How to Buy Smart in Hawaii: What Every Buyer Needs to Know Before Making an Offer

You found the home—but now you’re second guessing everything.

Am I paying too much?
 Should I use the listing agent?
 What happens if something goes wrong after I close?

In this episode, we answer the real questions Hawaii buyers are asking right now so you can move forward with clarity instead of uncertainty.

We walk through how representation works, what to watch out for during the buying process, how to evaluate your offer strategy, and the hidden costs that can impact your decision long after closing.

You don’t need perfect certainty—you need clarity.

If you're thinking about buying in Hawaii and want to make a confident, informed decision, this episode will help you understand your options and protect your future.

To explore your options or connect with our team, visit iharateamhawaii.com

@iharateam  |  iharateam.com  |  ihara@iharateam.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You found the house, you love it, but now you're expiring it. Should I go through the listing agent? Am I paying too much? What if I'm missing something and regret it for that? Today, we're answering every question running through a buyer's head right now so you can stop guessing and start moving with confidence. We're real estate wealth advisors here in Hawaii, and our mission is simple to help families build, protect, and pass on wealth through real estate. We believe in educating the community with the information and options that you need to make a good decision. Hi, I'm Randy Ihara, and this is JJ. Hi. And today we're gonna talk about buying. We've sat across the table from hundreds of buyers, and we know exactly what's keeping you up at night. And today we're gonna talk about it no fluff, no it depends, just honest answers to the questions you're already asking yourself. Today we're gonna break down what you should know before you buy a home and how to make a confident decision every step of the way. Welcome, JJ.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

How's it going, man? Thanks. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

It's always good coming on here. Yeah, folks. Thanks for being on the podcast. So if I'm looking, if I find a home and I'm really interested in it, um, should I go through the listing agent to buy the home? Does that save me money? Do I get a better deal? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

That's a really common question that we get quite a bit. Right, especially on our homes that, you know, need some need some repairs or renovations and things like that. Um, when it comes down to that, what we always like to tell everyone is, you know, when they're deciding, hey, should I go through the listing agent? Do I need representation? Um, it really comes down to what what what kind of, I guess, advocacy or protection would you want? Because to be completely honest with you, right, what people have to understand is the listing agent has a has a duty to represent their their client, which is the seller, right? And when it comes down to you buying a home, it's one of the biggest decisions you're ever gonna make in your life. And you know, when you're going through this process and making this huge financial decision, you want to make sure that you have the right advocacy and someone protecting you, right? At the end of the day, if you're going and going through the seller's agent, there's a good chance that their their fiduciary duty is to represent their seller and they're gonna do what it takes to essentially represent their seller first, right? Um, but because it essentially is dual agency.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people think that going through the listing agent is gonna get them a better deal, maybe because the listing agent's gonna tell them what price they need to come in at, right? To maybe save them money. They think, oh, if the the seller's agent represents me too, they're gonna get the commission for mine and maybe they'll help me out. Um, but that's not always the case, right? Where they have the obligation to their seller first, um, and they're gonna try to get their seller the most amount of money.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Yeah. And you know, to be honest, that's almost never the case, right? People always ask, hey, if I go through the seller's agent, I'll get a better deal, or you know, I'm gonna be able to save some money. That's typically never the case. At the end of the day, when the seller's receiving offers, especially if it's a multiple offer situation, um, typically if it's competitive, you're branding not gonna be able to get a deal unless a property's been on the market for 60, 100, 150 days, right? Um, and then from a buyer's standpoint, when it comes to saving money, right? I think the the way to look at it is obviously, you know, compensation is always negotiable, right? But at the end of the day, yes, it helps out the seller's agent, but it may not help you out as a buyer, right? And the biggest thing is yes, it even if you get it for a little bit cheaper, whatever it may be, if you're not going through the process or the right um having the right level of advocacy and protection on your side, after you close, it could end up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars or or thousands of dollars.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Yeah, you know, we've had scenarios where we're having a listing and some buyers want to use us, and you know, we can easily tell them, hey, wave the wave the home inspection, wave the termite inspection, wave the conodox, and they don't know what they're doing, right? Um, and so they make these decisions without the information um that they need to actually make that good decision and protect themselves. So um I think as someone else, someone who's out there that doesn't maybe know much about real estate, doesn't know much about the purchase contract or the actual legal documents that requires to make a purchase, um, you can easily get swayed in one direction or another because you don't know what you don't know. Yeah, right. Yeah. I guess that leads me to my next question is you know, I'm working with an agent and you know, I want to go on a showing, but he's asking me to sign this document, right? What should I look out for in that document? Is it a trap?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Yeah, um, what what it is is it's called a buyer's representation agreement, right? In August of 2024, there was a settlement that happened in the National Association of Realtors. Essentially, what that um settlement I guess changed the landscape for the buyer's standpoint is that now they require any buyer that's represented by an agent to get a buyer's representation agreement prior to going to see any properties, right? Um, I know for some buyers it could be, you know, a big level of commitment, but that's why it's important to make sure that you sit down with with potential buyers' agents and have a conversation with them. And we do a buyer's you know presentation or a buyer's class where we walk our clients through our potential buyers through our processes, how we protect people and how we're gonna advocate for you so that you're comfortable in making that decision and signing a buyer's representation agreement. So it's not a trap. Essentially, what that document allows us to do is advocate on your behalf, right? Reach out to any potential listings or listing agents and ask them questions about the properties to do proper due diligence prior to our showings and therefore be able to represent you throughout the transaction.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

And so if I'm a buyer and I sign this document and maybe something goes wrong or I maybe I don't like my agent or maybe it's not the service that they promised me, what happens then? Can I am I locked in?

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yeah, you know, obviously it is a legally binding contract, right? But it's important to look at the terms in that contract, right? Because typically there's a start date, typically there's an end date, right? And then either party may be able to, you know, submit a written request to terminate that contract. So, but again, it's also always super important to make sure that before you sign those documents, make sure that the person that you're you're you're going with and and you know wanting to see a property with is the right agent for you because there's a lot of agents out there that that do whatever it takes to get someone to buy a represent or sign a buyer's representation agreement, and after that the service isn't as great. So do your due diligence on that because not all buyers' agents are the same.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Yeah, no, of course. We definitely see that. So I guess I I see a lot of things maybe on like Reddit or Instagram where you know, like, oh, I don't need a buyer's agent, you know, I'm just gonna do it myself. And I think a lot of people think that is my agent actually trying to protect me or are they just trying to close me?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Yeah, you know, um, I can't answer for every every agent in the industry, right? But you know, I'm gonna be completely honest, there are agents like that, right? There are agents that, hey, you know, in order for me to get paid or in order for me to put put food on the table, I need to get this deal closed. And that can be a dangerous situation for buyers, right? And you know, we're not here to, you know, talk about any other agent or anything like that. But you know, for us, the way that we approach it is, you know, what we focus on is your best interest at all time, right? Our buyers' interests, so we put our buyers' best interest above our own, right? We're not here struggling to get a deal or struggling to to close this amount of deals. We we do, you know, we're lucky enough to do pretty well for ourselves and therefore allows us the um the freedom and the flexibility to truly, truly advocate to the highest level. And if the home is not right for our buyers, right? We can we know the seven ways that you can cancel. We could we teach our buyers all of those those those the ways that they can get out of a contract and let's go find them the right home rather than getting them to close on the first home that they write an offer on.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Yeah, there's actually many times where we actually recommended a client to even cancel, right? Because, you know, for example, we just had this condo come up where we're helping a buyer, and you know, when we're looking through the condo docs, it's a stack of documents, you know, hundreds of pages, but we're reading through it because we want to help protect our client. And you know, in those documents it says the maintenance fee is gonna rise $100 every year for the next you know five years, it's gonna go from six hundred dollars a month to eleven hundred dollars a month, right? Um, which at that point our buyer wouldn't be able to afford that. They would actually have to default and and foreclose because they can't afford that extra $500 a month. Yeah. Um, and then on top of that, there was another project coming up in the building. They had to do spalling, they had to do the elevators. It was about four million dollars in projects, and that wasn't even included in those increasing maintenance fee. So, on top of the maintenance fee increase, um, they have another four million dollar loan that they're gonna have to pay off additionally, I think a special assessment around $30,000. Yeah, right. So, you know, our buyer was super happy and they wanted to purchase the property, but we're like, hey, here's the information, right? Now what do you want to do? Right. And um, we always want to make sure that we look out for them, right? Because, you know, we see that so much, especially nowadays, where maintenance fees are just hiking, they're rising and rising and rising.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah, and and to add on that, I think that goes back to, you know, should we go through the listing agent and should we not? Right. To be completely honest, right? When you get into dual agency, the agent now becomes of almost they have to be equal to each other, they cannot advocate for one party more than they do for the other. So when it comes down to reviewing those documents or maybe, you know, making sure that they're going the extra mile to figure out, yes, the finances may be okay now, but what does it look like five years from now? What does it look like 10 years from now? Because if you are buying a property like that, there's gonna be a time where you're gonna most likely have to resell it or you're gonna want to sell it to go move on to a bit bigger and better property. And what if you can't sell it at that time? And that's what we're starting to see with a lot of the older condos.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

And so I guess, you know, if I'm looking to buy a home, what am I not seeing at the showing, at the inspection, that it's gonna cost me money after I close?

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Whenever we go to a showing, right, you're there for 20, 30 minutes, right? Even if you go to an open house, you may be there with 50, 40 other people, and you're not really being able to spend the right amount of time or you know, or have the right professional, I guess, you know, eyesight or or insight to be able to see, hey, this could be a potential issue, or that may be a potential issue. So um, you know, when it comes down to what are the most common things that may cost you money after you close is number one is, you know, the for example the condo docs, right? Those or the building not being managed in the right way, right? Because if it's not being managed in the right way today, you're looking at a special assessment or a loan coming up in the future. The other thing is being able to do due diligence on when you do when we help our buyers, we do a home inspection, and what we require is our home inspector walk the roof, crawl in the attic, and crawl under the home. Because those are places we're probably not going into when we're doing a showing, right? So when they do that, we want to make sure is that the waistline is good, the electrical is good, structurally is it sound? Because those are the big ticket items that you may have to pay for should the time come, of you close, you didn't get the right level of advocacy or protection, and now you're stuck with the problem.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of buyers when they're buying a house, um, because you don't see it the sewer line is under the ground, most people don't think about that. Um, but especially if a home is over 50 years old, because that's how long they're expected to last, um, we want to do a sewer scoping, right? Send a camera down there, kind of like a colonoscopy and see what's the structural integrity of that sewer line. Uh, because if it's cracked, if it's broken, if it's clogged, that could be a huge expense, tens of thousands of dollars to fix or replace that. It's kind of hidden, right? You don't think about it. Yeah. Right. Um, even another one where we had a buyer where the the electricity was going underground and they had a hundred amps, so they didn't have enough power to power their um electric vehicles, right? And the ACs that they wanted to put in. Right. And you know, they're like, oh, it looks so good, you know, I love this home. But then we brought a contractor in there, right? And they're like, hey, it's gonna cost 30 grand, we're gonna have to dig up the driveway, dig up the concrete, replace the to upgrade from 100 to 200 amps, and the buyer's like, oh wow, right. I'm glad I didn't buy this home and then have an extra $30,000 that I don't have money for. Yeah. Right. So those are like the little things that can become much bigger, and we want our clients to know about that before they close. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

And another thing too is when you're going through that process, like you just explained, there's there's probably a lot of agents that would say, Hey, oh don't worry, you can upgrade to 200 or you can move this wall, you can do this, and you can do that, which they're right. But there's a lot of you know, underlying factors that can cost you much more money. It's not as simple as just, hey, changing out the panel or changing out the the box that's coming in or the the cables that are coming in. It's you need to move the wires from here to here, and and it's just yeah, you might have to cut through concrete. So there's a lot more that goes into it.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

So, how do you know I'm a buyer, I like this, I love this property, and I want to put in an offer. How do I know how much to offer?

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Yeah, I mean, that's a million-dollar question, right? Um, but you know, there's it's a process to it, right? We can simply say, hey, we believe it'll be this and just submit blind offers, which which we see a lot on the listing side, where there's some times where we receive offers and I've never even spoken to the agent. Or I receive an offer, I'm like, you know, no one has ever called, or so the process to really figure out what is the best price or hey, what should we offer? It really comes down to the situation. How competitive is it? Right. And the process that we take in order to help our clients make the best decision is it's through gaining information, right? Helping them make the best educated decision. So what we do is, you know, we'll start the communication early with the agent, let them know, hey, we have a buyer that's interested. Can you tell me a little bit more about the property? How has your activity been?

unknown 14:09

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

And now, if there's an offer due date, there's two ways that a seller can receive offers presented as they come in or with a due date. If it's presented as they come in, we kind of want to be the early bird that catches the wind, right? We want to be kind of the first one in with a strong offer because that does carry weight in a lot of sellers' eyes. Now, if there's an offer due date, what we don't want to do is submit too early, and then your offer gets shopped and we end up losing, right? So now when there's a due date, like you said, million dollar question is how much do we know to offer? What we do is we make sure that we stay in communication with the agent throughout the week. And leading up to the date, what we're gonna do is we're gonna ask questions to place you in a position of strength, right? How's the activity? How many offers do you have? Are they above the asking price? Right? Could you tell us how high they are, right? Therefore, we can come back to any buyer that we're representing and say, hey, here's the information we gathered. What would you like to do? Right. Because at the end of the day, it really comes down to how much do you like the property? And you know, is it something, is this property something that you feel if we don't win on this, can you go find it somewhere else for this price? Because that's how you'll truly know what is the best or what is the off, what is the amount to offer.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Yeah, there's so much nuance and strategy that goes behind the offer price that I think a lot of people don't see, and they just think, oh, I'm gonna write a number down, I'm gonna send it over. Um, and that's one way to go about it, right? But there's much more strategy that can go behind it to help, you know, win in win in a competitive situation over multiple buyers, right? Make sure you're not overpaying for a property that's been sitting on the market a while, right? Yeah. Um, and I just remember this this wire that we just helped, right? Where you know they didn't have an offer due date, and um the property went on the market on Tuesday. We saw it on Thursday, we were interested, wanted to write an offer, and we called the listing agent, right? And she goes, Yeah, submit an offer right now so I don't have to have open house this Sunday. And we're just like, Great, yeah, we love that, right? As the buyer's agent, I'm like, that's awesome. I want to help my buyers get it for cheaper than probably I could. So we wrote the offer, got into escrow. Um, you know, during the escrow process, we get the appraisal, it appraises for $25,000 higher than we're in escrow at, right? And then we didn't have to compete at all because it was a very desirable house, you know, in Hawaii. And um it was just a just a funny story. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

And just to touch on that too, when we're talking about a lot of people say, hey, um, what is the right price to offer? Essentially, it's what the market feels it's worth, right? Like let's say, for example, if a property got eight offers and seven of them are above the asking price, and what you what buyers I think have to realize is there's seven other people that are interested in that this property the same way we are, right? And what we like to always tell people is you know, there's there's a lot of buyers that say, hey, I don't want to overpay and I'm only gonna pay tax assessed, or I'm only gonna pay list price or whatever it may be. But you know, at the end of the day, you're acquiring a property that you really like and it checks off a lot of boxes for you and it's in the location that you want, over time that property is gonna appreciate, right? And we have we sit down with many of our clients and they bought homes in the 80s for $50,000, $90,000, and now those properties are worth $1.5 million. No one is sitting here today saying, Man, I should have bought it for $80,000 rather than $90,000. Right. So putting things into perspective that way helps too.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Yeah, because I think a lot of people want to know, did I overpay? Right. But it's kind of funny because the actual definition of market value is what is the buyer willing to pay and what is the seller willing to sell at? And that's the contract price. That's what you're actually buying it for. And that is actually the market value, right? Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a buying is such a big decision, right? And everyone buying wants to know, you know, am I making the right decision? How does someone go about knowing what the right decision is for them in their situation?

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Yeah, I think um, again, the process that we help people understand what is am I making the right decision? Is this the right home for us? What we do is we have our buyers fill out a buyer's needs and wants for them, right? And it's a pretty good exercise. It's like kind of a little bit of homework where you go through this list of questions and you really figure out what is a need and what is a want, right? Because as we know, not every there's gonna be no home that's absolutely perfect and it's gonna check off every box. But if you can get a home that checks off 80% of those boxes, but what we always like to say is location is the most important thing, right? If you can buy a desirable home in the neighborhood that you want to be in, because you can always change the home, you can never really change the location. And then from there, you start to break it down of hey, it's in the location that we want. This is the you know, the layout that we want, or whatever the needs are, if it checks off majority of those needs, now you know, you when you look back at it, you're most likely gonna be happy with the purchase that you made or the home that you pursued in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

So, how does someone know, you know, I want to buy a home, I want to hire an agent. How do I know like which agent to look for? Who's better than this guy? Like, how how do I make that decision on who to choose and who's gonna best serve me?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, yeah. I think the first thing is sit down, you know, and and and come come to a conclusion of what are the most important things you're looking for in an agent. You know, whether that's communication, whether that's making sure that I'm protected or or I want a seamless process. I'm a very busy person and I want my agent to make sure that he's giving me all the information and I can make a decision from there. However, you operate or however you feel you're gonna need to go about this transaction is figure out what are the three most important things that that you want in an agent. And then from there, talk to multiple agents, right? Interview them and see what their process is. See if they're just talking to you about, hey, you should just buy this home or I got this great home for you. Or is it, hey, whenever you're interested in a home, what we're gonna do is we're gonna do the proper due diligence. We're gonna figure out, hey, get as much information as we can. We're also gonna teach you the seven ways that you can cancel on a contract, right? We I know we mentioned that quite a bit, but we actually teach our buyers how to cancel, right? Because from there on out, they know, hey, these are the ways that we can get out, so they're more confident in putting in offers on homes, right? Yep, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Yeah, I think you know, if I was a buyer and I was looking to hire an agent, I would want to know, right? Not just who's gonna sell me on a home, but who's actually gonna help protect me and how are they gonna protect me, right? And what is that gonna do during the process, right? Are they just want a quick sale? They want to make you know compensation off me, or are they really looking for my best interest, really looking to protect me through that process?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

So yeah, and and you'll be able to tell when you're speaking to multiple agents of their approach, right? Is it are they coming from a place where where they're educating me, they're showing me how they're gonna advocate for me, and they're showing me the process that they go through to help me find my home, or is it more of a hey, what are you looking for? Oh, I got this product, let's go take a look at it, right? Because typically that's when you can find a not so pleasant experience on the buying side.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Awesome. Well, thank you, JJ, for joining. Of course. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me on. If this episode gave you clarity, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss future conversations. If you're thinking about buying, selling, or just want to explore your options, visit yhari teamhawaii.com. Thanks for watching.