Think it’s stressful to buy a home today? Lauren Risley, the host of HGTV’s new show “Call the Closer,” is here to offer hope.
On her series, this real estate agent helps struggling homebuyers close the deal in the highly competitive market of St. Louis. And if the house is lacking anything her clients want, she also renovates the space so they’re truly happy with their purchase.
Curious to hear more about Risley’s experiences in the real estate trenches, we talked with this rising HGTV star to learn about how she got into the biz—plus her best advice for homebuyers today.
How did you get into the real estate business?
I bought my first house at 19 and started rehabbing it. I lived in my house for probably four, five years, and then I rehabbed another house to live in.
I went to school for business, specifically finance. I did mergers and acquisitions here in St. Louis. I always got to learn something different, but it was never something that I was passionate about. Real estate was always something that I was interested in. So I just said, “You know what, let’s just try out this real estate thing.”
I’ve been a full-time real estate agent for seven years now. I love meeting new people and helping them through one of the hardest processes there is.
HGTV
How did ‘Call the Closer’ come about?
I actually just started doing some YouTube videos, just for fun, around three years ago.
In the real estate world, people were talking about how if you’re going to market to your clients, you should market with video. I had a friend who was a videographer. I said, “Hey, I will give you X amount of dollars and one day a week, you can just follow me around and we will go to a certain neighborhood in St. Louis. We’ll look at three or four houses and tour them.” My idea was that we were just going to edit it to show the houses.
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But he goes, “You know what, we should do a vlog, which will be all the fun stuff in between.”
The videos got noticed by a production company. We met, and it just kind of took off from there.
HGTV
What’s it like being on TV? You seem like a natural!
It’s funny because while they’re filming, they’re like, “OK, Lauren, why don’t you be more natural?” I’m like, “Tell me how to be natural when there are 15 people watching, three cameras, and audio boom?”
When I first met the executive producer, he said, “Hey, we’re going to make you a TV star,” and I was like, “Absolutely not. I have no interest in that.” And he was so confused. I think typically when they pitch people, people want to be on TV.
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So he said, “Well, how about this? Why don’t you film with us for a couple of months and the likelihood of getting picked up by a network is very slim. So if it doesn’t work, we’ll give you the rights to all the footage and we’ll make whatever marketing videos you want.”
And that’s how this started: me saying, “Cool, yeah. That’s fine,” with no intention of this ever getting picked up. So you could imagine it was a huge surprise.
It’s a tough seller’s market throughout many areas of the U.S. How does this impact homebuyers?
In this market, especially in St. Louis, our average price point is about $275,000. So if buyers are looking between really $250,000 and $400,000, most of the houses are getting multiple offers and some of our buyers are writing four, five, six different houses before they get one.
And I will tell you, after you write an offer on one house that you love and don’t get, the process changes. Buying a house just got much less fun. You feel like you lost. And then it’s so hard to not compare that house to every house that you see moving forward.
Exclusive: Lauren Risley of ‘Call the Closer’ Reveals the Secret to Making Homebuying ‘Fun Again’ appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.