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Elizabeth Weintraub
Use Only a Secured Sacramento Real Estate Website with a SSL Certificate
If you have not yet secured your Sacramento real estate website by obtaining an SSL certificate (secure socket layer), you could be in trouble. Chrome announced big news yesterday. You have a secure Sacramento real estate website if your URL is an HTTPS. If it is not, your site is not secure. A secure website encrypts the connection between a user and the website. For example, although I do no commerce through my website, I do allow visitors to email me directly through the website. Their email address would be vulnerable if my site was not secure. However, it is secure.
Further, because Chrome has become the browser of choice lately — even for me, a die-hard Safari fan — it can write the rules. The old rules were Chrome would display secured websites by sporting a green icon in the URL. If the website was not secure, it would not clearly call this out. However, in October, when Chrome 70 releases, anybody with an unsecured website will be clearly evident. Chrome will penalize those sites. There will be a red icon on unsecured sites and it will blink.
Danger, danger, Will Robinson.
In fact, I noticed yesterday that my photographers’ website is not secure. It’s supposed to be, and it says the information is encrypted but the URL bar tells a different story. Which is important since I enter my credit card information on that site. I hounded that poor guy like no tomorrow to acknowledge and fix it.
If you don’t want to be left in the dust, you need to obtain an SSL certificate for your website and install it. GoDaddy sells a certificate for $60. They also have a program where they will renew it for $75 a year. My website company will renew it for me at $50 a year, so that’s a bit of a break.
One caveat, after installing the certificate, be sure to update Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools by verifying your new domain.
You can trust the Elizabeth Weintraub website to be a secure Sacramento real estate website. And of course, some of the best information on the internet about real estate comes from this veteran Sacramento Realtor, with more than 40 years in the business.
Why a Six-Month Listing is Normal for Sacramento Listing Agents
Every listing I write starts its life as a six-month listing, and there is a darned good reason for that length of contract. Like I explain to my clients, it’s not always possible to close an escrow within 90 days. For one thing, it doesn’t take into account the first buyer who is likely to cancel for some flakey reason and then I have to sell that home again. Or lender delays or any of the other million things that can happen. At least, I figure, our six-month listing will not expire, and it’s one less thing to monitor.
Yet is rare for me to have a listing for as long as I’ve had my south Sacramento listing by Elder Creek. I sold a halfplex in that area a while back, and I recall that was a bit of a problem as well. Not really sure why. Buyers have not been overly enthusiastic to buy in this neighborhood, it seems.
Countless open houses, almost every weekend. Full-blown marketing efforts but no bites. I pulled out all the stops, including taking the home off the market and putting it back a number of times to reset the days on market.
I wrote this six-month listing at the end of September of last year. We just closed escrow yesterday. This home lingered on the market over the cold months of October, November and December, and then we finally snagged a full-price offer. That excitement lasted all of 24 hours when the 1031 exchange buyer canceled as quickly as he signed the offer.
In early January, we received a lower-priced offer from a buyer who could not afford the home. It’s hard to be a buyer who can’t afford the home he wants to buy, I imagine. But it doesn’t mean the seller cares. In fact, the sellers wonder what’s wrong with the buyer that he is writing a lowball offer on their house. In the sellers’ minds, the buyer should focus on homes the buyer can afford.
Finally, in March we received a full-price offer from buyers who had no skin in the game. No money at all. Not even closing costs. NACA was paying for everything, down payment and closing costs. Then, in exchange, NACA demanded a shitload of repairs, and the buyers threatened to walk.
Walk, go away, the sellers said. The repairs noted by NACA were the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around the block. They wanted the sellers to test the ceiling for asbestos and pay for those tests. So of course, regardless of testing, the buyers wanted the ceilings all scraped and the popcorn removed. It just got uglier and more horrible. Nope. Go away.
Under these circumstances, it can sometimes be difficult to keep up my client’s spirits. I mean, I knew the home would sell, but sellers don’t always feel so overly enthusiastic when buyer after buyer flakes out on them. My clients were darlings, though. Always a great attitude, upbeat, optimistic. They were no spring chickens, either. We’re talking 80s and 90s. The kind of people who make an agent want to be a better person for them.
We were near the date of having to extend the six-month listing. In fact, from inception to closing, it was 7 1/2 months. This wasn’t a short sale. Just a late 1970’s ranch home with updates in south Sacramento. It’s also the time of sale that messes up my stats. If I sell 50 listings on average in 10 to 15 days, this one sale will blow to pieces those averages. It’s also 7 1/2 long months for the sellers.
Finally, around the middle of April, we received a good offer. The sellers accepted the offer. No sooner did they sign that purchase contract than we received a second offer for even more money, which we put into backup. When it rains, it pours. This is why April is the best month to sell a home.
6745 Villa Juares Circle, Sacramento, CA 95828 closed escrow May 17, 2018 at $320,000. I’m kissing the ground.
Quitting a Job is Bittersweet Yet It Is Time for a Change
The nightmares should have been a clue that it was time to think about quitting a job. I’m not talking about my primary occupation as a Sacramento Realtor. That job is as strong as ever. Still closing a couple of homes a week or so on average and turning in $30+ million in sales on an annual basis. With all of that action going on you would not think I would have time for a second job, but being an overachiever tends to come with the territory of being a top producer in Sacramento real estate.
In fact, some people are shocked to learn I even held a second job. They see I often rank in the top 10 agents in Sacramento and wonder how I do it. It was a passion for me in the beginning. I had to interview by doing the job for three weeks, back when About.com was owned by The New York Times. It was a prestigious and exciting place to work, and the experts were pioneers. We each had our websites to run and populate with content, as well as monitor a discussion board, write daily blogs and a weekly newsletter. My husband pooh-poohed the idea when I first mentioned it to him, but I was eventually hired and was totally shocked when I received my first paycheck.
It paid very well back then because we were the creators of everything. One could easily earn six figures freelancing on the internet. We held About.com meetings all over the country. But since 2006, other companies have jumped aboard. There’s been plagiarism galore. Thieves today swipe content and publish it on their own websites. The company has been sold so many times I hardly know who owns it now. Yet, I stayed onboard for 12 years, loving most of it. But there is a downside.
Obviously, I’ve been thinking about resigning. Even my dreams have been telling me to let go. But quitting a job does not come easily to me. Being a content writer is very demanding, and you’re on a tight schedule every month. Many of my weekends were devoted mostly to writing for About.com, and now I suddenly have my life back. It’s a strange feeling. When I pause, I recall vacations overseas when I desperately sought internet connections to update my articles on About.com. I was always in a panic about that job.
However, when I looked at the time expended in exchange for compensation, it just didn’t add up financially anymore. I kept writing even though my income over the years got slashed to about 20% of what I had originally earned. It became a point of diminishing returns for me. We could not come to an agreement on compensation so the contention morphed into a valid reason to resign. I’ve contributed a wealth of information on that site, which will hopefully continue to delight and inform readers as time marches forward.
I’m also not ruling out the possibility of entertaining other offers that are less demanding of my time. But for now, my full-time Sacramento real estate job is quite enough for any human. Quitting a job is like releasing an enormous amount of stress that I didn’t even know I had until I let go.
I wish the company well, but so glad I’m off the hamster wheel.
The Story of Closing a 1911 Fixer Craftsman in Woodland
When I was about to list this 1911 fixer Craftsman in Woodland, I called a few agents in that area. Small towns are typically tight-knit. One of the agents said she thought our price was too high and it would never sell over $399K. But I’m pretty good at pricing homes, even if I don’t have an intimate knowledge of a street or certain area, I know how to get that intimidate knowledge and price accordingly. It’s just a knack I have. So it’s a good thing I specialize in listing homes in the Sacramento area. I say put that skill to good use.
We listed the 1911 fixer Craftsman at the end of March. Held the home open on Sunday and snagged 4 interested buyers. One buyer did not want to offer over $350K. Well, that’s not a buyer in my book. That’s a guy looking for a needle in the haystack. Another buyer was out of the country. A third buyer could not make up her mind, and then there was the buyer whose agent swore up and down they understood what they were buying, were old pros. They just wanted to check on the historical preservation and would close.
Later, the agent said it was too expensive to rewire the house so her perfectly credible buyers were bailing on us. This is after the seller had found a place to move. Yikes. Agents don’t often think about how flakey buyers affect sellers. So we went back on the market. All of the excitement had vanished for the sellers, but after a few more days, we found a new buyer who was one of the 4 interested buyers from the open house. This was the buyer who was out of country and could not act fast enough.
Everything went smoothly except for some confusion between the buyer’s agent and the seller, which I was not involved in. The main problem was the buyers could not close on time. Like usual, it boiled down to loan docs not arriving in escrow before the contract expired. And when the buyers signed, they did not sign correctly so the documents had to be resigned. It was one thing after another, and the seller was becoming stressed. Most mistakes and buyer-side issues I can manage in an escrow but not when it comes to lender performance. Or buyers signing.
The seller was mad at the buyers because they could not close as planned. Her new home could not close if this 1911 fixer Craftsman did not close. Due to a small glitch on the buyer’s part, it could not close. I shared the circumstances with the buyer’s agent: the seller had moved out all of her furniture, had no bed, no refrigerator. Of course the seller expected compensation, and the buyer’s agent, after a few delays, made it over to the house to rectify the situation.
Finally, on the following Monday, we received the docs back from FedX and released to record. In a surprising twist, a few hours before closing, a relative of the seller left me an unexpected voice mail. She insisted that we could not sell this house and demanded that I call her immediately. Well, like I reassured the seller, that relative is not my client. I have no fiduciary to her, and in a few hours we will be closed.
I prefer to focus on the good aspects of this transaction and that my seller is happy, moving on with her life.
70 2nd Street, Woodland, CA 95695 closed escrow on May 14th, 2018 at $425,000.
The Story of Selling an Overbuilt Rancho Cordova Home
One of my listing specialties is selling white elephants like this overbuilt Rancho Cordova home. We call them white elephants when they don’t conform to the neighborhood, not that there is anything specifically wrong with the home. Most of the homes in this subdivision are 1,200 to 1,600 square feet. This particular home is over 2,100 square feet. Pricing is different when a home is larger than others around it. Usually the per square foot price is less than the surrounding homes.
A recurring complaint from buyers was they didn’t like the fact this home mirrored the home next door. The exterior appeared identical, except for a reversed floor plan, which meant the garages, which were side facing, also faced each other. One potential buyer from Chico called to say he was submitting an offer. A few minutes later he said he looked at the home on Google, spotted the garages facing each other and said, nope. No offer.
Other buyers complained that the baths were vintage with canary yellow fixtures in one bath, pink in another. It’s odd how people can pull apart and shred the appeal of a mid-Century home by expecting it to look like a brand new home in 2018, but that’s buyers for ya.
Once we found our sweet spot on pricing for this overbuilt Rancho Cordova home, we got an offer within 3 days. This particular property’s location fell within the no-income restrictions for Guild Mortgage’s free down payment assistance program. I explained the program to the buyer’s agent. What about their own lender, she asked? He’s done a lot of work.
My response conveyed forget about that lender in not so tender terms. That lender can’t give the buyers $7,000 in free money that they don’t have to pay back. No brainer. Of course, that lender was upset when he heard about it and called to “introduce himself.” That’s code for: I’d like you to like me so you’ll send me more business. Then he began to tear apart Guild’s program, telling me the buyer made too much money, blah, blah. Au contraire, sugar bear, there are no income restrictions in this neighborhood.
I wished him greater success elsewhere. Goodbye.
Now, the buyers were thrilled with Guild Mortgage’s program. They could not believe their good luck. Apparently, according to their agent, they were planning to receive gift funds from family members, and now they didn’t have to. Not only that, but we were able to bump up the price to cover their closing costs. They truly came in with only 1% and the seller got a little bit over list price.
Since their other lender could close within 15 days, we asked Guild to match that timeframe. Guild met that schedule and issued loan docs within 12 days. From start to finish.
At one point, the buyers asked for a larger sum of money and repairs. The seller suggested splitting it with them. Well, he could, if he wanted to give away money, but I suggested he not. I have my seller’s best interests at heart. Further, facts don’t lie. The buyers wrote other offers without success. They can’t get this particular loan anywhere else since it’s sunsetting mid-June. Their family is a source of funding. They aren’t walking away. Finally, the seller said he hired me for a reason and followed my advice.
No repairs. No additional cash. All righty, then, and the buyers removed their contingencies.
By closing on this overbuilt Rancho Cordova home, though, everybody seemed happy. Of course, I haven’t yet gone over there to remove the lockbox. I could still get sprayed with a garden hose.
10829 Glenhaven Way, Rancho Cordova, CA 95670, closed escrow on May 11th, 2018 at $358K.
