Remembering Lahaina, Being Thankful & Thanksgiving in Maui 🦃 Betty’s Real Estate Corner

Betty Sakamoto: Aloha, and welcome to Betty’s Real Estate Corner, brought to you by Sakamoto Properties, Coldwell Banker Kapalua. Cindy Paulos is here in the studio with me today. We gave Roy the day off. We’re not quite sure what he’s up to, but he might give us a call at some point. He’s a bit busy, though.

Cindy Paulos: Well, he works very hard.

BS: He does work very hard.

CP: Yeah, and I appreciate it. You know, both you and him are very, very smart. You really are.

BS: No, we are smart. We really are.

CP: Yeah, and I appreciate that. We were talking about what we were going to discuss, but then I had this flash that next week is Thanksgiving.

BS: Oh, yes. Do you have a turkey yet?

CP: I’m a Vegetarian.

BS: Oh, there we go. See, there’s a win.

CP: And when you have two people, it’s not worth buying a turkey.

BS: Well, especially if one of you doesn’t eat it. You could invite some people over.

CP: I’m going to go out for turkey, and we’ll be with someone who eats turkey, but I’m not going to eat it. I’ll have all the side dishes.

BS: The side dishes are fabulous.

CP: They’re the best part.

BS: Now, what if somebody puts a little turkey gravy on your food?

CP: I pretend I don’t know.

BS: Okay. Then it doesn’t bother anyone. Well, Cindy and I talked last night, trying to figure out what we were going to talk about today, and finally, in the end, decided we weren’t going to make a plan.

CP: Right. It’s Thanksgiving coming up. You won’t be here next week. So, I always feel that Thanksgiving, strangely enough, for me and many people I know, is their favorite holiday of the year.

BS: I really do like Thanksgiving a lot. I loved Christmas when my daughter was young, and my sister had lots of young kids, too. It was great. It was fabulous. It was a different world for us back then. Then time goes on, and typically, we’re not together for Christmas anymore.

However, last Christmas, she came to Maui with her family. Now, her family is all grown up, too. But they all came, and this year, they’re going to come again. And that’ll be great because it probably won’t go on and on. It’s expensive for everybody to make that commitment to come here. 

CP: Very, very.

BS: They’re going to be here for a week. One of the kids is out of college now and working. The next one plays soccer for the University of Washington (U-Dub). 

CP: Wow. 

BS: Yeah. He’s a good player. Great player. 

CP: That’s nice. 

BS: And he’s doing well. Then the next one, Alexandra, she has been on the show. She’s really bright and wonderful. She’s now studying epidemiology at UCLA—how do students remember that one? It’s a wonderful school, and getting in was a huge thing. She got in kind of easily, but she’ll be here, too. So that’ll be great—it’s going to be a wonderful Christmas.

CP: Isn’t that nice?

BS: And it will be a short period.

CP: I think that’s just a blessing to be able to have that.

BS: It really is. I mean, we’ll have such a great time.

CP: Do you do trees?

BS: Yes.

CP: Yeah. Okay.

BS: Except there is the cat in the tree. Remember, we have two cats.

CP: Oh, that. That could be an issue.

BS: It is. This year we have a new kitten. 

CP: Oh, oh.

BS: And the kitten is growing fast.

CP: Yes, they do that.

BS: Yes, but this one is going to somehow she’ll be the death of us. She’s so great. We just love her.

CP: You have to be so careful that they don’t knock things off the tree.

BS: Well, we got to be careful what we’re putting on the tree.

CP: Right. And they think they’re play toys. 

BS: They do. 

CP: They do bat them around. And so each of their life samples is how hard can I hit this and make it fall?

BS: How can I spin that across the room so it crashes?

CP: So they have that very well planned out. So, all of a sudden, I can’t get things on the tree with the cats in the room, and I can’t get anything that will break. They hit the tree, or the cats go into another room. But how do you ever keep the cats out of the room where the tree is?

BS: No, you can’t. We don’t have a way of locking them up, and somebody will climb the tree.

CP: Oh, gosh.

BS: As the younger one will figure out, it’s not fun because if he gets stuck in the tree, it doesn’t feel really good. And then we have to rescue him.

CP: I won’t say what could go wrong.

BS: No.

CP: What could go wrong?

BS: But it’s Christmas. Whatever it is, it’ll be fabulous.

CP: I know you will have it. And you know what? What a blessing to have your family.

BS: Oh, it is great. We’re going to have a…

CP: It’s something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. I’m so thankful for my family.

BS: Roy and I have four kids or five kids between us. He has four. We have one. So that’s the only one that’ll be here. So it’s always a little hard, but it’ll be perfect because it’s what can happen. They all have other commitments, other things going on, etc. One of these years, maybe we’ll try to get everyone together, but to do that, we need to get more housing. Otherwise, it’s not easy to put everybody together. We’ve been together for pushing 50 years, but still, if you try to put five kids together, it’s very difficult, and then grandkids.

CP: You know how expensive it is if they want to stay.

BS: Yeah, that’s right.

CP: Where they’re going to stay and how much?

BS: Well, that’s it. We’d have to get housing. We’re not going to do that, but we’re going to have a great Christmas this year. It’ll be a lot of fun. 

CP: Well, you need that.

BS: Meanwhile, what do we do? We sell real estate. But today, Cindy and I are thinking we’re going to drift around on everything that we can tell you. That’s going to be happy and ready for the holidays. 

CP: Yes. Yes. 

BS: And things to think about.

CP: Well, is it true now, someone told me that in real estate, actually December is not the month that a lot of people buy?

BS: It’s not. Definitely not.

CP: And is that because they’re just busy with Christmas, and they don’t want to think?

BS: I think so. I think early on, everybody’s shopping more or less. Those people aren’t here yet—the ones that would be coming here, theoretically.

CP: Theoretically, about mid-December or the third week.

BS: I would say after Christmas.

CP: It’s after Christmas.

BS: I think so. Or the Christmas week. But again, it depends. You’ll always hear of someone who had the sale of their lifetime, a realtor over the holidays. That’s really great because it’s hard on people even if you want to do it. I don’t know where the market’s going right now. The upper end of the market, I think, is still pretty hot.

CP: I thought I read this last week that the average price of a home had gone up to—it’s up to 1.3 million, is that?

BS: The average?

CP: Is it 1.3 million? I thought it went up another hundred thousand dollars.

BS: It probably did, but it’s because the upper end keeps going up—the upper, upper.

CP: That’s true.

BS: The multi-million. A lot of the middle almost doesn’t exist so much. There have been a variety of lower—and I mean lower nice places. See, I hate to say “lower,” but it’s not. There are still really great properties.

CP: What would you call the lower end, because I don’t really know—I don’t follow enough where what a price on a lower-end home would be.

BS: Well, I mean we’re talking home, meaning condominium or home.

CP: Well, there’s a big difference. I’m talking about an actual home.

BS: An actual home, the lower end, well, is probably over $1,000,000. 

CP: That’s the lower end.

BS: However, when you say that, some homes are substantially less, but a lot of them will need a lot of work. But I think somebody can still get into the market. I don’t follow everything, but I think that all around the island you’ll find… I should have done this before coming here today.

If you just did a printout of every home that’s on the market. And if you pay attention to every other realtor that we’re all talking to, you’ll hear someone say, “I’ve got this great listing at such and such, and I can’t believe we haven’t sold it yet.” Again, if you come up with somebody looking at that, it could turn out to be really the deal of the century.

I think if somebody wants to have a home, and I remember the first home that we had, we thought we paid too much, but we didn’t. It was fine. You just had to do what you wanted to do. You did it. We lived there for a long time, and when we later sold it, we did really well.

CP: I’m sure you did. So it does seem the market continues.

BS: It does, yes.

CP: Go up and up. And it’s not just Maui.

BS: No, no.

CP: The entire country.

BS: Pretty much so. I think there are places like… I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and everybody wants to make fun of Buffalo because of the weather. 

CP: I won’t do that. 

BS: No, please try not to because Buffalo is the greatest. I love Buffalo. Could I live there again? I’ve been here now for almost 50 years. I don’t think I could. I’m sorry to say this out loud. I’m too old to be sliding around on wet streets. I’m too old to go skidding on black ice when you walk to get to your car. 

CP: Oh, yeah. 

BS: Or to have my car do a 360 driving along where Lake Erie is, which I did a long time ago. You’ve just got to be so careful with everything that you do. I’ve been here too long. I like to visit my family, and I haven’t done that recently, but I should. It’s hard to get everybody from Buffalo to come here, and they’ve all been here at least once. But it still is—It’s a long, long trip. It’s an expensive trip.

CP: It is. You do travel a lot, people know this because you don’t usually talk about that, but you do travel a lot.

BS: We do. We did.

CP: Well, we did Vegas, right?

BS: No, we did a trip to California, which was for a medical appointment. Then following that, we did… very confidentially, we aren’t telling the whole world.

CP: Oh, thank you.

BS: Thank you, everybody. That’s okay. I’m just kidding. We did Las Vegas for a couple of nights, and we had a great time there. I don’t know. Roy and I both enjoy it. We go there every so often. If we’re going to pass by, we’ll try to go there for a couple of days. We saw a show, and it was three nights, and we saw a show every night that we were there.

Don’t ask me what we saw, but they were great. It’s so fun to do that, to just mindlessly pick shows. We don’t go to the ones that are over $1,000. I just don’t think there’s anything I want to see that’s that expensive. But we’ll go to one of the newer things, and they’re great. So we love being there. It’s fabulous.

CP: Absolutely. So during this time when you are thinking, okay, maybe big homes aren’t happening as much, but there seems…

BS: The big homes are selling. 

CP: They are? 

BS: They are selling. There’s just limited inventory, and it’s a limited number of people that are buying them.

CP: So how, in your higher market… I’ve always wanted to ask you this because you have the most amazing clientele, and a lot of it is through referrals—friends telling friends. How do some of these people know? And I know you… okay, we don’t usually talk about this, but you’ve been in this business for a long, long time.

BS: Yes, I moved here and, pretty quickly, worked in real estate law in Chicago. When I moved here, I worked for a large law firm, Sidley Austin, which was the largest in the country at the time, with fabulous attorneys. So I came here, and getting the job was not that simple. Nobody with the law firm was dying to pay me a lot.

Roy was already in real estate, so I went ahead and got a real estate license right away. It’s been great. Over the years, we’ve sold a little bit of everything. We happened to have been able to move into the upper end of the market. We’ve recently had a huge house sale, which I can’t remember the price of right now, but it was mammoth, and we’ve had a lot of those over the years. Pineapple Hill prices have gone up drastically, and I think they’ll continue to because Kapalua still has everything.

It’s got two of the greatest golf courses in the world. They’re not cheap to play, but owners get a special rate. So I think Kapalua is amazing. If you’re there any time, there are people out walking, and you’ll see whole families going up and down the streets. I think Kapalua is glorious. It’s amazing.

CP: Well, you’ve been there a long time. You know a lot of the people.

BS: Yep. We lived in the early days. We made this joke, but it was funny at the time because it was great. We lived in so many places over the years because we’d live sometimes in a place that was for sale. But they were happy to have us there because it was harder to find renters.

We always took care and made it look better than it looked and showed it and sold it. Then we’d move on. We were fortunate to build a house in Kahana, which was, again, so fun and amazing. We kept it after we were able to buy the Pineapple Hill house.

But then, eventually, it was a pretty big job. Even though you could hire someone, we felt better handling it, and then we finally sold it to someone great. Of course, they sold it maybe a year later for a huge amount. I just think, “Oh, why didn’t we hang on?” But they were the greatest people, and it was good. They made a great decision.

CP: But in this business, as you know, I’ve seen a lot of people think they could go in and get rich quickly in real estate. They get their license, and they think they can just do it. I think there may have been a time, way back when, that might have been possible. But I think those days are pretty much gone. I think it goes on reputation, and I could be wrong, but I think it goes on reputation a lot, doesn’t it?

BS: It does. But I also think if somebody gets into the real estate business, and it’s what they really want to do, and they make themselves available to people… Oh, wait. I think this is going to be Roy Sakamoto calling in. Are you going to tell us to stop talking about personal things?

Roy Sakamoto: No. Sounds like you guys are having too much fun.

BS: We are having fun. We’re kind of laughing a lot because we started talking about how much real estate we were going to discuss, and then Cindy was asking me questions, and I kind of got from one thing to another. And then Christmas came up.

CP: We haven’t gotten to your relationship with Roy and how you met him and all that. That was going to be our next topic.

BS: Here we go again. That could come up next. You might want to turn the radio off.

CP: Or on.

RS: I think so. Yeah. 

BS: Yeah. 

RS: One thing I wanted to bring up, though, is that we’re involved in this celebration to honor our first responders and those who were instrumental after the fires.

BS: December 15th, remembering Lahaina. Yes.

RS: Yeah. There are a few of us getting together to help sponsor this. It’ll be at the Old Lahaina Luau on Sunday evening. We’re inviting as many of the first responders as we can find who were involved, as well as those who offered shelter and comfort, especially in the first few days after the fire.

You know, people like those from Maui Prep and various other organizations. I just wanted to point out that it’s time to honor people who really stepped forward. A lot of citizens put their lives on the line to help evacuate people and take care of them.

BS: You’re right. Remember where we were that day, just a place where people needed to be. I know we helped out a lot. It wasn’t monumental, our lives were never at stake or anything. But so many people that were there on Front Street, evacuating people, and many of them got sick afterward from smoke inhalation.

I’m sure that at the time, they never thought about it or never cared, but they were just helping someone. I’ll always remember Cille MacDonald who just passed away, which is so sad. Everyone who remembers Cille knows she was just an amazing, amazing woman. She was Rosie the Riveter from World War II, one of a very limited number of people.

She passed away at 98. She actually lost her oceanfront home in the fire. Her husband had passed away long ago, and she’d been by herself. She was a great friend of Lori Costello and the family, and even though Lori moved away a while ago, Cille was such an amazing woman.

I’ll never forget her. It’s a tragedy she’s gone, but she lived such a full life. I saw her driving a while ago—she was so sharp and on top of everything. That was even after the fires. There are so many people like her, we all need to try to remember them and say thank you.

I mean, maybe no one will get invited to this or that event, but we all know who these people are, and if we keep remembering them when we see them, don’t you think?

RS: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. To any first responders who are tuning in and would like to reach out, please contact us with your name, phone number, and so on. We’d like to invite you to this event. It’s on Old Lahaina Luau, December 15th starting at 5:00. It’s not going to be a formal program, just a way to personally thank you. My number is 888-707-060, or Betty’s number is 808-870-7060.

BS: When we say first responders, we’re primarily referring to the police department and fire department, since our number of people we can have there is fairly limited. But it’s those who were truly the first responders. There were other people who were equally important in so many ways, and it would be very difficult to include everyone. But to a certain extent, we’re doing our best. There’s a lot to cover, but it’s going to be spectacular.

CP: Roy, what location is that again?

BS: Old Lahaina Luau.

CP: Old Lahaina Luau and the day of the week. Not just the date, but the day of the week.

RS: It’s on a Sunday evening.

BS: They’re not doing the luau, but there’ll be a portion of the luau. It’ll be the Lahaina Luau, but not the entire thing, or we wouldn’t be able to do everything else involved in trying to say thank you.

CP: Yeah, that’s a wonderful thing. That’s a wonderful thing for people to do. We should do a PSA on that and get the word out.

BS: I think we will. Good idea. What she’s saying is we need to do a public service announcement for whatever we’re trying to do.

RS: Oh, absolutely. So thanks to Michael Moore and his group, as well as everyone who really stepped forward and helped us make this happen. It’s going to be great.

BS: It’ll be really exciting.

CP: I’m so glad you’re doing this, really.

BS: It’s not totally us because it started with Mary Anne Fitch. Or maybe not started, but… What were some of the others who got this off the ground, Roy?

RS: Tamar Goodfellow. There’s a bunch of people. We’re just happy to be a part of it.

CP: Yeah.

BS: It is going to be really exciting. We just got started on it. So, it’s going to be a short fuse, but I think it’ll be pretty spectacular. It will be.

RS: Absolutely. It’s a small way of giving thanks again to these people. It’s a very small token of our thanks.

BS: Yes. It’ll be pretty spectacular. It’ll be fun. The entertainment will be great, and it’ll be an early Christmas. Hopefully, it’ll spread, and we can all figure out things we can do for the first responders because many of them have had difficulties since the fires.

CP: Absolutely.

RS: A lot of them lost their homes.

BS: That’s right.

RS: They put their lives at risk. We can’t thank them enough.

CP: What else amazes me is how they take it so personally. They care so much. I think sometimes we don’t realize that long after the event, it’s still on their minds. I know some of the firefighters.

BS: I agree. Same thing.

CP: Their whole mindset is to save lives, to help people. When things don’t go as they would like, it hurts them. A lot of the firefighters felt completely broken up about not being able to save more lives.

BS: And like you said, though, a lot of the same people had to worry about their own families—where they were, their children, what was going on. They were working. They couldn’t just walk away and take care of their families. They had to rely on friends, other colleagues, whatever they could to take care of their closest people because it was all they could do.

CP: Yeah.

BS: Right now, again, we’re back out there. It’s, in a way, glorious. Everything is wonderful. It couldn’t be better. You drive through Lahaina, and you see what’s happening, and while it’s so sad to just look that way, it’s horrible, but we’re coming through it. I’m sure those trying to build homes are facing such a hard time. Nobody had enough insurance. We’re down to one minute, which is only 60 seconds.

CP: Always a pleasure to be here with you. It’s always great to hear from you, Roy.

BS: This has been great. We still have one minute? Okay. I’ve only got about a minute—only 60 seconds in it, forced upon me. Can’t refuse it, didn’t seek it, didn’t choose it, but it’s up to me to use it. I’m a sufferer if I lose it, give account, I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute. But eternity is in it.

CP: I love it.

BS: Aloha.

CP: Aloha.