Paying less for your house (if that’s important to you)

Many houses in the San Francisco Bay Area are sold on “offer dates” via informal auctions. Information about this process is surprisingly hard to find. Agents often hide the details of the process from their clients, and most internet resources are geared towards the vast majority of US markets with rolling offers and extended post-offer negotiations.

The goal of this document is mainly to highlight a few aspects of the home buying process that are not always obvious to first-time home buyers in the Bay Area, along with a few tips and tricks for each part of the process.

The primary audience here is probably someone who has looked into buying a house in enough detail to know the basics. If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend going to a few open houses and talking to the agent on duty. You can find open houses on Redfin. Working with agents may be a useful pre-read.

If you only take away one thing from this document, it’s that you should not let your agent influence what you offer for a house.

Preamble

Much of the advice below applies only if you would care a lot about saving 5–10% on the price of your house. Many people I talk to do have that attitude, and I think it is a reasonable one. A 5% reduction on the price of your house is maybe 6–12 months of salary, after taking taxes into account. So it’s worth spending some effort to get that saving.

That being said, I do want to emphasize that this is not the only possible attitude. Many people empirically do not have that attitude about their salary, and could probably get 10% higher pay for the type of work they do (e.g. if they spent more time interviewing). If you haven’t tried to optimize your salary, don’t feel like you need to optimize the 5–10% out of the price of your house. The most likely outcome of trying to optimize the price of your house is that you don’t end up buying anything at all, or delay buying for a year or more. It is totally fine to just pay top of market and move on with your life.

Ok, preamble over.

Don’t let your agent influence what you offer

The single most important thing to know is that you should not let your real estate agent dictate how much you offer for a house. This is extremely counter-intuitive to a lot of people because the agent is the expert — they’ve been looking at houses for decades, they know the neighborhoods, and, well, they’re your agent.

Unfortunately, the commission system means it is not possible to give honest pricing advice and stay in business as a real estate agent. Under the current commission system, agents get paid only when your offer wins. But the optimal “win” rate if you care about getting a good deal is very low. For a regular buyer, putting in 5–10 offers before you win is not unreasonable. I would guess real estate investors put in ~20 offers for every one that they win.

From the agent's perspective, clients taking ten offers to win on average vs. five is a 50% cut to an agent’s annual compensation [1]. And in reality it’s actually a much bigger hit — most clients won’t have the stomach for nine rejections and will exit the market long before they win a bid.

And then, why stop at five? If you can get your clients from a 5 average to a 4 average, it’s another 25% increase in total compensation. Getting from 4 to 3 is another 33% increase. Being a real estate agent is rarely a labor of love, in the way that being a plumber or a general contractor can be. In my experience people become real estate agents because you can make a lot of money if you work hard and are good.

In any case, it is likely critical to your agent’s job security that they convince their clients to make high offers. So it is generally not worth trying to get an opinion on the price of a house you’re going to bid on from your agent. Usually this opinion will come anyway in the form of a “Competitive Market Analysis.” You should not let that analysis influence either the comps [2] you choose or your final bid.

Pricing a house

If you can’t rely on your agent to help you bid, you’ll likely have to do it yourself. At a high level, use Redfin to find comps, and base your price off of that. The details are mostly out of scope for this document, but the main piece of advice here is that if you are comfortable with numbers, it is less scary than it looks.

You can Google around and read a few articles on how to do this (include the word “comps” in your search), or your real estate agent can help you with the process. A few notes for the bay area:

• Do not use the Redfin estimate itself for anything; it’s typically within 10–15% of the final sale price, but that’s not close enough to be useful for comps. It’s not uncommon for the Redfin estimate to jump by 25% between when a property is listed and when it is sold.
• You’re ideally looking for a handful (3–5) of similar, recently sold properties. It’s better to focus in on a few highly similar properties than ten pretty similar properties (though you may need to start with a shortlist of ten to narrow down to three). Do not include unsold properties.
• Similar means different things in different areas, but often includes location, living area, lot size, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, parking, condition of house, type of street it’s on, distance to transit, and year built.
• Time on market has an effect on price, in the following way. If the property has been on market more than 10–14 days, people are unlikely to bid way over asking price. Conversely, if the property is being sold after only one or two weekends of open house, both the sellers and buyers are expecting there to be multiple offers.
• Bay Area buyers are extremely sophisticated about location, especially in higher-end neighborhoods. Even one or two blocks can have a substantial impact on pricing, and a few blocks in the wrong direction can easily put you in a different market entirely. If you’re buying in these markets you’ll want to walk the neighborhood at least once to be able to interpret Redfin house prices.
• Comps from your agent (e.g. in the competitive market analysis) are likely either chosen selectively or chosen algorithmically, neither of which is very useful.

The best way to get a sense for pricing in a neighborhood is to make a few lowish offers on houses in that neighborhood. When you make an offer, you usually learn what the other offers were, which helps a lot in building intuition. The two ways I can think to do this are to either find an agent who is up for it, or to go to open houses and use the agent on duty as a one-off agent for that house.

Other tips:

• Just to set expectations, par for the course is comps that are not that similar to the property you’re bidding on, or comps that seem slightly contradictory. You just have to do the best with what you have.
• Use additive adjustments to comps, rather than multiplicative adjustments. Try to think how much you/your friends/the market would pay for a three-bedroom house vs. a two-bedroom house in your price range (as a made up number, say, “50k”), and use that to adjust a two-bedroom comp to a three-bedroom property. A lot of people’s first instinct is to use multiplicative adjustments (e.g. “add 5%”) for comps, but it’s both harder to think about and a less accurate model. Professional appraisers use additive adjustments.
• In San Francisco, be aware that it can take a year or more to get modifications to a house (e.g. adding a second bathroom) through the permitting process. Architected plans for how a house could be are not worth much, unless those plans have been approved by the city.
• My impression is all-cash offers can get a 1–3% discount over financed offers, depending on the seller. The discount is due to a faster close of escrow (7 days vs. 30 days), along with the fact that financed offers are slightly more likely to fall through. If you bid a few times (or ask your agent) you’ll get a sense of what fraction of offers in your neighborhood are all-cash.
• Doing comps in a neighborhood I know well takes me a few hours. Getting a number within 5% of the final bid is relatively quick, and then narrowing it down further takes longer.

Market timing

In general, the real estate market is about as predictable as any other financial market (e.g. stocks), with two major exceptions.

The first is seasonality:

• Many markets in the Bay Area do have a predictable seasonality. In San Francisco the seasons are March-May and September-October. I don’t know the seasons elsewhere, but generally I would expect November and December to be off-season everywhere in the bay.
• The more expensive the property, the more likely it is affected by seasonality. $1M and below is less affected, $2–3M is noticeably affected, and $5M+ you may not even be able to buy off-season.
• Off-season you’re less likely to end up in bidding wars, and more likely to find deals. But inventory is also way down. If you’re at all picky about where you live, you may find that you’re willing to pay the premium for the added selection of shopping in-season, even if you’re otherwise optimizing for price [3].
• I’m not sure what the premium is exactly, but for the $2–3M range it’s maybe a few percent.
• Here is Unlocked Home's take.

The second is financial downturns. The real estate market generally lags the stock market by 6–12 months after a downturn. In particular, after a stock market correction, real estate inventory goes down, but prices tend to stay high. Of course, this is a general trend and mileage may vary.

Note that agents may not be particularly helpful in talking through either of the points above. My brokerage specifically had training to help new agents handle seller objections for November/December sales.

It’s also worth noting that as a rule, agents will not be helpful working through questions like “will the market go up or down due to upcoming {interest rate changes, legislation, elections, expected market corrections}?” Agents are not investors. Asking these questions of a real estate agent is like asking someone at a car dealership whether they think upcoming trade wars will increase the price of cars next year.

Unlike at a car dealership though, so many people expect their agent to be knowledgeable here that brokerages have playbook responses designed to take advantage of this fact. As an example, when I was training as an agent, interest rates were low, and the lowness of the interest rate was frequently in the news. My brokerage’s playbook response to “should I buy/sell right now” was:

• To buyers: Interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in X years. It’s a great time to buy, since mortgage rates are as low as they’ll ever be.
• To sellers: Interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in X years. It’s a great time to sell — prices are high since buyers can afford to take bigger mortgages.

A final note on understanding the market: Even within a narrow geography, there are usually at least 3 different markets: the ~$1M market, the low-2s to high-3s market, and the $5M+ market. The market movements are correlated but not exactly, and the dynamics of the three markets are pretty different. This makes it hard to look at newspaper articles and understand what is going on, since newspapers tend to present statistics aggregated across those three markets.

The offer process

The most carefully laid plans can go awry during the truly odd auction process through which houses are sold [4]. At a high level, the process works as follows:

• Bids are collected on an offer date. Bids generally expire in 24 hours.
• Some subset of those are formally or informally counter-offered.
• Those that got counter-offered write new offers, or otherwise informally go back and forth with the sellers until there is an agreed-upon price.

However you go about the process of determining a price, decide on the max amount you’re willing to pay for the house ahead of putting your offer in. Do not change that number under any circumstance. There’s a good chance you’ll get the opportunity to counter-offer, and it is way too easy to lose perspective in that moment. Note: It is totally fine to overpay for a house. Just don’t make that decision during the counter-offer stage.

A few things worth understanding about this process:

• The listing agent is primarily trying to maximize the chance the house gets sold at a price that feels acceptable to the seller. Maximizing the price is secondary.
• The listing agent is legally required to present all offers to the seller. They can editorialize them, but there’s no danger of them not showing it all, even if they say things like “we won’t consider an offer unless it beats X other offer by at least Y”.
• A formal counter-offer invalidates the original offer. This makes counter-offering fundamentally risky for the listing agent. E.g. if they counter-offer the highest offer and it falls through, the seller (their client) will forever know they got a lower price for their house than they could have.
• I haven’t found a reliable way to predict whether the selling party will make counter-offers or not. I expect listing agents in general try to convince their sellers not to make counter-offers, but it nevertheless seems to happen quite often.

The best way to understand how this works is to make a few low-ish bids and participate in the process. You should ask your agent to find out as much as possible about the other bids each time you participate.

A few important tips:

• Stay glued to your phone for the 24 hours your offer is live, if you can. You should be prepared for your agent to call you and say “they’re about to accept an offer for X. If you’re willing to counter with Y I’ll let them know and they’ll wait”.
• It’s not the norm, but you can call the listing agent directly if your agent is not moving fast enough, or giving you the information you want. Call, don’t email or text. Many agents are happy to give you information (like what the other bids are) if you put in a serious bid.
• If you are a first-time buyer, try to make at least 1–2 lowball bids in neighborhoods you’re considering near the start of your search. You will learn a lot about the process, the neighborhood, and potentially yourself.
• Selecting and bidding on a house is an extremely emotional process for most people. It is a ton of physical and emotional work. Do not expect to be able to make serious bids (and lose) on 5 houses and not have that wear you down.
• If you bid on a house and find out the details of other bids, please let me know! In return I can tell you whether your agent is likely telling you everything they know, or if you should be asking for more :).

The advice above will come together in different ways for different people, but as an example, here was my personal bidding strategy the last time it was relevant.

• Find out from the listing agent when they expect to present the bids to the seller, and how many bids they are expecting.
• Aim for the initial bid to be high enough that, if the house sells at a reasonable price, you will be “in the running” and get called back for the counter-offer.
• Try as much as possible to find out the other bids and how the seller is thinking about it, soon after the bids have been presented to the seller.
• If applicable, send in a second bid with that information in mind.

One benefit of this strategy is that you don’t have to agonize much over the initial bid. That also allows you to put in lots of bids — you can have a lightweight process for deciding your initial bids, and only do a full analysis for houses where you’re in the running after the initial bid.

As a different example, a strategy a real estate investor uses might look more like

• Do a quick estimate of how much the house is worth
• Bid that minus 10%
• If you don’t get it, forget it and move on

That allows you to put in truly a lot of bids.

Pricing: Miscellaneous

Houses are hard to price, I think surprisingly so for many people. It’s usually pretty easy to get within 10–15%, but it’s not really satisfying that the best you can do sometimes is “this house will probably go for somewhere between $900K and $1.1M”.

One analogy is if the house were someone on the job market, and you were trying to guess the salary they would end up with. There is only so much certainly and precision you can have.

Finally, it’s worth noting that if you’re looking to get a deal (save 5–10%) on a house, you have to be willing to lose on any given house. It’s ok to be picky, but you can’t fall in love. If you do fall in love, there’s no shame in paying top of market, but make that decision before the auction starts, not in the middle.

Working with agents

The expectation in the Bay Area is:

• If an agent shows you a house, you should use them as your agent for a bid on that house. (This doesn’t apply to any agent you meet at the open house itself.)
• If you used an agent for one bid, you have no obligation to use them for other bids. I.e. the relationship is “per house”.

Discount agents

Some brokerages and agents are willing to share some of their commission with their clients, in exchange for a less high-touch experience. It’s possible to save up to 2% of the purchase price of the house this way. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend a DIY strategy when selling a home, it can be reasonable to DIY much of the buying process.

The discount strategy is the following:

• Use Unlocked Home for any property you can. Unlocked gives you up to 2% of the purchase price back [5]. The only thing they provide is looking at the disclosures and writing the offer. In particular, they cannot let you in to houses. (Coronavirus update: It seems like maybe they do provide this service now, last checked Nov 2020. Check their website.)
• For properties without open houses, Redfin agents can let you in, and will give around .5% back. There used to be a competitor in this category (Open Listings) that gave 1.25% back, but they were acquired by Opendoor in 2018.
• Agent at the open house: If you gel with the agent at the open house, it can make sense to get them to write you an offer if they agree to a discount. You can try to negotiate one by mentioning Unlocked Home as the alternative. Between .75% and 1.25% back is probably reasonable here.

A full service agent would provide 0% back.

Some thoughts:

• It’s not worth using Redfin agents for houses that have open houses, if you’re able to go to the open house. It’s better to go to houses during the open house anyway if you can, since you’ll get to eye the other buyers and also talk to the agent coordinating the open house. The Redfin agents are paid hourly and may or may not know much about the house or neighborhood.
• Unlocked did not seem excited to put in super lowball offers when I interacted with them, though you may have better luck.
• Unlocked may also not be as aggressive as a full-service agent in getting information about the other offers after you bid.
• Be firm about getting a discount in the “agent at the open house” case. Do not let them convince you into using them for a 0 or .5% discount! If you aren’t confident in your bargaining skills just avoid this option entirely.
• The purchase price rebate is tax-free.

Full service agents

Even though I put the discount section first, a good full service agent can provide a lot of value. Full service agents provide:

• Knowledge about neighborhoods.
• They increase the stock you have access to by 1.5–2x (especially if you are not price sensitive), by giving you access to houses not yet on the market.
• They can do things like aggressively get information on the other offers after you bid.
• In theory, a full-service agent's network can give you a slight edge; given two equal offers, a listing agent is more likely to try to get their friends’ deal in than Unlocked’s. An example of how this might manifest is they may offer their friend a chance to counter-offer no matter what.
• Being a full service buyer’s agent is only barely worth it anyway (in terms of expected dollars earned per hour), so don’t expect much of a discount here. The only way to get a discount is if they have reason to believe you are more likely than normal to quickly bid on and buy a house.

Most importantly, a good full service agent can cause you to get a house, by convincing you to pay a little more than you wanted for a house not quite as good as you hoped for. This might seem counter-intuitive, but I would not underestimate the value of this service. Most likely if you go out to buy a house without a full-service agent, you will get outbid 3–4 times and then shelve the project for another year.

Other things to know:

• Do not sign anything that gives an agent the exclusive right to represent you. It’s not the norm in the bay area, and doesn’t benefit you in any way.
• Full service agents like to say they are “free” since it is the seller that pays them, but you should think of a full service agent as charging 0.5–2% of the purchase price (relative to a discount option).

As a general rule, only work with experienced agents, unless you have reason to believe someone is good. Experienced means they’ve done at least 20 transactions in the past 12 months, and many of those transactions are in the price range and neighborhoods that you’re interested in.

At least in the south bay, most submarkets have a few dominant agents that do a large fraction of the deals in that submarket. A submarket might be “$1–2.5M homes in Cupertino with Asian owners” or “$3M+ homes within walking distance of downtown Mountain View”. Given that the price is the same regardless of who you work with, you want to be working with one of the dominant agents in your submarket.

This is for a few reasons:

• They will have access to the most unlisted properties, and whatever secondary benefits you get from them knowing the listing agents.
• You can probably get a discount from a junior agent, but it’s not worth it. Much better to go with Unlocked Home in that case — they will both be better and give a larger discount.
• Most real estate agents are not that great, and you may not know how to tell until you’ve worked with them.

The stat I heard is 80% of real estate agents (in California?) exit the business within their first year.

Contrary to many people’s initial expectations, agents at open houses are not always listing agents. Successful agents don’t have the time to attend all their listings. The reason non-listing agents sit open houses is that it is one of the better ways to find future clients.

A good etiquette here is: If the agent is busy (or the open house is busy), don’t take time away from them unless you are seriously considering making an offer on the house. If the agent is not busy, feel free to ask them anything you want.

The agent’s goal will be to get you to give them your email and phone number, and/or commit to an appointment. Take their card and politely say you will reach out to them.

Sometimes a thing they will offer is sending you listings that match what you’re looking for. Once you know what you’re looking for, Redfin is actually a much better way to find listings. This is not their fault; the brokerages’ tools for searching properties are substantially worse than Redfin’s.

If you’re at the beginning of your house-buying journey, going to open houses and talking to the agents is the number one best way to start the process.

Three disqualifiers for me are:

• Not telling you enough information about the other offers after you lose a bid (with the understanding that on any particular offer, the listing agent might be more or less forthcoming). My guess is most clients don’t push for this, so you should communicate up front that this is important to you.
• Being non-communicative during the offer process. It is extremely stressful to have signed documents that are waiting for your agent’s signature, and it is basically not worth the stress.
• It doesn’t feel like the agent gets what I’m looking for. This can happen if an agent mostly sells in a slightly adjacent market.

If you don’t dress or drive like you’re a million dollars, it’s helpful to show your agent that you are in fact prepared to spend a million dollars on this. One way to do this if you don't currently have preapproval for a mortgage is to have all your financial docs in a Google drive folder (with account numbers blacked out), and share the folder with the agent early in the relationship. Do not expect your agent to know stereotypes about your industry (even if that industry is tech), and automatically assume you have the will and the means to buy a house.

As mentioned earlier, being a full-service buyers’ agent is only barely worth it anyway, and from the agent’s perspective it’s important for them to spend their time with the most promising buyers.

Many agents strongly prefer talking over the phone to any other form of communication. Even if you are more comfortable with email or text, it’s worth meeting the agent where they are rather than asking them to come to you. Real estate is not too litigious, but I imagine it’s still more comfortable for agents to convey things verbally than on a permanent record. The real estate world in general also works entirely by phone.

That being said, Unlocked Home in particular is pretty good with email, so feel free to email them.

Bonus: Becoming a real estate agent

This section won’t apply to most people, but it can be a real possibility.

In most cases I think it is not worth it, if the goal is only to represent yourself. But here is some advice if you do want to go that route. The main benefit of representing yourself is you can open houses yourself, and there is no friction to making a lot of bids.

At minimum I think

• You should think of yourself as “good at school” (or at least, “good at taking tests”), or be prepared to spend hundreds of hours studying.
• Be okay with spending $2000 and ~100 hours on a lark [6].

The fastest way to go about it is probably:

• Use Real Estate Express for the (mandatory) coursework (3 online courses, technically 45 hours each). Do not take any package that includes a “pass or don’t pay guarantee” — that will significantly increase the amount of busywork you need to do. In particular, I think it means you need to get 100% on each chapter quiz to continue, instead of 80%. Feel free to email me for other tips as well if you go this route.
• The material on the test is dissimilar enough from the coursework that you need to do some test prep outside of the required courses. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to find study guides with correct material [7].
  • I used PrepAgent, which generally had correct information.
  • Still probably 20% of the test was material I had never seen before.
  • Not sure what resource I could have used to see that other 20%.
• IIRC, there was either no math on the test, or it was just 1–2 questions. So I think you can basically just skip the math part of the coursework, if you’re not inherently interested in it.

Note that the main goal of the coursework and test prep is to teach you the laws and regulations relevant to real estate. I came in expecting a lot of information directly useful for being a real estate agent, and it wasn’t that. When you think about it, it's a good system — the role of the state isn’t to ensure that real estate agents are good at their job, it’s to ensure that real estate agents generally know and follow the law.

The test is in downtown Oakland. Parking is impossible. If you’re planning to drive and don’t know the area, I would consider adding a 45–60 minute buffer (20 min to find parking a 25 min walk away).

After you pass the test you need to find a broker. It’s a contractor relationship. As of 2019 I could find three categories of brokers:

• Those that only take experienced real estate agents
• Franchises like Coldwell Banker that take new licensees, but have processes stuck in the past. They generally require frequent in-person attendance, and are not set up for extreme part-time agents.
• Exp and Keller Williams, which have almost everything on-line, and which are reasonably set-up for extreme part-time. Unfortunately, both Exp and Keller Williams are multi-level marketing schemes, and it can feel pretty gross to be a part of it.

If you get this far, happy to give advice on which one to choose.

To get the job, it’s usually a 1 hour interview, about half of which is them selling. If you work in tech, or went to a brand name school, the reason they will be excited about you is that you have access to rich people. At least at Keller-Williams, the advice to agents in the Bay Area is that a household should be making $250k+ to be worth pursuing as a client. For a lot of real estate agents, the hardest part of the job is getting face time with people making that kind of money.

Besides that, I think they are generally looking for:

• Are you able/willing to pick up the phone and sell
• Are you someone who could plausibly get hooked and switch into real estate full time

As a minor pro: outside of the terrible parking situation in Oakland, the real estate licensing process is one of the best case scenarios for licensing in my mind. I.e. if one were to give an argument for why licensing is good, you could use CA real estate as an example. I enjoyed being a part of the licensing process and seeing a part of the state machinery I normally would not get to see.

Bonus: What do investors do?

If you find yourself in a market with offer dates, you’re very likely buying in a prime neighborhood in a sellers’ market. Such is life for the picky.

If your primary goal is to get a house (any house) at a low price, other strategies may apply. To name a few: houses that have been on the market for a while, houses that were listed on MLS and then delisted unsold, for sale by owner (e.g. houses on Craigslist), short sales, foreclosures, fixer-uppers, and houses with rent-controlled tenants. If you’re buying locally, you can also look for houses through your network, e.g. ask your friends to ask their landlords if they would be interested in selling. Many people sit on houses they want to sell for years due to the amount of work involved in selling a house, and are willing to give a substantial discount to have that crossed off their todo list.

Many of these come with tradeoffs in limited selection, higher buyer effort, tougher financing, and/or additional risk, but can be viable strategies, including for non-professionals. Note that most buyers’ agents will not touch any house not on MLS, or will ask the buyer to pay them the 2.5% commission.

Bonus: Working with me

In 2019, I was curious about the real estate industry, so I obtained a license and signed as an agent at Keller Williams. I don't currently work in real estate, but the one area I can help with is putting in low-ball, no questions asked offers. It has been frustrating to me in the past that this isn't a service that is easily available.

If you go this route, you would be working with me, along with an experienced agent at Keller Williams. You would not get much of a discount on the sale price (relative to Unlocked Home), but you would be able to put in lower and more plentiful offers than you otherwise could.

Footnotes

[1] At the risk of being pedantic — there is definitely an initial fixed cost per client (in the form of a large client acquisition cost), so 10 offers/client is not twice as much work as 5 offers/client. But there are also significant fixed costs to being a real estate agent, so an agent’s take home, Schedule C income is affected at a more extreme ratio than their gross receipts.

[2] Comps are comparable properties — recently sold homes in same neighborhood and price range, that buyers (and sellers) use to price a house that hasn’t yet been sold.

[3] If you’re wondering why investors don’t buy houses in December and resell them in March, it’s because

• The transactions cost of buying and selling is generally higher than the price difference due to seasonality.
• All real estate transactions are public, including the price. If buyers know a house sold for a certain price three months ago, they’re not likely to offer much more.

[4] This section only applies to houses with offer dates. The alternative to having an offer date is “rolling” offers. You can find out which situation you’re in by asking the agent at the open house.

[5] It’s 2% for properties 1.5M and higher. Below 1.5M it’s 2.5% of the purchase price minus $7500.

[6] Getting the license itself is only ~$500, but if you want to meaningfully use the license you have to buy memberships to various real estate associations and pay desk fees to a brokerage, which adds up quick.

[7] If you’ve used prep materials for the SAT or other tests with a large test prep market, you may be surprised by this assertion. E.g. if you see a vocabulary word defined in an SAT prep book, you can generally assume the definition is correct. The CA real estate test has just enough people taking it that at least a dozen companies decided at some point it was worth it to put out a test-prep book, but not enough people taking it that any of those companies decided to put out a second edition (or put a ton of effort into the first edition).

Author: Rishi Gupta
CalDRE #02091043