Email ElizabethThe Jelly Belly Factory Tour in Fairfield
It is possible for a Sacramento real estate agent to have too much fun? From champagne and lobster at Rue Lepic, to Van Morrison in Nob Hill, to the Grace Cathedral, to the Jelly Belly factory, to Thomas Dolby at the Crest, I’m pretty much exhausted. That’s not counting Thursday night at the Club Fugazi to catch Beach Blanket Babylon. Which means I am happy it’s Sunday, and I have a day to catch my breath before jumping with both feet into Monday.
Usually, I go nowhere. I do nothing really exciting. I am not one of these let’s go out and party guys. Way too old for that. My idea of a good time is to list a home for the maximum a seller can realistically expect to receive and to exceed my seller’s expectations. My passion is real estate. After that, I’d just as soon curl up on the sofa with a purring cat and watch Boardwalk Empire, as my husband occasionally massages my feet.
As a result of the past couple of days, though, I managed to receive an offer for a home in Elk Grove from a very motivated buyer, complete most of my holiday shopping in Haight Ashbury and shove an entire bag of Jelly Bellies down my throat. OK, we picked up some fudge, too.
If you’ve never done the Jelly Belly Factory Tour on your way back to Sacramento from the City, you owe it to stop in Fairfield. An agent at another real estate brokerage called and asked me what I was doing. “I’m putting on my Jelly Belly hat,” I responded, which was indeed my activity when I answered my phone. Oh, says he, you must be in Fairfield. This is a favorite activity for families with kids, but you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy the tour.
Being a Saturday, we didn’t get to see a lot of production in the factory, but you could smell the bubble gum scent wafting in the parking lot, which was being processed in a small part of the factory. Not really my favorite. President Reagan’s favorite, they remind you, was licorice. Seems sort of boring, especially since you can get licorice in other forms. I lean more toward cherry or cinnamon flavors. An added bonus was the fact we received samples of Jelly Bellies along the tour and a free bag at the end. The tour itself involved gazing mostly at production lines and conveyor belts that were not moving or staring at a video screen showing a variety of brightly polished Jelly Bellies rolling along.
An astonishing part of the tour was the number of robots in production. Real, actual robots. They wouldn’t let us take photos, and I wasn’t about to risk my free bag of Jelly Bellies to violate that policy, or I would show you. We watched robots picking up crates of Jelly Bellies from one conveyor belt and setting them on another conveyor belt. I wondered how many jobs were replaced by those robots. It was like something out of The Jetsons. And don’t you hate it when the only futuristic thing we can ever compare anything to is the Jetsons? A goofy cartoon from the 1960s?
I believe you would like the Jelly Belly Factory Tour. But go during the week, when there is more to see and probably fewer crowds. You’ll find the Jelly Belly Factory at 1 Jelly Belly Lane in Fairfield, just off Interstate 80. Reduced hours on the weekends from now until the end of 2013, due to the holidays.
Van Morrison Belts it Out at Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium
Even though I had never met the musician, when I was a 15-year-old girl who felt she lived at the center of the universe, I was pretty much certain that Van Morrison was singing Brown-Eyed Girl for me. I used to hear it on the jukebox at a hippie hangout in Denver, back when I crashed wherever I could find a spot on the floor indoors somewhere. Of course, that all changed when Bob Dylan teamed up with Johnny Cash to perform Girl From the North Country — after I had been busted and forced to move back to Minneapolis, which then made Van Morrison a thing of the past.
Kids. So young, so innocent, believing we knew it all, and there was little left to learn. It’s not until we get older do we realize how little we do know. Mark Twain made an observation about that when he discovered how much his dad learned between his ages of 14 and 21.
There is a big market in marketing to baby boomers these days, especially music. Because we baby boomers have the bucks to blow $500 on a concert, and we’ll do it if we don’t have to stand. During a concert in Minneapolis some four decades past I rushed the front row seats, just like every other kid who came to see Jefferson Airplane. Didn’t matter which seat you were originally assigned to, when you’re a female with feminine ways, you could pretty much go wherever you wanted.
And I wanted to stand on the front row seats. It wasn’t enough to stand on the floor. My entire group was yelling, hooting, hollering, carrying on, jumping up and down like a bunch of kids, which we were. Grace Slick appeared, grabbed the mike, looked down at the row of squealing rockers before her and asked us how much we paid to get into the concert. How much, she yelled? I squeaked out the words: eight dollars. “Well, they ripped you off,” she shrieked.
But today, if you want seats near the front at any major concert, it’s highway robbery, and we’ll pay it. Some people want to return to their youth, if just for a few hours. A Van Morrison concert is not a return to anybody’s youth, although, there are boomers who will go to see him just because he was from back in the day.
He didn’t play Brown-Eyed Girl last night at the San Francisco Masonic Auditorium, but he did perform Into the Mystic. Although nothing from Astral Weeks. That album, an all-time favorite, was produced in 1968 and recorded over 2 days in New York. Another little known fact you might not know, Van Morrison wrote the song Gloria, G-L-O-R-I-A, THAT Gloria.
He mixes rock music with jazz, a lot of saxophone, and he’s become more progressive over the years, like any artist would do being dedicated to the craft. He’s performing again tonight in Nob Hill, so if you’re really dying to go and you haven’t thought about scoring tickets, you could probably pick up tickets from the scalpers hanging out on California Street.
Van Morrison, Nob Hill and a New Elk Grove Listing
The last time I stayed on Nob Hill in San Francisco was a few years ago, before my friend Rose Mary and her husband retired to Boston. Rose Mary worked in my real estate office alongside me as a Sacramento real estate agent, and her husband has an MBA in taxation, which made him an excellent guy to do taxes. We had suggested they join us for a quick trip to San Francisco for dinner, followed by a concert at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Well, by quick trip, I mean it’s about 90 minutes by car in good traffic.
Rose Mary and her husband drove. My husband and I road the Capitol Corridor train from Sacramento and caught a ride back home with them. I scoured the Internet for a good hotel rate. Our friends used Hotwire. They hoped to score a 3-star hotel at a 1-star rate, which is sensible. I, on the other hand, being less sensible, hoped to score a fabulous suite at a discounted price. We landed one of the Telegraph Suites on the 19th floor of The Fairmont Hotel at about 50% off. The room offered panoramic views of the city, from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate. To our delight, we had a personal telescope allowing closeup views of Alcatraz.
I don’t recall the band we went to see. I only remember the torture for Rose Mary and her husband. It wasn’t Laurie Anderson, this time, that was another time, and yet they still accompanied us to this concert. Maybe it was The Twilight Singers, with Greg Dulli? In any case, we could not get seating together, which meant my husband and I had assigned seating in the balcony but Rose Mary and her husband had standing room only on the first floor.
The evening didn’t end well. Rose Mary threw up in the bushes outside of the Great American Music Hall, for no apparent reason. But I bet she felt like a kid again.
Our second time staying on Nob Hill in San Francisco, we could not obtain such a great rate at the Fairmont Hotel, so we settled for a suite at the Huntington Hotel, overlooking Huntington Park. The suite is spacious but the bathroom is very tiny. Management thought to provide coffee service from 5 AM to 7 AM in the lobby for travelers from New York, but there is no self-service coffee machines in the rooms.
We came to San Francisco’s Nob Hill this time to see Van Morrison.
But first, let me tell you about my new Elk Grove listing that came on the market early this morning. This is a regular sale in Elk Grove, more than 3700 square feet, with 6 bedrooms and 4 baths. Two bedrooms, one of which is the master suite, are located on the first floor. The other four are on the second floor, along with a giant great room boasting hardwood floors, which was used as a media room. The second floor also has a built-in office space in the hall.
It’s located in the desirable Britschgi Ranch off of Bond Road. This was the last home built in the subdivision, in 2008. It shows like a model. It features clerestory windows, soaring ceilings, and a large open floor plan. You will find many upgrades. Even the rounded windows are covered in custom plantation shutters. Perfect new Elk Grove listing.
Best of all, it is affordable. 9244 Crowell Drive, Elk Grove, CA 95624 is exclusively offered by Lyon Real Estate at $499,000. Call Elizabeth Weintraub, your Elk Grove agent, at 916.233.6759. Even though I am in Nob Hill, I still work on my listing in Elk Grove, like I do all of my listings.
The Fall Sacramento Real Estate Market Update
Say what you will about the down Sacramento real estate market years of 2005 through 2012, but the best thing to hit Sacramento real estate is the fact that period is over. This spring marked the turnaround in real estate. We have a little bit more inventory this fall than we did last spring; however, by all practical standards, it’s still a seller’s market, yet buyers are really the deciding factor. So, is that a seller’s market? Based on inventory alone? I don’t believe so. I believe it’s a buyer’s market disguised as a seller’s market.
You know what I see when I look at this chart? I see twice as many homes for sale and half as many selling. The sold numbers have dropped below the pending sales. But the market is still relatively stable because the pending sales are about the same over the past 15 months. This means buyers have choices.
You can look at what the giant investment firm Blackstone accomplished in Sacramento, buying up some 1,500 homes and turning them into rentals, and you can say that was a bad thing for communities. Now, Blackstone has turned those rentals into securities and leveraged their investments by selling off 75% of its value in the form of bonds to pension funds, or so they say. Hard to know how they are establishing market value. They might have decided that their investments have grown by 25% and are leveraging 100%.
It’s similar to what other investors in Sacramento have done by buying homes supposedly for cash and then converting those offers into hard-money financing. I’ve had to counsel investors that writing an offer for cash when the intent was hard money is not a cash offer. It’s a hard-money financed offer. Cash is cash. I would suggest they include the option in the offer to convert to financing, and many did just that.
Of course now, the investors are pretty much gone. I have a fixer in South Sacramento that has not yet sold and, last spring, this home would have had multiple offers with buyers fighting over it.
Most homebuyers in Sacramento who intend to occupy a home, well, they want that home in turn-key condition. They don’t want to have to make any improvements. Many want their homes to be new or remodeled, with all the bells and whistles.
In closing, I spotted a survey by NAR the other day about the types of things that buyers wanted in a home. Top of the list was energy-efficient improvements. Never have I heard a buyer say that energy efficiency was a #1 concern. I wonder if the utility companies or manufacturers of energy efficient appliances sponsored this survey? Or, maybe they interviewed only buyers from Davis. Nope, Sacramento buyers want those granite counters and stainless appliances. Energy efficiency is welcome, but I doubt it’s a #1 motivating factor.
What it Means to Be a Motivated Seller in Sacramento
It’s not unusual for sellers to ask a Sacramento real estate agent to please tell buyers that they they are motivated sellers. They think that the term “motivated seller” is a code phrase for something important and immensely material to their marketing. I suppose they get this idea because they see the words “motivated seller” in other agent’s listings and think we speak some kind of silent language to each other.
They’re not completely wrong. Agents do engage in conversations with other agents that sound completely foreign to the public. We burn sage and dance naked under full moons, too, but I’m not telling you where. However, the truth is most sellers have no idea what “motivated seller” really means. It doesn’t mean what they think.
First, let’s look at why they think they have to say it. Some sellers believe that even though their home is on the market, some buyers and their agents might wrongly presume that the sellers don’t really want to sell. The reason that buyers and their agents might presume a seller might not want to sell is because the price of that home could be unreasonable or, in some instances, absurd. So, sellers want to assure buyers that they are not unreasonable, they are not absurd, and they really do want to sell even though it might not appear that way because, guess what? They are motivated sellers.
Every seller on the Sacramento real estate market is motivated or they shouldn’t on the market. An agent who slips “motivated seller” into a listing is typically telling other agents in that agent-speak-code that their seller is priced too high and will not reduce the price. It is the agent who is desperate. The agent desperately wants an offer, any offer, even a lowball offer, so they can take that offer to the seller and beat the seller over the head with it until the seller lowers the price.
It could mean the motivated sellers are stubborn, cagey and inflexible. The listing agent might be hoping that other agents will shock the seller into reality.
A motivated seller who is motivated to sell presents his home in the best possible light, and chooses a sales price a buyer is willing to pay. He doesn’t have to advertise that he is motivated because his home listing and sales price will say it for him.
Sorry we are experiencing system issues. Please try again.
