Email ElizabethWhy Do People Start a Real Estate Career?
Few people know that I bought my first real estate brokerage at age 26. That’s sort of an anomaly, especially for a woman back in 1978. It’s even odder today because there are so few young people in real estate. Why, according to the National Association of REALTORS, the median age of a real estate agent today is 57. I imagine, however, that due to the troubled state of our economy, that median age is about to change.
Why do people start a real estate career? I’ll tell you why but agents aren’t gonna like it. They go into real estate because they can’t get a job doing anything else. That’s the truth. They are misfits. They either can’t conform to the outside workplace or else they can’t get a job.
It used to be mostly the rebels who sought out real estate careers, because in the 1970s, an agent didn’t need even a high school education. It was only over the past dozen years or so that education requirements for brokers were put into place. Today, to get a real estate license in California, apart from passing an examination, applicants must also complete a series of 3 real estate classes and be fingerprinted / checked by the F.B.I. As long as a person doesn’t have an arrest record (and there’s some question about that), just about anybody can get a real estate license.
I came into the business because I was already had a real estate career as an escrow officer. I was swamped revamping deals by helping agents salvage their blown-up transactions due to 18%-and-rising interest rates when I suddenly realized I was on the wrong side of the business. On top of this, I had completed real estate and escrow courses, carrying 20 credits a year, through a community college in Orange County, California, while working full-time at a title company. Not your normal Sacramento real estate agent entry to the business.
But today, we have a wide spread of unemployed people, kids graduating from college who can’t find a job, no matter what. Kids struggling to make it through college who can’t graduate because they can’t get into the necessary classes. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the over-50 group getting laid off. Companies can hire cheaper labor if they can dump expensive overhead. There is little loyalty between employees and corporations. It seems that the majority of people employed full-time are those in-between the 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds.
This means we’ve got this huge group of young people and all of us older people who can’t find work. I see that Warren Buffet is concentrating on young people, trying to pull them into the business. That’s a smart move. That’s what I’m telling my niece to do. Go into real estate. Start a real estate career. She might find that she has a passion for the business. She’s outgoing, personable, smart and hard-working. She seems to gain considerable personal satisfaction from helping other people.
The money is nothing to sneeze at, either.
You hear that, Laura?
You Can Keep a Short Sale Off Your Credit Report
There are short sale sellers in Sacramento who do not know that if they fit the guidelines, it is possible to do a short sale, be current on your mortgage payments, and NOT have a short sale show up on your credit report after closing. In fact, there can be no ding to credit whatsoever and a seller can go out the next day and buy a new home, if she so desires. They don’t know this because a) their Sacramento short sale agent doesn’t know it, or b) their short sale agent doesn’t want to bother with it because the agent just wants to close the deal the fastest and easiest way possible.
Everybody knows that if a seller is in default, that short sale has a greater chance of being approved, even if there is no hardship. That’s the easy road for lots of agents with short vision. They tell their sellers to stop making mortgage payments so they can do the short sale, but that is not always necessary.
Granted, I don’t have a lot of sellers who fit the parameters to be current, but when it’s a possibility, it’s often worth it to give it a shot. I have to do what is best for my sellers — as hokey as that might sound to some of you, it’s the truth.
Sometimes, it doesn’t work out. When it doesn’t, then the alternative is to go into default. Of course, the bank won’t tell you that. The bank will almost always never directly say that a seller needs to stop making her mortgage payment. Think about being a shareholder of that bank. Do you want that bank telling customers to go into default? No, you don’t. A bank will instead say there is no hardship.
You will look at the hardship letter you wrote and say yes, there is a hardship. What is wrong? The key is the seller is not in default. Stop paying at that point and, when the seller is 30 to 60 days in arrears, that short sale will most likely get approved. But if you want to try to do a short sale while you are current, hire a smart Sacramento short sale agent who knows how to do it.
My Book About Remodeling and Finishing an Unfinished Home
I want to write another book, this time about the 9 months of my life that I invested 20 years ago in remodeling and finishing off an unfinished home with my two bare hands. I am feeling compelled, a strong drive, like it’s something I need to write, and I believe people would like to read it. You can give birth in 9 months but instead of working on having a baby, I did nothing else but work on a split-level home. 14 to 18 hours a day. All by myself, then, at age 41, listening to my biological clock tick.
You would think a person would not tackle a project like that without a background in construction or building, but then you would be thinking about somebody else. Not a person like me. There were lots of reasons why I wanted to finish building and remodeling that unfinished home — particularly to show how a woman with no experience nor special talents for power tools could do it. It was immensely pleasurable, horribly painful and incredibly powerful.
‘Twas an amusing and unusual trip. I had no job when I bought the house and was unemployed when I closed escrow, but in the middle I landed a gig that allowed me to qualify for a conventional loan to buy the home. If I had a client who tried to do that, I’d say she was nuts and would refuse to represent her. Three weeks into escrow, I was unexpectedly fired. Yet, the sale closed, and then I focused all of my energy on finishing the lower level and remodeling the upper.
As I pieced together some of the ideas in my proposal, I wondered where I would find an agent to help me find a publisher. My outline included flashbacks to when I used to live high on the hog, selling real estate in Newport Beach, before I lost everything and ended up divorced and penniless in Minnesota. I considered how to offer small glimpses of my future — eventually selling hundreds of homes in Sacramento. Maybe I would talk about my online dating strategy and how well that actually worked out, being in the right place at the right time as one of the very first subscribers to AOL.
Then it dawned on me. Duh. Wait a minute. I already have an agent. I have an agent who negotiated the book deal for The Short Sale Savior. How could I forget I have an agent? I would contact her. Yeah, that was a brilliant idea. I quickly dashed off a letter to my agent, explaining my idea in great detail. Two days went by and she did not respond. While I was in the middle of explaining to a buyer’s agent what I needed to present her offer, my email dinged. Yes, it was from my literary agent. Yes, yes, yes.
My heart leaped a little. I clicked. I read the email 3 times because I could not believe my agent had turned me down. She said publishers do not offer book deals anymore unless the author is a celebrity and has her own platform to promote the book. She wasn’t interested. Well, I guess that means I won’t be working with her. But it doesn’t mean I won’t write it, and it certainly doesn’t mean I won’t find a publisher.
I didn’t get to where I am today by taking no for an answer.
Downton Abbey Preview at the Crest Theatre
When I spotted seemingly free tickets to the Season 4 premiere of Downton Abbey, I snatched up four for my Elizabeth Weintraub Team to attend, along with my husband, of course — who will tell you he doesn’t matter because he jokes that that’s what I say when I do not. Tickets were free so a couple of cruise lines and a clothing designer could get our names and addresses, because I was required to register. Not only that, but KVIE collected another 250 names and addresses as backups in case anybody canceled.
Yet, still, none of us was allowed to sit in the lower front section of the theater because all of those seats were reserved for corporate sponsors. We did not allow this kind of marketing to damper our enthusiasm for Downton Abbey. After all, we are Sacramento real estate agents and we put up with worse stuff during our work week. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that KVIE could have sold seats for $100 a piece and people would have paid it, so there must be some kind of non-profit rules that prohibited it.
The Crest Theatre sold refreshments and there was a wine / beer section. There were not enough employees staffing the refreshment stands, and the lines were long. Not to mention, the night was pretty chilly for downtown Sacramento in December.
So, that’s all of the downside. The upside, of course, is the fact my team and I, along with my husband who doesn’t matter, got a chance to see the first hour of Downton Abbey Season 4, which is not showing in the United States until January 5th. Some of us have no patience. That’s another reason to go into real estate. Nah, I’m not gonna give you any spoilers.
My husband prepared cocktails and appetizers for a pre-theatre get-together at our home in Land Park. The photo above is Elizabeth Weintraub, with the always delightful Barbara Dow on the right. Linda Swanson was planning to come dressed as a maid but she had a prior appointment in Elk Grove to show a home. You know how that would go over. Like, who is this? Why is Mrs. Bates showing me a house?
Ways to Spot a Sacramento Short Sale Scam
As a Sacramento real estate agent — and just a long-term participant / observer in the world of life on earth — I tend to notice Sacramento short sale scams, and scams in general. My radar is always on the alert. It’s pretty difficult to bamboozle this agent. While other agents laugh and scoff when I ask what if, it generally turns out that I am correct in my initial assessments.
First, I listen to my gut instincts. You know, people don’t pay enough attention to their gut instincts, and they tend to mistrust that instinct because it’s not always based on logic. It’s telling you something for a reason, is what I find. If you feel uneasy or uncertain, listen to your instincts. There could be a sign you’re just not picking up with the side of your brain that processes that kind of information but it’s still sending a signal to you, regardless.
The scam I see run in Sacramento short sales over and over is that of secret collaboration between the listing agent and the sellers. There is some kind of confidential arrangement going on. Maybe a family member or a friend wants to buy the home as a short sale and then either later live in it, rent it out or flip it. The parties involved might not even see it as a scam, but that doesn’t make it any less fraudulent.
Sacramento short sale scams are almost always mortgage fraud because the parties involved don’t fully disclose to the lender and, if the lender knew, the lender would not have approved that short sale. But there are most likely other laws and, if the agent is a REALTOR, various Code of Ethics that could be violated.
I just spotted a suspicious short sale in MLS today, because a buyer in San Jose called about it. There are 3 homes in a row on the same street owned by people with the same last name, all in various stages of foreclosure, one purchased less than a year ago. But the short sale stands out like a sore thumb.
Here are the things I see that buyers and their buyer’s agents might want to question. They result in downplaying the home and telling a buyer’s agent not to bother to write an offer. Let me say that any one or two of these alone is not a reason for suspicion but when they mostly all apply to your transaction, you could be in trouble:
- One photo in MLS, with a car in the driveway
- More than 30 days on the market with no history of pending status in a hot neighborhood
- Brief and odd marketing comments such as: 4 bedroom home on a public street needs TLC. (What kind of agent writes like that?)
- Out-of-area real estate agent
- Out-of-area real estate company
- Agent shares same last name as the sellers (relatives cannot sell a short sale)
- Commission offered is less than what short sales pay (no reason for that)
- Showing instructions state: call listing agent (who probably does not call back)
Be careful out there. There are the crooks who know they are crooks, and then you’ve got the ones who don’t know which end is up yet are still crooks. You can’t tell the difference. But you can stay clear if you smell trouble.
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