Email ElizabethIs There a Real Estate App for That?
We all hate to face the fact, I suppose, that sometimes there is just not a real estate app for a Sacramento real estate agent. A conscientious real estate agent follows up, though, and never lets any sellers or buyers fall through the cracks, and that includes new business. For a long time, I had been guilty of letting new business fall by the wayside and die, even though I’m the kind of busy agent who is very detail oriented and pays attention the world around me. My solution for tracking business, staying on top of my files, was years ago to create systems, the kind of complicated systems with cross-checks.
You know how it goes in life, you’re driving along the freeway, for example, and somebody calls with information and, if there is note-taking involved, you might think: Oh, I’ll remember that, no problem. Except, of course, it is a problem because once other information finds its way to wiggle into your brain, the box that particular data was comfortably resting in gets shoved way to the back of the attic, where the dustballs reside. Phone rings again, dog>squirrel>gone.
My husband, a former journalist, has it engrained to carry a pen and pad, even though he no longer writes for a newspaper. That doesn’t do me any good, though, if he’s not sitting in the passenger seat. I’ve solved that problem, the need for a paper and pen, by a) printing map directions, even though I use GPS and b) tracking vehicle mileage in a book, with extra pages I can rip out. See, you can’t have a Plan A without a Plan B as backup. I always have something in the car to write on, and sometimes I end up writing on my car seat because I’m looking at the road. What was the last number? Oh, yeah, it’s here on the headrest, a number 9.
Now, of course, the trick is to get this information into a format where I won’t lose it. And this is where a third party is helpful. Yup, an actual real live person to keep track of this stuff and a system in which to do it. My particulars for selling Sacramento real estate are too specific for any one app to take care of what I need. Sometimes, what a busy agent needs is a virtual assistant utilizing an organized system to keep things from falling through the cracks.
I’ve already got a fabulous transaction coordinator on my team who handles the paperwork for my clients and makes sure every I is dotted and every T is crossed before we close escrow. But I needed a way to help me track my own business, and to assist my team members. I am really excited to have found a virtual assistant to close the cracks and make us all more productive and focused. Because some things, there’s just not an app for.
Dangers of Hiring Any Old Realtor for Sacramento Short Sales
All Sacramento short sales are not the same, and a seller should not just hire any old Realtor he or she can find to do a short sale. I can’t express the sentiment enough that if you need to do a short sale, you owe it to yourself to hire the best Sacramento short sale agent you can find because you have no idea, and I mean seriously absolutely zero idea, of what can happen in a short sale, but a specialist does. A specialist can prevent some crap from ever taking place to start with.
For crying out loud, Sacramento short sales are traumatic enough without lopping a second or third helping of pain on top of existing angst and agony.
In this next short sale I’ll share with you, the seller had hired some other agent in Sacramento to do his short sale. He called me because he hadn’t heard anything from his agent for a while and wondered what was happening. Asked if I would be so kind as to go over to his house and check it out because he lived out of town.
Tahoe Park is not that far from Land Park where I live, so I drove over but not before I checked his listing in MLS. Lo and behold, the listing was still listed in MLS as “expired pending” status, which is not allowed. It meant there was an offer of some sort, most likely expired as well but not necessarily; however, the listing itself had expired and there was no longer any agreement between the seller and the listing agent. The seller insisted that he wasn’t even aware they were in contract.
First thing I noticed when I arrived at the home in Tahoe Park: there was no sign in the yard. The place looked forlorn. Lockbox was there, but no sign. There was another lockbox, too, the kind attached to the gate by a preservation company hired by the bank, which meant a side door was drilled out. It would appear that the short sale agent had simply given up on this client and forgotten about the listing. I retrieved the key from the lockbox, inserted it into the lock and slowly pushed open the door. There was something on the floor in front of the door. God, I hoped it wasn’t a dead animal. It was a pile of old mail and a FedX envelope. I called the seller and he asked me to open the FedX envelope. Dated in September and this was February. The letter from Bank of America informed the seller his short sale was denied.
And this is how I came to list an FHA short sale with Bank of America in Tahoe Park last February. I’m not certain the previous agent even realized this was a HUD-related situation.
After MLS removed the expired listing and allowed my listing entry, the previous buyer’s agent called to submit the same lowball offer she had previously submitted. As a top Sacramento short sale agent, I know it is not necessarily in the best interest of the seller to submit a lowball offer on a short sale. Not only that, but since it’s an FHA short sale, two things must happen: #1) the seller needs to receive an ATP from HUD, without which the sale will go nowhere, and #2) HUD will prepare a formal appraisal, not a BPO, and the offer price must meet or exceed the net expected.
The agent appeared highly agitated and frustrated that I could not advise the seller to take her buyer’s offer, especially since the seller had previously accepted an offer from that buyer. Well, that was part of the problem, the offer was too far below the comparable sales. Would her buyer like to increase the offer or does the buyer believe banks are handing out short sales left and right like toasters?
It took a while to obtain an offer that would meet HUD’s guidelines and to meet the seller’s expectation of commitment duration. FHA short sales are not processed quickly and can take months and months. On top of this, since the sellers no longer occupied the home and had moved away, we needed to obtain a variance from FHA because the reason for moving did not fit like a round peg into a round hole. That’s how the government works. No square pegs in round holes allowed without a variance.
But the long and short of it is we got the ATP, we got the variance, and we closed the escrow in September. I know this without hesitation, and the truth is if the seller had not finally hired a top Sacramento real estate agent who used specialized knowledge to close this sort of FHA short sale, he’d have a foreclosure instead on his record.
Closing a Bank of America Short Sale After Two Years
It’s not really fair to call this a Bank of America short sale when in reality it is actually a Bank of America short sale with Fannie Mae as the investor, which is a different kind of animal from other types of Bank of America short sales. When Bank of America is merely the servicer, it means Fannie Mae short sales are handled differently. In fact, Fannie Mae now has its own website for submitting short sales, which tremendously expedites the process.
But the procedure and short sale process still needs to follow Fannie Mae guidelines, which at times, I realize, can be difficult for sellers and buyers to wrap their heads around. The valuation placed on some Fannie Mae properties astounds other real estate agents. I suspect it’s because we work under the premise that valuation means market value, like an appraiser would do it, but that’s not how Fannie Mae seems to work. Its valuation, I suspect, has more to do with whether it is more economically feasible to sell at its suggested valuation over being paid to do a foreclosure and, yes, banks make money on foreclosures.
This supposed simple short sale began life as a Cooperative Short Sale. I met with the sellers in August of 2012. We listed the home and signed the paperwork for the Bank of America short sale to proceed as a cooperative, with no financials, sort of a short path to a preapproval. REDC was involved as the third-party vendor, which added a bit of red tape, and what usually would take Bank of America 10 days ended up taking 45 days, but we eventually received a pre-approved price for a Cooperative Short Sale that was $80,000 over the comparable sales. Not yay for us.
That Fall 2012 Sacramento real estate market was one of the hottest markets I had seen for 7 years. We held numerous open houses that should have resulted in a half dozen offers and nothing. No nibbles. No offers. We finally accepted an offer we believed to be reasonable and submitted. It was rejected. Over the next two years, we submitted a total of 5 offers, each a little bit closer to the price Fannie Mae expected. At one point, on Thanksgiving Day, I kid you not, a guy from REDC called the sellers and threatened to close the file if the sellers didn’t immediately submit a document he suddenly wanted.
The home needed work. On top of this, the roof was shot and at end of life. This meant either we needed a buyer who would pay cash or a buyer able to obtain an FHA 203K loan. Investors called and begged us to take their offer. These buyers felt we were being obtuse and cruel but in reality, after 4 rejections from Fannie Mae, it became pretty clear even to the most dense of us that we had better the submit the offer Fannie Mae expected if we wanted to receive short sale approval.
At another point in this short sale, I made a deal with the third-party vendor hired for this Bank of America short sale and obtained verbal approval for a lower price from Fannie Mae. We submitted an offer at the slightly slower price, and Fannie Mae then promptly demanded another $5,000 on top of it. The investor walked. Over $5,000. I couldn’t believe it. This is a fabulous neighborhood in Carmichael, and many of the homes around this particular home are much larger and in better condition.
It was a little disheartening, listening to buyers after buyers yelling and screaming at me on the phone about why we refused to accept their offer. They called me names. They swore at me. They wrote mean emails about me. They insisted I was prejudiced against investors. They just could not understand that this was not my call nor my decision. They felt they knew better how short sales operate, even though they may have never dealt with a Bank of America short sale through Fannie Mae, and this Sacramento short sale agent has worked on Fannie Mae short sales for years.
We finally got to the point this summer when market value had moved up enough, even with the mounting repairs and required new roof, that a buyer who wanted to live in the home decided to make an offer. At list price. A foreclosure notice had already been filed and we were in the final 21-day countdown to a trustee’s auction. I cried, I pleaded. We then received approval from Fannie Mae on this Bank of America short sale in 18 days. It was a miracle.
And you know what’s really odd about this? This was the first time ever in which we were able to stop a trustee’s auction due to short sale approval. We were literally days from foreclosure, but once we received that short sale approval letter, all foreclosure proceedings had to cease due to the California Homeowner Bill of Rights. We were saved in the nick of time. I’ve always felt that the dual tracking portion of the law passed in 2013 was pretty useless about stopping foreclosure during a short sale because it doesn’t apply to short sales until January of 2018 (when we probably won’t need the law) unless we get short sale approval. Generally, by the time we get approval, we still have plenty of time to avoid the foreclosure, so it doesn’t matter.
But in this case, our California short sale law made all the difference in the world.
We closed today, 30 days later. See, this Sacramento real estate agent does not give up, regardless of what I have to go through to close a short sale, I hang in there and make it work for the seller. But no short sale should have to drag on for more than two years like this Fannie Mae / Bank of America short sale in Carmichael.
The Comparison Between Sacramento Real Estate and Pastries
Sacramento real estate is bit like pastries.
Selling Sacramento real estate is a little bit like selling pastries. Everybody always wants the cherry beignet or creme brûlée, and they walk right on by the original glazed creme doughnuts or cinnamon rolls. Sell out of the chocolate-sprinkled pastries, and people go wild and keep calling, wanting to know when you’ll get more chocolate sprinkles. Or, maybe it bothers me more than I let on that Doughbot has closed its doors over on 10th Street and W.
The thing is once a home goes into escrow, it seems everybody wants it even if for months nobody wanted it before. Bam, pending sale and buyer’s agents start calling to see if the seller won’t at least allow one more showing, puhlease. They want to know how the sale is moving. If we don’t have a release of contingencies on file, we don’t really know for certain how the sale is moving.
The truth is I can’t predict whether a buyer will close escrow on a Sacramento real estate transaction. I can call the loan officer to ask if the buyers have actually filled out a loan application and submitted tax returns, and that’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t assure anybody that the buyer will close. Buyers have a way of freaking out lately, maybe more so than usual. Sacramento real estate has been a bit squirrelly over the summer.
It’s almost like I want to ask the buyer’s agent, are you certain your buyer wants to buy a home in Sacramento? Because a signed purchase offer for that piece of Sacramento real estate is NOT that assurance. It should be, but it’s not. Further, I would like to shelter my seller from any disappointment these types of situations can generate. But we can’t protect them from buyers who will change their minds.
Their agents aren’t likely to ask if they are certain. Their agents are more likely to say sign here and here,?and thanks for the earnest money check. Not because they’re ruthless or whatever, it’s because they often wrongly assume that because a buyer signs a purchase offer that the buyer really wants to buy the house. So, I don’t know how solid an offer is and there is no way I can accurately or honestly tell a buyer’s agent if it’s worth pursuing a pending sale.
If the buyer doesn’t want the chocolate eclair but prefers the creme brûlée, then by all means, put a backup offer on the creme brûlée but that chocolate eclair, I tell you, is mighty tasty. I encourage you to call Elizabeth Weintraub for all of your Sacramento real estate needs.
Beautiful Waterfront Home in Laguna West
If you’re looking for a home smack dab on the water in Laguna West, a spacious home with beautiful water views from almost every room, this is the waterfront home in Laguna West you’ve been waiting to buy. No matter what kind of home you’re looking for in Elk Grove, I can probably help you to buy it as I have listed a variety of homes in the Elk Grove area, from a one-bedroom condo all the way to homes with pools over 3,000 square feet, including this beauty on the lake with its own dock.
You can tell how massive and impressive the interior will be by noting the clerestory windows and gorgeous enclosed courtyard as you approach from the street. There is a water fountain in the courtyard, which complements its quiet reserved nature. The waterfront home is tucked away on a cul-de-sac, too.
Inside the entry, the ceilings soar to the second floor. To the left, you’ll pass the first-floor bedroom, which is presently used as an office, behind French doors. The other direction takes you through the entry to the formal living and dining room. In the kitchen, you’ll find ceramic flooring, an island, recessed lighting, and a spectacular water view. The sliding doors in the second dining area also lead to the back yard, and the water view carries into the family room, boasting a built-in entertainment center and fireplace.
The master suite will delight, which also overlooks the water and offers a balcony to relax upon and read or just stare at the blue calmness. Spa-like qualities of the master bath are inviting, a tub for soaking, luxurious shower and two separate his-and-hers vanities, coupled with a walk-in closet. Surprisingly, the other two bedrooms upstairs are very spacious as well.
Overall, the home features 3,133 square feet, it was built in 1999, and it has 4 bedrooms, 3 full baths. You can check it out during our open house on Sunday, September 7th, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM or call us for a private showing before then. Offered by Elizabeth Weintraub, Lyon Real Estate, at 916.233.6759.
9248 Beach Haven Court, Elk Grove, CA 95758. Affordable at $575,000.
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