Update your settings

EXCLUSIVE: When celebrity real estate agent and investor Josh Altman gets a product partnership pitch, he says 99% of the time the answer is "no."

But on Wednesday, Altman begins a new gig as an advisor and spokesperson for a tool he calls a "game changer" for protecting first-time homebuyers in one of the most expensive and competitive housing markets in the country.

"Real estate, in my opinion, is the best investment, not a good investment. It’s always the best investment," Altman exclusively told Fox News Digital. "When I heard about Home Value Lock, there’s a couple different reasons why I loved it and I believe in it, and now I’m part of it. Number one – it helps the masses."

By teaming up with California-based insurance provider Home Value Lock, Altman — best known for his 15 years on Bravo’s "Million Dollar Listing" — said he wants to bring confidence back to homeownership, particularly for first- or second-time buyers purchasing homes under $2 million.

CALIFORNIANS TEMPTED TO LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND FOR MIAMI'S SCORCHING REAL ESTATE MARKET

After a trial run in Sacramento, the company now offers homebuyers a guaranteed "safety net" by covering up to 10% of the purchase price if the home is sold within three years during a market downturn. The buyer protection will launch in Los Angeles, Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area, with plans to expand to Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico.

"Buying a home should be exciting, not terrifying," Home Value Lock CEO Oliver Tickner said in a statement. "For too long, everyday buyers have carried all the risk. We built Home Value Lock to flip that script — to pave a way forward even when headlines read ‘stay put.’ Not only does having Josh on board bring credibility to our product, but it underscores our shared belief that confidence, not fear, should define this market."

"The affordability factor of real estate has really changed … A buyer out there with a median-price home of about a million bucks in California, we’re talking about a down payment of about $250,000. That’s a good amount of money. So there’s very little room for error," Altman said.

"The California home-buying market is always tricky, right? And that’s what we pride ourselves in — navigating our buyers and sellers through that market," he added. "You have to realize buying and selling a house is a very scary process … protecting them and protecting their investment is the most important thing you can do."

"Of course, you hear of mortgage insurance. Guess who that protects? It protects the bank, the lender. So I'm more interested [in], because of what I do for a living, protecting the buyer. I want them to be in a good place where, if they ever need to sell in the first three years of purchasing a property, it makes it easier for them to get out of that property."

According to the California Association of REALTORS® 2025 forecast, the statewide median home price is projected to rise to $909,400 in 2025 — up from about $869,500 in 2024 and $814,000 in 2023. Meanwhile, estimates provided by state builders to nonprofit CalMatters show that building-code updates in California over the past 15 years added between $51,000 and $117,000 to the construction cost of each single-family home.

"In California, it's expensive. There's no question about it," Altman said. "Because of the home prices, a lot of people have been priced out. And since the pandemic, we've just seen it continue to rise and rise … And no matter what the taxes are, no matter what the mansion taxes are or anything like that, number one, rates are still competitive … It is telling that houses are moving, the deals are just getting tougher."

Altman says early results in California have been "a huge success" and that "you shouldn’t be buying a home under $1.5 million without this."

"This is another layer of protection, not for the lender, not for everything else, but for the actual homebuyer. And that's why it's a game changer," he said. "It's such a small fee that anyone should be able to get this."

"Being in real estate in the past 12 months … everything has changed … There's our industry as a whole and even on the agency side, it's constantly moving: the new rules, the new ordinances, the new laws, whatever it may be. I will tell you, though, that this is just another thing that's going in the right direction of protecting the buyer and seller," Altman expanded.

Though he’s typically the face of multimillion-dollar deals, Altman expressed eagerness to help buyers make what he calls "the biggest investment of their life."

"Whether it's a $500,000 deal or a $50 million deal, it's the same deal," he said. "Wealthy people, they have many different tools on how to invest in real estate, how to hedge their bets, how to make sure their losses are against the gain somewhere else, no matter what it is. But this is more for that homebuyer … when it comes to the masses of America that it's protecting."

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

For skeptics who may think California’s market is still too risky or question the need for a back-up plan, the celebrity agent urges buyers to prepare for the unexpected — and focus on confidence over fear.

"We can look at the future of the market, we can guess, we can go off of data, but at the end of the day, if you find a home that you love, you should buy it. But you just gotta make sure that you can afford it – and always plan for a conservative exit, as opposed to what everybody's telling you what's gonna happen in the market."

READ MORE FROM FOX BUSINESS