Email ElizabethWhat Neutral Carpeting Means to a Sacramento Seller
I receive a lot of interesting emails from readers all over the country. I do my best to answer questions. Many of those questions center on short sales, probably because I write a lot about short sales and have personally sold hundreds of short sales. But since selling short sales takes up a small portion in retrospect of my annual real estate sales, I also field questions on other activities such as selling homes in Land Park and home listings throughout Sacramento that are not short sales.
I’ve been in this business almost 40 years. Not many agents can say that. But some things that were true 40 years ago are still true today. Take neutral carpeting, for example.
A reader from my About.com homebuying site wrote to me in quite a huff. She was a bit perplexed that I had not yet answered her inquiry, which I had not received because so much of these types of inquires go to spam. She had a “very important question.” She and her husband had been engaged in “repeated discussions” regarding the color of the carpeting for their mother’s home. They were preparing the home for sale and could not agree on which colors constitute neutral coloring. She did not understand the word “neutral.”
At first blush, one might wonder how a person could be confused. But the more I thought about it, it’s not so unusual for some individuals, especially those from other cultures, to be perplexed. Some of us live in a white-bread world. No color at all. But other cultures are awash in color and relish color. Color is treated as a daily substance. It’s water for the thirsty, spiritual for the soul and serenity for sleep. Color brings the world alive.
However, when you are selling a home, neutral is the recommended choice of color, especially for carpeting. It evokes no emotion and does not detract from the home’s features. It presents a clean slate, a home you can move in to immediately and decorate to your preference. It’s a light beige, a sheer coffee-cream, sandy fair-skinned brown, boring pale tan, much like the photo above. Above all, it is not white.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
About Agents Who Swipe Sacramento Listings
It’s hard, at times, to tell if a person is joking around or not when you receive an email. I am not a big of fan of smiley faces, but against my better judgment, I am also guilty of slipping them into emails. That’s because not everybody gets a wry sense of humor. And sometimes I’m so busy that I literally don’t have time to make sure my parenthesis is facing the right way. It’s easy to type a frowny face by mistake. I’m so happy that you sent me a photo of your adorable baby. Frowny face.
We can all make mistakes, honest mistakes. We’re only human. But what about the people who deliberately set out to deceive and then claim they made a mistake? Or worse, don’t rectify it? And those people are Sacramento real estate agents? I ask myself if I should report them. On the one hand, I pretty much leave other agents alone and don’t turn them in, even when I spot blatant, unethical behavior. I’m not the ethics police. I also don’t have time for it.
Whether to report a violation is one thing, but another aspect is whether one should one talk about it in public. If it’s information the public should probably know, I say, yes, even if it tends to taint the profession. Other agents may disagree and say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
So, I’m just gonna tell you what happened. Without naming the website, I tried to manually post a new listing but the site told me the home was already claimed. Not surprising; it was listed before. I clicked on the details and noticed the home was listed for sale by an agent other than the previous listing agent. But it had the old listing number attached to it.
I called the seller to find out if she had any knowledge of this agent. Nope. The seller called the agent. Immediately, the agent dove into bait and switch mode. The seller made it clear that it was her home she was calling about and she was not a buyer. The agent mumbled something about this being a very confusing situation and promised to remove it.
A few days went by, and the listing was still published under that agent’s name. Hmmm. I wondered how many other Sacramento listings were swiped and misrepresented.
Usually, people who would do unethical things do other unethical things. That agent had a couple of pages filled with some other agent’s listings. I ran the first 5 addresses in MLS. Not one belonged to that agent. What a good idea, the agent might have thought. I know how to get buyers to call me. I’ll just swipe a bunch of listings, who cares if they’re even for sale or not, and post them on a website as my own. Brilliant. No, it’s stupid. And it’s unethical.
I finally notified the staff at that website, and several people responded. It’s difficult to regulate, they say. Well, how about you make the poster check a box that says, “If this listing doesn’t belong to me, I authorize you to charge my credit card a $1,000.” I heard giggles. They must have liked that idea. And the website removed the listing.
Why should the public care? Because the Internet is unregulated. It’s difficult to trust some of what you read. You should not rely on information found on websites that download data directly from MLS. Ask your agent about it. And use a smiley face in your request.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
Don’t Burn Bridges During Escrow
Your first instinct is not always reliable. I’ve learned that over the years. While I often rely on my intuition, I don’t always grab the first instinct that pops up. For example, when I put on my reading glasses this morning to peer at my monitor, my vision was blurred. My first thought was perhaps this is my free flashback. Ha, I would imagine that. But when nothing further happened, I realized that I had forgotten to remove my contacts before going to bed.
A friend called yesterday to talk about her horrible real estate transaction. She shared details about all the nasty things the buyer and the buyer’s agent had done to her since entering escrow. It was pretty clear she despised these people, and I didn’t blame her. “I was going to leave the buyers all the furnace filters,” she hissed, “But now I am taking them.” Well, I offered, make sure you don’t leave behind any aluminum foil or bottles of Windex, either. Leave the scum nothing. That made me laugh, but she wasn’t laughing. She was still furious.
I’m a firm believer of not burning bridges if one can help it. We’ve all had to deal with difficult people in our lives. We can’t change them. The only thing we can change is our attitudes.
As a Sacramento real estate agent, I advise my sellers to be nice to their buyers as well, regardless of how the buyers behave during escrow. For one thing, the sellers might want their mail forwarded. And I try to not transfer any frustrated feelings that I may be experiencing to my clients. It’s part of an agent’s job to be a buffer, not a buffoon.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
The Direction a Sacramento Home Faces
When I counsel home buyers for Land Park, one of the questions I typically ask is which direction they prefer their Sacramento home to face. It’s a facet of home buying they might not have previously considered. Then it hits them, yes, the direction a home faces is a preference. The direction of their new home is a choice, a selection. The orientation of real estate is important.
In the northern hemisphere, southern exposure gets the most sun, when the sun moves from east to west. But the way the streets are laid out in Sacramento, especially in the core areas close to downtown such as Midtown, Land Park and Curtis Park, many streets run east and west. This means most of the homes in Land Park face north or south.
However, in East Sacramento, many streets run north and south, so those homes typically face east or west. If your Sacramento home faces east or north, the front part of your home will receive the morning sun and the back yard will be hit by the hot afternoon sun.
One of my Land Park neighbors behind me wants to rebuild a shared fence. Her dog has a habit of jumping over the fence. Well, that and the fact the fence is falling down. It doesn’t matter much to me since that fence is located behind our garage. But the type of fence matters to my husband because he maintains several raised-bed vegetable gardens back there.
The neighbor asked if it would be all right to build a fence higher than six-feet, and I gave her the go-ahead. Then my husband had a chat with her, because he was worried that an additional foot of fencing would block part of the sun from his garden. He suggested she top it off with chicken wire. When she shared that bit of information with me, I couldn’t help but laugh. I suspect my neighbor was a bit horrified by that suggestion. Chicken wire isn’t exactly visually appealing. I think lattice would look better.
However, my husband is right about one thing. (Quick, call out the media.) A higher fence on a southern property line would throw shadows on that part of the yard. So, if you’re looking at homes in Land Park, consider which way the sun moves. You may prefer to buy a Sacramento home where the master suite is shaded in the afternoon, with a sunny morning breakfast nook. Or, you may prefer a back yard with a northern exposure, especially if you do a lot of late afternoon entertaining. But look out for those neighbors who tell you to put up chicken wire.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
Art is in the Eye of the Beholder and Her Pocketbook
The Collectibles Guide and Miniatures Guide at About.com would literally kill me for saying this, but who buys all this crap? I imagine these mail-order houses probably hold private contests for artists to see who can come up with the gaudiest most awful-looking piece of trash. I bet they award prizes for the tackiest design in collectibles. I mean, what else could explain this phenomenon?
You can’t pick up a Parade insert in the Sunday newspaper without finding a full-page ad for some tasteless trinket or a limited edition Elvis Presley inspiration pressed into velvet and passed off as collectibles.
I used to think the baby angel on a motorcycle wearing a leather jacket was my favorite, but yesterday, The Bradford Editions reached a new low that exceeded my wildest imagination.
Let me see if I can describe this accurately enough for you to picture this newest little gem. It’s a foot-high crystal snowman with extended arms made from bell-shaped glass, wearing metallic mittens, matching scarf and a top hat that resembles a dinner plate topped by a diamond ring and finished with a crystal bowl.
But wait, there’s more, inside the body of the snowman is a tiny little Bavarian village with houses, a church, pond, walking bridge and 12 itty bitty villagers, all dusted with snow. If that’s not enough to flip your switch, the exterior base has a miniature holiday train that actually moves around the snowman. And the whole thing lights up. The glass also has swirls and gilded touches, and for good measure, the artists threw in a miniature lantern suspended by a diamond-looking tennis bracelet around the snowman’s right mitten.
And it’s only a $100. I bet The Bradford Editions makes hundreds of thousands of dollars on this cheeky masterpiece. I’m sorry if I have offended Thomas Kinkade aficionados and doubly sorry if you wake up one morning to find this holiday spirit-filled inspiration on your doorstep, but somebody has to step forward here and just say no to this stuff.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs published in previous years.
Sorry we are experiencing system issues. Please try again.
