Rick Albert, Dre#01884303

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Rick Albert, Dre#01884303 This is all things real estate. Ready for the ride? I know I am.

As a Broker Associate (DRE #01884303) and House Hacker Investor in Los Angeles, we are going to talk about what's important in real estate.

LA County Housing Market UpdateThe shift is clear: The market is trending toward buyers.While the median sales price set...
10/06/2026

LA County Housing Market Update

The shift is clear: The market is trending toward buyers.

While the median sales price settled at $920,000 (down just $5,000, essentially a rounding error), the rest of the metrics point to a competitive edge for buyers:

• 98.3% Sales-to-List Price Ratio
• 4.7 Months of Inventory (supply is building)
• 24 Days Average Market Length of Service (DAMLS)

The Catch? Interest Rates. Even with slightly more room to negotiate prices, higher interest rates mean your monthly payment might look identical to buying at a higher price six months ago.

So, what’s the game plan?

For Buyers: Get creative. We negotiate seller credits to buy down your rate, dropping your monthly payment without sacrificing purchase power.

For Sellers: Get realistic on pricing. Pricing strategically still works, our latest listing generated multiple offers and sold over asking price despite market conditions.

Whether you’re looking to buy, sell, or navigate today’s rates, strategy is everything right now. Send me a message to talk about your best move!

CaliforniaRealEstate HomeBuyingTips HomeSellingTips MortgageRates RateBuydown RealEstateStrategy LAHomeSearch

10/05/2026

Nobody wants to think about estate planning. I get it. We are all busy and it costs time and money for something that almost never benefits you directly during your lifetime. You are essentially doing the work for someone else. That is a hard sell.

But here is the other side of that equation.

When people put it off, someone else ends up dealing with the mess. And that mess can be genuinely miserable. Probate court. Family disputes. Frozen assets. Fees calculated on gross value not equity. Months or years of legal proceedings that could have been avoided entirely.

Jenna Glassock ended up in this profession partly because of what her own family went through. Eight years in probate court. She watched firsthand what happens when the paperwork is not in order.

I have the same conversation with people my own age all the time. Friends, family members who keep putting it off. And I understand why. But the cost of doing nothing is not zero. You are just passing that cost on to the people you love at the worst possible moment in their lives.

Is estate planning at the top of your to do list or is it something you keep meaning to get to? Drop it in the comments honestly because I think most people know they need it and just have not pulled the trigger yet.

Jenna Glassock from Laurel Trust Law and I get into this and a lot more on Key to the City of Angels EP 83. Link in bio!

The Key to the City of Angels Podcast Laurel Trust Law LLP

Here is a test for your house. Take every piece of furniture out of it. Is it still a good room?Andrea Michaelson of And...
10/03/2026

Here is a test for your house. Take every piece of furniture out of it. Is it still a good room?

Andrea Michaelson of Andrea Michaelson Design says that is the bar, and most homes do not clear it. She trained at the USC School of Architecture and took her degree in environmental design at ArtCenter, which is why she starts where most people finish.

What we got into:

The background comes first. Doors, windows, flooring, finishes, lighting. Furniture is the last decision, not the first one.

Nothing is too small to be designed. The site, the orientation, how light moves through the place, down to the switch plates.

Her clients hire her specifically for what is not familiar and not popular. That is the brief, not a preference.

She bought a brass chair at Design Miami and placed it in a client’s entry four years later. The good pieces get collected long before anyone knows where they go.

On AI: it saves research steps, but its answers come from what is already popular, which is the exact thing her clients are paying to avoid.

Episode 84 is live now. Link in bio to watch or listen.

Which room in your place would fail the empty test?

The Key to the City of Angels Podcast Andrea Michaelson Design

In a world where AI and algorithms can generate design based on what is most popular, this is the reminder that actually...
10/03/2026

In a world where AI and algorithms can generate design based on what is most popular, this is the reminder that actually matters.

The clients who hire Andrea are not looking for familiarity. They are looking for her filter, her vision, her point of view. And that only exists because she stays true to it.

Andrea Michaelson and I get into this and a lot more on Key to the City of Angels. Link in bio!

Do you think AI can ever replace the kind of design that comes from a truly individual perspective? Drop it in the comments.

The Key to the City of Angels Podcast Andrea Michaelson Design

10/03/2026

Good design is patient.

Andrea Michaelson saw a chair at Design Miami made entirely of one inch brass pieces, completely open in its structure. She filed it away. Four years later a client had a return air register that needed to stay open and that chair was the perfect solution.

Nobody could have planned that. It came from years of paying attention, building a mental library of objects and ideas, and knowing when the moment is right to use them.

That is the part of design that no algorithm can replicate. You cannot prompt your way to that kind of intuition. It comes from experience, curiosity, and staying true to your own eye over time.

Andrea Michaelson and I get into this and a lot more on Key to the City of Angels. Link in bio!

Do you think great design is more about vision or patience? Drop it in the comments.

The Key to the City of Angels Podcast Andrea Michaelson Design

10/03/2026

Most people think interior design starts with furniture. Andrea Michaelson would disagree.

Before a single piece goes into a room, the space itself has to be right. The site orientation. The natural light. The artificial light. The doors and windows. The flooring. Even the switch plates. Every detail of the background has to be intentional enough that the room looks amazing with nothing in it.

That is a completely different way of thinking about design. And it is exactly why clients do not hire her for something familiar and popular. They hire her because she starts at a level most designers never get to.

It also has real implications for anyone buying or selling a home. The properties that photograph well, show well, and sell for more are almost always the ones where someone thought carefully about the bones before worrying about what goes in them.

What do you think matters more in a home, the design of the space itself or the furniture and decor inside it? Drop it in the comments.

Andrea Michaelson and I get into this and a lot more on The Key to the City of Angels Podcast. Link in bio!

Andrea Michaelson Design

10/02/2026

Staying ahead of the market means keeping a pulse on the data and the details. Here is a quick snapshot of what is happening in the LA real estate investing world right now. 👇
Rates are up and another hike before year end is on the table. We could be sitting at 7 percent or above by December. If you are planning any acquisitions or refinances in Q4, you need to be running your numbers at that level now, not hoping rates surprise you on the downside.

On the legal side, habitability is not optional and it is not something you can hand off to a property manager and forget about. California law requires your rental unit to be livable, functional plumbing, working heat, solid structure, no pest infestations, and as of 2026 a working stove and refrigerator. If something goes wrong, the liability sits with you as the owner. Not the management company. You.

And for the general tip, the BRRRR strategy, buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat, is still a viable way to build a portfolio without constantly needing fresh capital. The idea is to recycle the same money over and over. But the refinance step is where most people are getting stuck right now because of where rates are. That means you have to buy more aggressively on the front end. Lower offers, tighter numbers.

And here is something I tell people all the time. If you are submitting a lower offer, explain your math. Tell the listing agent or the seller exactly why the number is what it is. You are not trying to lowball anyone. You are just making the deal work. If you do not explain it, you look like a problem. If you do, you look like an investor who knows what they are doing.

What strategies are you using to make deals work in this rate environment? Drop it in the comments.

Rick Albert | Broker Associate | LAMERICA Real Estate
DRE #01884303

LALandlord

10/01/2026

That list price you’re looking at might not be the real price.

Back in 2018, we put in an offer on a property and found out we were one of 17. Seventeen. The listing agent priced it low on purpose, and it worked exactly the way he wanted it to.

When you price a property under market, you aren’t leaving money on the table. You’re pulling every buyer in town through the door at once, and then you let them bid against each other. I’ll give that agent credit. It was smart. It’s also a little annoying when you’re the buyer.

And it’s happening in a lot of markets right now. Some days it feels like sellers could just list everything for a dollar and let the market decide.

If you’re a rookie investor, here’s the takeaway. Don’t build your numbers on the asking price. Run your own comps, decide what the deal is worth to you, and set your ceiling before you ever see how many offers are on the table. The asking price just starts the conversation.

I got into this on Episode 773 of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Rookie podcast, along with how an overlooked LA condo I bought with 10% down turned into 17 units across three states.

🎧 Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsX59F6X308

BiggerPockets Real Estate Rookie

09/30/2026

If you set up a trust more than ten years ago and have not looked at it since, this one is for you.

A lot of people did their estate planning when their kids were minors. The trust made sense at the time. But now those kids are adults and the whole picture looks different. Who should manage things if something happens? Who is actually the right fit for that responsibility now versus who seemed like the right fit twenty years ago?

Retirement is actually one of the best times to revisit all of this. More time, more clarity, and usually a clearer sense of what you actually want to leave behind and for whom.

But here is the part that surprises most people. The conversation around estate planning has shifted significantly in the last few years. The estate tax threshold used to be a million or a few million dollars and a huge part of the planning conversation was about minimizing that tax exposure. Today the threshold is fifteen million per person or thirty million per married couple. Most people are not in that territory.

So the conversation is no longer primarily about taxes. It is about values. What do you want to leave? To whom? Under what conditions? How do you want to be remembered?

That is actually a much more interesting conversation. And one most people have never had with an attorney.

Jenna Glassock from Laurel Trust Law and I get into this and a lot more on The Key to the City of Angels Podcast EP 83. Link in bio!

When did you last update your estate plan? Drop it in the comments because you might be surprised how much has changed.

Most people think signing the trust is the finish line. It is the paperwork.Episode 83 with Jenna Glassock, Esq., MBA, f...
09/29/2026

Most people think signing the trust is the finish line. It is the paperwork.

Episode 83 with Jenna Glassock, Esq., MBA, founder of Laurel Trust Law, is about the gap between having estate documents and actually being protected. She moved into this work after watching her own mother’s estate spend eight years in probate.

What we got into:

A trust only controls what you retitle into it. No recorded deed, no protection, and the house goes to probate anyway.

California probate fees are calculated on gross market value, not your equity. A million dollar home with eight hundred thousand still owed gets billed like the mortgage does not exist.

$208,850 is the small estate cutoff. Almost nothing in Los Angeles is under it.

Adding an adult child to your deed reads as a change of ownership. Half the property gets reassessed at today’s value and decades of Prop 13 protection go with it.

Prop 19 still preserves an inherited tax base, but only if the home was the parent’s primary residence and the child makes it theirs, capped at one million above the old assessed value.

If you own property in California and your trust has been sitting in a drawer since the day you signed it, this one is worth your time.

Watch or listen: https://youtu.be/nhXcUB7uxO8 (link in bio)

Educational only, not legal or tax advice. Talk to your own attorney about your situation.

The Key to the City of Angels Podcast Laurel Trust Law LLP

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