Email ElizabethThoughts About Green Tree Short Sale Collections
A Green Tree employee at that notorious debt collection agency offered a vile suggestion to a homeowner in Elk Grove. This homeowner is a single mother with financial struggles, like many other suddenly divorced underwater homeowners in Elk Grove. It’s tough enough to raise children on a dual income much less a single salary. When she tried to explain her budget woes to the debt collector, Green Tree said: You should feed your children macaroni and cheese.
Where do they come up with this stuff? I have to suspect that it’s not in the script because if Green Tree compiled a script — and I’m not saying whether management does or doesn’t as I have no idea, but you’ve got to think that it does hand employees a script of objections — that script would be much more nasty. I suspect the person who made that statement figures a Mac ‘n’ Cheese diet?is a viable solution because it would be a solution in his or her own circumstance.
That kind of thinking probably stems from the same sort of person who might think it’s OK to chain your children to a tree in the backyard when you go to work. Who needs to afford daycare when you’ve got a 50-feet elm out back?
Sometimes short sale sellers hear from Green Tree that if they don’t make a payment, that Green Tree will not approve their short sale. Which is not a true statement. It’s a lie. The short sale department and the collection department are separate.
Green Tree debt collectors are not that different from debt collectors who work at any other collection agency. They will still call a borrower at work and hound. They apply pressure. They aren’t always very nice. Maybe they feed their own children macaroni and cheese as a sole diet? How happy can they be with their own lives if they have to spend all day on the phone calling delinquent borrowers and trying to squeeze a payment out of them? What a horrible job for these poor souls.
What would happen if people refused to take jobs like that?
If you need to do a Green Tree short sale, I close my Green Tree short sales and can offer suggestions to help ease your transition from underwater borrower to free-and-clear relief. You can call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. It doesn’t cost anything to do a short sale, and I’ll never tell you to subsist on macaroni and cheese.
Upside and Downside to the MetroList iBox Exchange at Cal Expo
When my team member Josh Amolsch and I walked into Cal Expo for the MetroList iBox Exchange, a vision of a Tiffany sterling silver flask flashed quickly through my brain. I had been joking around earlier about needing to find a bar that serves bourbon to get through the iBox exchange, but those jokes proved to be unnecessary. I did not need a sterling silver flask in my bag, not that I have ever owned such an item anyway but it is now on my extravagant holiday wish list. As an emergency backup for those Sacramento short sales that haven’t yet gone away.
A sea of tables were laid out before our eyes. If I had organized the event, I would have placed table stands with alphabet letters to direct traffic, but the event was very well set up. The people at each table understand their task and only their task and were able to easily direct us to the next table. We met Q at the first table, who was not named after the Star Trek character (because I asked). His eyes grew wide when he perused my lockbox inventory on his monitor and exclaimed: You have a lot of lockboxes!
I did not exchange them all. I kept roughly 40 of them because MetroList made a last-minute decision that we could keep our lockboxes if we didn’t want to exchange them 2 for 1 (thank you, MetroList). The reasoning from MetroList for the measly 2 for 1 exchange (when the rest of the country seemed to get 1 for 1) is because if it exchanged our lockboxes 1 for 1, our monthly dues would go up by $10. That would result in $120 extra a year, more than the cost of a new lockbox. Is that really true? MetroList says it is.
Also, my 40 other lockboxes have a lot of juice left in them. More than 50%. They will last at least another 7 years, I imagine, which is when the warranty runs out on the new lockboxes. Except we don’t own the lockboxes we picked up in the 2 for 1 exchange. They are leased to us, and if we lose a lockbox or some thief, heaven forbid, saws it off the gas meter or removes the door knob with a lockbox attached and runs off, a Sacramento REALTOR will have to pay MetroList $100 each.
That’s the downside. Because of that, I probably won’t use my new lockboxes unless I absolutely have to. But the exchange went very smoothly. We were in and out in 30 minutes, and I was able to blow up and capture 3 portals for my Ingress team. I own that California Bear on Exposition. The good thing is if I lose it, I don’t have to pay a hundred bucks like I would have to do if I lost my new lockbox.
How Former Jobs Helped Shape a Top Sacramento REALTOR
What kind of former jobs have helped to boost the career of a Sacramento REALTOR in the year 2014? I thought about that yesterday as I drove around Elk Grove in the rain after listing another home for sale. The jobs that I held as a kid certainly helped to prepare me for the career I enjoy today. I got my first job at 16, followed by two more jobs at age 17 that helped put me through my senior year at high school — because I had my own apartment at that age. My life is so different now than it was in the year 1970.
My first real job was as a counter waitress at the Tick Tock Diner, which was located on 6th and Hennepin in downtown Minneapolis. All of my friends thought I was a nurse because I wore a uniform and a hat. I recall hauling a dishrack of glasses, and stopping to slip a nickel into the jukebox on the counter to play I’m Free, by The Who. And freedom tastes of reality. It made me stop dead in my tracks. I wasn’t free. I was chained to the counter 8 hours a day; it made me realize the price of freedom. We all pay a price.
By the time I became a senior in high school, I needed two jobs to pay for my apartment. Both were part-time, each four hours a day. The first was selling magazines over the phone as a telemarketer. We received bonuses for our sales. This job helped me to learn how to effectively engage with people on the phone. I often veered off the script we had memorized and talked to people, like they were real people and not a target for sale. I sold a ton of magazines. It was called: “smile and dial.” I dialed a lot, got hung up on a lot, received wrong numbers, busy dial tones and no answers. But I did not give up; I met my quotas and exceeded them. I hated this job because except for closing sales, the rest of it was boring.
My other job was as a teletype operator at Northwestern Bell. This involved typing codes on cards for phone installation orders on a huge machine the size of a small refrigerator. I quickly memorized the codes. I also learned to type more than 100 WPM. I had to sit in a chair and type for four hours straight. I hated this job with a passion, but everybody around me said it was my ticket for a full-time job in management at Ma Bell. My coworker went on to achieve that status. On the path to college, I chose instead to work full-time as a telemarketer. It was the lesser of two evils and, for years, I thought I had made the wrong choice.
Both of these jobs, the telemarketing and the teletyping, definitely prepared me for a profitable career today in Sacramento real estate as a Sacramento REALTOR. Today I type faster than anybody I know, which means the words from my brain hit the screen with rapid speed. The sales aspect, the thrill of closing, well, that has helped to propel, and I still love talking with people today. Real estate is a people business. Homes are just the commodity we move. I hope if you’re looking for a Sacramento REALTOR, you call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
Sacramento Realtor is Buying a New Computer
After this Sacramento REALTOR bought her new iPhone 6 Plus, my husband pointed out the age of my desktop computer. It was almost 4 years, which made it ancient, and it took forever to load. It was time to consider buying a new computer. The lousy speed was very noticeable when I would upgrade software on my laptop and desktop simultaneously. My laptop, being 2 years newer, was very fast while my desktop chugged along. I know many Sacramento REALTORs prefer to work solely on a laptop and don’t even own desktop computers, but I need as much efficiency in my life that I can possibly snag, and desktop is better.
Yet, it is still agonizing to face buying a new computer. It’s an evil necessity. My poor husband was up until almost 3 AM working on it, and I had to postpone all of my listing work to today. My new computer is about the size of a Belgian waffle. My old computer — which had cost initially twice as much, btw — is roughly the size of a built-in kitchen trash compactor. My new Mac is minuscule by comparison. It’s a mini Mac or, as the guy who helped configure it called it, a Monster Mac.
I decided it was time for buying a new computer during a car trip to Roseville to inspect a new listing and shoot photographs. Since time is precious to this Sacramento REALTOR, I asked Siri to call the Apple store from my Bluetooth device, and I talked to an Apple guy about what I needed for memory, hard drive space, the types of applications and software I use, speed requirements, and we configured this thing while I was on the road.
Well, first I reached some doofus who did not speak “tech-speak,” and she told me all of her callers are generally iPhone customers. She didn’t seem to know much about the computer end of the business, so I ended the call with her and asked Siri to call again. This time I got a guy who knew exactly what I needed. You’re either a Mac fanatic or you’re not. It’s like finding a Sacramento REALTOR on a Bell curve.
Selling real estate means I have an aptitude for numbers. You might find this hard to believe, but my credit card number is memorized, as is the expiration date and 3-digit code. Please don’t kidnap me and try to force me to recite it because I can guarantee you I will be unable to recall it under those conditions. However, I could rattle off the numbers as I rolled along I-80, and we finalized the transaction just prior to me pulling up to the curb at the seller’s home.
You couldn’t buy a new computer like that when I bought my first Mac in 1991. But back then we used modems and Bulletin Boards for connectivity, too. Much as I gripe about it, I love new technology. Every Sacramento REALTOR needs to stay up-to-date with the best technology to best serve her clients.
Real Estate Success Story Starts with Fairytales
To sell a lot of homes in Sacramento as a real estate agent, it is imperative that an agent be an extremely organized person. I’ve never done a survey of successful real estate agents, but I would imagine that maintaining organized systems and utilizing creative efficiency are essential traits that we all have in common. I realized early on when my sales began to climb above those I could count on my fingers and toes that I needed to develop systems to handle the workload. It means I do everything pretty much in the same manner all the time.
I can’t afford to make a mistake. Literally. My clients bank on my efficiency. Plus, I never have to remember precisely which tasks I have completed because they are all handled in an identical way. I was wondering how I got to be this way, whether maybe there’s a little bit of Asperger Syndrome going on due to my ability to intensely focus on certain tasks and dissect them, piece by piece, to the exclusion of everything else. I possess intensely creative organizational skills.
My husband says I disappear into my computer and don’t come up for anything, especially not when I’m writing email updates to potential clients or negotiating with agents in text messages on my monitor about requests for repairs or comparable sales or the bazillion other things that pop up on my screen every day. Sometimes I forget to eat breakfast or lunch and then suddenly realize I’m starving.
When I reflect back on my life, I am reminded of a marvelously disruptive time that I had created in the third grade in Mrs. Brill’s class at Centennial Elementary in Circle Pines, Minnesota. I loved to read fairytales like some girls love to read books about horses or detectives. I cleaned out the school library and read every fairytale book I could find. I had asked Mrs. Brills if I could put on a play. I pulled everybody in the class into the play, and every afternoon the class would shut down so we could do a performance.
Because it was my idea, I had the starring role. I was either Goldilocks or Snow White or Cinderella. I assigned roles to my classmates, ran through the general idea of the story and let the kids ad-lib the action and narrative as we went along. Sometimes I would whisper lines to them when nothing would come out of their mouths and they were stuck for something to say.
I was promoting, directing, writing and starring in my own fairytale stories. And I didn’t have to do any school work. That takes a great deal of creativity and organizational skills.
The authorities eventually figured out that we weren’t doing any work and the whole class was participating in a play with nobody really sitting in the audience, so the school made us stop. Just cold turkey. We were not allowed to put on class plays during class anymore. I was kinda crushed. It was such a brilliant way not to have to learn how to write cursive when I could print very well, thank you.
Sorry we are experiencing system issues. Please try again.
