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Elizabeth Weintraub
The Lead Based Paint Disclosure for Sacramento Sellers
One of the (many) problems inherent in selling a home yourself as a for sale by owner is FSBOs typically don’t have the seller disclosures. All sellers in California are required to disclose certain conditions and information about a home. Most of the time, a seller never gives these things a second thought because her agent handles that for her by providing the forms. We are constantly, as Sacramento real estate agents, thinking about managing risk for our sellers and, by extension, ourselves.
I try to have that “disclosure talk” involving potential lawsuits with each and every one of my sellers. I must put the fear of god into them because of the way some respond. For example, yesterday, a seller sent me a series of emails about whether his home has or does not have lead-based paint. He couldn’t remember when he bought the home what the seller at that time had disclosed. He wanted to make sure he disclosed the same thing. I love sellers like him to pieces. They are conscientious.
The lead-based paint form is a federal form that is required for every California real estate transaction in which the home was built prior to 1978, and I use it for transactions involving newer homes as well. You never know where a person might buy lead-based paint. It’s still sold in some states.
The lead-based paint form states there might be lead-based paint in the home. It puts a buyer on notice that if a buyer is concerned, the buyer needs to further investigate. This might involve having the paint tested. There is also another law that says you can’t hire a painter to paint a home who doesn’t comply with lead-based paint removal procedures.
My seller wanted a yes or no answer. Should he say yes he has lead-based paint or should he say no, he does not. Not everything in life requires a yes or no answer. Some things simply need to be disclosed and a seller should disclose what a seller knows for certain to be true. My seller was pretty happy yesterday that he had a real estate agent. While we can’t fill out these forms for our sellers, we can direct and help them to make the right decisions.
Looking for a Small Condo or Fixer Homes in Sacramento?
There is a big market in Sacramento for fixer homes, believe it or not. Every day it seems I receive an email from some newly formed LLC begging for listings and offering to work with me if I’ll let them know when a fixer hits the market. As though I will treat them any differently than any other buyer. They’ll find out about the listing when everybody else finds out about it, when it hits MLS.
Why they write to me, I don’t know. All new listings in Sacramento are updated within minutes on my website.
Maybe they don’t know any better, but I doubt it. I suspect it’s something more sinister than that, but maybe I give them too much credit. It’s so cute — some of the calls are from individual investors from the Bay area who probably stare at their image in a mirror all day long. They act as though they are this rare and precious commodity, a cash investor. They are often the 20th such investor that day who has called. And I’m not the only Sacramento real estate agent they are calling. They are calling all the top listing agents in Sacramento and offering to work with them. What a waste of time.
But I did list two new homes yesterday. If you are looking for a home in south Sacramento that needs a little TLC, check out this 3 bedroom, 2 bath home on almost a 1/4 acre. It features a raised fireplace with an insert in the living room, breakfast nook in the kitchen, and a giant yard with 3 outbuildings that could probably be used for storage. It needs a little paint and new flooring. 6820 Sandrock Way, Sacramento, CA 95828. Offered at $159,000, Elizabeth Weintraub, 916 233 6759, Lyon Real Estate.
I’ve also got a condo in the gated community of Amherst Place. It’s an upper floor unit with two levels, bed and bath on each, perfect for roommates. Decent shape. Indoor stacked laundry. Fireplace in living room. HOA dues are $245 a month and include a swimming pool. Offered as a short sale at $90,000, and the servicer is Green Tree; the investor is Fannie Mae, which means the price could be higher depending on the comparable sales at time of sale. 1019 Dornajo Way, #229, Sacramento, CA 95825. Offered at $90,000, Elizabeth Weintraub, 916 233 6759, Lyon Real Estate.
See, I don’t always list the high end stuff. Sometimes, I sell the fixers, and that’s OK. Just don’t call and beg me to work with you. You can just write an offer, like anybody else.
About Buying a Home in East Sacramento
My hairdresser in East Sacramento was getting married last Thursday so I had to get my hair done on a Sunday. Which is OK, I guess, at least this way I don’t have to style today, as long as I didn’t toss and turn all night and let our new kitten Tessa throw up on my head, and I think I’m good there. It was while I was sitting in the salon on a Sunday afternoon touching up what she calls my sparkles, when I realized my hairdresser needs to buy a home.
Wait a minute. Sparkles, what are sparkles, you might ask? I asked that myself because for a moment I thought perhaps diamonds were a thing of the past, like Bruce Jenner’s face. I swear he no longer looks like a man, he looks like a woman. And I wouldn’t know that if I wasn’t sitting in a hair salon on a Sunday afternoon peering at the cover of People Magazine and discussing Sparkles.
Sparkles are gray roots. Yes, one of these days I’ll get around to letting my hair grow out its natural color just so I can see what it is, but for now, I don’t have that kind of luxury of time. If I have gray roots, I color them. I am jealous of the women who don’t have to mess with that, but then again, you still need to get your hair cut unless you want to look like Albert Einstein, or maybe Morticia Addams — the latter is the direction I’m heading.
Rather than spend my time at the salon catching up on all of the pop culture stuff I’m better off not knowing about, I used that time to talk with my hairdresser about buying a home. She has two incomes, a spouse, decent jobs, and she’s tired of living in an apartment. She needs a house. So, if she’s gonna buy a house, she may as well get started on the right path.
It’s funny what you hear yourself say when you spend time talking to a person who doesn’t know anything about buying a home. This particular couple will probably buy a two-bedroom, 1 bath, maybe about 1,000 square feet, and I predict it will be an older home somewhere in Midtown or among smaller bungalow homes in East Sacramento. However, my hairdresser needs to learn about home repair. Take responsibility for fixing up her new home; I insisted, it’s empowering, too. Unfortunately, she believes she can find whatever she needs to know about home repair on the Internet.
Only if she chooses wisely. Doesn’t end up electrocuting herself.
So, yesterday we talked mostly about debt ratios and finding out how much she and her spouse pay each and every month for bills and living expenses. Her first step is to talk with a mortgage broker and get pre-approved. If she needs to pay down debt, now is a good time to get started. I have plenty of time to help her out, lots of patience, and I’m in no rush. My experience says, once she catches the fever, she may be the impatient one, though.
Another Sacramento Home Has Closed Escrow
Want to read about a Sacramento home that closed escrow without a hitch? It’s not often in this Sacramento real estate market that I am afforded the opportunity to gush about what a smooth transaction we just closed because in squirrelly times like the present, the real estate business is typically anything but smooth. The escrow that just closed, with the exception of the document delay on Wells Fargo’s end, presented no problems at all. It was a miracle, in retrospect. I will probably close more than 100 homes again this year and, when I can count smooth closings on one hand, I consider myself and those around me fortunate.
No agent is an island in this business. I might be a rock but I am not an island. I need my team members, escrow officer, transaction coordinator, lenders, title company, appraisers, office assistants and, most important, the agent on the other side to successfully close.
The trick is to not burden the client with every little hiccup in a transaction. That’s one of the reasons home sellers and buyers hire a Sacramento real estate agent — it’s to be a buffer. This doesn’t mean we don’t disclose what’s going on, but there are some behind-the-scenes situations that don’t affect the parties and the parties might be better off not hearing about it, until it closes, if ever. There is no reason on god’s green earth to make other people miserable if they can be spared.
That’s why Powers that Be created real estate agents. We are the ones who often bear the brunt of the transaction. We take the punches so our clients don’t have to.
The agent I worked with on this last transaction was wonderful. She worked tirelessly to meet the demands of the escrow, and I would eagerly work with her again in a heartbeat. Many agents are fabulous in this business and will do whatever it takes to close. In the beginning, though, her buyer was a little bit wary and not as optimistic as his agent.
The home that sold was newer, built in 2010, so we weren’t overly worried about defects or problems, although every single home on the face of the planet will have some kind of defect. There are no perfect homes out there. But because so many escrows lately have developed problems midway through after buyers discover a small defect and suddenly wanted to renegotiate or lower the price, the seller, on advice from a legal friend, elected to be upfront about what she expected. Cut off that behavior at the pass.
In the counter offer, she explained the Sacramento home was sold in its AS IS condition. Yes, that verbiage is in the contract, but few pay attention to it. She simply asked the buyer to agree not to request repairs nor try to renegotiate, regardless of what a home inspection may reveal. The buyer was worried that he could not cancel, but after he thought about it he realized that was not really a valid concern. The seller wanted assurance of some sort that when she removed her home from the market, the buyer would not continue to negotiate.
She wanted the AS IS clause to mean AS IS. Not maybe. There are buyers in Sacramento who have no intention of closing on the sales price they offer. They know it when they write the offer. These types of buyers plan to further reduce the price after the home has been removed from the market for a few weeks. That’s a sneaky way to do business.
Some buyers don’t know when the negotiations have ended. Some negotiations, on the the other hand, never end. But this one did. It stopped at the counter offer. The buyers agreed and the escrow closed, as they say in Shakespeare, without further ado, sigh no more.
Home Staging in Sacramento is Worth It
There are some markets in which a Sacramento real estate agent can barely get her sign planted in the front yard before her email starts dinging with purchase offers, which can make home staging pretty much overkill. This Sacramento fall market of 2013 is NOT one of those markets. Oh, but you might say there isn’t much inventory, but there is almost twice as much inventory as we had last spring. But half of that inventory is overpriced or a mess. So, in that regard, you’d be right, there isn’t much inventory.
This means if you want to sell your home quickly, without a lot of fuss and for a decent price, you’ll need to do home staging. You can hire a professional stager or you can do it yourself with your listing agent’s help, but for best results, get the home staged. This doesn’t mean you need to be deceptive, but your home is now a product and must be sold like a product. When a buyer walks into your house, she better be walking into a commercial that says buy me as she rounds every corner.
Agents are influenced as well, and while you would think an agent can look past the disarray, it is never a good idea to let a buyer’s agent view a home in less than stellar condition. I made that mistake once a number of years ago, and I allowed agents to preview a home that wasn’t ready for the market. Beds were unmade, toys strewn about the floor and clutter everywhere. I thought the agents could see past it, but they couldn’t. That image was ingrained in their minds, and it took me a long time to sell that home, even after it was fixed up and ready for sale.
Now, my policy is nobody gets in to see a home before it is staged and ready. Of course, not every seller is willing to stage. It doesn’t mean I won’t list the home because I will, and I will eventually sell it, too. Just not as fast. And maybe for not as much. Like I said, not every market requires staging. But this fall market in Sacramento definitely is screaming for quality inventory in tip top shape.
