Email ElizabethLowering the Price of that Sacramento Home Listing
The California Association of REALTORS sent me and every other Sacramento real estate agent an email this morning. I could not figure out if it was an April Fool’s joke. It said that on April 1, 55 million households will see its new commercials: California REALTORS, Champions of Home. I don’t recall exactly how many people live in California, but I think the number is around 35 million. Maybe 38 million. I suppose many people could own more than one home; hey, I know, maybe babies own a few extra homes.
My thoughts today is how to be a champion of home for sellers in Sacramento when sellers don’t have enough equity and don’t want to do, or won’t qualify for, a short sale. One thing an agent can do is offer to put the home on the market at a price point where it will not be a short sale if a buyer elects to pay that price. In other words, let the market decide. Don’t make the decision for the seller. But that approach can backfire because when the home doesn’t sell, the sellers might be very upset with their agent.
Some agents just want the listing, period. They don’t always care if the home will ever sell. They just want their sign in the front yard and for buyers to call them. It’s free advertising. I never want to be THAT listing agent. I won’t tell sellers what they want to hear. I will tell sellers what I think. That’s what I promised to do many many decades ago when I became a real estate agent, and I don’t vary from that premise today.
Sometimes, it is necessary to tell a seller that the price might be too high. Telltale signs are many showings and no offers. The only thing worse than that is no showings at all, but in this market, buyers want to turn over every rock. Hence, just because a seller is getting showings doesn’t mean the buyer wants to buy that home. If a seller has showings and no offers, then the price might need to be reduced to a point that will entice a buyer to make an offer.
How do you know the price point that will work? By examining comparable sales. In this crazy market, wetting your finger and sticking it in the air might work, too. It might be painful to tell a seller that she may be better off renting her home than trying to sell it, but sometimes, that’s the call a Sacramento real estate agent has to make.
Dye’s Gullah Fixins on Hilton Head Island
There is nothing more rewarding for a Sacramento real estate agent than to receive a referral from a happy client. No purer words in the universe sound better to my ears than to hear so-and-so referred me to you when I answer my phone. The problem is I have so many clients named so-and-so that I don’t always recognize immediately who they are talking about, but one thing I do guarantee is that my client will be happy.
The problem that can happen once in a blue moon is I won’t make a client happy. That’s life. It’s human nature. Every once in a rare Autumn day a client might go Ying and I might go Yang. If that happens, I release them. Immediately. There is no argument, no long drawn-out discussion about who is right and who is wrong because it doesn’t matter if one person is unhappy. You can’t have a happy couple if one party is unhappy all of the time, and the same is true in business.
How one person my husband and I met yesterday handled an unhappy person and her end result makes for a good story, so I will share it with you here. Meet Dye Scott-Rohdan of Dye’s Gullah Fixins in Hilton Head, South Carolina. She serves up a whole mess o’ Southern fried chicken, sweet potato fries and cabbage salad, or a crab or shrimp burger or plate o’ ribs, created from old family recipes. What she calls authentic lowcountry food and I call comfort food. Especially her butter-soaked, melt-in-your-mouth corn bread!
One customer was unhappy. That customer jumped on an online rating system and posted a vile review. First, you have to wonder about a person who would be so vile as reviews are only as good as the source from whence they come. Some people are nuts. In fact, a lot of people are nuts, and the longer I am in real estate, going on 40 years now, knock on wood, the more I know this fact to be the solid truth. This person said Dye had an attitude and she would never eat in that restaurant.
The truth, because don’t you know there are always two sides to a story — even to my stories, and even when I know I am 100% in the right, there are always two sides. Turns out a customer came into the restaurant with her husband and kids in tow. The kids in tow were toting McDonald bags filled with McDonald’s food. Even though there were items on the menu the kids could eat like fried chicken and macaroni and cheese.
Dye explained they could not eat in her restaurant because the kids needed to order from the menu. As an alternative, she suggested the parents could get a take-out order for themselves and have a picnic with the kids down the street in a park. Completely miffed, apparently, that this couple couldn’t get their own way and let their kids take up seats reserved for paying customers and perhaps even set an unwelcome trend, the family stormed out. Then one of the family members posted a nasty review online.
Don’t you just hate people like that? Yes, and so does everybody else. Dye is such a sweet person, and you can tell after a brief conversation that she didn’t deserve such crap. But evil people who dish out crap rarely stop to consider anything beyond their own little universe.
What happened is others read the review and thought: Wow, I need to get me some of that food that these people were so eager to get and were refused. The food must be really good at Dye’s Gullah Fixins for this person to be so mad. The reviewer never mentioned the food because she never got any.
And they are right. The food is marvelous! So, the awfully mean “review” backfired.
Dye’s Gullah Fixins is located at 840 William Hilton Parkway inside the Atrium Building. Reservations are a must: 843.681.8106 but catering / take-out is also available.
Sun City Hilton Head is Resort Retirement Living
We tried to go into the back entrance of Sun City Hilton Head yesterday, but fast realized the gate was coming down too quickly to zip through without a pass. Which was my suggestion to my husband. Oh, just hurry up and follow that car in. Because that method always works for a Sacramento real estate agent without a passcode or auto reader in the vehicle. But the electronic arms are really fast in the south, where one might expect things to move more slowly and they do except for THIS.
I have clients who have bought and sold homes in Sun City Lincoln and in other Over-55 Active Adult Communities such as Heritage Park in Natomas. But those pale in comparison to Sun City Hilton Head. Why, not only do seniors end up not paying any state income tax, the property taxes are ridiculously low as well. South Carolina is a great state for retirees hoping to save money or live on battered retirement accounts.
My husband’s family has a home in Sun City Hilton Head, so I was treated to a first-hand experience. There many differences between this Sun City and say Sun City in Lincoln, California. For example, the streets are laid out mostly in curves. The homes are oriented on the lots to maximum distractions or annoyances from the neighbors — in other words, they are not lined up in rows looking like duplicates of each other. The designs are very distinctive. Not a tiled roof in my vision path. And many of the homes are situated on ponds or lakes or other inlets of water.
I could be wrong about this but it seems that the home designs and locations seem to take advantage of the environment and work around the natural habitation instead of chopping it all down or draining it. This appears to be a very quiet area where nothing evil lurks except maybe that alligator.
Yes, there is an alligator in the pond out my family’s back door. And a Snowy Great Egret. Cardinals and bluebirds. Of course, there is a golf course. And swimming pools. Clubhouse. Rec room, heck, even a movie theater with a 500 person capacity. It’s got almost everything. But the drawback is one is removed from urban civilization and plopped down in a field among other people mostly all hailing from other states. I guess it beats sitting around and listening to strangers yak about mutual hometown friends and high schools or, worse, being hated by the natives because you’re not from there.
Still, there are no grocery stores, no shopping centers, no museums or art galleries, no restaurants or music halls, none of the stuff you’d find in an actual city. But it’s close enough to heaven for most folks or they wouldn’t have chosen Sun City for retirement.
Short Sale Negotiators Should Move to South Carolina
An endearing thing about the South is the way people interact with each other. Whereas, I, for example, will tell you to your face exactly what I think — although, even a critical statement will be tempered somewhat — that method of communication is a stark contrast to the way it’s done in the South. I am called all sorts of sweetness in the South. I am addressed as “darlin,” which immediately warms me up to the person speaking until I begin to wonder what he wants. Oh, nothing, he’s just holding open a door for me to pass through. My feminism cringes a little but I fast get over it.
Why, this politeness and gentleness is so contagious a person could bless my heart and tell me not to worry my sweet little head over it, and I would not be offended no matter what the issue was at hand. They could be dropping nuclear bombs on the city, and I wouldn’t care. Southern hospitality is not overrated. It’s the real thing.
Short sale negotiators should be forced to spend some time in the South before working in customer relations at a bank. If every time I spoke to a short sale negotiator, I was treated the way the nice residents of Hilton Head, South Carolina deal with strangers, this Sacramento short sale agent would have died and gone to heaven.
This view in my blog today is of a cold, wet beach at Hilton Head, South Carolina. But the people here are so danged charming, I don’t give a hoot that our weather kinda sucks. Can I interest ya’ll in some grits?
A Sneaky Way for Fannie Mae to Reject Short Sales
Fannie Mae and Bank of America can be a difficult combination in a Sacramento short sale. Not insurmountable by any stretch but still difficult. Part of this stems from the guidelines overhaul last fall, I suspect, in addition to the fact that Fannie Mae has been releasing Bank of America from servicing. But much of the struggles short sale agents face with Fannie Mae short sales probably have a lot to do with the fact that Fannie Mae, under the direction of the FHFA, has been moving away from short sales all together. There is a lot of speculation in the short sale community as to why.
It’s kind of a joke that Fannie Mae has set up a place where short sale agents can escalate or contest a price valuation. It’s just a website and a process to make an agent feel like Fannie Mae is doing something positive when it’s not. Just a way to shut up an agent. It’s sort of a smoke screen, I imagine. Because I knew a value was wrong, and I asked Fannie Mae to review it. Not only did the BPO agent call me upon completion of the BPO, but she told me the value. Fannie Mae again insisted on a much higher value — even with the evidence of the true value put before its very eyes. The BPO means nothing. The review process is worthless.
It doesn’t matter what the value is to Fannie Mae, if it doesn’t want to do the short sale it will set a value too high. And the value will stay there until the moon turns blue or the market finally turns around. That’s Fannie Mae and our government for ya.
I’ve got another short sale in which Fannie Mae is insisting we produce corporate documents for a buyer who is not a corporation. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we ask them to read our lips, the buyer is not a corporation, the buyer is a general partnership, Fannie Mae has continued to demand corporate documents such as Articles of Incorporation. When we finally passed that hurdle, the representative from REDC asked for POF in the partnership name. It seemed fastest for the buyer to deposit all of the funds, including the balance of the sales price and all of the closing costs, into escrow.
The buyer deposited all funds into escrow and we presented Fannie Mae with the receipt. Not good enough, says REDC. The buyer must now remove all of the money from escrow, put it back into the bank and produce a bank statement. I’m not kidding. I wish I could make up this crazy crap — but then I wouldn’t be a Sacramento short sale agent, I’d be some insane person in a mental hospital.
Will both of these Fannie Mae short sales close? Yes, most likely. And that’s why I’m a successful Sacramento short sale agent. I hang in there for the long haul and don’t give up.
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