Email ElizabethHow to Lose Your Dream Home in Sacramento
There are times in this business when home buyers ignore the essence of time and wrongly believe that they have all the time in the world to decide whether they want to buy a particular home in Sacramento. The constant that is sure to happen, even if a home has been on the market for a year, is the minute one home buyer decides she might want to buy it, so does another. I can’t explain how or why it happens but it does.
It’s not a trick. It’s not a listing agent trying to get more money for her seller. Nothing up my sleeve, I swear.
Such was the situation with a home that closed escrow this month. I first started talking with the seller about this home a year ago. He is retired and volunteers on government issues in Washington, D.C. He had never seen the home, and it has always been a rental property for him.
I inspected the home in Sacramento and found the living conditions to be substandard. The carpeting required replacement, the walls and cabinets needed repair and paint. Bottom line, the only way he could sell that home for a decent price would be to get the tenant out and fix it up. His property management company wasted about half a year to remove the tenant. No idea what’s so hard about giving 60 days to move.
I sent a handyman over to fix up the home and get it ready for market. First buyer in escrow could not qualify for a loan, some little glitch at the last minute prevented him from closing. Back on the market. A few months later, another buyer made an inquiry and wrote an offer through their agent. Although I warned the buyer’s agent that the seller would want list price, the buyer had other ideas.
It took the buyer another week to write a series of counter offers and to eventually end up at the place where the buyer should have been in the beginning. We asked for list price and no concessions. Pretty simple. But the buyer wanted to negotiate. By the time we got to the third offer with the buyer, or maybe it was the fourth offer, I don’t recall, I had uploaded all of the paperwork to DocuSign for the seller.
At that very moment, a full price cash offer arrived for this home in Sacramento. Cash is not always king anymore, but a full-price cash offer does tend to rule.
So, the moral of this story is the seller elected to ignore the first buyer’s final offer, which met all of his demands, and accepted instead the full-price cash offer. Those buyers were so close to buying what they continued to insist was their dream home. They lost it. One minute they were celebrating that the seller was about to accept their offer, and the next they were crying. I felt empathy for them because they were a young family with another baby on the way, but I didn’t represent them. I represented the seller.
The Showdown at the OK Corral in Sacramento Home Buying
The fall Sacramento real estate market seems to be morphing into a showdown at the OK Corral. Why not, October 26, is just around the corner, and it was October 26, 1891, that the famous gunfight took place, with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, and all those boots and dust in the street. The fighting lasted roughly 30 seconds or so. But the fighting in the Sacramento real estate market seems to know no boundaries of time.
The thing is we’re not really in a seller’s market anymore in Sacramento. But I’d hesitate to say that we’re in a buyer’s market because I just don’t see it. Our inventory is reduced from the norm, and buyer demand in the market is still present. Interest rates have actually dropped a little, last I checked. The problem is we’re encountering more difficulties than usual in bringing the parties to the table in some sort of agreement.
It stems from the fact that sellers want to get a fair market price for their home and buyers don’t want to pay it. Buyers are reluctant to pay market value because prices aren’t going up through the roof anymore. Now, an ordinary person of relative intelligence would say that’s a good thing, it’s good that prices are stable, but home buyers are feeling uneasy about stability. They’d rather pay more than the last guy as long as prices are quickly appreciating, they just don’t want to pay the same and have prices remain constant or worse, fall. They are very afraid of that dark place.
The trouble is we can see an identical home sell 2 weeks earlier for $400,000 and a buyer will thumb her nose and refuse to pay $400,000. She may have no justification for a lower offer. It’s like an illness is the air. It’s causing confusion, and when buyers get confused, they do nothing. They freeze. Sacramento home buying comes to an end for them.
This means we have to meet in a middle road somewhere. Without guns and a showdown. Sellers might have to give a little bit and buyers might have to give a little bit, and we’ll find our way into escrow. Otherwise, we’ll be at a standoff and buyers will go home to an tired apartment or maybe to a rented house that its owner is probably thinking about selling and end up with no new home.
Buyers tend to lose sight that what they want is a home to live in. They get caught up in the hype. A home purchase doesn’t have to be the steal of the century. It’s a roof over their heads with four walls and a place to stay warm, be loved and make memories.
Pleasing All of the People as a Sacramento Real Estate Agent
To paraphrase John Lydgate, a 14th-century English monk and poet, a real estate agent can’t please all of the people all of the time. In today’s Sacramento real estate market, an agent might wonder if she pleases all of the people some of the time but there’s no need to focus energy on that question since she pleases some of the people practically all of the time — those people being her clients.
It’s nice if everything balances in a real estate transaction, but it’s not always possible. Sometimes, an agent has to pick which side she wants to please, and most agents will always choose her client. Well, the ones with any brains.
The REALTOR Code of Ethics says an agent must treat all parties honestly and fairly, but it doesn’t stipulate making the other side — the side we do not represent — happy. Sure, we hope they’re happy and speaking strictly for myself I’d never want to purposely upset somebody else, but we can’t control what other people think, say or do. We can only control our own behavior.
This is why I get to be the rational and calm person. The agent who sticks to the purchase contract by managing performance and ensuring the transaction closes. I get to deal with all kinds of personalities in this business. I get the screaming hysteria, the weeping and sobbing poor me’s, the F-150s in a China shop, the indignant hyenas, the bipolar-sans-meds, the threatening gorillas, the barking dogs, the guys with explosives strapped to their backs, and that’s just the agents.
It’s a balancing act, sometimes, to try to keep that noise away from my clients but still deliver important information to my sellers.
I went to lunch last week with a Sacramento agent I met years ago on an agent website. She lives in Rancho Cordova and still sells real estate into her senior years, a ways past retirement, and I love her to pieces. She lamented that agents have become more mean lately. I wonder if it’s the transition into a normal real estate market that sets so many of them afire?
It’s tempting at times to return fire, that’s only normal, but it’s better for all concerned to keep my eyes on the horizon. That’s why so many sellers hire Elizabeth as their Sacramento real estate agent. Pleasing all of the people all of the time is unreasonable.
Flashback to 1970s Real Estate and Sincerity
In retrospect, it seems like selling real estate in the 1970s was a lot more carefree than it is today, but that’s probably just twisted perception. Part of that feeling could stem from I was in my 20’s then and just didn’t know any better, even though I thought I knew everything. It takes a while for people to mature to the point where one realizes she will never know everything and there is a ton of stuff she will never in a million years know, even if she turned into a vampire and was granted eternal life.
In my younger days when I worked in 1970s real estate, I recall making training videos for other real estate agents in Orange County with Tucker T. Watkins and Scott C. Strohbehn. They were such a blast. It was odd to make a video of anything back then because nobody had video cameras. We had to hire a production company. It was my idea to incorporate a glass-framed poster of the Monopoly Game to use as an illustration for our topic about investment real estate, or at least that’s how I recall the episode. Somehow the glass broke when we started to film.
My motto has always been to make do with what’s presented. I say if it rains on your parade, then parade in the rain — because the alternatives don’t always solve the issue at hand. It’s easier to change perception than to move a roadblock or change nature. Everybody was crushed because we couldn’t use the poster in the broken glass frame. So I suggested to Scott that he use a pointer and poke it at the poster, saying something like, “The Monopoly Game is not exactly what it’s cracked up to be.”
That simply set us into fits of uncontrollable laughter and we could not film the sequence. We rolled off the sofa with tears streaming down our faces, clutching our guts. And it wasn’t just the drugs from the 1970s real estate lifestyle. When out touring homes for sale, it was common for an agent to do a U-turn in the middle of Pacific Coast Highway and explain it away by saying, “It’s OK, officer, I am a real estate agent.” Because being a real estate agent somehow gave us permission to do things that other people could not do. That’s how screwed up we were, because we believed that. At least we were sincere.
I’m still sincere today, mostly because it’s easier than being insincere. I’ll share an example. I went to Nordstrom in Arden Fair this weekend to exchange a top that didn’t quite fit right. Imagine my delight when I zipped into the parking lot to discover a parking place right along Arden. I didn’t mind walking that distance to the store. When I came back to my car, I heard some dude screaming. I was certain it wasn’t directed at me.
I began to back up my car and almost ran over this screaming guy. He approached my driver’s side window and knocked on it with his knuckles. Yes, what can I do for you? He was very angry and still yelling about a fat yellow line, and didn’t I notice all the other cars parked in backwards, and if I do it again it will be a $5 fine. I said I was very sorry that I did not notice this was valet parking. Yeah, I was on my cellphone talking about real estate when I pulled into the parking spot, so I was a bit oblivious to my surroundings.
I get that way when I’m focused on a conversation. Hey, I’m a Sacramento real estate agent. I honestly did not notice that I parked in valet parking, Sir, I’m sorry. I was about to reach into my bag and hand him a $20, relieved that he didn’t want to fine me five bucks — $5? Seriously? But then he said he didn’t believe me. How could I have NOT noticed? Well, obviously, he’s not in Sacramento real estate. Attacking my integrity and sincerity? He’s also not getting any money, and I drove away. I’ll gladly give him five bucks the next time I park in valet parking, though, at least I know where it is.
Why Move to Elk Grove When You Can Buy This Home in Galt?
Chancellor Estates is a subdivision of homes in Galt, set in a quiet area of the country yet still close enough to the freeway to get downtown Sacramento in roughly 30 minutes, and it offers spacious homes at better prices than Elk Grove. This home in Galt is for sale at an unheard of price for a home this size of $129.36 per square foot. It’s enormous, too, at 3,440 square feet, with 5 bedrooms, a mezzanine-level loft, plus 3 full baths.
On top of all of this, there is a 3-car garage. But what you don’t know is that part of the garage is a pull through, meaning you can park a boat in the backyard on the slab. If you don’t have a boat yet, I once owned a 17-foot Bayliner with an inboard / outboard, which was very easy to transport and operate, and they’re not all that expensive. Prices seem to start around $12,000 to buy a Bayliner. If you already have a van or a pickup truck, you may as well buy a Bayliner, don’t you think?
Apart from having a great place to store your boat at this home in Galt, you’ll enjoy an incredible living experience inside this home with all of its upgrades and magnificent layout. From the warm and inviting entry, to the formal living room which is open to the formal dining room, to the hard-to-find first floor bedroom, to the marvelous open kitchen with an island, ceramic flooring and a ton of cabinets, including recessed lighting, you’ll absolutely fall in love.
The family room is cooled by a ceiling fan and warmed by a stone fireplace, but the home also has central heat and air, of course. The family room has angled walls and recessed areas cut into the walls for the fireplace and entertainment center, which not only gives the room an interesting feel but it makes it seem even more spacious than it is.
You will absolutely love the back yard. The patio is covered, featuring white columns for support, and the ceiling is beadboard, with a ceiling fan and light attachment for dining at dusk. The yard is .193 acres of a lush lawn and fenced with nothing but trees behind it, providing a feeling of privacy.
If you would like a private tour, please call Barbara Dow at 916.761.7398 or Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. This stunning home in Galt is offered exclusively by Lyon Real Estate at $445,000.
944 Trafalgar Circle, Galt, CA 95632, $445,000
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