5 Reasons We Love El Paso

5 Reasons We Love El Paso

Hi, welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña. I'm a real estate agent here in El Paso, and this video is all about the top five reasons why we are so glad that we moved to El Paso. Hi, thanks so much for tuning into the channel. This channel is all about El

Paso, Texas, eat, sleep, work, play. If that's the kind of information that you're looking for, by all means please consider subscribing to the channel. Click the notification bell if you'd like to know when new videos come out. And in this video, this is kind of like a part two of the very first video I did

back in July. So I've lived here in El Paso for just over about a year and a half now, and in July, about seven, eight months ago, I started this YouTube channel, Living in El Paso, Texas, to drum up business for my real estate business, and to provide as much value as I possibly can for people who are

considering moving to El Paso. And it really has made a huge difference in my business. I hear from so many of you. If you are considering a move to El Paso, or if you just have questions and want to talk to somebody, please consider reaching out. My name, number, email, all of that's in the description below. And so

my very first video was the top five reasons why we moved to El Paso. We had a, you know, a variety of reasons for moving to El Paso, as I'm sure most people do when they're considering a relocation. And we decided that El Paso was, you know, perfect for what we were looking for. So now, fast forward about, you know, like I

said, over a year and a half, we've been here, we've had time to adjust, we bought a home, we've had an opportunity to kind of settle in, get to know people. And so I thought it would be nice to kind of do a video about the top five reasons that really kind of make us feel great about our decision. So, number one, people. You

know, I always talk about, if you've reached out to me, a lot of people say, are the people nice? You know, like, what's the community like? I've said it a thousand times probably already. The people here in El Paso are nice, they're friendly, they're kind, they're loving, they're generous people. So, just, I wrote

down a couple examples earlier. So, this is the kind of place where people say hello to you, right? This is the kind of place where, you know, when you're driving in your car, somebody's going to wave at you, you know? And it's not somebody you know, it's just like somebody caught your eye and, you know, they wave. I love

it, all right? Speaking of driving, this is the kind of place where, you know, if somebody has, like, you know, a mishap, a blown tire or something with their car, I see people all the time stopping to, like, actually help out stranded motorists, right? This is something, I grew up in the Midwest and this was very common. In

Florida, I didn't see this too much, not to bash Florida, but here in El Paso, I see it all the time, right? We have a swimming pool. I've got a pool guy named Al. He's awesome. During that freeze, we had something happen. I think pipes probably just got frozen and we didn't know to keep our filter, our pool filter

running. So, something got messed up. Al came out, did a bunch of work for us, and then I still needed to order another part. I reached out to Al. He took the initiative. He called. He found me the best price. I got the part. I was trying to install it myself. I couldn't figure out what I was doing. I called up Al and

he wasn't grumpy about it. He wasn't getting paid for this. He just took his time. He patiently walked me through this process, which I never would have figured out without him. It's not like he was, like, trying to, you know, make a buck or be like, oh, I'll come over and I'll charge you another whatever. Just a

nice friendly guy, right? All the real estate agents. Now, as you can imagine, real estate is a bit of a competitive space, right? So, I imagine that in some cities, you know, it's a little more cutthroat. I just met a real estate agent the other day. He happened to be listing a home that a customer of mine, or a

client of mine, ended up renting. Nice guy. We got to talking. We're not, we don't work with the same brokerage. This guy called me this morning and said, hey John, you know, I've got a client I can't meet with. Do you want to, you want to meet with him? You know, implying that we would, you know, maybe split any profits that

came from this. Like I said, it's just a nice thing to do. This guy could have been like, you know, just tried to hoard this client for himself, pass it off to somebody else in his brokerage. No. We got along. We had a nice relationship. Free referral, right, from him. Visitors. I'm gonna put some photos up. This is my

buddy, Mateo. He and his mom and dad were just in town not so long ago. People come to me all the time that want to visit because they might catch the channel and be like, ah, this guy's selling El Paso pretty good. Like this, this looks like a pretty good place. We better go though and check it out for ourselves. Which, by

the way, I highly recommend you do. If you're thinking about making a move to El Paso, you should definitely come and check it out. But what I do is I usually spend about half a day with folks and I'll drive them all around the city. I'll show them all the different areas that they could potentially move in. If you

want to look at houses, I'll show you houses. So my buddy Mateo here, great guy, awesome kid. We had a fun half day together. And so these are the type of people who routinely come to El Paso and they say, yeah, you know what, this is a super friendly place. The guy at our hotel was doing this. The guy at the gas

station was like this. Like somebody was just talking to me. Mateo met a little buddy at the playground, right? So I could go on and on and on. It's an awesome place. I knew that. I had the sense that that was the case when we moved here or when we visited here for the first time. And that has proven to be so, you

know, a hundredfold. So that's reason number one. Reason number two, opportunities. So a lot of people ask me about the job market here in El Paso and the honest answer that I always give is, look, if you're an unskilled worker who's going to be competing in a market with, say, you know, fast food jobs or, you know,

maybe retail or what have you, these jobs are challenging and our minimum wage is not great, okay? It's sub $10. So for unskilled workers, it's a very challenging market. But for skilled workers, it's pretty darn good. Healthcare, transportation, education, right? Construction. All of these industries are

doing very, very well. And another thing that I think could be said is that this is a pretty darn good city if you're a remote worker. If you now, because of COVID or for whatever other reason, if you can now work remote, you know, you can live wherever, but you're still going to get paid by your employer. El

Paso is a fantastic option because, as I'm going to get to in a second here, one of the other reasons, our cost of living is still so unbelievably low and real estate prices are very, very affordable. So opportunities. There's also a budding entrepreneurial scene. There's a little bit of a tech buzz popping up in

these different places in the city. So there's a lot of opportunities. Quite honestly, for me, you know, I came here and I didn't know anybody. I got into real estate and, you know, it's gone very well for me. I've been very fortunate, very blessed. But this city provided me with that opportunity. So that's the second

reason why we're pretty excited about having made the decision to move to El Paso. Reason number three, cost of living. Okay, cost of living is still pretty unbelievable. Yeah, so I'm gonna pop up the receipt. I've mentioned this before but I'm gonna I'm gonna actually put the receipt up there so nobody knows that I'm

trying to pull the wool over your eyes here. So I told you the story about how we had that really kind of wintry blast, right, a while back. It wreaked tons of havoc on most of Texas. El Paso was spared for a number of different reasons. But it still got really cold here. On Sunday, the coldest day of this of this

storm, our furnace broke, right, the worst day ever because it was super cold. And two, it was a Sunday and all of these, you know, heating guys were out on jobs. Like I said, we were able to get a hold of somebody. He came out. He fixed our furnace on a Sunday on the coldest day of the year and the bill was $133.50.

You know, for me, having been in bigger cities in other states, we felt great about that. That was one of those many aha moments we've had where we were like, man, it costs what? Like sometimes you're in disbelief when somebody tells you how much something costs. You're like, sometimes I feel like

I didn't hear them right. Going out to eat. My wife and I, we love this restaurant called Savage Goods. I've blabbed on about it before. But we routinely go there for breakfast and our bill will be like $25 and that's with like a 20% tip, right. And we just didn't get one thing. Like I probably got like a

burrito and a donut, coffee. My wife probably got like some granola and a side of bacon. $25, right, for a meal for two and a good meal, right. You can routinely now go out and still get a beer for, you know, two, three bucks for a domestic beer. So that's pretty darn awesome. Gas was super cheap for a while.

Now because of everything, it is starting to climb up. We're still way below $3. But still, since we are such an energy producing state, we're in West Texas where we're sitting on a bunch of oil and natural resources, typically our gas and transportation costs are pretty low. Another one that I talk

about a lot is natural gas. So in El Paso we use natural gas for cooking, our hot water, and our heating. In the summer when I'm just using it, you know, essentially for hot water and cooking, my bill is like $15, all right. Now of course in winter it's more because I'm heating my home. But still, you know, cost

of living is still pretty darn good. Groceries still remain very, very affordable. Restaurants, like I mentioned. Entertainment. These beautiful hotels that you can go stay in for a night if you just want to get away. Very affordable. That's the third reason why we're pretty pumped about having

moved to El Paso. Number four, travel options. All right, now these are just a few of the travel options. There's a lot of day trips you can do, and if you really want to have an awesome time and see some amazing natural resources, parks, things like this, you can do weekend trips. But here's just a few of the

places that we still want to go. Now I did do a video about Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Love it. You can check that video out. Some other places we haven't gone yet. Ruedoso, New Mexico. Unbelievably awesome place. Inn of the Mountain Gods. Place where they have, I believe, it's a casino. They have concerts. Ski Apache. In

the winter you can go skiing. Sierra Blanca Peak. Somebody recommended this in the comments, but this is a skiing place that we haven't gotten to yet. Somebody recommended Columbus, New Mexico. White Sands is an awesome place. I've probably talked about this before. I'm sure we'll do a video on it. Just an epic kind of, I

believe it's like gypsum sand, and so even in the summer when it's super hot out, the sand doesn't get hot, right? So you can walk on it. It's this massive white sands area. We'll definitely do a video on it. Waco Tanks. I did a video on that. Carlsbad Caverns. We've actually gone there. I just didn't do a video, but

I will. It's this epic, amazing, underground, like huge underground cavernous space. Juarez, Mexico. Now, I have got to do a video on Juarez, and a lot of people always ask me, is Juarez dangerous? Yes, it is. Will I be strolling around there at night by myself? No, I probably will not, right? One, my

Spanish is terrible, and two, I'm not familiar with the area. Will I go there with my wife during the day and go check out some markets and eat lunch? Absolutely, right? So, you know, we've got another country literally, you know, right right behind me. Guadalupe's National Park. Marfa, Texas. Marfa is this amazing

little place where like this kind of small art community has developed, and so it's it's super cool and hip, but also there's like epic stargazing out there at different times of the year. Gila National Forest, that's where I did that hiking trip with my buddy Javier. Silver City, New Mexico is supposed to be

awesome. The Big Bend region is very close to here. Old Mesilla, New Mexico. So there's a lot of history. There's a ton of, like I said, amazing parks, cool little like old historic communities, hip little art communities, tons of opportunities for you to kind of get out, do a day trip, take a weekend, go check out

someplace really, really cool. That's one of the fourth reasons that we're super excited to have moved here. The last reason that we're so pumped to have been here, the weather. So I talked about this in my, you know, top five reasons why we moved, the weather, right? But now, you know, I've been here for a couple of

summers, and I'm just rolling off my second winter that I've been here, and we are still pumped about the weather. So I've been, I've bashed on Port Phoenix a little bit because I heard something about how they had like, you know, a ridiculous number of days that were over 100 degrees, and so I wanted to be fair. I

always try to be fair, and so I wanted to see, get some data, and see, you know, how we compared. So this is from usclimatedata.com, all right, and this was for the summer of 2019. The summer of 2020, that data hasn't accumulated yet. This is for the summer of 2019. This is the first summer that we moved here. Okay,

in June of 2019, we had eight days that were at 100 degrees or higher. In July, we had 20 days that were over 100 degrees, and then in August, 18 days that were over 100 degrees. So in the summer of 2019, there were 46 days where the temperature was 100 or higher. Okay, now here's the real kicker though. How high

was it? 106 degrees. We had one day in July where the high was 106, and we had one day in August where the high was 106. Okay, not 110, not 115, right? Two days in that summer where the high was 106, and that's where we tapped out. Okay, so it's a dry heat, okay? I just came from Florida. I grew up outside of Houston, and if it's

a hundred degrees out, you're probably staying inside because as soon as you step outside, you're like immediately sweating, right? Here, it's a dry heat, not nearly as bad. Now, if you stand out in the sun, you are going to get hot. If you stand in the shade, you're probably going to be cool, right? I mean, cool as in like

hip, as in good, as in comfortable, alright? Not cool as in temperature. So that was the summer. So now here's some data from the winter. So how cold does it get in the winter? So this is, I'm looking at data from November of 2018 through February of 2019. These were the numbers of days when it got less than, when the

high was less than 50 degrees, okay? When it did not get above 50 degrees during the day. In November 2018, one day when it was, when the high was less than 50 degrees. In December, three days when the high didn't get above 50. In January 2019, three days where it didn't get above 50 for a high, and then in February, one day

where it didn't get above 50 degrees. So that's a total in a winter of eight days where the high didn't get above 50 degrees. That's not too shabby if you ask me. Now, it is a desert, so at night in the winter, man, it's gonna get cold, right? It's a desert. Once the sun goes down, it cools off very quickly, right? But, you

know, the data, let the data speak for itself. So those are kind of some of the top reasons why we're really excited and we're really happy to have moved to El Paso, Texas. I mean, we love it. And now I'm starting to have enough relocating buyers who I've sold homes to here, and I've maintained these relationships. Some

of those people are becoming my friends, and they love it too. And we'll do some episodes about that. And just to wrap up where I am right now, this is San Jacinto Plaza. And yes, I know people in the comments love to talk about how terrible my Spanish is. And yes, look, I've made this very clear. I am NOT from El

Paso, right? And I've made it very clear. I do not speak Spanish well. Mi espanol es muy mal. Lo siento. I know, okay? So anyway, this is downtown behind me. Maybe you can make out these alligators. And I guess back in the day, there were actually real alligators in this plaza. Those live alligators have since been removed, but

the statue pays homage to them. Beautiful day here in March, and I hope that everybody is well. Like I said, if you have any questions or want to talk about El Paso at all, I really do embrace this idea of being the ambassador for El Paso, because it's a city that I love. I think that it has so much to offer, and I

would love to talk to you. And with that, we will see you next time.