Sacramento Sellers Ask: Where Do Buyers Come From?

There are many myths in the Sacramento real estate business, including an assortment of wrong answers about where do buyers come from. Sellers tend to believe a myth because they don’t really know how real estate works. I’m also not so certain that some agents don’t feed into that myth. I often find myself unwinding twisted tales that sellers believe because some agent made up crap. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they say, or maybe you would. Sellers have told me that other agents swore up and down that they had tons of buyers waiting to purchase their home. That’s crazy. It’s nuts. And it’s not the truth.

If you want to know where do buyers come from, I can tell you. But first, let me explain where they don’t come from. They don’t come from listing with an agent who promises a bunch of buyers, for one thing. Because agents do not have a bunch of buyers in their back pockets. Now occasionally, a buyer will be looking for a certain type of home and will ask to be put on a list in case that type of home comes on the market for sale. Usually, that type of home is unique and rarely for sale. Other than that, agents do not have a bunch of eager and motivated buyers on hand. Why?

Because when a buyer is eager to purchase a home, qualified and motivated, guess what happens? That home buyer is in escrow within weeks if not days. We have plenty of inventory in Sacramento now, about double since the beginning of the year. Many choices. If a buyer wants to purchase a home, there are homes to be bought. That’s what we do as agents. We find homes for buyers to purchase and we close those sales.

But to truly answer the question where do buyers come from, is to understand how the real estate market works. First, the listing agent signs a listing agreement with sellers. The information for that home is uploaded to MLS. When MLS publishes the listing, that information is also downloaded to a bazillion other websites across the internet. Some websites such as Zillow might require tweaking by the listing agent. But for the most part, it’s done automatically.

Buyers then find the home for sale online and either call the listing agent or the smarter buyers will call their own buyer’s agent.  Yet either way, the buyers find the home for sale because the listing agent is marketing the home. Buyers come from the listing agent’s marketing efforts and from MLS. They aren’t sleeping in the back of a real estate office waiting for a home to be listed. When I list your home, my goal is to find you a buyer. So that’s what I do and how it works.