Email Elizabeth
Elizabeth Weintraub
Why Adversarial Tactics Backfire for Sacramento Buyer’s Agents
Why do some Sacramento buyer’s agents feel it is necessary to become adversarial when they don’t get their own way and that employing aggression is the secret to winning cooperation? You would think that after a few times of getting shut down they would give up this defeatist tactic, but some don’t seem to learn from their mistakes, like the rest of us. You always get further with diplomacy than you do hostility. Honey, not vinegar, is the adage. Gosh, didn’t their mothers teach these guys anything? Were they raised in a barn?
Lobbing a phrase like whore of Satan at the listing agent will not get an offer accepted. Total opposite. A pushy attitude is likely to send an offer to the bottom of the rejected pile. Buyer’s agents would improve their buyer’s chances of offer acceptance if they behaved a bit more like, oh, I dunno, Sidney Poitier, I suppose, instead of Kanye West.
I recall way back in my career when I was just a wee lass of a Realtor in the 1970s. I was a buyer’s agent back then and not primarily a Sacramento listing agent. I came into the business believing that presenting offers in person was an excellent way to circumvent the listing agent and speak directly to the seller. Layout my buyer’s case. Show the benefits. I was so naive and determined and wet behind the ears.
Fortunately, I learned rather quickly that adversarial attacks were counterproductive, and the person with whom I should be developing a cooperative relationship was the listing agent, because the agent is the gateway to the seller. Sellers typically trust and like their Realtor. They don’t know the buyer’s agent from Joe Schmo and, in fact, the buyer’s agent represents the buyer, not the seller; sellers could give a flying fig what the buyer’s agent wants.
Sellers rely on their listing agent’s advice. Even if the listing agent is a total doofus and completely incompetent, a buyer’s agent is not about to change that relationship between the listing agent and the seller. Apart from the Realtor Code of Ethics, which prevent a buyer’s agent from interfering in a listing agent’s transaction, it’s just not a good idea to try to implement a personal agenda from an adversarial viewpoint.
Acting like a pompous bully is simply not smart, if you ask me. Yeah, alienating the seller and the listing agent from the buyer’s agent and buyer is pretty much a 100% guarantee that a buyer’s purchase offer is going nowhere, regardless of price and terms.
Why Blogs Don’t Always Have to Be About Real Estate
Because I live with myself and know what odd subjects I am capable of writing about, it should not astonish me when I spot some of the search terms that visitors to my website search for to end up here. Every time I sign on the editing page, I am greeted with the search terms recent visitors have entered into Google. Some of them make me laugh out loud. Like “do tennis balls explode in the microwave?” I could have sworn I did not write a blog in which I mentioned exploding tennis balls, but I would have been mistaken.
Just like I did not write a blog about whether counter tops should be flush with the vanity or that I did not even realize people would search for that phrase, but the answer, in case you’re wondering, is a resounding NO because water can run down the face of the cabinet and ruin it. Just like I did not write a blog about why vessel sinks don’t drain, except that I did, and I provided the solution to vessel sinks not draining.
I did not realize what a plethora of information I have shared in my blogs, real estate or not. But if it helps other people, that’s just as well because goodness knows we all need a little help now and then. If you know something that could benefit other people, you should probably share it. Unless you’re not certain. If you are feeling uneasy or uncertain about sharing certain facts, maybe you should keep your trap shut. Maybe that’s nature’s way of telling you to shut up. To stop the TMI.
I had to remove myself from a local website that I used to enjoy spending time on and reading little nuggets of wisdom on until it became a dumping ground for all crap all the crappy time. And for people to freely deposit their ignorance and share racist and bigoted views. Stuff I didn’t want to know about anybody, and now that I know about it, I wish I didn’t. They say if you sit on the sidelines and say nothing, you’re part of the problem, which is why I’d rather have nothing to do with it.
I don’t ever want to be part of the problem. We have enough problems in the world today. And there are enough things going on in Sacramento real estate on any given day to keep my fingers busy on the keyboard for years. Every so often I like to write blogs about something different. You never know what you’ll get when you click on my blog but you can rest assured that it won’t be bigoted, fascist or racist.
For help with your real estate needs, call partners Elizabeth Weintraub, Sacramento Broker, or JaCi Wallace, RE/MAX Gold at 916.233.6759.
When Does a Home Buyer get Possession?
New real estate agents have it kinda tough in a market where they are supposed to know what they don’t know, especially when it comes to the final walkthrough for the buyer. The problem seems to be that some think it’s a time for the buyer to conduct a final inspection, which it is not. I’m not sure where they get that idea, but probably from the same place that other bad ideas come from, the land of assumption. To get to the land of assumption, you’ve first got to cross the river of confusion and hope you don’t have to navigate blindfolded at high tide.
I wish there was some sort of handbook, filled with mistakes that rookie agents make, so we could buy this book and gift it to them, but life seems to do a pretty darned good job of preparing them for mistakes through the gift of consequences. It’s a good way for people to remember mistakes and not make them again. Although it can be painful.
Things are not always as logical as one might assume. For example, for some reason, a buyer’s agent thought a home would be vacant for the final walkthrough. The agent believed it would be completely void of personal belongings, including said person. This information was conveyed to the buyer as a matter of fact when it was actually a matter of a big mistake. I suppose when it’s your first deal, you don’t necessarily think through every step or you believe things will happen a certain way, even when they happen a different way.
In times of confusion like this, it’s always a good idea to read the Residential Purchase Contact. Buyer possession is handled in a paragraph under “Closing and Possession.” By default, the contract gives possession of the home to the buyer on the day of closing at 6 PM. This means the seller retains possession of the property and can keep his or her personal items in the property up until 6 PM on the date it closes.
So. if you’re planning to do a final walkthrough that morning, guess what? The seller may still be living in the home and still in the process of moving out. If that is unacceptable to the buyer, the time to address this is prior to closing, say around the time the contract is presented for acceptance or any time after that, prior to the date of closing. One does not wait until the day it is supposed to close escrow and then decide to ask the seller to vacate the premises earlier. That’s poor planning and likely to backfire.
But that’s why buyers want to hire an experienced agent to help. Buyers deserve an agent who understands buyer possession and can arrange for possession to be delivered in the manner the buyer desires.
Call partners Elizabeth Weintraub, Sacramento Broker or JaCi Wallace, RE/MAX Gold at 916.233.6759.
Why Security Questions are Impossible to Answer
What damn good is a security question if the danged question is so freakin’ difficult that you get it wrong? I understand the need for security questions for certain types of accounts because, after all, a password, coupled with an image, is not enough precaution in our cyber-hacking world. Although I’m not so certain anything is hack proof for North Korea or China. Short of an eyeball imprint. But then I watched an inflight movie on my way home from Vanuatu one winter, I Origins, which suggests that eyeballs are reincarnated, so I don’t know what to believe.
I just transferred all of my investment accounts to another brokerage, which means I needed to set up new accounts with new passwords and new security questions. Of course, I managed to lock myself out of my account because I could not remember the answers to my security questions. I could have recalled the answers if the answers were not so ambiguous. If you answer one question wrong, they go to the next question, so it’s not like you get three tries to answer a question. If you answer more than 2 questions wrong, bingo, you’re locked out. I hate it. It made me want to go back to my old life with my old securities company.
For example, in what city were you born might sound like an innocent security question until you figure out that if you were born, say, in Fort Lauderdale, would you type Ft. Lauderdale, Ft Lauderdale without the period after abbreviating Fort, Fort Lauderdale, or maybe just Lauderdale or FT? It’s also an easy word to misspell. There are options called ways to screw it up. If you complain, a person will defend it by saying just answer the way you would usually answer, but the deal is maybe you write it differently depending on the circumstances, so it could be different each time. Oy.
Then, where did you get married is a seriously impossible thing to answer. Let’s say it was like my situation, when we married over dim sum. Do I name the Chinese Restaurant? Or what about the state? Should it be specific to the city, or the major city that most people refer to? Too many variables. They could ask me the date I got married, and I could get that answer right, although there could be 16,425 choices. I’d nail that answer.
Or, where did your meet your husband? I met my husband at the airport. However, that’s not where we were introduced. But it was the first time I saw him. What do I choose?
And it goes on down the list. It asks for Best or your Favorite. I don’t have Bests or Favorites. For example, I do not have a favorite color. Some days I like purple. Other days, it could be pink or maybe red or even royal blue. I have my orange moments like any decent girl seeking a bit of excitement. Orange is pretty thrilling. And I simply adore wearing an emerald green dress. When it comes to my favorite color for cars, my tastes are more simple such as white or silver. If I’m talking about selling a home in Sacramento, then yellow is the preferred color for flowers. See how difficult this is?
The problem is the older you get, the more variety and flexibility you seem to develop in your life. Nothing is cast in black and white, and everything comes in shades of gray. Not 50 of them, either. There are many variables depending on how you look at a situation. I don’t apply the same selling strategy to every client because every seller is unique. There are no off-the-shelf answers for anything, not even for security questions. The best I can hope for is not to be asked a security question.
Chickens in the Road and Fairytale Town
My office is always running some kind of “togetherness” team-building promotional event for its real estate agents, but expecting this Sacramento REALTOR to dress up like a chicken should not be one of them. To be fair, this did not happen in real life but it is what I dreamed last night, and let’s face it, sometimes dreams turn into reality; at least mine often do.
They styled my hair into a chicken comb — btw, am I the only person in the world to google: what is the name of the thing on top of a chicken’s head — and dressed me in white skinny-leg pants, paired with a yellow top and painted scary looking chicken toes on my feet. It was some sort of Mardi Gras party and there was me, dressed like a chicken. You know, I can see the reason I had that dream. But it’s not what you are probably thinking.
When I was in Molokai earlier this month, one thing you can’t help but notice is all of the red hens and roosters –chickens, running in the wild. You see them everywhere on the island, pecking in the grass, sprinting through the trees along side the road. If you ask Don, who looks like he’s been driving Midnight Taxi for decades, he’ll tell you it’s because the plantation guys brought in chickens around the turn of the 20th Century for cockfights. He’ll also groan about the guy on Kamehameha Highway who won’t share his mangoes with anybody, even if you politely ask.
On top of that, I spotted a chicken yesterday walking around the parking lot outside of Fairytale Town. I suppose they can fly. Or maybe some careless kid left a gate open. It was strutting back and forth, wondering why it had black tar under its feet instead of sand, I imagine, or maybe it was enjoying exploration beyond the fence and sending text messages back to the other chickens: nope nothing here in the parking lot except for some Sacramento REALTOR pounding on her cellphone and blowing up Ingress portals.
I felt the need to stop at Fairytale Town on my way home to Land Park after shooting photos of a new listing in Freeport Park, just across the road from Hollywood Park. The portals beckoned. For more info, call Elizabeth Weintraub, 916.233.6759. There are a ton of Ingress portals at Fairytale Town. And that one chicken running loose.
