Email ElizabethBefore Remodeling Your Home
You probably don’t think to call an agent before remodeling a home, but maybe you should. Ah, we agents of a certain agent suffer from remodeling nostalgia overdose; it’s no wonder I have a hard time remembering what year it is. Much less the month and day. There is so much nostalgia going on that it’s like the 1960s all over again. OK, no smoke-filled rooms stuffed with stoners stumbling around toting bongs — which today would be water bottles — but you get the point. The clothes, the TV shows, the home furnishings, they all yell groovy, baby. Or maybe it just seems that way with Mad Men and Masters of Sex.
My husband is often eager to remind me that he was drooling in his crib during the period I talk about the early 1960s. He doesn’t see the era as special for that reason. I’ve got clients who absolutely adore “mid-century,” as in 50 to 60 years ago. Notwithstanding that mid-century homes, especially in Sacramento, are in high demand. In fact, homes of any character tend to sell faster and for more money than cookie-cutter boring homes. It’s like the difference between a 1950 Buick and a 2013 Camry. Style, curves, angles, real steel, heavy metal construction versus cheap plastic boxes.
The problem comes about because it seems like it’s in our DNA to want to remodel. To modernize. OK, maybe I’m just talking about myself. But when I think back over homes I have torn apart and remodeled, I cringe. I shouldn’t have done it. I can’t believe, for example, that I hung hunter green wallpaper and installed hunter green ceramic tile in an Eden Prairie, Minnesota, split-level home. I am very sorry that I installed white cabinetry with oak trim in a Cape Cod by Lake Nokomis in South Minneapolis. I apologize profusely today for the Pergo floor in the Victorian in the Whittier neighborhood.
Thank goodness I came to my senses in Sacramento.
But at least I can say I never ripped out 1940s cabinetry and replaced it with tasteless cherrywood and granite counters. Some homes deserve better. Historic homes deserve to be preserved and admired. Restored, if possible. Not stripped of all character, detail and design to try to conform to what we might call modern standards. What we call modern doesn’t last very long. It’s really a trend. It’s not modern. There is a difference between the two.
So, before you raise that sledgehammer, ask yourself this question: Are you doing more harm than good? Maybe you should set down that sledgehammer and move away from the walls. Call a Sacramento real estate agent to ask if you’re damaging your home before you undertake any major home improvement project.
Think About Selling a Sacramento Home When Buying
One of the biggest fears sellers often harbor about selling a Sacramento home is what if it doesn’t sell? They have those fears because they are not in real estate. When you’re in real estate, like this Sacramento real estate agent, you know that anything will sell if the price is right. Even a flooded-out house with mold the size of basketballs will sell. And yes, I’ve sold a lot of those types of homes, too.
There are a variety of reasons why selling a Sacramento home might take longer than usual to sell, though. These are sometimes the reasons that some sellers don’t want to hear because they are reasons the sellers should have thought of before they bought a home. I often tell people that the time to think about selling a Sacramento home is when you buy a home.
Maybe it’s in a bad location. You know, location, location, location is what drives real estate. Maybe there’s something about it that other homes have and yours does not. I ask buyer’s agents who show my listings to give me buyer feedback. From feedback I hear about things we can rectify. If we can’t rectify those things, we can adjust the price to account for it.
It’s difficult to explain to a seller that she bought the wrong home or paid too much, but I do try to get that point across if it is true. It is often true. Especially in certain neighborhoods in Sacramento, it’s easy to buy the wrong type of home in the wrong location.
Or, we can wait for the buyer who is just like the seller of any other beautiful home in Elk Grove. Because the seller bought this home for a reason. That is most likely the same reason a new buyer will buy it. Nobody is that unique. A buyer will appear, and we will reel ’em in.
There is a buyer for every home in Sacramento. If this agent is listing and selling your home, you can count on it.
Tips For Canceling a Short Sale Offer in Sacramento
Some buyer’s agents do not know that when a buyer and a seller sign a purchase offer for a short sale listing, they have entered into a binding contract to buy a home. I don’t really know why agents often treat a short sale like the red-haired stepchild, but it’s a real transaction just like any other real estate transaction. If you sign a short sale offer, you’re committed.
This means if the buyer elects to cancel after approval, a buyer can do so. The RPA contract put out by C.A.R. is written in favor of buyers. Probably because buyers sue more often than sellers. Sellers are typically happier after closing than buyers. It’s rare that a seller feels that he or she got the raw end of the stick. But buyers? Whole ‘nother story.
Some people believe that the only time a buyer cannot cancel is after all contingencies are removed, and that’s a myth. They can still cancel. Buyers can always cancel. But in that event, they could get sued because they don’t have a contractual right to cancel, although, that’s where they will argue.
If a seller does not sign a buyer’s cancellation simply out of spite, a seller can be facing a $1,000 fine. The seller has no right to ignore the cancellation, if the buyer is within the time period to cancel. But that’s after 30 days. So, you can’t really force sellers to immediately sign a cancellation for a short sale offer especially unless you’re standing over them with a sledge hammer, and no agent has the inclination to do that.
But what happens when it’s the other way around and the sellers want to dump a buyer? How is that handled? Before my sellers cancel buyers from a short sale transaction, we give them a chance. It’s the fair and equitable thing to do, even if they are not fair and equitable to us. Besides, contracts stipulate. We send them a Notice to Perform. We spell out what we want them to do, and if they don’t do it, we can unilaterally cancel that short sale offer.
However, if you as a buyer wants to cancel, you need to sign a cancellation of contract. Not a withdrawal of offer and not an addendum. Buyers sign the top and bottom portion and date it, along with escrow information to release the earnest money deposit. Buyers also need to state a reason for the cancellation. When buyers sign a short sale addendum, agreeing to wait for short sale approval, the buyer is supposed to wait during that period of time. But bottom line, if a buyer doesn’t want to buy, nobody can make ’em. I suppose it’s possible they could be sued for sending a seller to foreclosure, but that’s for lawyers to argue.
For more questions about a Sacramento short sale offer, call your Sacramento short sale agent, Elizabeth Weintraub, at 916 233 6759.
One Way to Handle Christmas
My family was so poor in the 1950s that my drunken excuse for a father always bought our tree at a huge discount on Christmas Eve. After the bars closed. He told us kids that Santa Claus brought it at midnight, along with all of our presents. In a way, it was pretty cool because I never knew for certain whether it might be Christmas when I woke up. Stumbling around the corner, tightly clutching my robe — due to the fact that all of the heat was turned off at night and you could see your breath in the morning — I first sniffed the scent of pine needles before spotting all the decorations, the tree, and the half-chewed ribbons on the presents under it, and our dog, Lulu, slopping all of the water out of the tree stand. Christmas was a big deal.
Before global warming, we almost always had snow for Christmas in Minnesota, mounds and mounds of white, covered in a thin glaze of sugar, gleaming in the winter sun. Then, I grew up and realized how cold it is in Minnesota: bone-chilling, with iced earlobes that hurt like hell from frozen metal earrings, and snot-freezing in your nose, kind of cold. I moved to Colorado and then eventually to California, the land of Santa Clauses tied to palm trees.
I still carried on the tradition of Christmas. Some years I would fly home to Minneapolis, back when airline travel was glamorous, the golden era. Women wore hose and white gloves and little hats. I flew on the discounted student travel fare, which meant I could share the same space as those who paid 75% more and still smoke out my brains. Seats were roomy and comfortable. Today, the airlines have made travel so completely hellish that you pretty much are forced to fly business or first class if you don’t want to be stuffed into a can of sardines with the lid rolled up and locked.
If I didn’t fly home, I decorated the house and bought a Christmas tree. For my first Christmas away from home and on my own, I insisted on trudging through the woods to find a wild tree, chopped it down and hauled it home. As the years progressed, I was content to stop by a local Christmas tree stand and buy the biggest tree I could find, slap it on the roof of my car, tie myself in so I couldn’t open the doors and drive home with it.
After 30 years of this nonsense, I felt an urge to graduate to the (heaven forbid) artificial tree, but it had to be all white, flocked and enormous, which I figured would save me money year after year. As with most purchases that lose luster after a while, I began to yearn for a new tree, one not quite so big and not flocked (dropping bits the cats puked), and just plain green. A plain, artificial, green tree.
When that got to be too much work, I downsized to the four-foot tree you can buy at Target, the kind that comes with all of the lights attached, so all you have to do is a buy a box of miniature bulbs for decoration, the very same tiny bulbs the cats will knock off and bat around the house, right after they try to run up the tree.
After my mother died and we moved to Sacramento, the thought crossed my mind that we could get a smaller tree, perhaps the 10-inch-high standard issue desktop tree, but that seemed a bit ridiculous. Besides, by now I had married a Weintraub who did not share my Christmas tree traditions, which were dwindling, or personal views of Christmas, none of which was religious.
Instead, it seemed to make more sense to take a winter holiday over Christmas. Every year we go away on an extended vacation to some place exotic and warm. For many years, it had been trips to the Hawaiian Islands. In 2009, we toured Viet Nam and Cambodia. Last year it was French Polynesia. No tree. No presents. No glitz. No commercialism.
Tomorrow we go to the Florida Keys and new people move into our house to care for the cats in our absence. I wonder if our house sitters will miss the Christmas tree and decorations? They never say anything about it. I suppose they think we are both Jewish.
When the Mortgage Loan Officer Comes a Callin’
As the holidays draw near and business slows a little bit . . . seems like the perfect time for mortgage loan officers to jump on the horn and start dialing-for-dollars every top producer Sacramento real estate agent who answers her cell. Which means they probably don’t get an opportunity to talk to very many real estate agents in the Sacramento Valley, except for me. Because I do answer my cell.
The story is always the same. They are calling because they all of a sudden noticed that I close an unusually high volume of homes in Sacramento — much more than the average agent — so they figure, I suppose, that if they could align themselves with a winner, why, they would be a winner, too. Because most of these guys and, for some reason, they are almost always men, don’t have enough real estate business. Some of the mortgage loan officers, apparently, are relatively new to the mortgage loan business.
They are smart enough to figure out that they need to give an agent an incentive to work with them, but not smart enough to figure out that the agent didn’t become a top producer without a strong mortgage loan officer or two or three at her side. We’ll give you lots of seller and buyer leads, they promise. Yeah, because they have so many leads right now that they need to call a Sacramento real estate agent and beg for business, right?
Do I look like a person who fell off a turnip truck? Do they even know what that phrase means?
Why doesn’t their manager or mentor explain that a new mortgage loan officer starting out in the business would do better to match himself to a brand new agent? They can pick and choose a promising agent, a hard-working agent, and then go up the ladder with a soon-to-be top achiever, instead of banging their heads back and forth in the door jamb.
Because there is nothing a Sacramento real estate agent likes better than to answer her phone and find out it’s a solicitation call. I wish them Happy Holidays, but I can’t help them. Besides, I am off to the Florida Keys to continue my real estate business from this year’s winter getaway on the water. I’ll chat with clients while flamingoes strut about in the sand, but God help the phone solicitors.
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