’re timing the market as soon as you can do it here in 2025 is going to make you oodles more money than trying to time the market. Timing the market makes you more money than trying to time the market.

Why did I say all that stuff? I could go deep into it, but it’s one thing and one thing only. I’ve been saying it since 2019. The big overall factor that affects where the housing market is going is an extreme lack of inventory. Forget what anyone else tells you about inflation, the new government, interest rates, or whatever. All that is negative noise.

I’ve been on the record with this since 2019. It is low inventory. Low inventory means supply and demand are not working in your favor as a buyer. That’s why we tell everyone to get things together as quickly as they can, so they can get in and start building equity immediately because the market is going to keep going up.

When the market moves to a time later, when perhaps things might be dropping a bit, and maybe you might want to wait a little bit, that’s fine. I will tell you that. I’ve been telling clients, “Go jump on it,” or, “Hold on. The market’s moving.” I’ve been telling people that since 2006. I’m in the long game for my clients, and so are all the unicorns.

I know that there are some data nerds out there who are going to fight me on this. The reason why, since 2019, I’ve been saying it’s a good time to go is because of this low inventory. I am on record, and I bet most of the time, if not all the time since 2019, I’ve been correct. It’s a simple thing if you’re involved in this. The people out there who are telling you, “Wait for the crash,” or, “The sky is falling,” check their track record. See how many times they’ve been right in talking about where the real estate market is going.

Inventory is the only factor. We are anywhere from 4 million to 7 million homes short here in 2025. Every hater out there, or every, “Wait for the crash,” person, for the last couple of years, they’ve been saying that. If they’ve been sitting on the sidelines, they’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. Even when interest rates jumped from 3% to 8%, it didn’t crash anything. It slowed things down for a little bit. Most people, especially the haters, thought for sure that it would be a crash. It’s simple supply and demand. There isn’t enough inventory. Prices have kept going up.

In fact, we even survived a global pandemic weeks after the shutdown in March of 2020. The vast majority of homes for sale had multiple buyers, more buyers than the sellers knew what to do with, because we were still in that place of low inventory. Bidding wars have been the norm for the last few years, and in 2025, it’s going to continue to be. It’s not going to go away anytime soon.

Don’t freak out if you reach out to a professional unicorn team and they tell you, “You’re in better shape than you think you are. Let’s start looking into this.” Planning is your best move. Starting a plan yesterday is the best way to have your best options for tomorrow. If you need more time, fine. For 200 tomorrows. Whatever happens, you can adjust your plan instead of having to react to a market shift when you’ve done no planning to see where things are going.

If you’re still here, God bless you. That must have been a heck of a workout. You probably burned a lot of calories. If you’re sitting there and you’ve read all this, and you’re thinking that maybe you’re one of the people who might be more ready than you think you are, go to HowToBuyAHome.com, and you can ask me for a unicorn. It’s free. It’s a recommendation. You can also hit the Ask David button and ask me anything you want. I’ll answer it.

If you want more details on the unicorns and how that whole thing works, check out episode 229. Finding a guide or a unicorn, if you can’t tell after an hour of me here on the episode, is the biggest step in your homebuying journey. If you still want to keep going and you feel like you’re getting your feet wet, and you want to figure everything out, fine. There are going to be 8 more episodes in this 10-part series. That’s coming up. If you want to dig deep into it, go back and check out the past episodes. You can follow me on Instagram @HowToBuyAHomePodcast. There’s tons of information if you scroll through all my old posts. You can also get more information @HowToBuyAHome on YouTube. There it is. Get your guides. Find yourself a unicorn that knows the terrain, helps you avoid the pitfalls, and shows you paths that you didn’t even know existed. With the right supportive team, you can do what’s best for you, and it won’t be a sale for somebody else. You can do this.

Important Links

This podcast was started for YOU, to demystify things for first time home buyers, and help crush the confusion. After helping first timers for over 13 years, I knew there wasn’t t a lot of clear, tangible, useable information out there on the internet, so I started this podcast. Help me spread the word to other people just like you, dying for answers. Tell your friends, family, and perhaps that random neighbor you REALLY want to move out about How to Buy a Home! A really easy way is to hit the share button and text it to your friends. Go for it, help someone out. And if you’re not already a regular listener, subscribe and get constant updates on the market. If you are a regular and learned something, help me help others – give the show a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, or write a review on Spotify. Let’s change the way the real estate industry treats you first time buyers, one buyer at a time, starting with you – and make sure your favorite people don’t get screwed by going into this HUGE step blind and confused. Viva la Unicorn Revolution!

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