Sacramento Real Estate Agents: Ramp Up

I love waking up in the wee hours of the morning to find a bunch of purchase offers in my email. Well, it beats stepping into cat puke. I don’t know why cats seem to wait until 4 AM to chew on houseplants as a new fun-filled activity and run around the bedroom horking when they should be sound asleep. Anybody who shares a home with cats knows exactly what I mean. As I sit here wiping my toes and scrolling through my email, I can overlook a bad start to my Sunday because little is as exciting as receiving purchase offers. If I’m thrilled, imagine how my sellers feel!

This is the best market ever for Sacramento area listing agents and sellers. After years and years of begging on my knees for a buyer to write an offer, the tide has changed. Flipped overnight. It used to be I would not dream of putting a home on the market if it wasn’t staged to perfection, shining from top to bottom and ready for foot traffic. I would be on hands and knees licking the floor looking for dirt. Now, when tenants whine at me me that they don’t have time to pick up the empty beer bottles, toss the half-eaten pizza in the trash, much less make the beds, they think I won’t show the house. Ha, I can shrug my shoulders because the home will still sell. It will sell fast. It will sell for top dollar.

The truth is this Sacramento real estate market is so burning hot at the moment a listing agent can sell even the worst property in a heartbeat. Buyers are making offers on homes sight unseen. I have to check my SUPRA stats to find out if agents have shown the property before sending me an offer because I need something to help us determine the strongest buyer. Believe me, if I have 5 identical offers from 5 buyers but only one of those buyers has looked at the home, guess which offer this Sacramento real estate agent is advising her seller to accept?

Agents complain that they can’t submit offers fast enough so they have to submit without showing. No, they don’t. They just need to get their act together. An agent lamented that he could not show a home yesterday during the time period it was convenient for the tenants to show it. He asked if he could send his buyers over to the home without an agent escort. No, he can’t. But I heard that some buyers were wandering around the home by themselves. Just because we’re in the middle of a home buying frenzy in Sacramento does not mean it’s OK to set aside standards of practice. If anything, we, as Sacramento real estate agents, need to ramp up our professionalism to ensure quality service to our clients.

And stay out of the cat puke. You know what they say. When the market gets tough, the tough Sacramento real estate agents get going.