Email ElizabethOpen Houses in Sacramento and Elk Grove
If you’re looking for open houses in Sacramento and Elk Grove today, I have a very nice selection for you — homes that are pretty much guaranteed to impress for a variety of reasons. The good part is if you’re out and about anyway, why not stop by? If you’re looking at homes in the area with your agent, ask your agent to bring you over. You’ve got nothing to lose, and you just might fall in love with the home of your dreams:
3892 Exmoor Circle, Sacramento, CA
Stately Pool Home in Wilhaggin
This beautiful stunner is a gracious one-story with an open floor plan in the entertainment area. The kitchen has been updated, featuring a wrap-around granite counter and gleaming hardwood flooring, plus a dining space, which overlooks the pool. This 1962 home has 3 bedrooms and 2 1/2 baths, with roughly 2,700 square feet. Oversized family room shares space with the kitchen and the same fabulous view of the pool. The professionally landscaped yard, more than 1/3 of an acre, was once featured in the Sacramento Bee Lifestyle.
3892 Exmoor Circle, Sacramento, CA 95864. Offered by Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate, $750,000. Open 2 to 4 PM.
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6209 Jefjen Way, Elk Grove, CA
Desirable Quail Ridge in Elk Grove
If you’re the kind of person who does not want to be surrounded on all four sides by other houses, this 4 bedroom home in Elk Grove is for you. It features that hard-to-find first floor bedroom, too. The other three are upstairs. The back yard has no homes behind it, which lends an open and airy feel, almost like you’re in the country, and it’s unlikely that anything will ever change behind this home.
The kitchen has an island, granite counters and is open to the family room with a fireplace. It has 3 baths and 2549 square feet, built by Morrison Homes in 2003.
6209 Jefjen Way, Elk Grove, CA 95757. Offered by Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate, $359,000. Open 2 to 5 PM.
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9688 Bovill Dr, Elk Grove, CA 95624
5 Bedroom Lennar Home in Elk Grove
For people who need a minimum of 5 bedrooms and 3 baths, look no further. This home built in 2004 has the space and amenities you want. It is located on the corner of a cul-de-sac in the heart of Elk Grove, south of Elk Grove Boulevard and East of Waterman. Soaring vaults give the illusion of additional space to its 2491 square feet. You’ll find newer carpeting and wood-like flooring.
Of course, the kitchen is open to the family room, the latter features a fireplace. It’s move-in ready as well and can close quickly. Back yard is perfect for a pool. Priced right.
9688 Bovill Drive, Elk Grove, CA 95624. Offered by Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate, $369,000. Open 11 AM to 4 PM.
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260 Aldeburgh Cir, Sacramento, CA 95834
North Natomas Single Level
Today is the first open house for this four bedroom, with 2 1/2 baths and almost 2300 square feet on one level in Cambay West Village, a community of homes built in 2004 in North Natomas. Beautiful front porch lends curb appeal, and the three-car garage will surely delight those who own more than two vehicles. Spacious living and dining areas lead toward the open kitchen with an island and huge pantry closet, plus a family room with a fireplace.
Large back yard with a fruit tree and uncovered patio. Located near Arena and Duckhorn.
260 Aldebaugh Circle, Sacramento, CA 95834. Offered by Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate, $359,000. Open 2 to 4 PM.
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1732 51st St, Sacramento, CA 95819
East Sacramento Cottage Remodeled
Perfect starter home for first-time home buyers or investors. Simply cute as a bug’s ear, this two bedroom home has been remodeled for you. You will note trendy dark-finished hardwood floors throughout and appreciate the cork flooring in the kitchen if you have to stand cooking on your feet for any length of time. Stainless appliances have been purchased and installed for you. You will love the formal dining room and with an indoor laundry room; you won’t miss using?coined washers one little bit.
Wraparound driveway, gated yard and a big garage in back. Hurry, if you want to buy an affordable home in East Sacramento, this might be the one!
1732 51st Street, Sacramento 95819. Offered by Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate, $340,000. Open 2 to 4 PM.
Paperwork: It is Not Personal, It is My Job, Ack!
Anybody who works with Sacramento real estate agents knows that a truism for many agents is we all hate to do paperwork. That’s a fact. Further, many agents are not detail oriented. The traits that make an agent excellent at working with other people and a successful negotiator don’t necessarily transfer to the paperwork department. Most people cannot be the life of the party the night before and settle into a cramped chair to prepare a tax return the following day.
The two don’t necessarily mix. Like rap and classics, although Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga would disagree.
Some of us buck the norm; even though we are gregarious, we might carry that weird gene — the one that wants to make sure all of the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed and will occasionally give in on ending a sentence in a preposition if it happens to add flavor and comes with. This weird gene somehow blends rather nicely with the social-butterfly gene, that one that embraces people and life and looks for the joy in the world. That’s my personal makeup as a Sacramento real estate agent.
When a buyer’s agent sends me a purchase contract, I want to make sure we are all on the same page. I sometimes ask the seller to send a counter offer, but it’s much cleaner if the paperwork is prepared properly in the first place. Sometimes agents can get very exasperated because they didn’t check a box or they checked the wrong box or they didn’t include the proper addendum or are missing required documentation, and they might misinterpret a request for those documents as extreme personal punishment, which is understandable from their point of view. They hate paperwork. Just because they hold a real estate license does not mean they understand contract law.
It’s a difficult spot, between rock and hard. Does a listing agent prepare a two-page counter offer that could make the buyer’s agent look incompetent or does the agent ask for a revised offer? How does the seller know if the buyer understands the agreed-upon terms if it’s unclear?
Yet, it’s engrained in me that if we’re entering into a legal contract, then it should be a clear understanding and agreement and executed correctly. That behavior probably stems from my years as a Certified Escrow Officer. In a buyer’s market — which is what it seems like we’re transitioning into — sometimes the best solution is to correct the other side’s mistakes for them and just go forward with the transaction. Focusing on the big picture and sweeping up along the way. Just get it done. That’s why we’re hired.
The only time a client will notice this stuff is if we’re sitting in front of a judge in a court of law who asks why we didn’t require a completed purchase contract. And that’s not a place any of us wants to go. I know the difference, and I’ll continue to ensure it’s done correctly in the first place, regardless of what I have to do to achieve it. Paperwork: it’s not personal, it’s my job.
Purchase Offers Under False Pretenses Can Backfire
When you list and sell as many homes in Sacramento as I do, you might begin to wonder what’s up when a buyer suddenly offers more than list price when there is no apparent reason to pay more than list price for a particular home. Even a full price offer can raise a red flag in Sacramento’s fall real estate market. It can make an agent a tad suspicious that the buyer might be trying to slip that home into escrow with intentions to later renegotiate. This is a bad practice with purchase offers known as locking out other buyers in an attempt to later force the seller into a price reduction.
I’m no lawyer, but that’s probably not a good faith contract if purchase offers are entered into under false pretenses. There are many buyers who think this way or it’s possible their agent may assure them they will always have the opportunity to renegotiate when they are presenting the purchase offer for signature. In some cases, it might even work. But it doesn’t work in a short sale at all. And it rarely will work when the seller has hired an assertive Sacramento listing agent because that kind of agent will fight hard for the seller’s rights.
The reason this type of underhanded approach does not work on Sacramento short sales is because once the bank has approved the short sale, there is a slim-to none-chance that the bank will renegotiate. Now, I have had short sale banks reduce the price when the buyer’s appraisal came in less than the contract price, which can happen when banks are unreasonable or the BPO agent messed up, yet not always. However, just because the buyer found a defect in the home or suddenly decided he no longer wished to pay the contract price, well, that is insufficient and not grounds to request a price reduction.
Negotiating with a short sale bank is not like shopping at Nordstrom. A collection agency, for example (which is where the bulk of short sales today land) won’t give the buyer a credit nor try to make the customer happy because they don’t give a crap about the buyer. Nordstrom doesn’t really give a crap either but it’s good policy for them. A happy shopper is likely to return to Nordstrom and buy more useless junk that will go out of style in a few months, but the short sale bank / collection agency has no relationship with the buyer.
A buyer asked a few weeks ago if we would ask the bank to reduce the agreed-upon sales price after receipt of short sale approval. The buyer struck me as the sort who would send back a pizza as the poor delivery guy is ringing the doorbell with his nose and juggling several steaming boxes of pepperoni pizza because the buyer suddenly decided he prefers ham with pineapple. He could have been delusional, too. Dunno.
The fact is the buyer probably would have lost more than the price reduction he requested if he canceled. That’s what it came down to, and I pointed out those facts to him. He had already removed all of his contingencies, and when a buyer releases contingencies, it puts the buyer’s earnest money deposit at risk.
A cancellation at that point could mean the seller might ask that the earnest money remain in escrow and file a suit in Small Claims Court to retrieve it. The seller would also lose the relocation incentive under the circumstances because the seller had already vacated the premises. If the home went back on the market, second-time around the bank won’t pay relocation if the seller doesn’t live in the home. The seller might sue the buyer for that loss, too. It’s not expensive to file these types of cases in Small Claims Court.
In this instance, the buyer needed to ponder whether he wanted to give that money to the seller and not own the property — or — if he wanted to own the property instead. Because it could cost him the same amount either way. Fortunately, he chose wisely.
Prevention is Better Than Cure in Sacramento Real Estate
Everybody knows that prevention is better than cure but few do anything about it. For example, one of the horrid side effects of growing older, I have discovered, is the fact you can’t just do any old thing you want to do. I don’t want to scare you younger guys, but did you realize that a simple action such as reaching across the kitchen table to push the cat off can cause a back injury? Bowling on the Wii can pull a muscle in your gut. Dropping to the floor to attempt a push-up can tear a rotator cuff. Whatever you used to do in the way of physical activity from 30 years ago you probably should not suddenly undertake in your 60s.
That’s kind of a hard realization to come to for me. On the one hand, I don’t want to walk around being paranoid that any little new action on my part will cause an injury, but on the other hand, I do want to be cautious. So, that’s why I’m enrolling in a physical therapy program out in Folsom, which is a good 30 minutes from my home in Land Park. I think it’s better to be proactive and take care of your health than be surprised when a random body part goes haywire. I try to live by the motto that prevention is better than cure.
Today’s Sacramento Bee says sitting will kill you. Not only will sitting kill you, but Diet Coke will kill you, too. All those mice can’t be wrong.
There are some things you can fix and prevent and some things you can’t do anything about. I can’t get buyer’s lenders to produce loan documents when they say they will, for example, but I can intervene and help them out when there are delays. We have an escrow that was supposed to close a week ago but the lender had difficulties. The first problem was deposit of funds — he didn’t advise the buyer on how to do it, so there was a check involved, which required clearing. The second problem was the lender could not get a document from the HOA, although he had requested.
The way some people deal with these things is they let them work themselves out. If you wait long enough, eventually most things will find resolution. That’s a lazy-ass solution. That’s not how I operate. I prefer to make things happen and not wait for things to happen. If you tell me that the entire situation is out of your hands because you are waiting for another person to perform, I will stare at you in disbelief. I will think you landed on this planet from Mars. There is almost always a way to get action.
I contacted my preferred mortgage lender to give the HOA a push. Sure enough, an hour later, we had the document. I’m just the Sacramento listing agent, I should not have to be involved in such matters. There is no money in this transaction for my lender but he helps out anyway because he’s a great guy who also gets stuff done. He told me if we didn’t receive the document shortly, he would go over to the guy’s office himself to get it. That’s my method of operation as well. Get it done. But I much prefer to manage the situation so that we don’t need to fix it in the first place.
If you need a referral to an excellent mortgage broker, let me know. And before you begin a new exercise program when you’re heading into senior-hood, obtain professional medical guidance. Remember, prevention is better than cure.
The iPhone 6 Plus and John Oliver
Yes, this Sacramento real estate agent caved in, succumbed, heeded the siren call, like a blind mouse chasing a pied piper, I bought into the excitement over the new iPhone 6Plus. I have been assimilated and cannot resist. Not only that, but I’ve been staring at my tiny little iPhone ever since I bought the 5S and gave up my beautiful, glossy shiny Galaxy in order to turn my life completely over to Apple for simplicity and efficiency. That was a horrible experience, having to download all new apps, upload address books, transfer photos and install new data. However, now that my life is all-things-Apple, switching to the new iPhone 6 Plus is as easy as plugging it into iTunes.
I preordered on Sunday the iPhone 6 Plus.
My husband thinks I’m nuts, of course, and that he is wiser than I and will wait for all of the kinks and bugs to be worked out first. There is a reason we are married to each other. He can be the rational person and I can be the kooky one to slip the pizzazz into our lives. Calculated risk, not crazy risk, is my belief system, and often I get lucky.
Besides, the iPhone 6 Plus is bigger, the screen is almost twice as big as what I’ve got now. I spent a thousand bucks to get a bigger screen. But see, I would do that and my husband would, too, he just wouldn’t want to admit it.
To go with my new iPhone, I need a new casing for it, and this time I decided flame red, no more boring black for me. A little red among a sea of black is a good thing. Unless, of course, you’re talking about the stupidest idea ever of the ridiculous Kent State sweatshirt sold by Urban Outfitters to nitwits.
I swear, John Oliver is right. Corporations should stay out of mass social media marketing and our living rooms and in fact anything to do with real people in general and just stick with stabbing each other in the backs and counting beans. Oliver actually on Last Week Tonight urged corporations to send a tweet, keeping it real, and corporations are doing it. This is what he asked them to tweet:
#WeUnderstandThatAsCorporateEntitiesOurPresenceInCertainDiscussions
IsNotAlwaysRequiredSoWeWillStriveToLimitOurActivitiesToJust
SellingYouShit
I’ve got to go out and list a home in Wilhaggin today, which should take my mind off of whether Scotland will become an independent country on Thursday and how that will affect the price of single malt scotch. But only 5 more weeks and counting before I get my new iPhone 6 Plus.
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