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Elizabeth Weintraub
Dealing With Negatives in a Sacramento Listing
Some Sacramento real estate agents don’t want to say anything to a home seller that sounds negative about a home. I suspect they are afraid of offending the seller. Besides, lots of sellers don’t notice the negative aspects of their home, especially after a number of years go by. They get used to it, whatever the problems are — deferred maintenance, dated condition, undesirable location or bad layout, to name a few.
I’ll tell you who will immediately spot those problems, though, and that person is the buyer. Those problems will become drawbacks, obstacles to overcome in order to sell. If a seller and her agent do not address the negative aspects, the home won’t sell.
Of course, you know me, as a Sacramento real estate agent, I have no problem being straight with a seller. Nobody ever accuses me of skirting around the bush. I lay it on the line. It’s not always a comfortable thing to do, to be realistic and share bad news with a seller. But it’s necessary to properly do my job. I’ve got to tell sellers the bad stuff and then devise a plan to overcome a buyer’s objection.
Don’t ever bring up a problem without offering a solution — that’s my M.O.
I do that partly by figuring out who the buyer will be and appealing to what is important to that buyer. If an agent or the seller don’t know who the buyer is, how can the agent create a home marketing plan to target those specific buyers? The other thing I do is find out why the seller bought the home. Because the reason that seller bought is the same reason a new buyer will. The last thing is to address the negative. Quickly. And offer a solution for overcoming that drawback.
Smart Women Sometimes Ask for Tech Support
My husband says Betty Friedan would rollover in her grave if she knew. That my behavior would cause Gloria Steinem to wag her finger at me and cancel my membership in NOW. Asking your husband for tech support is akin, he says, to expecting Dudley Do-Right to come galloping in to untie Nell from the railroad tracks and rescue her. But I suspect he doesn’t want to make my life easier because dealing with my crises interrupts his Angry Birds game on his cellphone, although his score ranking is off the charts.
Of course, you’ve gotta define crisis. My definition of crisis is what causes my work to come to a crashing halt. My husband’s definition of crisis probably has more to do with life-or-death situations.
See, I’m one of those people who don’t like to read manuals unless I absolutely must and there’s no other alternative available. When I buy a new digital gizmo, I prefer that I figure out how to use it myself. It should be intuitive. When I’m out at a client’s home in the field, I don’t have the luxury of time to study a manual. This is one of those rare times that having a kid around the house would be useful.
My second approach to solving a problem when I can’t figure it out myself is to ask a person who either knows the answer or knows how to look up the answer. That person, in many instances, is my husband. Manuals, as a general rule, are rarely very helpful to me, especially manuals that are missing a step or translated from another language.The first thing I read is the troubleshooting chapters. The first thing my husband reads is the directions. We make a good team. I wish he would jump into real estate instead of pursuing his career in freelance journalism, but that’s gonna happen when cows fly.
I am always looking at which technology tools can improve my marketing. If I need to ask my Lyon IT department oreven my husband for tech support, that doesn’t make me a damsel in distress, right? Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. Again? Presto.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are visiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
What Neutral Carpeting Means to a Sacramento Seller
I receive a lot of interesting emails from readers all over the country. I do my best to answer questions. Many of those questions center on short sales, probably because I write a lot about short sales and have personally sold hundreds of short sales. But since selling short sales takes up a small portion in retrospect of my annual real estate sales, I also field questions on other activities such as selling homes in Land Park and home listings throughout Sacramento that are not short sales.
I’ve been in this business almost 40 years. Not many agents can say that. But some things that were true 40 years ago are still true today. Take neutral carpeting, for example.
A reader from my About.com homebuying site wrote to me in quite a huff. She was a bit perplexed that I had not yet answered her inquiry, which I had not received because so much of these types of inquires go to spam. She had a “very important question.” She and her husband had been engaged in “repeated discussions” regarding the color of the carpeting for their mother’s home. They were preparing the home for sale and could not agree on which colors constitute neutral coloring. She did not understand the word “neutral.”
At first blush, one might wonder how a person could be confused. But the more I thought about it, it’s not so unusual for some individuals, especially those from other cultures, to be perplexed. Some of us live in a white-bread world. No color at all. But other cultures are awash in color and relish color. Color is treated as a daily substance. It’s water for the thirsty, spiritual for the soul and serenity for sleep. Color brings the world alive.
However, when you are selling a home, neutral is the recommended choice of color, especially for carpeting. It evokes no emotion and does not detract from the home’s features. It presents a clean slate, a home you can move in to immediately and decorate to your preference. It’s a light beige, a sheer coffee-cream, sandy fair-skinned brown, boring pale tan, much like the photo above. Above all, it is not white.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
About Agents Who Swipe Sacramento Listings
It’s hard, at times, to tell if a person is joking around or not when you receive an email. I am not a big of fan of smiley faces, but against my better judgment, I am also guilty of slipping them into emails. That’s because not everybody gets a wry sense of humor. And sometimes I’m so busy that I literally don’t have time to make sure my parenthesis is facing the right way. It’s easy to type a frowny face by mistake. I’m so happy that you sent me a photo of your adorable baby. Frowny face.
We can all make mistakes, honest mistakes. We’re only human. But what about the people who deliberately set out to deceive and then claim they made a mistake? Or worse, don’t rectify it? And those people are Sacramento real estate agents? I ask myself if I should report them. On the one hand, I pretty much leave other agents alone and don’t turn them in, even when I spot blatant, unethical behavior. I’m not the ethics police. I also don’t have time for it.
Whether to report a violation is one thing, but another aspect is whether one should one talk about it in public. If it’s information the public should probably know, I say, yes, even if it tends to taint the profession. Other agents may disagree and say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
So, I’m just gonna tell you what happened. Without naming the website, I tried to manually post a new listing but the site told me the home was already claimed. Not surprising; it was listed before. I clicked on the details and noticed the home was listed for sale by an agent other than the previous listing agent. But it had the old listing number attached to it.
I called the seller to find out if she had any knowledge of this agent. Nope. The seller called the agent. Immediately, the agent dove into bait and switch mode. The seller made it clear that it was her home she was calling about and she was not a buyer. The agent mumbled something about this being a very confusing situation and promised to remove it.
A few days went by, and the listing was still published under that agent’s name. Hmmm. I wondered how many other Sacramento listings were swiped and misrepresented.
Usually, people who would do unethical things do other unethical things. That agent had a couple of pages filled with some other agent’s listings. I ran the first 5 addresses in MLS. Not one belonged to that agent. What a good idea, the agent might have thought. I know how to get buyers to call me. I’ll just swipe a bunch of listings, who cares if they’re even for sale or not, and post them on a website as my own. Brilliant. No, it’s stupid. And it’s unethical.
I finally notified the staff at that website, and several people responded. It’s difficult to regulate, they say. Well, how about you make the poster check a box that says, “If this listing doesn’t belong to me, I authorize you to charge my credit card a $1,000.” I heard giggles. They must have liked that idea. And the website removed the listing.
Why should the public care? Because the Internet is unregulated. It’s difficult to trust some of what you read. You should not rely on information found on websites that download data directly from MLS. Ask your agent about it. And use a smiley face in your request.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
Don’t Burn Bridges During Escrow
Your first instinct is not always reliable. I’ve learned that over the years. While I often rely on my intuition, I don’t always grab the first instinct that pops up. For example, when I put on my reading glasses this morning to peer at my monitor, my vision was blurred. My first thought was perhaps this is my free flashback. Ha, I would imagine that. But when nothing further happened, I realized that I had forgotten to remove my contacts before going to bed.
A friend called yesterday to talk about her horrible real estate transaction. She shared details about all the nasty things the buyer and the buyer’s agent had done to her since entering escrow. It was pretty clear she despised these people, and I didn’t blame her. “I was going to leave the buyers all the furnace filters,” she hissed, “But now I am taking them.” Well, I offered, make sure you don’t leave behind any aluminum foil or bottles of Windex, either. Leave the scum nothing. That made me laugh, but she wasn’t laughing. She was still furious.
I’m a firm believer of not burning bridges if one can help it. We’ve all had to deal with difficult people in our lives. We can’t change them. The only thing we can change is our attitudes.
As a Sacramento real estate agent, I advise my sellers to be nice to their buyers as well, regardless of how the buyers behave during escrow. For one thing, the sellers might want their mail forwarded. And I try to not transfer any frustrated feelings that I may be experiencing to my clients. It’s part of an agent’s job to be a buffer, not a buffoon.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
