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Brilliant Real Estate Ideas for Sacramento Realtors
Often your best real estate ideas can come to you in a dream.
Some of my best real estate ideas come to me when I’m sleeping. They pop into my dreams. Which means some of my very best ideas are probably lurking in my subconscious. It beats having your best ideas come to you when you’re, oh, say, like Dudley Moore in that 1981 movie Arthur. His best ideas came to him when he was drunk. Probably because he was rarely sober. If you’ve never seen Arthur, you’re in for a treat.
A few nights ago I had a dream that I was holding an open house for that adorable family on Showtime’s Shameless. They live in this two-story wreck in south Chicago. I gathered the kids around me and assigned each one of them a room. When visitors came through the open house, the job of each kid was to stand in their appointed room and talk about the benefits of that room.
We rehearsed. Like a broken record, over and over. That’s a brilliant real estate tip, yes? Who better to sell a home than the people who actually live in it? Sell the benefits, not the features. The sun comes up in the morning through that window, so I don’t need an alarm clock.
Last night, though, I dreamed up a new wallpaper. You know how wallpaper has gone out of fashion? Well, I’ve got news for you, it’s coming back. Only edgier and with a bit more bite. My new wallpaper idea is to take the sections of your city’s free entertainment newspaper — the part with all the bands — neatly trim the edges, apply wallpaper paste and slap it up there. How cool is that? That real estate idea is worth millions.
Of course, with wallpaper, the pattern repeats. The unique thing about this phenomenal idea is the pattern does not repeat until maybe you get to last week’s paper or the week before that. But the pattern doesn’t have to repeat. You can write your own rules. And it’s free. Doesn’t cost ya a penny.
Back when I was a kid in my 40’s, I used to swipe posters from the halls of local venues and hang them on my living room wall. Now, I wish I had saved those posters because those fun days are gone; I can’t make myself stay up that late anymore. But this is the next best thing. Every kid in America will be clamoring for this rock-band wallpaper. I”m just joking, you know, about the real estate ideas.
While Elizabeth is in Cuba, we revisit older blogs published elsewhere.
Words Have an Impact
Words have an impact in print and online.
I received an email this morning from an unknown person in another state. I regularly receive email from people I do not know, but generally they are trying to sell me prescription drugs from Canada or they have tips about my love life that are essential to my happiness and filled with misspelled words.
Sometimes, though, the emails are from people who felt an overwhelming need to share their thoughts with a stranger. Most of these people are the type that if we met in public, I’d probably clutch the mace in my pocket and cross the street to avoid. But every so often, I get an out-of-the-blue thank you that makes me smile.
See, the thing is I know that words have an impact. I try to be very careful with the words that I use. One day last year, I wrote a blog in which I was talking about how my Sacramento real estate business had mushroomed over the years. I said something like my business had exploded like 1,000 percent, and I got slapped with a fine by the Sacramento Board of REALTORS. I didn’t mean to give a false impression, it was a figure of speech. Who in a million years would have thought that was a true statement?
But it tells me that people are paying attention to words. Word have an impact. Maybe they’re not my friends and the type who would jab a knife into my tires in the parking lot if nobody was looking, but all the same, it has taught me a lesson to be more careful with my words.
This morning the email I received said this: I just wanted to say thank you for your frequent use of language that acknowledges the diversity of relationships that home-buying couples have and that not all important functions in the world are performed just by men.
Somebody noticed. That email made my day.
While Elizabeth is in Cuba, we revisit older blogs published elsewhere.
Kicking Those Last Few December Closings into 2015
December closings are often tricky around the holidays.
My December focus, along with packing for our trip to Cuba and closing on our Hawaii house, is basically getting my last December closings sewed up in 2015. I’ve got 6 listings right now that I had initially hoped might close this month, but two have already rolled into January, which is OK. TRID regulations affect a few things but mostly it’s the same as always: last-minute issues popping up that the loan officers should have taken care of at inception and did not. When you’re a Sacramento listing agent like me, these loan problems are out of my control because I represent the seller, not the buyer.
There are some things I can handle with great efficiency, however. For example, yesterday a buyer’s lender required an addendum specifying a small change. I immediately whipped out the document in ZipForms, uploaded it to DocuSign, called my seller and while I had her on the phone walked her through signing the document and then emailed it to the buyer’s agent. I texted the buyer’s agent to let her know we needed the document signed and, in fewer than 15 minutes, the loan processor held the executed document in her grubby little paws.
That means one file will most likely close right away in my December closings, followed by another, leaving two escrows yet to close. The odds of closing over the remaining 7 business days are high enough on the remaining two that I imagine they will close this year, but it’s still nail-biting time. To close, you’ve got to have people on the job who care if it closes, who make it their personal project to close, and finding those kind of people in this day and age of people hating their shit jobs is really difficult.
It makes me think back to when I was an escrow officer in the 1970s. The reason I stood out among the sea of escrow officers is because I invested my time into closing, especially December closings. I studied each file, dotted each I and crossed every T, and often ended up going above and beyond what was expected me of me at that time to close. So many workers meander through workdays; they punch a clock, do a job and go to lunch, and they don’t care whether the work is finished or how many lives their performance affects. It’s just a paycheck.
Some Sacramento Realtors believe if they can flip a transaction into escrow, everybody else will force it to close. It works that way for some agents but that kind of cavalier attitude has never quite settled in with me. If I can interfere, find a way to make it close sooner for the parties involved, that’s what I do. The last few days of this month are often brain aneurysm avoidance days, but I certainly hope to bring my last few December closings in on time.
Royal Kona Resort for Lunch and Honokohau Harbor Snorkeling
Hawaii Broker Hella Rothwell and Sacramento Realtor Elizabeth Weintraub at Kona Royal Resort.
Our home inspection at the Hawaii house went fairly well. There wasn’t much the inspector found, just a bunch of minor things, and I am not the kind of Hawaii home buyer to ask the seller to fix them all because that’s just plain idiotic. Every home has defects. Asking for home inspection repairs that are puny makes people irritated. Besides, it is far wiser to maintain good relations with these guys for reasons I won’t go into but suffice to say buyers who nitpick tend to lose sight of the big picture and can end up with no home at all.
I have my own way of doing things. As Hella Rothwell and I were driving to Ali’i Drive to do lunch at the original Don the Beachcomber at the Royal Kona Resort, I noticed a credit union along the way and asked Hella to stop. It makes sense to have a bank account in Hawaii, for many reasons. The problem was I had not planned on opening a new account so I did not have anything more than about fifty bucks on me.
Eureka! Guess what? It costs $50 to open a savings account at Hawaii Community Federal Credit Union. It can’t be done over the phone or online, either. Then I ordered checks and the bank clerk said I could not start the numbering at the four digit I asked for. Sure you can, I suggested. She checked with her boss, and yes, I was right. Then I asked for the checks to have one address and to be mailed to another. Can’t do it, she said. Sure you can. She checked with her boss, and yes, I was right.
Some people always take others at face value but this is the wisdom of aging and experience speaking.
The server at the Royal Kona Resort said she could not get my iPad to take a good photo of us because the background was too light. Sure you can. Just tap our faces. BTW, did you know Don the Beachcomber of Royal Kona Resort fame is credited with creating the pupu platter? The view on the coast is incredible, and the food was excellent, too. My husband I will be able to walk to this Kona Royal Resort from our new home but there is also free validated parking.
After lunch, I decided to schedule a snorkeling adventure through my hotel, so I stopped at the Expedia Travel Desk, which seems to be ubiquitous. The clerk was a bit uppity with me. She suggested a tour that included whale watching. Hey, I’ve gone on whale watching tours from Hawaii that produced zero whales. Also, as I pointed out to her, I’ve had my fill of whale watching in Alaska; we had hundreds of whales following our catamaran, breeching, splashing, enough to last me a lifetime.
Well, that’s a pity, snotty clerk replied.
They love me here. Then she suggested a night snorkeling trip. This is where all the snorkelers get into the cold water, form a circle, hold hands and then shine light into the water to attract fish and manta rays. That did not hold a lot of appeal as I have seen many rays in the Tuamotos. I could see I was not endearing myself to the clerk but she did manage to make me a reservation to go snorkeling at the Honokohau Harbor for today.
A Newfound Empathy for Home Buyers and TRID
Elizabeth Weintraub lanai recouping at Hawaii house after completing TRID paperwork.
One thing this experience of buying a home in Hawaii has taught me is how difficult home buyers have it today because of TRID, the new lending guidelines that have so many lenders and title companies in turmoil. The paperwork itself is enormous. I received a welcome email that required 48 initials / signatures each from my husband and me. I know this because my middle initial was missing from my DocuSign email and I could not insert it because I already have an account without it.
The only way to do it would have been to delete all the tags and start over, which DocuSign disclosed I had 48 for me alone. I had to contact the lender to find out if it was necessary according to TRID to have my middle initial on those documents, and the loan officer is not really certain. Hawaii has its own particular weirdnesses. If TRID does, there is still time to get it on the hard copy documents, which was being mailed to our home in Sacramento.
Because I am a Sacramento Realtor, I know the questions to ask. A regular buyer, however, does not.
Oddly enough, the lender did not upload the welcome package to DocuSign for me. She emailed it and asked that both my husband and I print it out and scan it back. That’s a lot of work for a buyer when it could be DocuSigned. Lenders should do that for you, right?
Then I noticed my rate was not locked, even though I had asked for it to be locked. It was floating and said so in the welcome package, which I promptly rectified. I asked the loan processor yesterday if she was indeed mailing the package to my home or if she was sending it FedX. When she used the words “mail” she actually meant FedX. Well, can she send it without requiring a signature for delivery? No, she says, she cannot. What? Then send it UPS, for crying out loud.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
Most buyers don’t know enough to trouble-shoot their own loans because they are not in the real estate business and don’t know beans about TRID. This is how problems start and mushroom. I suspect buyer’s agents might need to work a bit more closely with buyers to try to anticipate difficulties and probably micro-manage potential difficulties.
Of course, it goes without saying, if a buyer is getting a loan through our preferred mortgage lender, there generally are no problems. These guys examine every document with a magnifying lens.
