What if Sacramento Real Estate Sold and Closed in 3 Days?

What do you think would happen if you could buy a home in Sacramento and close within 3 days? Wouldn’t it be sorta cool if we could demonstrably alter the way Sacramento real estate is sold and buyers did all of their due diligence upfront, meaning they came to the table with an appraisal and underwriting approval? Back East, buyers often conduct a home inspection prior to contract ratification. This idea isn’t so far fetched.

You can buy just about any kind of product, even an illegal product from overseas, and receive it within 3 days. If you were to refinance a mortgage, that takes 30 days generally, but even when all is said and done and they are ready to close, that’s when they are required by law to ask a borrower: are you sure? Are you really, really sure you want this loan? Because we’re gonna give you 3 days to change your mind and rescind.

Yet in our neck of the woods to close escrow on a piece of Sacramento real estate, we enter into 30-day escrow periods, sometimes longer when underwriting is said to drags things out — but a delay is often not due to underwriting but because the mortgage loan officer (MLO) did not carefully scrutinize the loan application at inception or possess enough experience to predict the problem. I see some situations that never should have progressed to the point they made it to if the MLO had been more competent, but I digress.

Back to closing Sacramento real estate within 3 days. It would add certainty to transactions and definitely reduce the number of cancellations. Of course I’m looking at this solely from a seller’s perspective and how anxious sellers become when a purchase contract is signed, but then they go through 30 days of uncertainty and anxiety, never knowing whether the transaction will close. Buyers have 10 ways from Sunday to cancel a contract. They don’t even have to sneeze and trip over their own feet. They can just cancel.

Part of the reason home buyers cancel is because they’ve had too long to think about buying that home. Why, if they only had 3 days before they were in their new home, sitting back on the sofa and putting up their feet on the coffee table before the realization hit: What in the hell did we do? Well, it would be too late. For more thoughts, call Elizabeth Weintraub, Broker #00697006, at 916.233.6759.