The Life of a Top Sacramento Listing Specialist

This top Sacramento listing specialist sells many homes in Sacramento.

Today is not a day that I feel like a top Sacramento listing specialist. Yet, the thing about being in the real estate business since the 1970s is I have developed thick skin, weathered many storms, survived plenty of heartache. Throw into that mix of regular real estate activity, the hundreds of short sales that I’ve personally negotiated and sold over the past 10 years alone, and you have the recipe for a very patient person. I attend to my job every single day, whether I feel like it or not, because that’s why I remain a top Sacramento listing specialist. Regardless of what is happening in my personal life, I get sucked into Sacramento real estate, as it’s easy to focus on somebody else’s problems for a change.

Sometimes I get overly involved in real estate to the extent I forget to eat. It’s why it took me more than a year to buy a new car because I kept running into roadblocks with the purchase I thought I was making. I don’t devote a lot of time to personal things because once it’s planned, on the schedule, those things take care of themselves. Then, last April as I pulled my creaky bones out of my 5-year-old Porsche it dawned on me the reason I don’t have a new car is because of me. I needed to stop looking for the easy path, schedule time at the dealership and just go buy a new Sacramento Realtor car. Once I put my mind to it, it happened.

In case you’re wondering, to be a top Sacramento listing specialist, organization is key. My clients occupy much of my time. Not every real estate agent in Sacramento is willing to devote so much of her time to her clients. In fact, most agents believe in balancing life and work. That doesn’t work for me. It’s a good thing I enjoy what I do and that I find the humor in most situations. Like this agent last week who said he was sending us an offer. No offer arrived. On Monday, he promised again to send an offer. Tuesday, same thing. Wednesday, still no offer but it was coming. How much, I asked? List price, he said. We already had multiple offers.

By Thursday, we received an offer from a different buyer, which the seller liked and accepted. The non-performing agent emailed an update: still working on the offer, so I had to break the bad news. He responded that his offer was now XYZ, over list. Implying if we had only waited. He could say whatever he wanted. He could say his offer was a bazillion dollars and he has a miracle cure for feline diabetes.

I focus on work because then I don’t have to think about the losing battle we’re encountering with our diabetic cat Pica. It is so expensive to take your cat to the vet these days. I don’t know how people on strict budgets can afford to take care of cats. $500 there, $300 here, another $400. That was just last week. His pancreatitis medications are interfering with his insulin. What was in balance is out of balance. We’ve changed his medications, his diet, put him on an opioid and are approaching the final decision every pet owner makes at one time or another. He thanked us last night by pooping on our jeans and urinating on as many flat surfaces as he can find. The results of his urinalysis culture can’t come back fast enough.

To top it off, yesterday I received an envelope from the IRS. Very hopeful it was my refund check for my 2014 return that we’ve revised twice. There was a mistake in the calculation regarding a retirement account contribution. The IRS hounded me, treated me like a common criminal demanding payment, making threats. It was wild. Under duress, I paid the ransom, even though I didn’t owe it. Supposedly my tax guy later straightened it out, after spending hours on the phone with the IRS and he billed us for those hours. I opened the IRS envelope. It was a letter saying the excess contribution is not eligible for an abatement, yet there was no excess contribution. Ack. This top Sacramento listing specialist routinely spots this kind of behavior in short sales. It’s like common sense flew right out the window.

I would much rather focus on my work. This is what a top Sacramento listing specialist does. She lists homes, she sells them. She works with her team members. She becomes more resilient with age. We all do. Otherwise, how can we account for moving forward with our lives after losing so many people we loved? We deal with it when it happens. You can’t really prepare for the uncertainty of death. It’s part of the circle of life.

Everything is intertwined. I saw an advertisement that offered a newsletter with a “desubscribe” button in my email today. That was a cute way to put it. And it reminded me of a forgotten book, more of a report, the first of many, that I wrote in 1983 for Impact Publishing: Definancing Real Estate. That was 33 years ago. Impact had hired my ex-husband to write the material, but he never got around to it, so I spearheaded the project and produced the content. After all, I knew more about definancing than he. It’s available at the UCLA Library. And here I am today, a top Sacramento listing specialist, still selling real estate and writing about it.