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Elizabeth Weintraub
A Tip for Sacramento Listing Agents About Showing Followups
My personal belief, as a top-producing Sacramento real estate agent, is every single one of my sellers deserves to hear about all of their showing activity. I mean, just put yourself in your seller’s shoes. Your home is for sale, you see business cards on the table when you come home so you know agents have shown it, but you hear nothing from your Sacramento listing agent about those showings? You would have no idea about what’s going on if your agent doesn’t follow up.
And that is not a good place for a seller to be. That, people, is a place of anxiety. My intentions are to never make my sellers anxious or stressed out. Part of my job as their listing agent is to make the process of selling a home in the Sacramento Valley move as smoothly as possible for my sellers, with the fewest hiccups and disruptions.
For example, even if I have nothing to say, if for some reason there has been no showings for a week and not much has happened in the neighborhood, I still try to check in with my sellers and provide them with updates, even if it’s nothing more than # of hits in MLS. For crying out loud, something probably sold within 6-block radius or a new home came on the market, and sellers might want to get that information from their Sacramento listing agents. You think?
I am constantly analyzing why a home might not yet have an offer. The difference between me and another agent is I try to share those thoughts with my sellers — to come up with a new strategy if my existing strategy is not giving us the results we want. With some homes, we just need to wait, be patient and continue present marketing because there might not be as many home buyers in that particular price range.
But to not follow up after an actual showing by a buyer’s agent with buyers in tow, well, that’s unthinkable in my book. Following up with the buyer’s agent is easy, yet many agents don’t do it. They say buyer’s agents don’t respond, and that’s true, some of them don’t. But some provide valuable buyer feedback. By contacting buyer’s agents, I’m also giving them my email address so they can quickly address a concern their buyer might have had but they didn’t yet have time to ask me.
Here’s how Sacramento listing agents can do it. Go to MLS and click on your listing to open it. Click on the box that says “SUPRAweb Showing Activity,” which is located under the row of photos on the very left of the page. That will open a small window in your browser showing all of the activity for that particular home. Don’t stop there. Instead, click on Log On to SupraWEB, on the right-hand side. Sign in with your user name and password.
This will take you to your Showing Dashboard, which reveals all the showings for all of your listings. You can change your dashboard date range but I keep mine set to the past 2 days because I constantly check this dashboard. Right there, in front of your face, are the emails, times accessed and all of the information you need about every single buyer’s agent who showed your listing. Click on the email, and it will automatically open an email for you to send the buyer’s agent a message.
And there you have it. Now you have no excuse not to keep your sellers updated with feedback from agents who have showed their homes. This makes your sellers happy, both of you informed, and it gives you a chance to build a rapport with the buyer’s agent.
Sacramento Short Sales Mortgage Debt Relief IRS Letter
Sacramento sellers who expect to close on a short sale in 2014 have a very good reason to send flowers to Sen. Barbara Boxer and, while they’re at it, maybe C.A.R. as well. I received the best news this morning, which I can’t wait to share with everyone because it’s about mortgage debt relief. Taxation on mortgage debt relief has been on the tongue of every single short sale seller I have talked to who might have to close escrow next year.
In a nutshell, we have no worries about federal taxation on mortgage debt relief resulting from most closed short sales in California from here on out. Other states, they probably have cause for concern, but not California. What makes California so special apart from our sunny weather, smog-hidden mountains and polluted oceans, and let’s not forget Cal Worthington? We’ve got California Civil Code 580e, resulting from the passing several years ago of SB 458.
Under ordinary circumstances, the federal tax code says if a person has had debt canceled, the amount that was forgiven is subject to taxation. However, in 2007, the Mortgage Debt Forgiveness Act passed that says taxation on canceled debt does not apply to a short sale, subject to certain criteria. Every year, the mortgage debt relief protection has expired and every year the federal government has extended it. This year, it’s not yet been extended because our lovely legislators continue to wrap in the mortgage debt relief extension with other legislation that won’t get passed even if they lined up every legislator against the wall, blindfolded them and threatened to shoot them all at will.
This political game has caused short sale sellers in Sacramento extraordinary grief and stress. Many of my sellers have called to say they don’t know what they will do if we can’t close their short sale by December 31st, 2013, when the federal mortgage debt relief protection expires.
However, the argument brought forth to the I.R.S. by Sen. Barbara Boxer, with C.A.R.’s assistance, is that sellers are released from personal liability in a short sale under California Civil Code 580e, and that makes short sales non-recourse, so why should a seller be subject to federal taxation on top of it? The I.R.S. agreed and issued a letter that said California short sales protected by our California Civil Code 580e are not subject to federal taxation for mortgage debt relief. This is huge!
C.A.R. and Sen. Barbara Boxer are working on a similar letter from the state of California, which is expected to follow suit.
Why Other Curtis Park Agents Gave This Seller a Higher Price
A seller in Curtis Park wants to put her home on the market next year and is looking for a Sacramento real estate agent now. She is calling agents to find out how how much her home is worth today. Listing now or waiting for spring is a hot discussion for many sellers at the moment, but the fact remains the price an agent names today is not the price the home will be worth next spring. That home in Curtis Park could be worth more or it could be worth less.
Plus, if it’s a Curtis Park home that few people want to buy due to location, condition or the seller insists on an over-the-top-of-market price, it could not sell at all. That’s always a very real possibility that few want to face.
I am always happy to talk with sellers who have future plans and are not ready to act right now. For one thing, if they are calling a bunch of other real estate agents, it’s probable many of those agents won’t still be in the real estate business by the time the seller is ready, which certainly decreases my competition — day after day I receive notifications via LinkedIn of agents who used to work in real estate and have since taken jobs in other industries. But I also want to remain in sellers’ minds when they are ready to list a home.
If they forget my last name, they can do something simple like go to Goggle and put in Elizabeth and Sacramento Real Estate, and out of the top 5 hits, four will be me. Or, they can just search on the keywords “Elizabeth Sacramento,” and in the middle of links for the incredibly delectable Ginger Elizabeth chocolate store in Midtown, they’ll find my website. It’s easy to find Elizabeth Weintraub on Google.
This particular seller remembered my name, though, because she contacted me a second time. By now, she has talked to other real estate agents, and she says two of them gave her a higher price than I did, and they both outbid each other. It’s so frustrating when this happens because I don’t want to say anything bad about another real estate agent, and I understand why they feel the need to falsify information to the seller, but to intentionally lie is considered unethical.
They don’t see it as lying. Because that would make them bad people. They see it as being overly optimistic. They hope if it doesn’t sell at the price they name, well, the seller will be willing to lower the price.
The seller doesn’t see it as lying because she just wants the top price and doesn’t really understand, I suspect, that she sets the price, not the agent. The price has to be based on something, though, such as comparable sales, what similar homes have sold at and not plucked from thin air simply to try to win a listing.
I suggested the seller call a couple more Curtis Park agents to see if she can’t push the price up. Get a couple more bidding against each other to try to win the listing. I was kidding with her, of course, because the price is really whatever the buyer will pay. I don’t choose the sales price. I give sellers enough information as to why I believe a certain home sales price will work, and I substantiate it by identifying homes within a 1/2 mile radius that are the same condition, location, type and age, and similar square footage.
The seller chooses the price and the market takes it from there. Buyers for a home in Curtis Park have the final word.
Remember, the seller has the first word, the agent second. The seller always picks the price. Sellers should choose an agent they like and trust and not the agent who pops up waving her bidding fan sporting the highest number, like at an auction.
Should NAR Rank Real Estate Agents?
All holy heck broke loose recently over the National Association of REALTORS endorsing an AgentMatch ranking system, which matches visitors to its website with real estate agents who belong to NAR. It’s a way to rank real estate agents. There has been a lot of yelling and screaming about it. The main problem is a good portion of agents would receive no leads. By a good portion, I’m talking about 90 to 95% of all real estate agents.
These are agents who also pay dues to be a member of the trade association, NAR. A trade association which allegedly believes some of its members deserve more recognition than others. Never before, really, has an agent’s production been made public knowledge. It’s like taking the curtain off income and letting everybody know exactly how much real estate agents make. Some of us make millions and some of us make thousands. Nobody in either camp really want this information to be public knowledge because, quite frankly, except for the IRS, it’s nobody’s business.
Some of the ranking criterium will depend on income (number of homes sold) but it also shows ratios, which are often useless and market dependent. Further, the rankings reflect days on market for listings, as though that has something to do with the real estate agent’s performance. We are not magicians. We cannot waive days on market nor decrease days on market. Anybody who has ever had to interview a real estate agent realizes that.
But overall, it basically says a consumer should chose a top-producing agent. You would think that would delight this Sacramento real estate agent because I rank fairly high and would receive a ton more leads, but it’s unfair. I’m sure NAR will find a way to make it fair such as by charging agents more money to be listed or some such, just like other real estate websites do now. If you see an agent showcased on Zillow or Trulia, trust me, the agent paid for that privilege.
In the end it comes down to how smart are consumers, how mad are real estate agents and how determined is NAR?
Predictive Analysis for Sacramento Real Estate in 2014
When it comes to the Sacramento real estate market for 2014 and NAR’s new focus group for Predictive Analysis, I say Predictive Analysis, my schmalysis. For starters, it’s sort of an oxymoron. For enders, it’s supposed to “solve complex problems in the housing industry,” among other remarkable features and benefits. It promises to help us all make better data-driven decisions.
If you want to know where the real estate market in Sacramento is going, you really don’t need to look any further than Trendgraphix and your own front steps, providing your home is for sale. As a consumer, you can read what the top-producing agents in the industry have to say about their business. Because I sell more homes than a good real estate agent on an average day, I see an abnormally high number of real estate transactions in Sacramento. We are the people media turn to when they want to know what’s happening in Sacramento because we have our fingers emerged in real estate every single day.
I use my knowledge to help my clients make decisions. I can pretty much accurately predict where the market is moving because I note trends. The secret is what happened yesterday is fairly certain to happen today, to more or less the same degree. And what happens today is more or less certain to happen tomorrow.
A spike is unpredictable.
To help our clients, what a Sacramento real estate agent (and agents everywhere in America) need to do to is a) listen to them, b) provide them with information to make educated decisions, and then c) make it happen. Just like we’ve always done.
But if NAR wants to call it Predictive Analysis and sell snake oil to us off the back of a truck, though, I’m predicting we’ll buy it.
