Email Elizabeth
Elizabeth Weintraub
It’s a Good Idea to Treat the Agents You Want to Hire With the Same Respect You Demand
Do you treat agents you want to hire with the same respect you demand? I already know the answer, but let’s explore.
Some people are very uncomfortable being fawned over. My husband is one of those. He especially dislikes being fawned over by insincere people in roles of servitude. I first noticed his distaste for this many years ago when we checked in to stay a night at Adare Manor, a castle in Ireland, County Limerick. Guests are treated like royalty at Adare.
First, they seat you in an oversized antique chair. You’re way too good to stand in line at reception. Then, a row of butlers gently wave fans in your direction and pluck grapes from the overhead vines to place into your mouth, one at a time. A handmaiden removes your shoes to wash and then massages your feet. A concierge rushes over to hand you a glass of chilled champagne. My husband squirmed.
I, on the other hand, pointed out the fact my left shoulder still had a tinge of tightness and could use a bit of manipulation. OK, that’s not really what happened, but it’s the impression I was left with — that’s how lovely it was.
The difference is: that’s the standard of attention at Adare. It’s not like some guests are treated differently than others. You’re pampered just the same whether you pulled up in a horse-drawn carriage or a VW bug. There is attention to detail, which is evident throughout the castle.
Of course, lest we forget, they had centuries to perfect.
As a real estate agent selling Sacramento homes, I’ve got all of two lousy seconds when a client calls to make an impression. To many people, I’m just some other agent. They often think we are all the same. But we’re not. For one thing, I’m a pretty cheery individual who is rarely in a foul mood. Clients tell me they love my energy. When a client calls, I stop what I am doing to focus on that call. Unless I’m driving, of course. Can’t just stop in the middle of the freeway; no, we share the phone and the road. For another, I’ve got years and years of experience. I’m the kind of person who learns from my mistakes and, more importantly, from the mistakes of others.
But I set my own standard of care, and I try to apply it evenly across the board. I truly try to provide exceptional service. I work fervently from 5 AM to 7 PM during the week. Much of my day is spent reacting to fires, especially working on 50+ short sales or so. Sometimes, I receive more than 500 emails a day. But if you want to be a client — a buyer or seller of real estate — I will call you back. If you are a client, I will call you back. If you are an agent calling on an active listing, I will call you back. This is a service business and I never forget it. I respect the time of other people.
I had to chuckle, though, when I received an email on Friday from a seller I had never met and never will meet. She had sent me an email a few days earlier saying she wanted to sell her home in Rocklin. I immediately called and left her a message on her cellphone. No response. Then I sent an email. No response. Four or five hours later, I called and left her another message. No response. Then, on Friday, she sent an email to say she was feeling ill and could not meet with me, we would need to reschedule, although we had not scheduled an appointment.
Some days I’m just damn lucky. I’m confident she will find an agent she deserves.
Banks Can Mess Up a Short Sale for Military Personnel Through Mortgage Insurance
Despite the fact that I am opposed to war, I hold the utmost respect for our military. All military — active or retired or no longer among us. Many of my clients serve in the military, so while I have no children and none of my relatives speak to me, I feel a special connection to my clients who serve, especially those deployed overseas.
OK, I have to admit a weakness when they call me ma’am. Especially the men. Everybody is so efficient, which I greatly admire, being the sort of efficient person that I am. If you know me, you know that I did not grow up around the military, and I don’t know much about it, either, so I try not to mess up the military terms and make it sound like I do because the last thing I would want is to insult a member of our military.
Yet, the short sale system and our U. S. banks seem to have no problem insulting the military. There is an awful thing going on that I wish would be investigated. It’s akin to the credit derivative swaps, which I still don’t fully understand. It’s when banks take out their own mortgage insurance policy on underwater homes. They’re doing this left and right. They do it without permission from the homeowner, because they don’t need permission, and they pay their own premium.
This is happening especially on those 80 / 20 combos. The old loans that financed 100% of the purchase price. When borrowers took out these loans, they were promised there would be no mortgage insurance. They relied on that assurance when they chose this product. Yet, today, they might have mortgage insurance. The mortgage insurer might deny or mess up their short sale. If I were those borrowers, I would be madder than hell. I’d believe I was sold a false bill of goods. I’d raise the roof and start screaming at reporters and lawyers.
But it’s also happening on first mortgages that have already been approved once for a short sale. It’s really bad when it happens to a member of our U.S. military who needs security clearance. Why? Because many of the mortgage insurance companies will not approve a short sale unless the seller is in default. If a seller stops making a mortgage payment, that could be enough to lose a security clearance.
I am presently working on an odd situation. We had approval for a short sale from U. S. Bank a few months ago. We could not close escrow because the buyer bailed. The buyer said he canceled because he wanted to use a garage in the condominium development to store commercial products, and the HOA did not allow it. Now that we have a new buyer, U. S. Bank is telling us it has taken out mortgage insurance for its underwater loan. That mortgage insurer requires default to approve the short sale, and our short sale seller has been making the payments. Dilemma.
You’ve got to ask yourself, how is there a market for mortgage insurance like this? Those policies are insuring thin air because there never was equity to start with. How is the mortgage insurance company making a profit? Is the mortgage insurance company in bed with U. S. Bank? In other words, after the policy is enforce, does U. S. Bank make the company subject to reinsurance? There’s a big lawsuit going on over reinsurance and mortgage insurance.
Fortunately, there is a program like HAP, the Homeowners Assistance Program. HAP was revised by Congress in 2009 to help our service members who were transferred and forced to sell an underwater home. It involves transferring ownership of the home prior to closing to the government, which then sells the home to the buyer. I am hoping this program will save the short sale for military. Because our banking system sure as hell won’t.
Photo: Shutterstock
Sacramento Housing Bust Led to the Collapse of the Stairway to Heaven
I once committed what some people consider to be a sacrilegious act. This unforgivable thing happened in 1976. I was living in a cramped apartment across the street from the ocean on Balboa Boulevard in Newport Beach, California. Many Friday nights were party nights. You younger kids might not believe this, but people used to gather at each other’s abodes, play records on a turntable and talk face-to-face, to each other, pre-cell and pre-computer era.
One Friday night were all sitting around, chatting, doing whatever we used to do with incense and whatnot, and listening to Stairway to Heaven, by Led Zeppelin. I asked my roommate to change the record. She refused. And that’s when it happened. You know how sometimes you just can’t stand to hear that song one more time? Maybe it’s a song that reminds you of a bad relationship, or an awful time when you were in high school or maybe it just doesn’t stand up to the arduous task of still being enjoyable after playing it over and over and over like, oh, I dunno, like the grating Honey by Bobby Goldsboro, for example.
Robert Plant, I can’t listen to you anymore. Just can’t do it. I went over to the record player, snatched the record off, opened my front door, walked out into the street and spun the album like a Frisbee into the center divide of Balboa Boulevard. Friends mouths agape. That was all I could take of Stairway to Heaven. There are people today who still do not forgive me for that act of treason. There are some who are very upset that I had the nerve this morning to compare Led Zeppelin to Bobby Goldsboro.
The Sacramento Bee has an interesting story this morning about 36 years of boom and bust in Sacramento, beginning in 1976. I was in the real estate business in 1976, working as an escrow officer. You could do no wrong in real estate back then. Why, you could buy a perfectly nice home in Orange County for $80,000, finance it with a second straight-note of no payments, hold on to it for 3 years and pocket ten grand, even after paying off 3 years of compounded interest.
The piece talks about peaks and valleys of the Sacramento real estate market over 36 years to present. It says the most recent boom ran from 1997 to 2006, and that’s about right. What I didn’t realize was after adjusting for inflation, that increase amounted to 135% — as compared to about 50% for the rest of the country. But after all is said done, Sacramento housing prices increased just 33%, or about 1 percent each year from 1976 to 2012.
It also made me think of Led Zeppelin. The Bee reporter Sangree quoted a source as saying “people thought housing was the stairway to heaven,” talking about that last boom. It’s true, they did. Everybody thought prices would never crash. I guess the question is will history repeat itself? Sure. But it’s not likely in my lifetime. Moreover, do I regret smashing a Led Zeppelin album in the street? Nope.
Photo: Shutterstock
How a Home Buyer Can Kiss Her Earnest Money Deposit Goodbye
We had a banner day in Sacramento short sales on Monday. While last week was one of those rare oddities in which it seemed that every time I turned around I was stepping into a big ol’ pile of stinky dog poop, this week is definitely back on track. I am back to a relatively smooth running real estate business with little bumps in the road along the way but no major potholes. I received 4 short sale approval letters yesterday and 2 extensions.
One approval was for a pool home in Carmichael. Another was for a Bank of America Cooperative short sale in Sacramento; there was an approval for a short sale in Galt, and an all new approval for a popular Carmichael short sale. I received a much needed short sale extension for a short sale that could not close in Rosemont and another in Sacramento, both of which were caused by excessive (buyer) lender delays.
Receiving short sale approval letters is a good thing. Finding out a buyer is canceling a short sale is not a good thing. It’s doubly NOT a good thing when the buyer cancels after short sale approval. I hate it when that happens. Especially if my sellers have moved out and now have to move back.
As a Sacramento real estate agent, I take precautions on behalf of sellers. It’s my job. For example, I routinely ask the buyer to sign a contingency release by the termination date for contingencies. Many listing agents don’t demand a contingency release from buyers because they don’t want to rock the boat or they don’t think of it. What a contingency release does, providing all of the contingencies are released, is put the buyer’s earnest money deposit at risk. It basically says if the buyer later elects to cancel, the earnest money deposit belongs to the seller.
Of course, if the buyer wants to contest the release, the money is not automatically released. Escrow requires mutual consent. In that case, the seller can take the buyer to small claims court and fight for the deposit there. Either way, once contingencies are released, the seller is generally entitled to the earnest money deposit.
Now, a $1,000 deposit makes a very small dent in the expenses a seller might incur when a buyer selectively cancels. If I was a seller who had to go to small claims court to demand a deposit that I believed to be rightfully mine, I might also ask for other damages that either meet the limit for liquidated damages in the purchase contract (3% of the purchase price) or small claims court monetary limits. The California small claims court dollar-limit maximum was raised this year to $10,000.
Guess I’ll polish the back of my high heels and trudge on stepping over dog poop. I’ve got another short sale in Lincoln to sell for a second time.
A Tip for Getting the Edge When Buying Homes in Sacramento
In this Sacramento real estate market, it doesn’t matter how many offers the seller has received. Yet, agents continue to call and ask that question. Why doesn’t it matter? Because any well priced home will be sold within hours if not within days of hitting the market. If a listing agent doesn’t have an offer when the buyer’s agent calls, you can bet an offer is on its way. Maybe 10 or 20 offers are in the works. It just doesn’t matter.
What does matter is how strong is your purchase offer? How well written is your offer? Have you included any special conditions to make your offer stand out among other offers?
I have empathy for buyer’s agents in this market. It’s very tough. A buyer’s agent is but one of many pigeons in the park scrambling for tossed bread crumbs. Sacramento is a seller’s market. Limited inventory. Want to know how many homes are available for sale in the entire county of Sacramento today? I just ran an MLS search and the answer is 1,831 homes. Of those, only 407 are short sales. To put this into perspective for you, in August of 2007, the number of our available homes for sale in Sacramento County was 10,521. Five years ago we had almost 6 times the inventory! Buying homes in Sacramento is very difficult today.
This is a huge drop in the number of homes for sale in Sacramento County. It’s gigantic. It’s like King Kong and Jessica Lange.
It must be even tougher to be a buyer’s agent who doesn’t want to tick off a buyer when the buyer insists on offering less than list price. It’s amusing to receive a low offer accompanied by a note telling us how much the buyer loves the home. They adore this home so much that they want to negotiate on the price. I don’t know where some buyers get the idea that making their offer even less attractive gives them a fighting chance or that a seller would be willing to issue a counter offer. When a seller has received a dozen offers — some cash and above list — the seller tosses lowball offers in the circular bin.
It’s difficult to get your head around the fact that a less-than-list price offer could be considered a lowball in today’s market. For all the home buyers buying homes in Sacramento, do yourself a favor and hire a buyer’s agent who will present the true picture and guide you in the right direction. Otherwise, you may as well go to the park and feed the birds.
