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Elizabeth Weintraub
One Way to Handle Christmas
My family was so poor in the 1950s that my drunken excuse for a father always bought our tree at a huge discount on Christmas Eve. After the bars closed. He told us kids that Santa Claus brought it at midnight, along with all of our presents. In a way, it was pretty cool because I never knew for certain whether it might be Christmas when I woke up. Stumbling around the corner, tightly clutching my robe — due to the fact that all of the heat was turned off at night and you could see your breath in the morning — I first sniffed the scent of pine needles before spotting all the decorations, the tree, and the half-chewed ribbons on the presents under it, and our dog, Lulu, slopping all of the water out of the tree stand. Christmas was a big deal.
Before global warming, we almost always had snow for Christmas in Minnesota, mounds and mounds of white, covered in a thin glaze of sugar, gleaming in the winter sun. Then, I grew up and realized how cold it is in Minnesota: bone-chilling, with iced earlobes that hurt like hell from frozen metal earrings, and snot-freezing in your nose, kind of cold. I moved to Colorado and then eventually to California, the land of Santa Clauses tied to palm trees.
I still carried on the tradition of Christmas. Some years I would fly home to Minneapolis, back when airline travel was glamorous, the golden era. Women wore hose and white gloves and little hats. I flew on the discounted student travel fare, which meant I could share the same space as those who paid 75% more and still smoke out my brains. Seats were roomy and comfortable. Today, the airlines have made travel so completely hellish that you pretty much are forced to fly business or first class if you don’t want to be stuffed into a can of sardines with the lid rolled up and locked.
If I didn’t fly home, I decorated the house and bought a Christmas tree. For my first Christmas away from home and on my own, I insisted on trudging through the woods to find a wild tree, chopped it down and hauled it home. As the years progressed, I was content to stop by a local Christmas tree stand and buy the biggest tree I could find, slap it on the roof of my car, tie myself in so I couldn’t open the doors and drive home with it.
After 30 years of this nonsense, I felt an urge to graduate to the (heaven forbid) artificial tree, but it had to be all white, flocked and enormous, which I figured would save me money year after year. As with most purchases that lose luster after a while, I began to yearn for a new tree, one not quite so big and not flocked (dropping bits the cats puked), and just plain green. A plain, artificial, green tree.
When that got to be too much work, I downsized to the four-foot tree you can buy at Target, the kind that comes with all of the lights attached, so all you have to do is a buy a box of miniature bulbs for decoration, the very same tiny bulbs the cats will knock off and bat around the house, right after they try to run up the tree.
After my mother died and we moved to Sacramento, the thought crossed my mind that we could get a smaller tree, perhaps the 10-inch-high standard issue desktop tree, but that seemed a bit ridiculous. Besides, by now I had married a Weintraub who did not share my Christmas tree traditions, which were dwindling, or personal views of Christmas, none of which was religious.
Instead, it seemed to make more sense to take a winter holiday over Christmas. Every year we go away on an extended vacation to some place exotic and warm. For many years, it had been trips to the Hawaiian Islands. In 2009, we toured Viet Nam and Cambodia. Last year it was French Polynesia. No tree. No presents. No glitz. No commercialism.
Tomorrow we go to the Florida Keys and new people move into our house to care for the cats in our absence. I wonder if our house sitters will miss the Christmas tree and decorations? They never say anything about it. I suppose they think we are both Jewish.
When the Mortgage Loan Officer Comes a Callin’
As the holidays draw near and business slows a little bit . . . seems like the perfect time for mortgage loan officers to jump on the horn and start dialing-for-dollars every top producer Sacramento real estate agent who answers her cell. Which means they probably don’t get an opportunity to talk to very many real estate agents in the Sacramento Valley, except for me. Because I do answer my cell.
The story is always the same. They are calling because they all of a sudden noticed that I close an unusually high volume of homes in Sacramento — much more than the average agent — so they figure, I suppose, that if they could align themselves with a winner, why, they would be a winner, too. Because most of these guys and, for some reason, they are almost always men, don’t have enough real estate business. Some of the mortgage loan officers, apparently, are relatively new to the mortgage loan business.
They are smart enough to figure out that they need to give an agent an incentive to work with them, but not smart enough to figure out that the agent didn’t become a top producer without a strong mortgage loan officer or two or three at her side. We’ll give you lots of seller and buyer leads, they promise. Yeah, because they have so many leads right now that they need to call a Sacramento real estate agent and beg for business, right?
Do I look like a person who fell off a turnip truck? Do they even know what that phrase means?
Why doesn’t their manager or mentor explain that a new mortgage loan officer starting out in the business would do better to match himself to a brand new agent? They can pick and choose a promising agent, a hard-working agent, and then go up the ladder with a soon-to-be top achiever, instead of banging their heads back and forth in the door jamb.
Because there is nothing a Sacramento real estate agent likes better than to answer her phone and find out it’s a solicitation call. I wish them Happy Holidays, but I can’t help them. Besides, I am off to the Florida Keys to continue my real estate business from this year’s winter getaway on the water. I’ll chat with clients while flamingoes strut about in the sand, but God help the phone solicitors.
Why Do People Start a Real Estate Career?
Few people know that I bought my first real estate brokerage at age 26. That’s sort of an anomaly, especially for a woman back in 1978. It’s even odder today because there are so few young people in real estate. Why, according to the National Association of REALTORS, the median age of a real estate agent today is 57. I imagine, however, that due to the troubled state of our economy, that median age is about to change.
Why do people start a real estate career? I’ll tell you why but agents aren’t gonna like it. They go into real estate because they can’t get a job doing anything else. That’s the truth. They are misfits. They either can’t conform to the outside workplace or else they can’t get a job.
It used to be mostly the rebels who sought out real estate careers, because in the 1970s, an agent didn’t need even a high school education. It was only over the past dozen years or so that education requirements for brokers were put into place. Today, to get a real estate license in California, apart from passing an examination, applicants must also complete a series of 3 real estate classes and be fingerprinted / checked by the F.B.I. As long as a person doesn’t have an arrest record (and there’s some question about that), just about anybody can get a real estate license.
I came into the business because I was already had a real estate career as an escrow officer. I was swamped revamping deals by helping agents salvage their blown-up transactions due to 18%-and-rising interest rates when I suddenly realized I was on the wrong side of the business. On top of this, I had completed real estate and escrow courses, carrying 20 credits a year, through a community college in Orange County, California, while working full-time at a title company. Not your normal Sacramento real estate agent entry to the business.
But today, we have a wide spread of unemployed people, kids graduating from college who can’t find a job, no matter what. Kids struggling to make it through college who can’t graduate because they can’t get into the necessary classes. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the over-50 group getting laid off. Companies can hire cheaper labor if they can dump expensive overhead. There is little loyalty between employees and corporations. It seems that the majority of people employed full-time are those in-between the 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds.
This means we’ve got this huge group of young people and all of us older people who can’t find work. I see that Warren Buffet is concentrating on young people, trying to pull them into the business. That’s a smart move. That’s what I’m telling my niece to do. Go into real estate. Start a real estate career. She might find that she has a passion for the business. She’s outgoing, personable, smart and hard-working. She seems to gain considerable personal satisfaction from helping other people.
The money is nothing to sneeze at, either.
You hear that, Laura?
You Can Keep a Short Sale Off Your Credit Report
There are short sale sellers in Sacramento who do not know that if they fit the guidelines, it is possible to do a short sale, be current on your mortgage payments, and NOT have a short sale show up on your credit report after closing. In fact, there can be no ding to credit whatsoever and a seller can go out the next day and buy a new home, if she so desires. They don’t know this because a) their Sacramento short sale agent doesn’t know it, or b) their short sale agent doesn’t want to bother with it because the agent just wants to close the deal the fastest and easiest way possible.
Everybody knows that if a seller is in default, that short sale has a greater chance of being approved, even if there is no hardship. That’s the easy road for lots of agents with short vision. They tell their sellers to stop making mortgage payments so they can do the short sale, but that is not always necessary.
Granted, I don’t have a lot of sellers who fit the parameters to be current, but when it’s a possibility, it’s often worth it to give it a shot. I have to do what is best for my sellers — as hokey as that might sound to some of you, it’s the truth.
Sometimes, it doesn’t work out. When it doesn’t, then the alternative is to go into default. Of course, the bank won’t tell you that. The bank will almost always never directly say that a seller needs to stop making her mortgage payment. Think about being a shareholder of that bank. Do you want that bank telling customers to go into default? No, you don’t. A bank will instead say there is no hardship.
You will look at the hardship letter you wrote and say yes, there is a hardship. What is wrong? The key is the seller is not in default. Stop paying at that point and, when the seller is 30 to 60 days in arrears, that short sale will most likely get approved. But if you want to try to do a short sale while you are current, hire a smart Sacramento short sale agent who knows how to do it.
My Book About Remodeling and Finishing an Unfinished Home
I want to write another book, this time about the 9 months of my life that I invested 20 years ago in remodeling and finishing off an unfinished home with my two bare hands. I am feeling compelled, a strong drive, like it’s something I need to write, and I believe people would like to read it. You can give birth in 9 months but instead of working on having a baby, I did nothing else but work on a split-level home. 14 to 18 hours a day. All by myself, then, at age 41, listening to my biological clock tick.
You would think a person would not tackle a project like that without a background in construction or building, but then you would be thinking about somebody else. Not a person like me. There were lots of reasons why I wanted to finish building and remodeling that unfinished home — particularly to show how a woman with no experience nor special talents for power tools could do it. It was immensely pleasurable, horribly painful and incredibly powerful.
‘Twas an amusing and unusual trip. I had no job when I bought the house and was unemployed when I closed escrow, but in the middle I landed a gig that allowed me to qualify for a conventional loan to buy the home. If I had a client who tried to do that, I’d say she was nuts and would refuse to represent her. Three weeks into escrow, I was unexpectedly fired. Yet, the sale closed, and then I focused all of my energy on finishing the lower level and remodeling the upper.
As I pieced together some of the ideas in my proposal, I wondered where I would find an agent to help me find a publisher. My outline included flashbacks to when I used to live high on the hog, selling real estate in Newport Beach, before I lost everything and ended up divorced and penniless in Minnesota. I considered how to offer small glimpses of my future — eventually selling hundreds of homes in Sacramento. Maybe I would talk about my online dating strategy and how well that actually worked out, being in the right place at the right time as one of the very first subscribers to AOL.
Then it dawned on me. Duh. Wait a minute. I already have an agent. I have an agent who negotiated the book deal for The Short Sale Savior. How could I forget I have an agent? I would contact her. Yeah, that was a brilliant idea. I quickly dashed off a letter to my agent, explaining my idea in great detail. Two days went by and she did not respond. While I was in the middle of explaining to a buyer’s agent what I needed to present her offer, my email dinged. Yes, it was from my literary agent. Yes, yes, yes.
My heart leaped a little. I clicked. I read the email 3 times because I could not believe my agent had turned me down. She said publishers do not offer book deals anymore unless the author is a celebrity and has her own platform to promote the book. She wasn’t interested. Well, I guess that means I won’t be working with her. But it doesn’t mean I won’t write it, and it certainly doesn’t mean I won’t find a publisher.
I didn’t get to where I am today by taking no for an answer.
