Email ElizabethDon’t Make These Sacramento Home Buying Mistakes
It can be a slow process, trying to buy a home in Sacramento, but it’s even slower if you don’t know where you want to live. Home buyers just starting out might have unreasonable expectations, and those types of expectations can lead to disappointment.
Before engaging a buyer’s agent to show homes, it’s common for buyers to identify and target a few communities. Agents can be a great resource, but buyers should really ask an agent to show homes when the buyers are ready and able to write a purchase offer. That’s not to say that an agent can’t help buyers to choose a place to live because that’s what we do. However, there are plenty of open houses every Sunday in Sacramento where buyers can go to look at homes, talk to other agents, get a feel for neighborhoods, without a personal escort.
Agents don’t hold all of the information anymore regarding homes for sale, but we do have access to MLS, which a buyer does not. We can send a buyer listings in certain areas defined by custom searches or however a buyer would like to receive the information. The best home buying website is generally the buyer’s agent’s own website or a feed directly from MLS.
Here are some of the common home buying mistakes I’ve heard about over the past few weeks that can easily lead to disappointment and frustration:
- Looking at homes with sales prices way above the buyer’s affordability point. It makes no sense to look at homes priced at $400,000 if your pre-approval letter maximum is $300,000.
- Dragging your agent through the same square-foot model home over and over, which a buyer does not like. If you really hate that closet and bathroom, it won’t look any different in the same model with different paint on the walls.
- Expecting a buyer’s agent to immediately respond to your email questions about new homes you just found on another website when she is showing homes to another client for a few hours.
- Asking personal questions of a seller to satisfy idle curiosity that have no bearing on whether the home is suitable for you and your children.
- Finding a home that fits your needs and pricing but not buying that home because you wonder if there might be some other home that is better for you. There is always another home.
Bottom line, if a home buyer needs to personally inspect 200 homes before buying a home in Sacramento, that buyer is probably not yet ready to buy a home. And that’s OK. But let your agent know and discuss expectations before asking an agent to show homes.
Super Bowl Sunday 2014 and Sacramento Open Houses
Home buyers in Sacramento were out in droves over the weekend, attending open houses, touring new listings and writing offers. This was the one weekend in January to do it because we got a break in those football games. Granted, I am not a person who watches football. I am probably in the minority but football doesn’t interest me. Not even if I imagine the team players as short sale negotiators at various banks — oh look, Bank of America just swiped the ball from Green Tree, and Wells Fargo bashed PNC in the head. Nope, still doesn’t do it for me.
Next weekend, of course, will be Super Bowl Sunday 2014, and it’s just not a good weekend for an open house. Oh, sure, there are Super Bowl widows and widowers who will be out and about, but the bulk of Americans will be focused on who will win the Super Bowl. Big Super Bowl parties everywhere except at my house. I’m not even sure who is playing, I think Denver and . . . After we get past this next weekend, it should be clear sailing through spring into summer for Sacramento real estate.
A negotiator at SLS called me this morning to ask when we would record on a short sale scheduled for closing. I told her it would be tomorrow. But what TIME, she persisted, almost in a whiny voice. Well, Sacramento has 5 recording times — it will be one of those, I offered. One of those 5 times. Don’t know which one. She probably would have smacked me if we were sitting across the table from each other.
But then I’d throw a football into her face and break her nose.
Pay Attention to Noise When Buying a Home in Sacramento
Don’t buy a home near an airport.
When buying a home in Sacramento, you need to pay attention to the noise factor, even if you’re half deaf, which I partly am. When I was in third grade, I stuffed a soda straw into my right ear canal. Why? I don’t know. Why do little kids ram crayons up their noses? I don’t even recall doing such a stupid thing but the pain afterwards was particularly memorable. My mother did not believe I had an ailment and sent me to school anyway, and I spent most of the morning with my head on my desk, quietly sobbing. Next thing I knew I had a large vacuum hose attached to my ear, which caused a great deal of pain as it sucked out the straw at the doctor’s office.
That soda straw pierced my eardrum. As a result I have a slight hearing loss in my right ear, which means when I sleep, if I want to block out sound, I simply sleep on my left ear. There is somewhat of an upside to this mishap, especially since I once lived in shared quarters with 17 other guys in Nederland, Colorado. When you throw loud rock-and-roll from my younger decades into the mix, it’s a wonder I’m not deaf, but I suppose there is still time.
I do find that the older I get, the more sensitive to sound I become. Because the older I get, the more I appreciate silence. (Silence is golden but my eyes still see . . . with the help contact lenses for old people.) I treasure the sound of nothing. Absolute quiet. Peaceful. Tranquil. Silent. No sounds of the freeway, children screaming, dogs barking, no helicopters overhead or planes, no logs crackling in a fireplace, no water running through a sprinkler system, no birds singing or crickets cricketing or frogs croaking, not even a sound of wind blowing through treetops.
Home buyers don’t want a lot of noise, either. A friend of my husband, a former editor at the Sacramento Bee, once said the thing she disliked about Sacramento was the sound of the freeway no matter where you were. She is right, it is hard when buying a home in Sacramento to stay away from neighborhoods where noise does not exist on some level. Even though my home in Land Park is at least a mile from Old Sacramento, I can still hear the train on the weekends, but dual pane windows blocks out all other sound.
My sister lives under a flight path in Minneapolis. You can practically identify what the first-class passengers are drinking, the belly of the plane flies so low. My husband lived 2 blocks from the El in Chicago. Home prices in those types of neighborhoods are much lower than in areas where noise is reduced.
If you’re in the market to buy a home in Sacramento, stand in the yard for a while and listen. Go there at different times of the day and different days of the week and listen. Ask yourself if you can adapt to the noises you hear. Because when it comes time to sell — and there will be a time you will want to sell — that noise factor will influence the price a buyer will pay. You just don’t realize it now because you’re surrounded by sound and noise every day, and you’re probably much younger than me. Not to mention, that noise-polluted home is probably very affordable. I always say the best time to think about selling a home is when you’re buying a home in Sacramento.
Winning the Cat Box Wars is Like Closing a Difficult Short Sale
Getting my cats to switch over to the Breeze litter box system is sort of like getting a short sale — with all of its moving and opposing parts — to close escrow. It becomes a matter sometimes of who will be last person standing at the OK Corral — who has the most staying power. Who will emerge the victor — will it be the 3 cats who have always used litter and are not exactly known for changing their preferences? Or, will it be me, the caretaker, who has to put up with a few extremely stinky cat boxes?
The way the Breeze switchover works is you have to stop cleaning the cats’ existing litter boxes and wait for your cats’ cleanliness instincts to kick in. The idea is when they no longer have a clean cat box, they will embrace the Breeze litter box. When that happens, you can remove the stinky old cat box and they should continue to use the new Breeze litter box. So, who has the most stamina? Me or the cats?
I understand stamina and perseverance. I am a real estate agent in Sacramento with extensive experience in closing short sales. Further, I have sold more than $65 million in short sales, according to the January 2014 Trendgraphix report, which is more than other real estate agent over a 7-county area. When I say that not every short sale is a slam dunk, thank you, ma’am, you better believe it.
A short sale is closing next week that had been denied 3 or 4 times — I can’t recall. I’ve been working on it for more than a year. The buyer has been waiting all of this time, very patiently. When the nearly impossible happened and we received the short sale approval letter from the first lender, we still had a battle to settle with the second, which involved more negotiation with the first lender. In the end, both lenders finally agreed to close. Each gave a little bit to make it work.
But bottom line, the agents and the buyers and the sellers all clung to the hope it would close. We didn’t lie down in the street and moan: Oh, shoot me now and put me out of my misery. And that’s why I think I will win the cat box wars. Plus, I found evidence of usage this morning, which is cause to celebrate. Oh, how a little poop excites a weary warrior!
Selling a Short Sale to a Person You Know Could be Short Sale Fraud
A potential short sale seller in West Sacramento called a few days to ask questions about selling her home to a relative. Friends told her she could sell the home to a Living Trust, which her son controls, and then she wouldn’t really be selling the home to a relative — what bunk. This type of short sale transaction could very well violate an arms-length agreement. I can’t believe any lawyer would suggest that idea, but it’s possible because lawyers are not infallible. They make mistakes. Plus, they can then charge a client even more money to build a defense. Pretty good racket. Just think: Better call Saul.
This seller said she read in some of my blogs that it’s not a good idea to try to pull the wool over the lender’s eyes because it can come back to bite you. Hard. Right on the butt. I realize people get emotional about their homes and want the real estate to stay in the family, but if you’re doing a short sale in which you have to sign an arms length agreement, it’s not worth the consequences. The lender could say it’s mortgage fraud and reverse the seller’s release of personal liability, not to mention, prosecute everybody involved.
If you want to read about what recently happened to a seller and his real estate agent regarding short sale mortgage fraud, you should read this article in the Modesto Bee. There were so many alleged wrong doings, it made my head spin. The federal prosecutors say the agent and seller conspired. Here are some of the allegations:
- The agent wrote the short sale hardship letter for the seller.
- The hardship letter misrepresented the seller’s ability to make the mortgage payments.
- The seller and agent made false statements about the seller’s assets.
- The agent and seller misrepresented knowing the buyer.
- The seller sold to the buyer, which was the listing agent’s son, as a straw buyer.
- The seller gave the buyer the money to purchase the home in exchange for the buyer giving it back to the seller.
The buyer’s agent also gave the listing agent 75% of the buyer’s agent commission, which makes me wonder — what about the buyer’s agent in all of this? Is that agent’s broker liable? What about the listing agent’s son? Sounds like a group effort.
At this point, the seller apparently has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing. If the agent is convicted, she could face 30 years in jail plus a $1 million fine. This might be a good time for the agent to watch the Netflex series Orange is the New Black.
Before you judge that listing agent too harshly, consider the fact that it’s possible she doesn’t really sell much real estate and just happens to hold a real estate license, like about 80% of the agents out there. It explains why she might not know any better but it doesn’t relieve her from responsibility to have known.
Sorry we are experiencing system issues. Please try again.
