Email ElizabethMobile Signers Make House Calls for Sacramento Home Sellers
Many home sellers in Sacramento do not realize that mobile signers make house calls. A seller is not required to make the trip to the title company to sign closing escrow papers. The title company, more or less, can come to the seller. Darn right, I can hear some sellers saying. Yes, it’s true, this Sacramento real estate agent works with a lot of grumpy people but that’s OK. I make allowances for people older than me. Younger though, all bets are off. You whippersnappers, you hop on your segways and skedaddle over to the title company, and no whining.
Even my sellers of Sacramento short sales can get a mobile signer to come to them at no charge, providing the bank will allow the notary fee on the HUD. Yet, any seller can utilize a mobile signer. Other sellers, though, generally have to pay a little bit extra for the service. Almost all title companies charge some type of notary fee, although it is not much. Some do not charge a notary fee and consider it part of the transaction built into the escrow fee. However, when a person drives across town to meet a seller, there generally is an additional fee for that service, usually around $125.
I have a lucky seller signing closing docs next week on a short sale and the mobile signer is coming to her house, and the seller doesn’t have to pay anything out of pocket. This woman is in her 80s. The mobile signer fee is approved on the HUD by her short sale bank. We build that fee into our short sales, especially to accommodate older sellers who find it difficult or irritating to drive.
Moreover, very busy sellers love mobile signers as well. Not only will the mobile signer come to your house, but you can meet the notary at a Starbucks or your office or even at the local bowling alley, if that’s where you prefer. There is no reason to have to make the trek into the title company to close escrow, if that’s inconvenient. Ask your Sacramento real estate agent how you can get a mobile signer to make a house call. Twenty minutes to sign docs and you’re done.
Why Buyer Feedback From a Sacramento Agent is Crucial
An agent who sells real estate in some other state said that he doesn’t “waste time” anymore responding to agent requests for feedback. His position is if an agent didn’t know enough about his marketplace or his listing, it was not that agent’s job nor anybody else’s job to educate the guy. You know, that kind of thinking seems sort of narrow minded to me. I’m glad he doesn’t sell real estate in Sacramento.
Agent feedback is often crucial on so many levels. Take for example the seller who thinks her home is worth more than it is actually worth. Watching days on market accrue might mean little to the seller. The seller might point her finger at the listing agent and demand to know why the agent isn’t doing more to market her home, when the real problem is the sales price is too danged high. Well, agent feedback, email after email after email, filled with buyer’s agents all saying the same thing speaks volumes.
Sometimes, an agent will point out a defect that nobody else can put a finger on. The listing agent might suspect there is something odd about the home, but neither she nor the seller can readily identify it. Not every person looks at a home in an identical manner. Take pet owners, for example. We don’t often notice smells from our own pets, but a person who doesn’t own a pet, bingo, they’ll immediately notice a scent.
Other times an agent might tell me that it was beginning to rain, so she closed a window. I can pass on that information to let the seller know we are looking out for her. It’s not just me, it’s my coworkers, the agents with whom I am proud to associate. We can all make each other look good and watch out for each other.
My clients appreciate the fact that I send them comments from agents who have showed their home. Is it too much to ask a buyer’s agent to share her buyer’s thoughts with a fellow agent? Especially when a seller has gone that extra step and allowed strangers into her home via a lockbox while she was at work. Lockboxes are a convenience for buyer’s agents, and sellers don’t have to utilize them.
I always try to provide buyer feedback to a listing agent if I am asked for an opinion. It only takes a second to click “reply” and type a line or two. I figure it’s a small thing, and it can mean so much to a listing agent. We’re all in this business together. No agent is an island, and I don’t care how successful she is. I hope the agent who refuses to give buyer feedback never finds himself in the position of listing a home.
Not Every Sacramento Home Buyer is a Buyer
Every Sacramento home buyer should enjoy the luxury — and it is a luxury — of working with a buyer’s agent who will check out the property records before writing a purchase offer for that buyer. A Sacramento buyer’s agent at the very least should examine basic details but so many do not. When a buyer wants to write an offer, a lot of agents will just write it without giving much thought to the possible consequences for a buyer. I suppose they might think it’s not their job or maybe they don’t know how.
An agent has many sources at her or his disposal to find this data. At minimum, even if an agent doesn’t run the comparable sales for the Sacramento home buyer — which for my team members would be inexcusable — the agent should check to see who owns the property. Is it one person? Is it a trust? Does the owner’s address match the property address or are the owners living out of state? A quick call to the listing agent would confirm whether two people are on title or if one of them is deceased. You know, just stuff that makes the entire transaction run smoother and gives the buyer enough information to make an intelligent decision.
A potential Sacramento home buyer called yesterday about wanting to buy a home along the river that is a short sale. He asked if moi, his newly found Sacramento real estate agent, would be willing to write a purchase offer for him. As an experienced short sale agent, the first thing I did was look at the tax rolls. I see that this is an investment property for the seller. The second thing I notice is his second loan is a gigantic refinance for many thousands of dollars, and the lender is National City.
National City is now owned by PNC. This makes it a PNC short sale. A second loan held by PNC, especially a hard-money loan that carries recourse in California, is a difficult short sale to negotiate. That’s because PNC knows it can go after the seller personally and try to collect the full amount of the loan should the home go to foreclosure. When the security for that second loan is wiped out, because it’s a cash-out refinance, that lender, you can bet, will pursue it.
If the seller is not willing to negotiate with PNC upfront in this type of short sale, well, the odds are it will not get approved as a short sale. If PNC approved the short sale, by law it must release the seller from liability, but it is not required to approve a short sale.
Not only that, but there is a trustee’s sale pending shortly. It is very possible that a seller who waits until the last possible minute to put a home on the market as a short sale prior to a pending trustee’s sale is not a seller who is willing to negotiate upfront, but you never know. Weird things happen in real estate every day.
Armed with this information, the buyer chose to move forward and write an offer because he decided that he had little to lose. He was prepared to be disappointed. I asked a team member on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team to prepare an offer for him. My team member explained that we need a preapproval letter to accompany the offer because the way to postpone a trustee’s sale is to submit a purchase offer. The bank will not allow submission of a purchase offer without a preapproval letter. An offer without a preapproval letter is not an offer. It is an incomplete offer and considered insufficient to postpone a trustee’s auction.
The buyer could not produce a preapproval letter. He was irritated about my team member’s insistence on it, too. You see, he had sold his own home as a short sale a few months back.
The buyer said fine, he’d find another Sacramento real estate agent to write his purchase offer. That was actually a very good idea on his part, but a wasted effort.
New Twist for Sacramento Short Sales With a Second Mortgage
Before I get started, let me say that I know agents in Sacramento who will refuse to work on short sales with a second mortgage. Yeah, that’s ridiculous. Sure, it’ s a little bit more work with two loans, and second mortgages on a short sale can throw a monkey wrench into negotiations if they are hard-money loans, but that’s the job of a Sacramento short sale agent, to make it work.
I used to believe that only a lawyer could negotiate certain types of Sacramento short sales but after doing them for almost 8 years, I don’t believe that anymore. In fact, many lawyers hire an assistant or clerk to actually process the short sale. There seems to be little hands-on involvement. Because of the volume I do, and my personal interaction, I hear new developments often before they become mainstream. That’s a benefit to hiring an experienced Sacramento short sale agent to do your short sale and not some recently licensed agent who sat through an online class or a lawyer who pawns off the work.
The new development with the second mortgages secured to underwater homes is some of them are vanishing. Yes, poof, gone. The seller no longer owes the debt. This is done without the seller’s approval, too. The bank simply releases the loan and forgives the debt.
At first I thought maybe they were releasing the loan but not reconveying the mortgage, as what happens in a bankruptcy before a short sale. In a bankruptcy, the debt is discharged and the seller is released from personal liability. However, the loan remains secured to the property in a bankruptcy and the seller remains in title. Some sellers end up filing a Chapter 7 thinking this will get rid of the house, and it doesn’t. Not only that, but some sellers might be better off just doing a short sale and forgetting about a Chapter 7, especially if their only debt is the house.
This is a good place to acknowledge that I have never heard a bankruptcy lawyer say to a qualifying client: don’t do a bankruptcy. That’s like asking a Sacramento real estate agent if you should sell your house or asking a hairdresser if you should cut your hair.
Why would a bank release a second mortgage? Partly due to the National Mortgage Settlement Act and a few other lawsuit settlements. You might wonder why do they care about hanging on to a worthless piece of paper that has no security anyway? So investors can question their assets? Yet, I’m still a bit amazed that banks are issuing reconveyances and letting sellers go.
In some cases, it might mean that the seller won’t even have to resort to a short sale if prices continue to go up. That’s pretty good news for Sacramento sellers. It also makes negotiating the short sale quite a bit easier when there’s only one lender. But it’s still not impossible to work on short sales with a second mortgage, and I do it all the time.
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When One Thing is Not Like the Other Things
A Sacramento real estate agent needs to possess extraordinary powers of observation, just like a journalist. My late father-in-law, a former Chicago Sun Times journalist, would often boast to strangers (and his family) that he was a “proFESSional obSERVer,” which was generally used in a conversation to support dissent, to build a case for his opposing point of view. Half-jest but half-serious, too.
Sometimes, an agent can tap a simple component in the power of observation by isolating and analyzing the one odd thing that stands out from the others. This happens when one thing is not like the other things. Let’s take a situation when sellers receive multiple offers from buyers for, say, single-level homes in Elk Grove. Even better if a single-level Elk Grove home is located on a cul-de-sac, with hardwood floors throughout and a 3-car garage. Then, in the middle of dozens of offers arrives a lone cash offer for significantly more money. Sort of stands out like a sore thumb. Like when one thing is not like the other things.
That offer would be the one thing that is not like the other things. A seller might want to grab that offer and latch on to it like Gollum stroking his precious ring. This is the part in which a Sacramento real estate agent might caution the seller, and make sure the seller understands the possible consequences. When one thing is not like the other things, something might be wrong.
For example, I wandered through my vegetable garden a few days ago, on a hunt for ripened serrano peppers. Because it’s October, the garden is overgrown; oddly enough, we have tiny little tomatillos that are no bigger than an olive. For some reason, the tomatillos are fairing poorly this year; their entangled vines are crawling up the sides of another garden box, blocking the path. My focus was on the tomatillos, wondering whether my husband is right and we should yank them out.
As I passed the hydrangeas, something caught my eye. Among the decaying purple and pink flowers, I spotted a peculiar object. Whoa. It was not like the others. It was a cucumber. That stopped me in my tracks. A cucumber does not belong there. This is one thing that is not like the other things. The cucumber had crept over on a vine and worked its way up the hydrangea branch. Just the right size, too. I plucked it and ate it on the spot.
That is an example of when it’s a good thing that one thing is not like the other things. Sometimes, though, when one thing is not like the other things, it can be a bad thing.
Take the cash buyer who offered way above everybody else for that home in Elk Grove. The cash buyer caused the sellers unnecessary stress and commotion throughout the entire transaction. Demanded kickbacks, insisted the seller pay for an inspection that the buyer ordered himself and made up his own rules as he went along. The buyer reneged on verbal assurances and in general made himself a royal pain to the seller. At closing, he made his buyer’s agent wait four hours at the home, in an empty house, to deliver the keys.
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