Hi y’all, welcome!

Inside: Hack your way to lower interest rate 🔻 + Luxury travel on the rise in Austin 🤠 

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WHAT'S INSIDE

• 🚨 TIPS FROM YOUR REALTOR

• 👀 DEAL OF THE WEEK

• 🤠 WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND TOWN

• ⁉️ WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

• 🤤 HOUSE WORTH DROOLING OVER

🚨 TIPS FROM YOUR REALTOR

(it’s me)

I’m an ex-dentist turned Realtor - let’s work together! Email me, tweet me or send me a carrier pigeon. 🐦️ 

How to get a lower interest rate with a rate buydown

High interest rates suck. There are a few ways to hack to negotiating process as a buyer and reduce your rates.

How?

Buydowns. A rate buydown is most common with large scale builders and new builds (think: Lennar, Dr. Horton etc). Here, the builder offers a promotion where they lower your mortgage rate for a period of time. The builder will pay the lender to lower the mortgage rate. Typically, we see 2-1 buydowns. This means:

• If today’s rate is 6%

  • Your interest rate will be reduced by 2% year 1 to 4%

  • It will be reduced by 1% year 2 to 5%

  • Year 3 it will come back to your original rate (6%)

Here’s why builders do this:

• When you’re negotiating with a builder, they’re not just thinking about your property. They’re thinking about all of the other homes they have to sell in the same neighborhood. If they give you $50k off your purchase price, they’ve now set a lower comp for all other homes in their inventory, potentially hurting their future sales.

• In order to keep the sale price of their homes high, they are more likely to negotiate in other ways -

  • Reducing the interest rate costs money but keeps the sale price high and doesn’t affect future sale prices

  • Other perks like free appliances, blinds, cash towards closing all incentivize you as the buyer without reducing the sticker price of the home

TLDR:

• Understanding the goal of who you’re negotiating against (builder) will allow you to get the best deal

• Large scale builders can reduce your interest rate when you purchase a property

• This is another way to negotiate with builders and will dramatically impact your monthly payments

• Resales/for sale by owners rarely have the capacity for this type of negotiation

👀 DEAL OF THE WEEK

Here’s a deal for you:
If you want a refresher on how to evaluate deals - check this out.

There are only a few neighborhoods in Austin that have been resistant to the post-pandemic decline. Mueller is one of them. A masterplan community just 10 minutes north of the city - it exploded in popularity during the pandemic. It is accessible to downtown, has a community feel (best farmers market in town) and is filled with walkable amenities (doctor, dentist, HEB, emergency, food, bars, movie theater).

The average sale price per square foot of home this size in Mueller is $490/ppsqft

This is priced at: $480ppsqft
ppsqft alone doesn’t make this property a deal. This property has been listed for 180+ days. This is extremely uncommon for Mueller. They started at $780K, did one price cut in September and one more 1/1/2025. This means they’re ready to negotiate.

List Price: $740,000 ($480ppsqft)
Kirtana’s Suggestion: $715,000 ($464ppsqft)

Want to check it out? Reply here!

🤠 WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND TOWN

The Loren is getting a loan.

The Loren at Lady Bird Lake is getting a $57 million loan. This 108-key hotel that sits on 1.5 acres at 1211 West Riverside Drive. The loan amounts to $528,000 per key.

The Loren opened in 2022, just across the river from downtown Austin. It’s part of a mixed-use development that includes 24 condo units, a coffee shop and a rooftop restaurant, Nido. Prices start at $1.8 million for their residential units.

Although The Loren is being tight-lipped on the use of this loan, we can assume it is to expand their Austin presence and cement itself as staple of Austin’s luxury scene.

Positive signal for Austin’s hospitality market:

Austin added nearly 16,000 new rooms between 2016 and 2022. The average occupancy rate is 67.4% and the luxury market saw a 4% increase in their average daily rates.

Read more here

⁉️ WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

If you’re a buyer/seller/investor/renter or just interested in real estate - this weekly newsletter will help guide your decision making and help you better understand the market.

🤤 HOUSE WORTH DROOLING OVER

An unassuming exterior hides an expansive oasis in Barton Hills.

Yours for $5,250,000

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