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Elizabeth Weintraub
A Good Reason to Do HAFA Short Sales in Sacramento
Several years ago, no Sacramento short sale agent I know was very happy with the way government short sales were run. But today it’s a different story. At least for the HAFA short sales. I am a Certified HAFA Specialist. It’s one of the few designations I felt it was important to get because it’s a certification in which I could learn something that I did not already know. A HAFA short sale is complicated because each is a little bit different, depending on the lender, and the Supplementals just keep coming. But every so often, you hit pay dirt.
I just closed a HAFA short sale over in Del Paso Manor. This was a home that the seller had tried to do a loan modification on for about two years. In fact, I don’t think she made a payment for two years while she struggled with this loan modification. Ocwen gave her the runaround like many banks do with loan modifications. I suspect, and I don’t know this to be a fact, but I suspect that banks really prefer to do a short sale. And whenever I am faced with a really difficult short sale, say, one in which the seller has, oh, over a million dollars in the bank, I will do a HAFA short sale. The guy with the million bucks did not live in Del Paso Manor.
I’m not telling you which of my short sales is or was the one with a guy who has over a million dollars in the bank. Just suffice to say that I suspect banks are a bit more lenient when granting a HAFA short sale than they are to do a traditional short sale. Believe it or not, the paperwork is reduced for a HAFA short sale these days. Not only that, but as long the boxes are checked and the hardship verified, the bank will probably not ask about the million dollars in the bank while processing a HAFA.
Banks get paid to do a HAFA short sale. The government pays the banks. The government will allow up to $3,000 as a relocation incentive payment to the seller as long as the seller occupies the home. Otherwise, that money goes to the tenant or it’s just not allowed if the home is vacant. But just because the seller might not receive a relocation incentive is no reason not to do a HAFA if your short sale appears to have no hardship. Think about this. Because as a Sacramento short sale agent, I surely do. It’s why I close so many short sales in Sacramento!
Not to mention, this is an excellent way for the banks to show the Feds that they are complying with all of those lawsuits. I’m telling ya, in many instances, HAFA is the way to go. Find yourself a Certified HAFA Specialist.
Note: The HAFA short sale time period expires on December 31, 2013. They are also no longer available for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Also, despite the illustration, no sign in your yard will say short sale on it.
When Will Home Prices Double in Sacramento?
“When my home is worth a gazillion dollars, call me.” That’s what a former client expressed this morning. It put a smile on my face, and it was a good thing to wake up to find in my email. It makes me realize that as a Sacramento real estate agent, I need to keep in the back of my mind that we are all a sum of our total experiences. Most sellers do not really know anything about real estate or how it works — even though they might think they do — because they are not in the real estate business and / or they didn’t focus on economics much less real estate in college.
We can’t forget our roots, from whence we came. At one point in my life, I knew very little about real estate. Back when I was crawling around on all fours. After I gained an upright position and could jump rope and tie my shoes, I began an early fascination with real estate. I built houses out of sandboxes. Later, of course, I learned much from college courses, mentors, books, and the very best learning ground: first-hand experience. That means I probably made mistakes from which I learned. That was about 40 years ago, but I still try to keep those moments in time in check and myself grounded in reality.
A former client called yesterday in a panic because she thought for certain that I had sent her the wrong document to sign. For some reason, she did not read the lone sentence on the document, which gave her exactly what she wanted. No, she insisted that I send her a different form that we do not use. Then, she dove into further panic mode because she had signed the document in DocuSign and that was not her signature on the document. How could that be legal, she asked?
We are all a sum of our total experiences.
However, that does not explain how Kevin Spacey acquired that upper-crust Southern accent when his character’s father was a peach farmer. I’m talking about that great Netflix show: House of Cards. I suppose it comes from hanging around with other aristocrats. You don’t have to grow up with it.
I am also excited about Game of Thrones. First, let me say I am no Scarlett O’Hara. I am not clutching a handful of dirt thrust into the air and crying as God is my witness, but I do remember my roots. And I try to stay true to who I am. I grew up in the Midwest, in Minnesota. I relate to that pull-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps character, the Khaleesi. Something I read described her as the balls of a man and the heart of a woman. I appreciate strong women, and it makes the show interesting to me because it wouldn’t be interesting if it was just about men fighting. I get enough of that excitement from third-party mortgage brokers who can’t fund. Only thing is I don’t have any dragons. I have cats, but almost the same thing. Except they can’t breathe fire or explain to clients that I will be dead and gone by the time their $300,000 home is worth again $600,000 in Sacramento.
Lowering the Price of that Sacramento Home Listing
The California Association of REALTORS sent me and every other Sacramento real estate agent an email this morning. I could not figure out if it was an April Fool’s joke. It said that on April 1, 55 million households will see its new commercials: California REALTORS, Champions of Home. I don’t recall exactly how many people live in California, but I think the number is around 35 million. Maybe 38 million. I suppose many people could own more than one home; hey, I know, maybe babies own a few extra homes.
My thoughts today is how to be a champion of home for sellers in Sacramento when sellers don’t have enough equity and don’t want to do, or won’t qualify for, a short sale. One thing an agent can do is offer to put the home on the market at a price point where it will not be a short sale if a buyer elects to pay that price. In other words, let the market decide. Don’t make the decision for the seller. But that approach can backfire because when the home doesn’t sell, the sellers might be very upset with their agent.
Some agents just want the listing, period. They don’t always care if the home will ever sell. They just want their sign in the front yard and for buyers to call them. It’s free advertising. I never want to be THAT listing agent. I won’t tell sellers what they want to hear. I will tell sellers what I think. That’s what I promised to do many many decades ago when I became a real estate agent, and I don’t vary from that premise today.
Sometimes, it is necessary to tell a seller that the price might be too high. Telltale signs are many showings and no offers. The only thing worse than that is no showings at all, but in this market, buyers want to turn over every rock. Hence, just because a seller is getting showings doesn’t mean the buyer wants to buy that home. If a seller has showings and no offers, then the price might need to be reduced to a point that will entice a buyer to make an offer.
How do you know the price point that will work? By examining comparable sales. In this crazy market, wetting your finger and sticking it in the air might work, too. It might be painful to tell a seller that she may be better off renting her home than trying to sell it, but sometimes, that’s the call a Sacramento real estate agent has to make.
Dye’s Gullah Fixins on Hilton Head Island
There is nothing more rewarding for a Sacramento real estate agent than to receive a referral from a happy client. No purer words in the universe sound better to my ears than to hear so-and-so referred me to you when I answer my phone. The problem is I have so many clients named so-and-so that I don’t always recognize immediately who they are talking about, but one thing I do guarantee is that my client will be happy.
The problem that can happen once in a blue moon is I won’t make a client happy. That’s life. It’s human nature. Every once in a rare Autumn day a client might go Ying and I might go Yang. If that happens, I release them. Immediately. There is no argument, no long drawn-out discussion about who is right and who is wrong because it doesn’t matter if one person is unhappy. You can’t have a happy couple if one party is unhappy all of the time, and the same is true in business.
How one person my husband and I met yesterday handled an unhappy person and her end result makes for a good story, so I will share it with you here. Meet Dye Scott-Rohdan of Dye’s Gullah Fixins in Hilton Head, South Carolina. She serves up a whole mess o’ Southern fried chicken, sweet potato fries and cabbage salad, or a crab or shrimp burger or plate o’ ribs, created from old family recipes. What she calls authentic lowcountry food and I call comfort food. Especially her butter-soaked, melt-in-your-mouth corn bread!
One customer was unhappy. That customer jumped on an online rating system and posted a vile review. First, you have to wonder about a person who would be so vile as reviews are only as good as the source from whence they come. Some people are nuts. In fact, a lot of people are nuts, and the longer I am in real estate, going on 40 years now, knock on wood, the more I know this fact to be the solid truth. This person said Dye had an attitude and she would never eat in that restaurant.
The truth, because don’t you know there are always two sides to a story — even to my stories, and even when I know I am 100% in the right, there are always two sides. Turns out a customer came into the restaurant with her husband and kids in tow. The kids in tow were toting McDonald bags filled with McDonald’s food. Even though there were items on the menu the kids could eat like fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.
Dye explained they could not eat in her restaurant because the kids needed to order from the menu. As an alternative, she suggested the parents could get a take-out order for themselves and have a picnic with the kids down the street in a park. Completely miffed, apparently, that this couple couldn’t get their own way and let their kids take up seats reserved for paying customers and perhaps even set an unwelcome trend, the family stormed out. Then one of the family members posted a nasty review online.
Don’t you just hate people like that? Yes, and so does everybody else. Dye is such a sweet person, and you can tell after a brief conversation that she didn’t deserve such crap. But evil people who dish out crap rarely stop to consider anything beyond their own little universe.
What happened is others read the review and thought: Wow, I need to get me some of that food that these people were so eager to get and were refused. The food must be really good at Dye’s Gullah Fixins for this person to be so mad. The reviewer never mentioned the food because she never got any.
And they are right. The food is marvelous! So, the awfully mean “review” backfired.
Dye’s Gullah Fixins is located at 840 William Hilton Parkway inside the Atrium Building. Reservations are a must: 843.681.8106 but catering / take-out is also available.
Sun City Hilton Head is Resort Retirement Living
We tried to go into the back entrance of Sun City Hilton Head yesterday, but fast realized the gate was coming down too quickly to zip through without a pass. Which was my suggestion to my husband. Oh, just hurry up and follow that car in. Because that method always works for a Sacramento real estate agent without a passcode or auto reader in the vehicle. But the electronic arms are really fast in the south, where one might expect things to move more slowly and they do except for THIS.
I have clients who have bought and sold homes in Sun City Lincoln and in other Over-55 Active Adult Communities such as Heritage Park in Natomas. But those pale in comparison to Sun City Hilton Head. Why, not only do seniors end up not paying any state income tax, the property taxes are ridiculously low as well. South Carolina is a great state for retirees hoping to save money or live on battered retirement accounts.
My husband’s family has a home in Sun City Hilton Head, so I was treated to a first-hand experience. There many differences between this Sun City and say Sun City in Lincoln, California. For example, the streets are laid out mostly in curves. The homes are oriented on the lots to maximum distractions or annoyances from the neighbors — in other words, they are not lined up in rows looking like duplicates of each other. The designs are very distinctive. Not a tiled roof in my vision path. And many of the homes are situated on ponds or lakes or other inlets of water.
I could be wrong about this but it seems that the home designs and locations seem to take advantage of the environment and work around the natural habitation instead of chopping it all down or draining it. This appears to be a very quiet area where nothing evil lurks except maybe that alligator.
Yes, there is an alligator in the pond out my family’s back door. And a Snowy Great Egret. Cardinals and bluebirds. Of course, there is a golf course. And swimming pools. Clubhouse. Rec room, heck, even a movie theater with a 500 person capacity. It’s got almost everything. But the drawback is one is removed from urban civilization and plopped down in a field among other people mostly all hailing from other states. I guess it beats sitting around and listening to strangers yak about mutual hometown friends and high schools or, worse, being hated by the natives because you’re not from there.
Still, there are no grocery stores, no shopping centers, no museums or art galleries, no restaurants or music halls, none of the stuff you’d find in an actual city. But it’s close enough to heaven for most folks or they wouldn’t have chosen Sun City for retirement.
