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Elizabeth Weintraub
A Short Sale Home in Woodland Closes
The first time I spoke to a particular seller of a home in Woodland, this Sacramento real estate agent was in the middle of a four-day vacation in South Carolina at Hilton Head. My husband and I were driving across the island, searching for a restaurant featuring Gullah cuisine when my cellphone rang. The seller was such a refreshing voice to hear. A person who wanted my help. I like to help people, that’s why I sell real estate.
Unlike a caller earlier that day, a seller from Folsom who was furious because I had answered my phone “when I was not at home.” On a Sunday, no less. He expected me to physically be in Sacramento and was very upset that I was not, even though it didn’t make one hill of beans difference regarding the sale of his home in Folsom. He evidently believed that he knew better how to run my business than I. Not every seller is a rational person and not every seller makes sense.
This person yelled and screamed and was obnoxious. I offered to cancel the listing for him, since he was so irate. Nasty people? No time for them. So, it didn’t bother me in the least when he immediately listed with another agent at a higher price. Last I saw of his home he had canceled that listing 30 days later because no buyer in her right mind wanted to pay his price. Sometimes, these types of things are a blessing in disguise when I no longer have to deal with them.
The woman who called and needed my help wanted to sell a short sale home in Woodland as a short sale. Well, I sell hundreds of Sacramento short sales, so she came to the right person at the right time. Turned out she lived in North Carolina, and was astonished to hear I was driving around South Carolina. But she had confidence that I would sell her home. She had gone to my website and knew my experience and decades in the business. It didn’t matter to her that I was in Hilton Head at the moment.
Later that week, I met with the tenant who lived in the home in Woodland. I shot professional photographs, studied the comparable sales and the seller chose a sales price. Other real estate agents in Woodland expressed an opinion that they thought the price was too high but it was right on the money. We received an offer from a qualified buyer, the BPO came back at value, and the short sale home in Woodland closed yesterday.
The negotiations took 5 months. Two loans plus mortgage insurance, so approval was necessary from all three. The buyer waited patiently all of this time because the seller selected the right buyer from the beginning. An added bonus was the bank did not require a price increase because prices have gone up since then. That can happen with short sales that take a while to close, just fyi.
The thing is no matter where I am or what I am doing, this Sacramento real estate agent always tries to answer her phone. I continually work on selling my listings. I don’t turnover my work to an Elizabeth Weintraub Team member while I am on vacation, although I certainly could. Because I don’t have to be sitting behind my desk to sell real estate in the Sacramento Valley. That’s why we have laptops, iPads, cellphones and DocuSign. What matters is that I get the job done and my client is happy.
The Sacramento Real Estate Market Train
The fall real estate market in Sacramento is not at all how I pictured it would be. Usually, transitions are made slowly and you can see the danged train coming, but not this year. One day it was summer and the next, bare trees. This was a very abrupt change in the Sacramento real estate market. But like with all things in life, you’ve got to go with the flow and change with it.
Take home pricing, for example. Just a short while ago, a listing agent could advise her seller to price a home very aggressively. In fact, this Sacramento real estate agent would push ahead of the curve. Examine all of the comparable sales for the past 6 months, single out the best for the last 3 months, determine the direction they were moving, calculate the difference, pare it with the active listings to position and pad it a little. That strategy no longer works in today’s real estate market in Sacramento.
The reason it doesn’t work is because the attitude of buyers has changed. Buyers always drive the market, even if it’s a seller’s market. Today’s buyers are worried. They are worried that another bubble is around the corner, which it is not. They are worried about interest rates going up, as they should be concerned. They are worried about whether they’ll still have a job tomorrow and whether our government will ever get back to work.
Meanwhile, you’ve got REOs coming on the market at almost double the prices from last year. I just spotted another foreclosure this morning. This was a home that I had sold a year ago as a short sale, a cooperative short sale through Bank of America. We had the cooperative agreement signed from Bank of America and yet still the bank released the servicing just days before we were set to receive short sale approval. Bam. Now the file fell into the lap of Seterus, the seller no longer qualified for the short sale, and the home went to foreclosure.
Back on the market today, a year later, at almost double the cost. The comparables in that neighborhood do not support the price.
Today, it’s better to be sitting at the back of the train and watching where the train is moving. Catching glimpses of the front of the train going around the curve. That’s how a Sacramento real estate agent will know where the market is headed.
photo credit: White Pass Train at Skagway, Alaska, by Elizabeth Weintraub
Sacramento Real Estate Agent Award Scams
Being a Sacramento real estate agent with one ear to the ground for scams sometimes make me the lone real estate agent who will point out the emperor has no clothes when no other agent has the tenacity or guts. It’s one of the reasons why I was hired many years ago to be the home buying expert at About.com. I will tell it like it is. People count on me to give them the straight scoop. It’s in my nature.
Not to mention, I really detest being taken advantage of. Nobody likes to get dressed up on her day off, studiously explore a pocket of homes, pore over a comparable market analysis, drive to another part of town to meet a seller from the mountains and her Duck Dynasty husband, be given a tour of a home in which the occupant is baking cupcakes and not be offered one single bite, only to discover her sole purpose in that house is to confirm a sales price that the seller had already signed a listing at with some other agent. But it happens in real estate.
What I find more annoying is the clever schemes being carried out to supposedly honor real estate agents and their achievements. These scams are so clever they border on being evil. Companies exist that are making a profit selling awards they create in the form of plaques or advertising to agents they honor with an “award.” It’s kind of hard for an agent to complain about it when the agent is receiving recognition. That’s why I hold contempt for it.
Two such companies come to mind but there are others. The first is Five Star Professional. They claim that they select agents based on client surveys, but I have my suspicions. First, as an experiment, I wrote to Five Star to ask why I wasn’t listed in its 2013 agent list. Lo and behold, suddenly a survey appeared in my email in which I was asked whether I had closed a minimum number of transactions (it wasn’t very many, a bare fraction of the number I had closed last year). So, that meant the bar was relatively low.
Next thing I know, I receive an email saying I have been nominated to the 2014 Five Star Professional list. You know, I don’t even like the word “professional” as a marketing tool because it sounds so slimy. It’s not used for real professionals like a doctor or a teacher. People use professional when there is no actual business designation or the individual has no degree. So, let’s call it what it is: a real estate agent. No sooner did that email arrive than my phone rang, simultaneously, and my Caller ID showed it was Five Star Professional. They want to help me market my new award. They want to sell me advertising.
So does Real Trends Best Real Estate Agents in California. They named the Elizabeth Weintraub Team in the top 25 of all teams in California based on number of homes sold. I know how many homes I have sold and I probably do rank in the top 25, but so what? Soon I began receiving emails and faxes and voice mails from a company, evidently associated with Real Trends, that wants to sell me plaques to hang over my desk.
This is what happens to a top producing Sacramento real estate agent. But . . . these things also happen to agents who are NOT top producers. No wonder the public doesn’t know what or whom to believe.
You might ask how is this different than a newspaper or a magazine or an association that holds an award dinner, hires a celebrity speaker and then charges those who have “won an award” to attend? I’d be right there with you asking this question. But at least the winners don’t have to buy their own plaques.
How a Sacramento Real Estate Agent Uses a Mini Stylus
For a Sacramento real estate agent like me, there is little as exciting in my small world of technology than that of buying a new cellphone. About 10 years ago, I used a BlackBerry, and upgraded to a better model every chance I got. Then, I discovered an Android and bought a Samsung. Finally, man, a screen big enough that my aging eyes could actually read. The downside was the feel of the keys had vanished, making typing very difficult, swyping a pain, and the screen is impossible to read in bright sunlight.
Trade-offs. There are always trade-offs.
Of course, I can talk to my phone but my phone has a really hard time understanding me unless I talk like a robot. Slowly. Distinctly. Sing-songy voice. Imagine the stares I get from strangers on the sidewalk: talKING . . . like . . . THIS Beats trying to type. Even though I am fairly certain I have no profane words stored in my Android, you would not believe some of the stuff it thinks I say which I do not say. My worst horror is that I’ll by accident hit send to a client when it types eat shit and die.
The solution for this Sacramento real estate agent is to use a mini stylus. I am forever giving away my miniature styli. So, I bought a bag of 50 of them. This way I can color coordinate my outfits to match the stylists on my phone. I carry a few extra in my bag in case I forget and dash out the door wearing gray, for example, and sporting a bright gold stylus when maybe silver might be more appealing. See, this is the kind of attention to detail and type of back-up plans this Sacramento real estate agent deals with every day. It carries over into my personal life.
Just so you know, they also wear out. You can tear up the tip by banging too hard on the iPad playing Plants vs. Zombies or Jelly Defense.
On the downside, strangers approach me on the street and ask why I have this thing dangling from my cellphone or my iPad. When I show them how easy it is to type on your phone with it — the precision one can use to pull back and aim that slingshot for Angry Birds — everybody wants one. So, I just give them my stylus. It also helps them to remember this Sacramento real estate agent. I should print my name on them, now that I think about it.
The nice thing is the doohickey plugs right into your device so you won’t lose it. And my miniature stylus will plug very nicely into my new iPhone. I can’t wait until it arrives, and then I’ll have to buy all new apps. Rats.
Treating Sacramento Real Estate Agents Honestly in Multiple Offers
Much ado about multiple offers lately. So much of the stuff contained in the REALTOR Code of Ethics is simply good common sense for a Sacramento real estate agent to adhere to in her real estate practice, and it’s not “just words” to many agents. Not to mention, an agent can be reported to the Board of REALTORS and / or fined for violating the Code. It says things like a member needs to treat other members and clients honestly.
On the other hand, treating agents fairly means without prejudice, without discrimination, giving equal weight to all parties by being equitable, playing no favoritism, partaking in impartial dealings, being honorable. One of my goals when I am the listing agent and representing the seller in a transaction is to give buyer’s agents an opportunity to view the home and present an offer on a level-playing field. This means I am not sharing information about the content of offers with other agents unless authorized by the seller.
The Elizabeth Weintraub Team encourages buyer’s agents involved in multiple offers to submit their best offer upfront. Not every seller wants go through the counter offer stage in a multiple-offer situation. I have worked with sellers who enjoy that process, but many of them do not. Many sellers just want the best offer possible and do not want to dicker back and forth. So, agents who submit an offer and say “please counter us,” are a) doing their buyer a disservice by implying the buyer will offer more, which could possibly be breaking their fiduciary, and b) their words are falling on deaf ears if the sellers don’t want to counter.
During multiple offers for a home in Roseville yesterday, an agent pleaded and asked how high her buyer had to go to buy the home. I explained in that instance I can’t play favorites, and she needs to do the best that she can. My sellers did not authorize me to disclose offers.
I try to help my sellers weigh offers by looking at all aspects of the offer and not just the sales price. We discuss contingencies, debt ratios, FICO scores (if we get them), preapproval letters, and any special considerations an agent might include in the buyer’s offer. No financing rejections based on type of loan — cash is not king — closing escrow is king.
Ultimately, it’s always the sellers’ decision which offer to choose. Funny thing is yesterday, the sellers chose the offer from the agent who did the best that she and her buyer could do, and that agent did not receive any preemptive suggestions from me. This is the way the seller wanted it. Not to mention, what goes around in this world tends to come around. I hope when my Team sits on the other side of the table presenting an offer for a buyer, we will be treated honestly as well.
