Nuuanu - Honolulu's Hidden Valley

All right guys today we're in town with a townie. Sam is partner, friend to the team, lives here in town, Nu'uanu. Look at condo living versus single family living in this town area. Those are baller houses. Cream puff overrated for me. Give us some quick hitters about solar. No look! It's a bad design bro. So Hawaii's in an energy crisis. The only way that Hawaii is producing any energy is from the sun and from oil. Oh damn. This could be me bro. I'm a third generation townie, Nu'uanu specific. Sam you take us to a few spots that you feel like either the uncles who are still on the mainland, local people and or relocators want to see to catch the vibes of what it's like living in town, being a townie. Yeah welcome to my town. What high school you went to? I went to HBA. HBA is actually just up the street. It's not just a high school right? It's a private school. I've never actually been to Hawaii Baptist Academy. Let us know in the comments, you prefer private or public and do you know where HBA is? I don't even know where it's at. I've heard of it. One thing we got to do is I kind of need some coffee and a bite. Is that your family? I don't know who that is. Me and Kenji were talking. Yeah. We live in, at least I feel like we live in one of those unique neighborhoods or side streets where you know every car that comes down the hill. Right, right, right. You know every car that comes down the driveway and when it's one that you don't recognize everyone's like, who's that? Look she looks lost. She's lost yeah. If it's someone you don't know on this street. There's so many streets and everyone is doing their own thing. Yeah. But town has so many little side streets where everyone kind of knows each other in their side street. Interesting. So you find a lot of micro communities and small pockets. Micro communities, yeah. There's a small street right here which is what I live in. There's one right there. There's one right there. It's every driveway on this street. Tell me about this, single family to condos. Do you know people who live in those condos? Yeah, two of my really good friends live in there from high school. Shout out to Arthur and Rhett. They live in that one right there. That's a senior living home. Yeah, yeah. More condos over here. They're super city people. They have like a bicycle hanging in their living room or like what's the vibes in the in the condo building? It's definitely older than the new construction in Kaka'ako. Yeah. But that's all I've ever known before Kaka'ako. There was no Kaka'ako like I say when we were kids but yeah we weren't kids at the same time. Growing up around here what percentage of your friends lived in single family versus condo? Private school is a little a little different. Public school everyone is in the same district, right? Everyone lives around each other. Yeah, yeah. But I have friends from all over the island that went to HBA. What about non-school friends? You have like community friends around here or most of your friends are from school? I'd say most of my friends today are not from high school. To answer your question, yeah, most people are in single family homes. From there like that's probably what I consider Nuwano. Really? And then more like by the country club, just sub country club. So what, is this not Nuwano? No, it's Nuwano. You're a townie, you tell me. I consider everything Nuwano between Aleva Heights and Pacific Heights. Tell me where to go. Uh, Track Point, Nuwano, it's super close. At least I think it's significant to me because that's where I also grew up. That's where my grandma used to live. Grandma's house is no longer. No? It's kind of sad. It's one of those monster homes. I could show you two crazy monster homes in this neighborhood. Okay. One of them is my grandma's house and one of them is down the Leha. Let's get out. Oh, damn. That ain't no Mililani Town Association-ass storm drain, bro. Goddamn. I know, I'm like, I've never curbed these rims. I've never been to Karihi. That's Nuwano. That's Karihi. Oh, I did catch them, bruh. That never was there. Bruh, don't be showing the name, bro. Bruh, it's so complicated. If you want to get real specific, like if you want to talk about Molehu, Noho Papa, you know, that's Ho'opili. So, this is all Nuwano, but this is Putunui. And let me know if you're a townie, actually, if you know Hawaii period, when you think Liliha, is that Nuwano or is that Karihi? Yeah, I think if you ask anyone who lives in Nuwano, Liliha, Putunui, if you ask them where they live, they're not going to ever say Karihi. If you have someone from Karihi, is this Karihi? They'd say no. I get it, but tell me not in the which hope that you respond. Like, subscribe to this channel, go to KorteamHawaii.com for all your real estate needs. Go to the bottom, fill out the contact form. My assistant will call right back five days a week, and then we try to catch the calls the other two. I think that most people in the comments are going to say, yeah, Liliha is Karihi. Like, where is Liliha Bakery? Liliha Bakery, down the street? No, no, but where is it? It's in Nuwano or it's in Karihi? Liliha. Liliha is? Honolulu. I got him and he's copying all. So, we're in Putunui. You're going to tell us about why this particular street is significant. I was just looking up the listings in the area. So, just up the hill from us, there's a five bed, two bath for 999,999, basically a million. There's an eight bed, 10 and a half bath, 5,000 square foot listed at 2.5 million. So, what you have is five beds, 1500 square foot, which is sort of akin to like three beds, a thousand square foot. You have smaller, cuter homes, but then you have those homes that were also torn down and became 5,000 square foot, 10 bathroom. What is this street to you? This is where? I think this is everything to me. This is where I grew up. I was thinking about it last night. I'm a third generation townie, Nuwano specific. So, that was actually my grandma's house. That's where my dad grew up. And then I grew up right down the street, always at grandma's house up until high school is when we moved down to Judd. All of my childhood, this is where I would go after school. This is where I would go before school. And we used to eat dinner here every Tuesday night. But now, if you look at it, how many bedrooms do you think that thing is? I don't know, eight to eight, 10. I could look up tax record, but this wasn't how grandma's house looked. What was grandma's house? Grandma's house was more like that one right next door. So, the one with the red steps? Yeah. The white house with gray roof. Grandma's house was more a small plantation cottage sort of house. You want to know something funny? What? That tow truck hasn't moved since I was a kid. Since you were a kid? Since I was a kid, it hasn't moved. Sam, if we have clients looking to buy in town, even though you're our solar guy, will you connect with them to give some neighborhood familiarity? Yeah. And it's so unique. Every street is different. It's pockety, right? It's that micro neighborhoods that we were talking about. This speaks to sort of a Hawaii atrocity. So, at one point you have the affordable housing conversation. And why should a three-bedroom, thousand-square-foot home sit on a quarter acre and only house two to four people? That's the American dream. But on the other hand, you have these investors who come in and sort of starve and rip the character out of a neighborhood by building that. But then, more Hawaii families who are in this unaffordable, hard place to live, they can actually live there. So, there's a yin and a yang to it. What do you think about when you think of these nice homes with character becoming these monstrosities? From deep down, it does break my heart. That house used to look just like that one. But at the same time, it's given probably four different families a place to live. That happens to every house here. This is not the same character. But we aren't in this pre- and post-World War II economy. So, what do you do? I see both sides of it. If I have to take a side, I want to keep the small house and figure out other ways to make Hawaii affordable, right? You want to check out Pu'u Nui? The park? Yeah, let's go to the park. It's an outdoor park, but there's never rain. Wait, there's never rain in this area? Or like, the park's never wet? The courts never wet? No, the court's never wet, but it rains every night here. Hey, you know what? You might say we're in Nu'uanu. I say we're in Kalihi. Either way, I'm going to grab my keys before we go that far from the truck. You know what? Kalihi is Farrington. This is Roosevelt. So, for you, is Aleba Heights still Kalihi? Or sorry, is still Nu'uanu? No, no, that's not Nu'uanu. Because Aleba also has a couple faces to it. Nu'uanu is a valley. It's not Aleba Heights. So, literally, this valley creates Nu'uanu Valley, right? Like, this is Nu'uanu Valley here. So, Aleba can't be Nu'uanu. Aleba Heights and then Pacific Heights, everything in between. You know what? I feel like that's the argument. That's true. This is Nu'uanu Valley. Oh, is it pickleball now? That's what everyone does. They bring their net. You remember how you guys were talking about what's the in-between of wet and dry climates? If you love the rain, where on O'ahu would you move? I think that Nu'uanu is one of those in-between wet and dry climates. The part of Nu'uanu that I think is quintessential Nu'uanu, go up Pali and the two neighborhoods before you go in over the hill, that gets pretty wet. It gets wet. But that's very mauka. But now that you've educated me and you're in all of this, you're considering Nu'uanu, it's not so wet here, right? Drier and drier the further you go down to the coast. Hawaii's like that, right? And so, Manoa. In the front of Manoa, it's just reasonable. But in the back of Manoa... You could be here, you look down into the valley and it's pouring down there. So, Hawaii, not only do we have micro-neighborhoods, especially in town, but we have a micro-climate. So, when you were a kid, being that you were always at grandma's house, you used to play at this park? Grandma would always ask me, do I want to go to the park or do I want to go to the beautiful park? Oh, this thing, I remember it being so much higher when I was a kid. This was higher? Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe I was like this tall. That's probably the case. My dad on Kauai, he was telling my stepmom about how he used to jump off this big rock and the rock was actually like here. But he was like seven at the time, you know. If you grew up in Nu'uanu, you have memories of this park, guarantee. I've been here once and the thing that made me realize, I've been to this park is this. I mean, this is where me and my friends would hang out. This is where we would come after school. We would even take field trips up here, play flag football in the field over there, play kickball. They would take us on field trips to Queen Emma's Summer Palace. There's like a nice stream down there. I don't know, it has that real dark green lush vibe to it as well. And the change of climates we were talking about in the last segment. This is the very wet area. Yeah. From here, Mauka, right? For me, when I look at this, so I see a banyan tree, multiple monkey pod trees. It's cool. Traffic, because the Pali Highway is right there. So I know that I'm in town. So town is Nu'uanu Valley, but town is also Kaka'ako or even like Hotel Street. Town goes all the way to the back of the Pali. When I lived in Oakland, California, I lived up on the mountain at one point. Down the hill was insanity, dangerous, crowded, weird, all this stuff. Up the hill was a little lush, quiet, and you could look down on it. It's interesting how at elevation you can look down on chaos and it looks peaceful. Through the trees, you can kind of see that. A lot of people have memories of grabbing a quick bento and coming over here, right? This is one of those bento spots in Hawaii. Leave me a comment. Where's your bento spot? You know, before Kaka'ako was all that it is now and you just go to slide down the hill at the water area, people go eat bento over there, right? We got one of those hills right here. It gets real steep over there. Yeah. A lot of people have bento memories over here. We could do a video on bento memories. Please be considerate of our residents and neighbors. Don't feed feral chickens. I went to a comedy show recently, but I was also looked at by the comedians. Andrew Schultz has a bit on Hawaii's feral chickens. Have you seen it? I know where you're going. I can't go there. I don't know the bit. He goes, hey, Hawaii, you guys have these arrogant chickens. You know, I've never seen chickens like that. And he's like, I also noticed you guys don't have a lot of, I'm just saying I do shows all over and in South Carolina, chickens ain't walking around all arrogant. If you had to live in a condo in town, where would you live? You know where it's pretty cherry? Kukui Plaza. You're not in the thick of it. You're right on the edge of it. Okay. So geographically you'd go downtown Honolulu over ward or. Yeah. I don't want to be in the thick of it. You know, some people, they do want to live in it. They want to be able to walk to their coffee shop. They want to be able to walk to Whole Foods. Yeah. They want to be able to walk to a South shore marketplace. Yeah. I can still drive there. It's fine. Or Uber. I mean, it's so much cheaper in downtown than Kaka'ako ward that if every day you took a $20 of Uber, you'd or every time you needed to go there, you'd still be better off because it's so much cheaper. I mean, we're comparing $800,000 in downtown right there. Yeah. You could get a two bed, two bath, or you could get a studio in Kaka'ako. You know, that 800,000 is going to go way further. I'm trying to check the value. I'm trying to check the topography. Are you saying we're still in Nu'uanu? This is Nu'uanu. Brother. Leave me a comment. Tell me Liliha Bakery is not in Karihi. Because I know this coffee shop. Yeah. You ever been there? Yeah. Conversations. It's Karihi, bro. Let me ask you, from a Mililani guy, would you say that Liliha Bakery is for tourists or for locals? Locals. Really? Yeah. You say tourists? I think it's both. Let's go look inside. I saw nothing but aunties and uncles. Yeah. It's on every travel website, but still grandma used to take us here every day. If you work in an office once a month, at least somebody's bringing these. Yo, guarantee. Cocoa Puff, Cream Puff. I'm Cocoa Puff. I'm going to get some heat from my Hawaii people. I apologize in advance. Liliha Bakery great food, but the Cocoa Puff Cream Puff. I'll take a Zippy's Napoleon Bakery Long John. What? The Cream Puff overrated for me. Bro, come check this out. Okay. That's wild. You think that? Really? Yeah. That's not just for the gram, bro. No, that's wild. No Cream Puff for you, huh? Actually, they have so many things that look really good, but 80% of their sales are that. You come here for that. I went to Cinnamon's in Kailua and I saw they microwave a whole plate because it had been sitting and the other stuff was ready, so they nuked it and took it off. So that's what I like about here is you see the food being cooked. So this is Waffle House in Hawaii. It kind of gives Waffle House vibes, huh? Better than Waffle House. We're having this ongoing saga of Nu'uanu versus Karihi. What are the differences in the two? Why would one care? Because like you said, Karihi people are not going to claim Nu'uanu, but then the Nu'uanu people are going to say, well, we're not that, and they're both okay with it. I think they're prideful in their own ways. This is my valley. Yeah. Right? And that's your valley. You think someone from the mainland would have a better experience in Nu'uanu or Karihi? There's no thought. You don't got to think about it. Oh, I would say Nu'uanu. Yeah. Yeah. Hands down. They might have a rough goal in Karihi. A little bit rougher of a neighborhood. There's definitely hidden gems in Karihi as well. And just like Wai'anae, Nago, any of the Wahiawa, you're going to find some of your best humans you ever, like just quality humans too, right? I have a lot of solar clients in Karihi Valley. Yeah. Some of the best people I've ever met. Whenever I come over, Sam, you want something to eat? If you sell solar in Nu'uanu, are they necessarily feeding you in the same way? They're a little bit more cutthroat. A little more. Yeah. Yeah. Right to it. I actually got a long john because this was one of my dad's favorite from zippies, but long johns in general, custard. Okay. Cocoa puff time. Which one do you want? Oh, that's another thing. No, show him. Show him. That's the thing I hate about these. That's gonna happen. Show him the ham. That's how she go. Oh, look. Right? It just happened. It's a bad design, bro. You know how you might take a girl out to eat ribs on a first date to see how she is? Take her to the bakery. See if she goes and eats her cocoa puff with a fork. Yeah. You ain't doing this in one bite. Can I one bite them? At least three. That was your Japanese side coming out or what? You see no Japanese tourists in there? We're going macho, baby. Look at this. What happened, kids? What happened? Another one down. For me, paola bakery all day. For food, you ain't get a plate? Do you think it's true that in town, there's a lot less yard space? A lot less land comparatively. In the suburbs of Chicago, the average lot size might be like eight to 10,000 square foot or something. I don't know. I'm making that up. Austin, Texas. But in the suburbs of Hawaii. 2,500? There's homes on 2,500 square foot lots. If you're batting in like the 6,000s, you're like, oh, that's a pretty big yard. And that's in our suburb. And then in town, to have anything is actually rare. To have any yard. They even have zero lots. What that does is it maximizes, right? So if this big square is a yard and I put my house in the middle of it, I eat up the yard. But if I put my house to the far corner, now all of a sudden I have this big yard, right? And so I like zero lots for the right application. And I'm glad you asked that question because in Hawaii, there is, I should especially say on Oahu, there's less land comparatively to most mainland situations. So if you're comparing San Francisco, New York, et cetera, Oahu is a densely populated area. Look at these condos like towering over us here. There's also more condo dwellers on Oahu. Have you guys ever been to San Francisco and see that they build houses, whole houses. They're like this in the city in San Francisco, you'll literally have this in between two whole monster houses in town. It's hard to find a yard at all. If you do have a yard, you're getting a higher price point. So let's talk about price points in Hawaii, in general, your average home costs across, I should say across Oahu. High 700s are low. I think it's like 775 or something. But what that's doing is it's allowing townhomes and condos to bring down the median average single family home price right now is I think like 1.13 or something like that. That allows for single family all the way in Makaha, Hawaii and I for five, 600,000 to be averaged in with super luxury for 20 million. In town, in Nuuanu, the average standalone single family, I haven't actually pulled the data, but I bet you it's around like 1.8, 1.9. Really? Well, it depends what we're calling Nuuanu, right? Because we've had this the whole video, but in the places that I feel like the more wetter parts of Nuuanu, you're going into the upper millions and easily getting into the twos and threes, depending on what you're buying. It's like, what did your family sell that home for? And in what year? This one went up for 1.3, I believe. And I think that was in 2022. Pretty big though. I think it was like 2300 square feet. So what did you think I was going to say for average price point in Nuuanu? I'm thinking 1.3. No way. But as you go up, yeah, for sure. It's going to go up and up and up. The deeper you go into the valley. And like the park that we were at, you're not going to find a home there under, depending on the condition, tear down, major fixer, but not under 1.7. Really? That's just the average price point in town, right? And so, or like in Manoa, the average price point is much higher than one valley over in Palolo. So it depends on what circle we draw around and pull the data from. We do 60, 70 deals a year. We're in the upper echelons, right? And so my opinion is that without having pulled the data, we're sub 2 million on average, but not as low as 1.3. Mililani, Mauka's average price point is for single family. It's probably closer to one, two or three. And this is just, it's, it's town. So it's going to be much more. So Derek, I know, you know, you've lived in Mililani for quite some time now, but if you were to move to town, where would you live in town? Single family home? No shade, but as a Mililani guy, when I got here, I'm like, well, Brian, you know where you are? Cause you were like, I love it. I love it. We'll never like, you guys know where you are, but I see cause you're townie. You don't expect this yard and garden and you don't expect it in the same way. Like having these accented bushes, like that's nice for you, right? As long as I can barbecue. You're good. Yeah. Cause you're gonna, you were just saying how you don't mind driving. You're going to drive beach. You're going to drive North shore. You do all these restaurants in town. I expect where I live to have more greenery. So to your question, where would I live in town? Single family. Are you going to put a budget on me? 1.5. So I was going to say Manoa, but I can't get into Manoa for anything that I would want to live in at 1.5. Single family, 1.5 town. So town I'm considering Diamond Head of Kalihi and Ewa of Diamond Head. I'm under the gun, man. Do I need to give you a bigger budget? Well, you gave me the budget you gave me. We can answer that separately. I think I'm probably going, ah, I have kids too. So I consider school district. I'm finding something that gets me into Roosevelt school district. So I'm probably going like Aleva. I agree. The Roosevelt district side of Aleva cause Aleva could change and I could be wrong. I don't commit to school district. Diamond Head side of Aleva, Roosevelt, Ewa side of Aleva, Farrington. I like that answer. That's probably what I'm doing at 1.5. And you get a view of the ocean. Now, if you're giving me a budget that gets me into Manoa, that's where I'm going. Manoa or Upper Nu'uanu. Upper Nu'uanu is probably my forever home. That's your dream? Something I want to get in into my late you know, forties, fifties. One quick thing I want to mention, you guys seen this driveway, seen all these houses. This lot used to be auntie over there, used to be her thing. And so one thing in Hawaii that you also see is what we call CPR and creating a condominium property regime. So in my big postage stamp, this is auntie's big, probably two acres that she owned. She retained a certain part and then they chopped up different sections for different homes. This is another way without building a monstrosity to take Hawaii land and house multiple families. And this is all your family. It's harder and harder to find as time goes on. You can imagine Oahu had these, you know, legacy properties with acre, two acres and there's zoning, right? So R5, you can have a house every 5,000 square foot. R10, every 10,000 square foot. Finding those opportunities is few and far between these days. Why does it matter to you? Well, what it matters is it could be tricky. So you're getting a certain loan, like a VA loan. If you don't have the right condo docs, association docs for this community, then that home that you guys sold wouldn't actually qualify for the VA loan. Does that mean a veteran can't buy it? No. It just means you need a lender that knows how to help the community create those docs so that this becomes a lendable community. Because this is a condominium community the way it was chopped up. So just quick real estate nugs for you. But we would be a mess if we didn't get into a little bit of solar. It's not a matter of if people are going to go solar in Hawaii. It's a matter of when and with who, because we're kind of in an energy crisis. We started working together because I trusted you to speak to my people. I don't need solar in our business. And our real estate reputation is, I've told this to you hundreds of times, right? It's far greater than my solar gains. Give us some quick hitters about solar. That's what you do full-time. So Hawaii's in an energy crisis because everything has to be shipped here, including our oil. We're no longer burning any coal. So the only way that Hawaii is producing any energy is from the sun and from oil. Oil needs to be shipped here. Hawaii has the most expensive rates compared to California, compared to the mainland. And the whole country, right? We're almost double. We're going to start entering a new phase where everyone is going to be put onto a new what's called shift and save program. If you shift the way in how you live and use energy, right, you'll save money. Essentially between nine o'clock and five o'clock, energy rates will be the cheapest. But between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m., when everyone's using the most electricity. It'd be the most expensive. It's three times the price. Makes no sense. No one's going to be able to wash clothes at 10 o'clock in the morning or at lunchtime, cook their dinner at 2 p.m. because they're off at work. And that's when they're making the rates the cheapest and they're making us suffer when they're tripling the rates after we get home from work. My parents, they were in an old program called net energy metering, NEM program, where we don't have batteries. But my neighbor over here, neighbor over here, they both have batteries. So energy is the second most expensive bill coming after your mortgage. It's a bill you're never going to stop paying. It's a bill you can't get away from. So buying a house is scary. And so is solar. But it just makes so much sense to buy a house versus renting your home. And it goes the same exact way for your energy. One of the reasons I started working with Sam and entertaining the solar thing was just what we see here. Like when we're just chatting, you're so natural. When it became time to sell, you're like, I don't want to be a dirty salesperson. And solar, one of my like, the things that's like riled me up about it, solar has so many dirty salespeople. And so I was like, this is a good guy who I can send to my clients. He simply wants to help. And if you don't want to buy, he's not going to shove it down your throat. And I actually saw that in this, because once it became time for you to start selling the camera, you're like, God, what do I say? I've seen you in solar appointments. You're extremely confident. You've told my clients, you have too many batteries. You got oversold on the system. You want two batteries, but you don't have enough panels to charge it. I could sell you an extra battery, but it doesn't make sense for you unless we're going to plan for an electric car and more panels. And then the second battery makes sense. These are things I've learned from you about solar. I think that it makes sense for multiple reasons. We're energy crisis. If they stop sending ships here, we run out of energy in days. We don't have the coal feeder booster plants. We can't boost our energy with that. Our grids old and failing similar to our water main in Hawaii. That's old and failing a little bit libertarian in that sense of, I want to like own my energy and be independent. That's like reason enough, but the cost savings, you know, a few hundred dollars a month can be enough to push people out of Hawaii on the same note, saving a few hundred dollars a month by having solar. And then having it stable for the next 20 years can be enough to keep people in Hawaii. So there's so many reasons that people should consider solar. Buying a house is scary, but people get over the hump and they go, Oh, I'll do that again. Well, with the best warranty, local company, and I got an exam and you can be not intimidated and do what you know needs to happen to get in front of this. The worst energy costs in Hawaii are in the country. This is running away from Derek. You know, the eggs crisis that we're having right now. Yeah. You kind of find eggs at stores, right? If I asked you last year, would you lock in your egg prices? Would you have? Yeah. Okay. So I think that translates so well into solar, because if I ask you about solar and I say, Hey Derek, if you went solar for zero down, you could lock in your rate for energy. Would you do it? For sure. Because that's another thing I like about Sam. When I've seen him talk to my client salespeople, we want to like talk, talk, talk, shove it down your throat and then be like, you get it. Sam ask questions and you respond. That's good. Yeah. Like I would, the simple answer is I would, I would lock in my egg price. Eggs are going for $15. They have a limit now. People scrapping over eggs. I saw it at Long's and Mililani Mocha. They had choked eggs. Spontaneous.