Email ElizabethIf You’re Tired of Your Sacramento Agent
It seems like lately I’ve been contacted by sellers and friends of sellers who want to cancel their existing listings and list with me. For whatever reasons, they are unhappy or they feel like they are not getting the service they expected. Sometimes, this is the fault of the listing agent and sometimes it is not. I won’t know until I actually talk with the sellers and hear the story. However, there are always two sides to a story.
Like yesterday, a seller contacted me to say she wanted to buy a home in East Sacramento. Apparently, she is selling a home in Natomas and has decided that she and her husband should try to buy a short sale in East Sacramento, a home priced around $300,000 to $400,000 that would actually be worth $500,000 to $600,000. Yes, I know what you are thinking right now, dear reader. You are thinking that I should have hung up the phone or not corresponded with this particular person, but President Obama says we should be nice to people who have mental deficiencies. That a mental disease is not a reason to shun people or pick on them or discriminate against them.
I wanted to make sure I heard this person correctly and to double check if she had indeed put her home on the market in Natomas. So I queried as to whether she was asking me to list her home in Natomas and buy a new home East Sacramento. She replied that her home was already listed by an agent but her agent was too busy to help her buy a home in East Sacramento.
That didn’t make sense. Agents are rarely “too busy” to help a client. It’s what we do for a living. We sell real estate. Even if an agent was otherwise occupied, perhaps taking a vacation, for example, an agent would refer the client to another agent who had time. There must be something else going on. So, I asked the person to give me her agent’s name and phone number.
That was the last I heard from her.
Generally, I will call other agents before accepting a listing. Just to hear the other side of the story and to assure the agent that I am not in the business of soliciting other agent’s clients. That’s not how I do business. I don’t swipe somebody else’s clients. Most of the time what I discover is there is a lack of communication. Sometimes, the relationship terminated due to agent ineptness or carelessness or inexperience. But rarely is it malicious as people sometimes suspect.
If I spot a listing that is on the market for a few days and then canceled, generally, that’s not a listing I want to take. It’s a clear signal there is something wrong, and let’s just say it’s not the agent.
When You Think the Location in Sacramento Doesn’t Matter
The seller who made an appointment with me to assess her home and its value canceled last week. She called to say another agent had persuaded her son to list with that agent so she did not need to speak to me. She further elaborated that the agent had greater exposure. Hmm . . . what was the comparison? After all, in 2012, I ranked as the #2 agent at the #1 company in Sacramento. It’s difficult to put a real estate phrase into Google without finding my name. But then I dropped the matter. I did not want to list a house that was slammed up against the freeway all that badly. Not as badly, apparently, as the agent who pushed for the listing and came up with whatever was said.
Nope, I will give it to my sellers straight. I don’t need to fabricate numbers or paint a rosier picture of myself than what exists. You get what you see with this Sacramento real estate agent.
As real estate agents, we can’t always choose which properties we sign on to sell. Well, sure, we sign the listing agreement, and we don’t have to do that. We could turn down the listing, and some agents will turn down certain types of listings. Sometimes, agents won’t take listings under a certain dollar value or in a certain neighborhood, but I don’t discriminate. I will list and sell just about anything that is located anywhere. It’s all real estate. Some sales are just more challenging than others. Sure, I love that beautifully staged home in Granite Bay, but I’ll also list that water-logged, varmint-infested roach motel. I’m flexible — like a round peg in a square hole.
Just this morning, I explained to a seller that he shouldn’t get upset with me because I was not the agent who sold him the house, which is located in about the worst location possible in Sacramento. The only worst kind of location, would be next to garbage dump. Location is everything in real estate.
People forget. They get caught up in the excitement of buying a home and they don’t stop to think about location. The next time location pops into their head is when they are trying to sell. That’s when they realize the home they bought is not in a desirable location. Homes in desirable locations quickly sell. Homes in not so desirable locations take longer to sell and sell for much less than others around them.
The time to think about location is when you buy that home.
Giving a Sacramento Short Sale Guarantee
We have buyers right now who want us to guarantee that their Sacramento short sale will close. They have short sale approval from the lender, they are paying cash, they have completed all of their investigations. The only people who would most likely prevent this transaction from closing is themselves, yet they would like us to guarantee their performance.
These are the types of buyers who early on might insist upon an authorization letter so they can talk to the bank. That’s not gonna happen. They are cautious every step of the way. Well, I might want to talk to the Pope, too, but it ain’t gonna happen.
What we have here are buyers who want to remove all risk from a transaction. There is no way to remove all risk. One can minimize risk and manage risk, but not prevent it entirely.
There are no guarantees in real estate and even fewer in a Sacramento short sale. Only odds. The likelihood is this Sacramento short sale will close without a hitch, and hopefully the buyers won’t do anything to screw it up. But I’ve seen it all as a Sacramento short sale agent and nothing really would surprise me anymore.
Beautiful Mansion Flats Fourplex Short Sale
When the seller first called to discuss selling her family’s fourplex in Mansion Flats, which is in downtown Sacramento, I could hear the emotion in her voice and suspected that selling was a difficult subject for her. I’ve had emotional attachments to properties myself and, even to this day, still ache for a home that fell into the ocean in Ventura, odd as that might sound. So, I understand sellers who have a hard time saying goodbye to their homes, even homes like this one, a place they did not live.
This is a beautiful time-standing-still Mansion Flats Victorian fourplex for sale as a short sale. Just walking around the building, you can see the love and care that went into maintaining the building over the years. The paint job still looks good. The stairs and railing are in pretty good condition. I did not go inside because we do not want to disturb the tenants until we receive final approval from Wells Fargo. We have preliminary approval on the price at $330,000.
There are two units up and two units down. The second-floor units are 748 square feet each and are 2 bedroom, 1 bath units, rented at $750 and $650. The first-floor units are 648 square feet, 1 bedroom, 1 bath units, rented at $700 each. The tenants pay electricity and gas. The seller pays for water, sewer and garbage, plus the seller gives one of the tenants a $50 a month allowance in exchange for maintaining the yard. There are no garages; the HVAC is window A/C units, and wall furnaces. Each unit has a washer and dryer. Three tenants are long-term.
There are no rent prorations / deposit credits through escrow as the buyer will be responsible for those, and the buyer will need to pay any overdue city utility bills. Call your downtown Sacramento listing agent for approximate numbers regarding this property in Mansion Flats.
DO NOT DISTURB THE TENANTS.
Inspection of units after final short sale approval from Wells Fargo. For more offer tips, call your downtown listing agent, Elizabeth Weintraub.
328 14th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814. Listed exclusively by Elizabeth Weintraub, Lyon Real Estate, as a short sale with a preapproved price by Wells Fargo of $330,000. Offers reviewed June 10th. 916.233.6759.
All information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
The Sacramento Real Estate Agent Who Shows 3 Homes
Not every home that comes on the market these days is a highly desirable home in a hot location. Some of them are ordinary homes in Sacramento, owned by sellers with a little bit of equity who might need every scrap of equity they can squeeze out. Every once in a while, one of these sellers might be close to short sale status but would be willing to pay a couple of dollars just to close the transaction. These homes seem to be overlooked by buyers or possibly used by real estate agents as “the home not to buy.”
Back in the old days, and quite possibly even today as I type, real estate agents used to show 3 homes:
- A home the buyer cannot afford
- A perfect home that meets the buyers’ needs
- A home so horrible nobody would ever want to live in it
And they would show the 3 homes in the above order. Because when the Sacramento home buyer falls in love with the first home, it can be heart-breaking to realize that it’s just a dream, and the buyer can’t really afford to buy that home. It’s similar to the concept that HGTV uses on House Hunters, except 2 of those homes are often not for sale. After the buyer’s heart is broken, it’s on to tour the home that’s perfect.
The buyer can’t believe her good luck. Everything is exactly the way she thought it would be. The living room is in the front, she walks through the formal dining — past the two rooms she will never ever use in her lifetime — and into the kitchen with the Wolf 6-burner stove — a stove she will never turn on, but wow, it looks magnificent. Which reminds, did you hear that Burger King is now delivering to select areas in Sacramento? Yes, it is true.
While the buyer is salivating over the perfect home, the agent takes her to the home nobody would ever live in. Maybe it’s nestled next to the train tracks, or under the freeway, or across the street from a graveyard, by a school, or maybe the home is just a mess inside, with torn-up carpeting, Corian counters and half-chewed cabinet doors in the kitchen. Most buyers do not want to buy a fixer these days and, if they do, they will discount heavily for repairs that they have no idea how to undertake or what the repairs will actually cost.
So, then the buyer goes to the agent’s office and triumphantly declares she will buy house number two.
Sometimes, though, your number just comes up. Sometimes, in this limited inventory marketplace, we run out of the homes that are too expensive and the homes that fit a buyer’s every requirement. Sometimes, all that is left are the unique homes with a defect. Did your agent show 3 homes? Think about it.
And that’s when we’ll get three offers in one day on the same house.
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