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A New High Tech Real Estate Tip for Busy Sacramento Realtors
High tech Realtor plugs into real estate technology
When people call a Sacramento Realtor, especially when one of those persons is another real estate agent, why do they leave some other number for us to call back, like we walk around with pens and paper in our pockets? Or, like we can remember a random phone number or even want to? They know they are calling a cellphone. Why don’t they call from their own cellphone? Hello? Call Back from voice mail. Especially when they are asking a personal favor and the inquiry is not about a property listing, much less related to, say, a benefit to the individual, as in the callers are asking the Realtor to share a personal high tech real estate tip to help them to increase their own business.
I’m not even sure why people leave voice mails anymore since that kind of function has become so outdated. Today’s consumers almost feel like, dude, if we wanted to hear your voice, we would have called YOU. We want text messages. At worst, an email. But a voice mail is so, so, so, personal, dude! Time consuming. And obsolete. And then you want me to remember a phone number to call you back rather than me hitting Call Back? It’s enough that I listened to at least HALF of your message to start with. Who listens to the entire voice mail? High tech real estate communication is about text, email if you have to, and efficiency.
Your real estate clients are with it so you should be, too. You don’t leave a voice mail, you hang up and send a text.
We had a Cuban dinner party last night, consuming many Cuban Rum drinks (we carried those bottles of Havana Club Rum to the States from our Christmas trip to Cuba), and a lovely Cuban stew prepared by my husband, with black beans and rice side dishes, including plantains with bacon. The idea was our guests would bring potluck dishes. Since most of the guests were my team members, they walked in the door, one after the other, carting carry-out because, being busy real estate agents, they spent all day showing property and did not have time to cook. I laughed. I understand that dilemma. Our personal lives often go out the window in Sacramento real estate. It comes with the territory, and anybody who claims you can be a top producer and live a perfectly normal personal life is not a top producer.
During dessert, a Cuban rum cake contributed by the gracious and delightful Shaundra, we talked a bit about old technology, and I shared the story of my home falling in the ocean in the 1980s and how I used to cart my cordless phone out to the beach in front of my house in Ventura to sell real estate. I thought I was so high tech: bikini-clad lounging on the blanket with my newspaper, circling homes for sale, writing notes on a legal pad and chatting with buyers on my cordless, watching waves roll to shore. Cyndi Lauper style.
Shaundra mentioned a high tech real estate tip for organization, and brought up Alexa Echo from Amazon. You talk to Alexa, and it remembers everything you say, and shares information; it sounds better than Siri, who, btw, is often unavailable lately. Have you noticed that? You can ask Alexa to order pizza, send a cab to your home, find a client’s phone number and call or even buy merchandise on Amazon. Shaundra says she uses Alexa Echo to make up a grocery list and adds items to it throughout the week. When she’s ready to go shopping, Alexa emails the grocery list to her.
How cool is that? Perfect high tech real estate tip and big time saver. I wonder if one could synch Alexa to MLS to search for homes? I could email a home selling article from my work on About.com to potential sellers with Alexa. I might even be able to utilize Alexa to call back those agents who expect personal favors and don’t call from their cell.
How to Know if Your Sacramento Home is Priced Right
If your Sacramento home is priced right, you will receive an offer.
Sellers sometimes wonder if their Sacramento home is priced right. Even though a Sacramento Realtor may explain how comparable sales work, how we arrive at pricing, it’s not unusual for sellers to be confused or to disregard the comparable sales. After all, if a buyer pays cash, the comparable sales are not always that important since there will be no appraisal. Believe it or not, not every buyer is concerned as long as the price pencils out or otherwise makes sense to them, especially if the buyers are from the Bay Area, like many of my buyers seem to be. They think our prices in Sacramento are remarkably affordable compared to the Bay Area, and they are.
You might wonder how a person could shrug off the comparable sales and proclaim they don’t matter, but then you are probably not in Sacramento real estate and you don’t deal with those sellers from another planet. I’ve had sellers scream that they did not care what the numbers showed, they wanted a certain price and if they could not get that price, then they weren’t interested in selling. Fine, I’ll go to the next amusement park ride and stand in line.
As a standard of practice, I always try to pass on all showing activity results during my listing period to the sellers. This can result in sellers getting very excited when they hear that a lot of buyers have showed up on a doorstep. They need a perspective. Following is how I explain the situation when a seller asks if all the action we’ve been receiving on showing a home means we should raise the price, because the seller now wonders if the Sacramento home is priced right. Normal reaction.
- If we receive 5 offers all over list price, then your home is priced too low.
- If we receive one offer less than list price and one offer at list price, then your Sacramento home is priced right.
- If we receive no offers after 3 weeks of showings, your home is priced too high (or something else is wrong)
In other words, it’s pretty much impossible in a seller’s market to price a home too low because the market itself will dictate the price. It’s finding that sweet spot, that place in pricing strategy that will generate a purchase offer. If it’s working, don’t mess with it. If you want assurance that your Sacramento home is priced right, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I’ll be happy to list your home and sell it at top dollar for you. It’s what I do.
What You Do Not Know About a Brand New Agent in Sacramento
The price of a reaching veteran status as a Sacramento Realtor means helping a new agent.
Don’t ever underestimate the power of new a real estate agent in Sacramento. Every Sacramento Realtor was a new agent once. No agent is born into this business knowing everything, even if one grew up in a family of Realtors. The way an agent learns is by doing. By accumulating years on the job. By closing escrow after escrow. The basic truism is an agent who closes a home a week is a much more experienced agent who brings tons of value to her clients than an agent who, say, closes a sale every couple of months.
This is not to say, either, that every agent who has been in the business for years knows everything because some agents repeat the same thing over and over without learning anything new. Some veterans work all by themselves in a one-person brokerage, unsupervised, they do not attend Sacramento Association of REALTORs monthly meetings, are often unaware of new laws and procedures (which occur regularly), nobody has their back, and they tend to conduct business the same way, year in and year out, inaccurately assuming that whatever crazy idea they can conjure will apply as a solution without consequences.
Yet a new agent in Sacramento is often discriminated against simply because he is new, and that’s not an ethical nor a fair way to welcome new agents into the Sacramento real estate business. I’ve been an agent through enough decades to realize that a brand new agent today could be a superstar next year and a megastar producer for years to come.
I am reminded of this because over the weekend a brand new agent called and asked for help. He had shown one of my listings and his buyer wanted to write an offer. For whatever reason, he was on his own and did not know how to prepare a purchase contract. See, the thing is, he had a buyer who was qualified and eager to buy this home. And guess what? I have a seller who is qualified and eager to sell her home. That meant I walked the new agent through the California Residential Purchase Agreement, paragraph by paragraph, explaining what he should do. He called no less than 8 times on Saturday. We talked for at least 90 minutes.
Not only do many veteran agents give back to the real estate community, they also don’t underestimate the power of a new real estate agent. They help their fellow real estate agents if for no other reason than they would have appreciated that kind of assistance when they were new. I suggest veteran agents spread a little compassion; it’s contagious.
If you’re looking for an experienced agent with 40 years in the business to list your home, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
Breaking Bad News to Sacramento Real Estate Clients
Not every real estate client is prepared to hear his agent breaking bad news.
Most of the time a Sacramento Realtor can bounce along with her sunny disposition always looking at the bright side of things, except when it comes time for breaking bad news to Sacramento real estate clients. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen very often. Generally, everything moves smoothly according to plan, but every so often we face disappointing news. It’s at those moments, I believe, that we Realtors are handed an opportunity to make our clients feel better, even though we’ve got to deliver news they might not want to hear.
I was reminded of this yesterday when I stopped at the Sacramento Co-Op to pick up a case of wine. The Co-Op’s customer service department made it slightly difficult to order the case. After listening to me explain what I wanted to buy, the customer service desk sent me to the Cheese and Wine desk. The Cheese and Wine desk said they were not authorized to take my order and sent the call back to the Customer Service, which then accepted my order and credit card number and promised to call when the order arrived.
All excited that my order had come in, I decided I could squeeze in a 20-minute stop at the Co-Op to pick up my order, just before an 11 AM appointment a few blocks away. Dude at Customer Service, disheveled, like he had just rolled out of bed, asked for my name. He misspelled it but people often do. I spelled it for him. Three times. He could not find my order. He called the Cheese and Wine desk. Messed around on the computer some more and then asked for my first name, and lo and behold, he discovered my order.
I watched customers check out. Kids bouncing oranges in the produce aisle. Eavesdropped on conversations. Waited through 3 ATM transactions and then decided I may as well withdraw cash, too. Cheese and Wine suddenly appeared to present a single oversized bottle of wine. Where was the case? She did not know. Cheese and Wine vanished. I waited a while longer and then realized I would be late for my appointment. When you figure this out, please call me, I said, and left. This was fairly irritating, and I’m at the point now where I don’t really care if they ever find my order.
How quickly my moods shifted during those 20 minutes, from anticipation to disappointment to irritation to a cavalier attitude.
Our real estate clients are no different. There were many things Customer Service could have done but did not. I suspect they bank on forgiving customers, capitulated by a strong desire for organic.
First and foremost to me is how my clients will feel when I am in the awful position of breaking bad news. I try to make sure they understand that if I can do anything about it, I will. Occasionally I can make them feel better by offering a partial solution to what often appears to be a dead-end street or another alternative.
The point is I try to find solutions. I apologize for the problem, even when it’s not my fault. I don’t get angry because they may want to assign blame in my direction, as that kind of response is human nature. No defensiveness. People always want to find the individual responsible for the difficult spot they might find themselves in, and I’m a buffer for that. It’s OK.
Mostly people want information when you’re breaking bad news. They want to know how and why it happened and what can be done about it. They want options. They prefer to be in the decision-making position, if at all possible, and they expect their Realtor to respect their opinions. If it’s within my power, I try to deliver that.
How to Effectively Reduce Spam Yet Run a Real Estate Business
An alternative way to reduce spam and just as effective as shooting spammers dead in the street.
I have discovered wonderful ways to effectively reduce spam yet run a Sacramento real estate business, even while cutting out the mortgage brokers and home inspectors who hound to death this Sacramento Realtor with spammy emails. Their actions, of course, now prevent any emails from reaching this busy Realtor. This means, if they are on the other side of a transaction from me, I will never hear from them, which is actually OK. I am not required nor is it essential, as a listing agent, to interact with them.
These guys think it’s perfectly acceptable to go after every listing agent, perhaps wrongly assuming that a) the listing agent will begin to use them for business, or b) the listing agent is bound to work with a buyer some day and need them. Any top listing agent already has her referral base intact, and many listing agents never work with buyers. The constant haranguing from these guys was beginning to drive me batty. Plus, you can imagine how many emails I receive every day: hundreds.
Por supuesto (of course), as real estate agents, we want to receive email and phone calls from people who want to do business with us. Many of these individuals are strangers. We don’t want to lock out potential business. Heaven forbid should an agent block a legitimate call or email. What do you do?
The first thing one can do to reduce spam is don’t put your email out there, if you can help it. And if you do, encode it or print it in such a format that robots can’t recognize it such as agent at bestsacramentorealtor.com. You won’t find my email on my Elizabeth Weintraub website. To contact me through my website, you can call or generate a form, which needs to be completed by a live individual.
The second thing is set up spam filters for email. Gmail already nicely sorts mail for you into categories, and you can specify an address to move to Promotions or vice versa. The problem with spam filters is you might lose legitimate email. To combat that problem, here is another tip.
The third thing is go to your email provider, whichever company hosts your email, and add email addresses — specifically or through a wild card designation, or even by adding complete domain names — to a blacklist. Save the blacklist. That’s an easier solution than adding addresses to a whitelist. I’ve eliminated at least 80% of my spam email. I just copy and paste the email address from the sender into the blacklist.
For my website, I require authentication for all comments so a person can’t spam at random. There are many WordPress plug-ins you can adopt to manage spam. Prefiero (I prefer) to use Disqus. Only after I approve a comment will it publish on my site.
For my phone, the first thing is to set up cloud accounts or sync for email so once an email is addressed on one device, it does not reappear on another. That’s great for vacations. Nobody wants to come back and find a bunch of emails you’ve already answered.
The next 2 easy ways to reduce spam on your phone is to ask your ISP to provide you with Caller ID (so you can see who is calling; it’s only 3 bucks a month) and second, to install a spam blocker on your phone. Check out the App Store. Me gusta (I like) the TrueCaller app but there are many available. It lets me add specific phone numbers while it also identifies and presents certain known spam callers as true spam. Whereas an agent can block the call on an iPhone directly from “recents” (click on the i and scroll to the bottom to block caller), the caller is still allowed to leave a voice mail, albeit as a blocked message, TrueCaller does not allow your phone to answer the call. At all.
And to save your sanity, it doesn’t get any better than that. Qué hora es? (What time is it?) Time to reduce spam.
