Email ElizabethA Funeral in Midtown and My Back-Story to Harold and Maude
Some people might call it a Harold-and-Maude-syndrome because that’s where I initially got the idea that I should start going to funerals. I first saw that movie in a renovated theater in Minneapolis as an advance screening premiere. This was back in the early 1970s when movie theaters didn’t tell you the name of the movie you were going to see as a premiere. You just hoped you got a good movie. People are much more demanding today.
The velvet drapes slowly parted, the lights went out, and the music of Cat Stevens filled the theater as we watched the lead actor hang himself. What’s not to love about this movie? It became my favorite movie and for just about everybody else I knew, too. Harold and Maude played at the France Avenue Drive-in in the Minneapolis area consecutively for years because every time I would call my mother after moving to California she would throw into our conversation, “Did you know that Harold and Maude is still playing at the France Avenue Drive-in?”
My first funeral was for a person I did not know. I had no idea that you could just pluck a dead person’s name out of the newspaper, go to his funeral and nobody would ask any questions. You didn’t need an affidavit of death. I asked my girlfriend what to wear, whether black was necessary, and she assured me it was not but I should dress conservatively over respect for the deceased. We engaged in long conversations about the length of my skirt, what was too short, too revealing, too bright? Should I wear mascara — because if I cried my tears would mess up my face. What kind of Kleenex should I carry? Important questions.
After my first funeral, I began to notice that some of the people whose death notices I read in the paper were people I knew. That was unnerving. I didn’t think I was old enough to know any dead people. One was a guy I had dated a few times. Naturally, I attended his funeral and much to my delight it was an open casket. Whoa, a new experience for me! Except he looked very bloated and not at all like I remembered him when I was on top.
I say all of this because I attended a funeral yesterday for a person whose name I won’t associate with this blog because I’d hate for people to get upset, and not everybody shares my sense of humor. It was very hot. The funeral home was packed, overflowing. We arrived 15 minutes early and had to sit in the third-tier room so we couldn’t view the videos. That funeral home on Capitol Avenue is moving, I hear. My dentist in Midtown told me. Who needs a Sacramento real estate agent when you’ve got a dentist?
I feel indebted to the person who passed away. He was always very generous with me. When I first posted a blog about Fairytale Town in Land Park and expressed my utter dismay and shock that I was not allowed inside without a kid in tow, he wrote to me personally and said I could take his kids. He was serious, he said he lived a few blocks away: yeah, come over and get ’em. But then they had that free day when anybody could go, so my husband and I went to Fairytale Town by ourselves, and I didn’t need to take his kids. He also told me how to get a bigger battery for my phone to extend its life. He had an enormous heart.
He was only 37. So young. Too young. We’re always too young when we go, unless we’re like my 88-year-old Hungarian grandmother who had so many things wrong with her health it was a relief to let go and she actually prayed for death every morning, but I’m nothing like her, thank goodness. She never saw Harold and Maude.
How Home Buyers Can Insult Sacramento Listing Agents
Sacramento listing agents don’t offer the best negotiation tactics for buyers.
Before I get into the reasons about how home buyers can openly insult Sacramento listing agents, let me state for the record that there are agents in Sacramento who don’t care about respect or integrity, they just want the money. It’s a problem for our profession, and it’s also what some home buyers count on.
Oh, they won’t come right out and say it, but it’s implied when they scramble to clarify: the reason we want you, the listing agent, to represent us is because you know all about the property.
That’s baloney. The listing agent doesn’t know “all about the property,” and that’s a ridiculous thing to say. Because what the home buyer really means by that statement is she wants the listing agent to compromise the agent’s ethics, to disregard what is right or wrong. The home buyer goes to Sacramento listing agents because she believes the listing agent will help her to get a good deal — a discounted sales price — because the listing agent would then receive both ends of the commission, twice the incentive. This type of home buyer believes money talks, and integrity walks.
It’s an unspoken assumption on the part of the home buyer, and the listing agent is supposed to be greedy enough to play along. These buyers don’t expect the listing agent to question motives and will deny obvious intensions if pressed because that would make them an undesirable person, a manipulator, and a type of pragmatic person who doesn’t bat an eyelash if their actions get them ahead, as nefarious as they may be.
Listing agents have a fiduciary relationship with their sellers. That relationship means they must put their seller’s needs first and foremost. It doesn’t mean they can throw their seller under the bus just to double-end a deal and get paid twice as much, but some agents do it. Sellers don’t want to hire those kinds of Sacramento listing agents. I know because I ask sellers when I take the listing, and I ask if they want me to work with those kinds of people.
There are always the few home buyers who just don’t know any better. They’ve never bought a home before and they never heard of buyer’s agents, and they think because the listing agent has a sign out front that they should call the Sacramento listing agents. It’s all well and fine to call a listing agent for information, but buyers should not expect an agent to compromise her ethics for them.
It’s insulting. But then I’m an odd duck. I would see it this way.
Myths About Sacramento Home Staging
Lots of people, apparently, want to know how Sacramento home staging works, especially those people who don’t live in Sacramento or are not professional real estate agents, because I get those calls every week. I’ve discovered there are some weird misperceptions about home stagers. The first is some people tend to believe that Sacramento real estate agents offer this service, when little is further from the truth. I wonder if they get this idea from HGTV? We can recommend expert home stagers, but we don’t do the work ourselves.
That would be like asking us to direct and produce a movie. We might enjoy stuffing popcorn into our mouths and gluing our eyeballs to the silver screen as we observe Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Ellar Coltrane slowly age over 12 years in that haunting movie Boyhood playing over at the Tower Theatre, but we don’t even know which direction to point a movie camera. It doesn’t mean we don’t recognize a good movie, connect with the content, scenery, acting and appreciate the aesthetics, but we don’t make movies. Holding an iPhone to video your cat chasing chicken treats is not directing a movie, which is what it would be like if a real estate agent suddenly decided to stage homes. Trust me, you want your Realtor to wear one hat. A real estate agent hat.
I have written many articles about home staging because I understand how staging works, but I do not possess that artistic ability nor the specialized training, and I don’t belong to the home stagers association. I sell real estate in Sacramento, and I’m a top producer real estate agent — that’s my shtick. You want top dollar for your home and to sell it as quickly as humanely possible, I’m your person. I market. I price right. I network; I don’t stage.
The second myth I hear from some people is they somehow hope that a Sacramento real estate agent will pay for the seller’s home staging. I don’t know of any agents in Sacramento who pay for their seller’s home staging, and that has never been my practice. That’s akin to washing the windows or fixing a hole in the roof, we don’t do it. The fee for Sacramento home staging is the seller’s financial responsibility. The seller will typically get more money if the home is staged, so it’s to the seller’s advantage to stage it.
For example, I recently sold a home that comped out at the top end, the very top end, at $250,000. We put it on the market with the home staging in place and immediately received an offer of $265,000. Now, the price to stage this home was roughly $1100 a month. Was Sacramento home staging worth it to this seller? What do your instincts tell you? As veteran agents, we learn over the years whose home staging sells and whose doesn’t.
Not every home needs to be staged and not every room needs home staging. Your Sacramento real estate agent can tell you whether your home needs staging. Maybe it doesn’t. She can also advise as to whether you need to play up the dramatics in every single room. That’s just the starting point. As we move through the sale process, sometimes we add other pieces of the puzzle to make the sale. I’ll even help a seller to rearrange her furniture, but I don’t pretend to be something I am not. I know what I am: a top notch Sacramento Realtor.
Hi, Elizabeth, I Am Looking at Your Website . . .
The caller starts out: “Hi, Elizabeth, I am looking at your website,” to which my immediate response lately has been to cut them off at the pass:“Well, get the hell off of it and don’t come back.” You might think whoa, what if that caller was a potential client, but I assure you it is not. It’s a telemarketer who heard Sacramento real estate agents have deep pockets and, trust me, she wasn’t looking at my website, she was staring at a computer screen with thousands of telephone numbers of Sacramento real estate agents.
Because for every phone call like this that I answer, there are also dozens of home buyers calling every day searching homes for sale in Sacramento, and they want to make an appointment to go look at homes or they want to talk about putting their home on the market. Talking to a telemarketer eats up precious moments in my life. I could be talking to a client instead and should be. I’m one of those agents who really doesn’t mind talking on the phone. Here’s a bit of a secret: sometimes, I even call other agents and speak directly to them instead of sending a text or email, imagine that!
Heck, I grew up with a party-line in my house, and I’m not talking about dancing about with lampshades on our heads. This was a 1950’s thing in which more than one household shared the same telephone line. Each had a special ring so you could tell if the call was for you, but you could also just pick up the receiver and listen to your neighbor’s scintillating phone conversation, like, I’m gonna be home late, honey, so put the tuna casserole in the ‘frig. I’m so happy now to have my very own cellphone in 2014 that drops calls left and right.
It’s kinda creepy to get these sort of telemarketing calls, though. What’s next?
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m standing in your bathroom wearing your panties.”
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m in your bedroom petting your cat.”
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m in your kitchen drinking your bourbon.”
Well, that last one will get me home in a jiffy.
I had just listed another home in Elk Grove yesterday, one of those emergency listings that pop up sometimes out of nowhere and require immediate attention. It was really hot by 10:30, and I had arrived at the home in Elk Grove around 9 AM to shoot photos and complete my visual inspection. At first I tried to remove the old listing sign post from the yard, but at my age, I’m likely to throw out my back so I gave up on it. Been there and done that.
Driving down I-5 on my way back to my home office, what do I get but another telemarketer trying to sell me SEO services. I’ve been doing my own SEO for a decade already, just by writing articles that are important to buyers and sellers. You can read some of those on homebuying.about.com. But I also write blogs and contribute in community forums, and it’s kinda hard to go anywhere online and not find this top producer Sacramento real estate agent and her listings.
I’m probably turning into Andy Rooney in my old age. Except he was a bit nicer about his crankiness, I suspect, whereas I tend to really lay it out there. I make other people laugh, too, by it. When I told the caller I was on her Do Not Call list, she said they don’t have that kind of list where she works. Hello? Do you work in America? I suspect the federal government would like to know about this company.
And I’m sorry that these people have to work as a telemarketer. I guess it beats hanging out on the street corner and panhandling or working at McDonald’s, which is the threat I hear that some of these private colleges make to potential suckers, er, students. I get they are just trying to make a living. Maybe they should go into real estate? This is where all of the misfits go.
Sacramento Real Estate Commissions
Sacramento real estate commissions are in direct proportion to ability.
It is not unusual for a seller to ask if I will take a lower fee than my usual commission, that is, to discount my standard commission, if they hire me instead of one of the other dozen Sacramento real estate agents they are talking to. I understand the need to try to save money wherever one can in a real estate transaction because money is a seller’s main concern and my responsibility to manage. But Sacramento real estate commissions are the wrong place to look. My primary two focal points when working as a listing agent are to save money for my sellers and to make money for my sellers. That’s why home sellers tend to hire a real estate agent. To help manage the money. Maximize the profit.
They think they are hiring a Realtor to sell a home, but that’s not the whole picture.
As real estate agents, we manage our sellers’ money in a wide variety of ways, and Sacramento real estate commissions don’t really enter the picture. We manage our sellers’ money through our marketing and pricing strategy, our reach on the internet and through open houses, our extensive experience, our professional advice, our successful negotiation tactics and our unwavering ability to close the transaction in a seamless manner. Which means all agents are different.
It’s not enough these days to get a contract into escrow. That’s just the beginning, of course, before the inspections, before the pest reports, the roof inspections, sewer inspections, chimney inspections, other homes coming on the market that can detract, other homes closing that affect appraisals, and a bazillion other things that can happen in a real estate transaction, including buyer’s cold feet.
Who is gonna see a seller through that maize? Hopefully, it’s the Sacramento real estate agent who is managing the seller’s money. I get paid the same percentage that I’ve been paid for the past 40 years; whether prices go up or prices go down, I don’t get a raise. My Sacramento real estate commissions have remained constant. Although, sometimes sellers pay me more after closing. They think my standard fee is not high enough. They send me gifts. The best lately was a $500 gift certificate.
The other day a client asked if he could pay me a big bonus if his home sold in 30 days. That tells me that people think we will alter the way we do business if sellers dangle more money in front our faces, and that’s not true. A really good agent can’t be bought and sold like a commodity. Many Sacramento real estate agents, me included, are not all that motivated by money. Our motivation, whether you want to believe it or not, is truly seller satisfaction. Our income is a by-product.
In conclusion, I will listen to your situation and will not be offended to discuss my fees because all Sacramento real estate commissions are negotiable, but in the end, a seller will pay me what I am worth. And they will be ecstatic about it after the home sells and closes. That’s my goal. All agents should want this.
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