Email ElizabethThe Point of Contact in the Real Estate Business
One of the little perks given to homeowners in distress through the California Homeowner Bill of Rights, apart from restrictions on dual tracking, is the right to a single point of contact, what we refer to as the POC. That acronym stands for Punch on Chin. No, it doesn’t, it means Point of Contact; you just feel like punching them. It’s nothing to really get excited about because the POC is often pretty useless. It is a person assigned by the bank to answer the phone when a customer calls. I don’t know if that person physically works at the bank in person or lives in Canada but by golly, it’s a live person you can talk to each and every time you call, even if that person is worthless and no help to you whatsoever.
There are no provisions in the new law that says the POC needs to be knowledgable or carry any authority. The POC doesn’t process your file; the POC accesses a computer database where supposedly notes are stored to glean information. As a Sacramento short sale agent who has worked with hundreds of bank negotiators over the years, I can tell you that much of the data that is not always entered correctly. But by George, you’ve got a live person on the phone. That’s a remarkable feat.
More than half of the time, the information the POC gives to a customer of the bank is incomplete or incorrect. I know this because my client will call to say the POC told her, for example, that the hardship letter is not in the file. Not only is the hardship letter in the file, but it’s at Fannie Mae for review. Along with all of the other docs such as the bank statements and tax returns the POC also says are missing. That’s because I am talking to the person who is processing the file. I am speaking to the short sale bank negotiator while the seller is talking to a POC — a POC who would dig through her bag to find an unwrapped Tootsie Roll pop and plop the thing in her mouth without washing it off.
I had a bank offer me a credit card a while back that would cost me $100 a year. At first blush, I rejected the idea because I am not that interested in accumulating points or cash-back bonuses as I always pay my bills in full and never carry a balance. However, the icing on the cake offered by the bank was not really the cash-back bonuses. It was the fact that I could talk to a real live person who would answer the phone through a direct phone number. That is now a luxury today! To be able to call a person directly and have said person answer the phone without punching through a menu or sitting on hold or talking to other doofuses.
There is little more frustrating than screaming Operator at a recorded message and hearing the reply: Did you say: Call Back Later?
The personal touch is missing from so much in business today. You can’t talk to anybody anymore. I was looking for a small business to help me over the weekend, and I was searching online. Most of the websites were geared to the company and not an individual. I don’t want to do business with a company. People do business with other people. That’s why my website features me because that’s what people want. My website is more than a search engine for homes in Sacramento. And I answer my phone. If you need a sharp real estate agent in the Sacramento area, you can call Elizabeth Weintraub 916-233-6759, and THAT, I promise, will make you happy.
How Long Will It Take to Sell My Home in Elk Grove?
Last week I talked to a seller who lives in the ZIP of 95757 in Elk Grove. I sell a lot of homes in that ZIP code, probably because so many of them are short sales, but some of them are not. It’s a desirable place to live, and some neighborhoods are located in a certain school district, which enforces the desirability of those subdivisions. This seller asked me how long it takes to sell homes in Elk Grove, and I told him we would be in escrow within 7 to 14 days, and probably closer to 3 to 7 days. His jaw dropped, but that reaction is expected because that’s what everybody does when this Elk Grove agent explains the market.
What’s going on in the market in Elk Grove and the Sacramento area in general is so wild and crazy that it’s difficult to believe. That’s in part because we’ve been depressed for so long. It’s like tying a circus elephant’s leg to a stake. The elephant eventually will give up moving, and you can remove the stake, and the elephant will stay there. It’s conditioned. And PETA will get after you for that. Yet in Elk Grove, homes are moving into pending very quickly and there are no consequences.
Unless you’re like this seller in Elk Grove I was talking to. When I showed him the pending sales to prove how quickly homes were selling, he looked at the numbers and snorted. He said the sellers were selling too quickly and for too little. Because he’s sold so many homes in his life that added up to the number 2, he knows for a fact the sellers in Elk Grove gave away money. Which is one way to look at it. Except they didn’t. They sold according to the market. They let the market dictate. And the market responded favorably for them.
Putting a home on the market for 30 days without accepting any of the dozens of offers you’ll receive is insanity. Because offer #29 isn’t going to be the highest offer. Neither is #30. Your highest offer will be among those received in the first 7 to 10 days. After three weeks, interest dies off. People begin to wonder what’s wrong.
My goal, as your Elk Grove listing agent, is to attract as many buyers as possible and let them bid for your home. In a seller’s market, like our present market in Elk Grove, a newer home in a popular subdivision priced between $200,000 and $300,000 will quickly sell. If your home is drop-dead gorgeous, buyers will be lined up down the block. An experienced Elk Grove agent can take one look at your home and tell you how quickly it will sell. Of course, selling is only the first step; you’ve got to get it closed and that’s another blog.
I will say this, if I were the owner of a food or ice cream truck, I would be driving around Elk Grove on the weekends.
A 3-Lockbox Friday for This Sacramento Agent
This Sacramento real estate agent should be adding 3 more homes to the inventory in the Sacramento area on Monday. It’s a small contribution to our sorry state of affairs in the Sacramento real estate market. We have fewer than 1,500 homes for sale in Sacramento at the moment, which is miniscule and does not meet the demand. This means when a potential seller calls to say he or she wants to put a home on the market, this Sacramento agent does her best to accommodate without delay.
I was driving back from Elk Grove where I have a lot of listings when I got the call to Rocklin. I seem to list and sell an unusually high number of homes in Elk Grove, even though I do not live there. I live in Land Park. Probably because so many are short sales in Elk Grove, and I am the best Sacramento REALTOR to handle short sales. Yet, a few that are not short sales are creeping into my listings. I closed a regular home in Elk Grove that comped out at the top around $245,000, and with one-eye closed and clenched teeth we pushed the limit to meet the rising pending demand to $259,000, yet it sold for all cash at $280,000.
Buyers are desperate to buy a home today. It’s hard to pick a sales price because it’s hard to predict how high a buyer might decide to go or how far out an appraiser will go to appraise. I realize sellers think us listing agents can pull rabbits of hats, but we can’t always predict what buyers will do. We can only guess. If your home is marketed correctly, the market will take you where you want to go. You don’t want to be too high because buyers will wonder what’s wrong with your home when you reduce. You don’t want to be too low because buyers might wonder upfront what’s wrong. You want to be priced just right, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Which brings me to my 3 lockboxes from yesterday. One lockbox went on a home in Elk Grove that will be a short sale. Another lockbox went on a home in Elk Grove that will be a traditional sale, and the home is absolutely gorgeous. Don’t call me about it because you’ll get your chance to buy it along with everybody else next week. I don’t make side deals or give special considerations to my friends. I’m not that kind of listing agent. Don’t offer to let me write the deal in the hopes I will compromise my ethics and tell the seller to take your offer, because I don’t do that, either. Yada, yada, that’s not what you meant, yeah, right!
Another lockbox went on a home in Rocklin, which will be a short sale. It will need some work, and homes that need work are often a struggle with the short sale bank because the banks often refuse to acknowledge the homes need work. Or, maybe those darn BPO agents just don’t go inside. Hard to say, but it will be challenge, yet not a challenge that I can’t overcome.
Elk Grove in the morning. Rocklin in the afternoon. Back to Elk Grove in late afternoon. That was a lot of driving yesterday for a Sacramento agent who lives in Land Park. I love this business.
The No Drama Sacramento Real Estate Agent
Arthur Burke, a real estate agent in Sacramento has, on more than one occasion referred to me as the No Drama Sacramento Real Estate Agent. Probably because there are real estate agents who will yell and scream to get their point across, but I’ve never found that approach to be necessary. The truth is everybody knows you get more attention if you whisper. Does that stop some agents from bellowing at each other or their clients? Logic would say yes but logic doesn’t govern real estate nor some Sacramento real estate agents.
I recall once driving down I-80 with the top down on my car and my right hand trying to steady a giant cat tree in the seat next to me — not the safest thing to do with cars whizzing by at 75 MPH — when my phone rang. Even though that was not the most opportune time to answer my cell, I was wearing a hands-free Bluetooth device. The problem was I could answer it only if I temporarily removed either my right hand from the cat tree or my left hand from the steering wheel. It’s not like I couldn’t talk and drive at the same time, but trying to do so with a 6-foot high cat tree wobbling in the seat next to me probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. If all of us always made the smartest decisions possible, though, Bandaids would go bankrupt.
Using my elbow to steer, I answered my cellphone. I had a lot of deals in escrow, many of which were short sales, and when banks call, a Sacramento agent better answer because she might not ever get back through to the negotiator. The bank’s call-back number isn’t just an 800#, it also involves a series of digits for an extension, sometimes up to 7 numbers, plus you need to know the last four numbers of the seller’s Social Security, including their middle initials, and the complete property address with correct ZIP code. Knowing I did not have any of that information available at this time as I sped past the bottleneck mess at the 99 South exit, I did not feel the least bit anxious about answering my phone.
It was a Sacramento real estate agent, and I won’t mention where she works because you might figure out who it was, and I’d rather not have to talk to her again. High, shrill voice. Screaming with accusatory tones. I had not spoken to this person for months. It took a while to figure out why she was calling and why she was so angry. She was upset because a seller she was representing had asked me to do a CMA for a home this seller owned elsewhere. I tried to explain that I did not call the seller, I did not solicit the seller, and we did not discuss the home the seller presently owns. After all, the seller is free to choose a different agent to sell a different property. Nobody owns a seller.
It made me wonder how this agent became a top producer when she screams at people. It’s one thing to scream when you’re right, which is not really justifiable, btw, but it’s another to scream when you’re wrong. I also tried to explain that this was not really the best time for me to be discussing our mutual client while driving down the freeway with this cat tree in the car.
She then began to scream at me for answering my phone.
There’s only one thing to do with these kinds of people. Click.
That action involved removing one hand from the steering wheel again. It didn’t feel like a life threatening situation at the time. Staying on the phone sounded like a life threatening situation. Whenever I see this agent’s name, I recall the experience in which I concluded I would rather face death than continue speaking to her. If anybody ever said that about me, I’d want to curl up and die. And that is one good reason I don’t scream at people. I don’t mind being known as the “no drama” Sacramento real estate agent.
Elizabeth Weintraub and Led Zeppelin Do Facebook With Downton Abbey
Admitting outloud in public that I don’t much like Facebook is like the day I tore my Led Zeppelin album off the turntable in the middle of a party and spun it like a Frisbee into the street. All of my party guests stopped flicking the Bic to light whatever they were smoking and stared at me with dropped jaws. Their gazes traveled from the opened front door to my defiant face and back. They were astonished.
That was a sacrilegious act. But you know what? There are only so many times that a reasonable person can listen to Stairway to Heaven before her mind begins to decay. And for crying out loud, it was my album. I tried pleading with my guests to play something else but nobody was listening. You would have thought I was begging for the Bee Gees when I really wanted to jam to Janis Joplin. But the only way to get Janis Joplin on the turntable was to get rid of Led Zeppelin. So, out the door with it. Imagine the guy driving down Balboa Boulevard on the Newport Beach Peninsula who suddenly spots a 33 LP spinning toward his windshield. See, we just didn’t think back then.
That was BF, before Facebook. With Facebook, you really don’t ever have to think again. You just click. I have all these people on my personal page, and I don’t know where they came from or who they are, so I’ve stopped accepting new friends. Because these people are not my friends. How can they be a friend if I don’t know them? Even some of the people I call my friends whom I do know I don’t particularly like. Yet, I have all of these people on my page, and they all submit crap that I can click through if I’m completely bored.
I started a business page on Facebook, too. Because I was told that I had to do it if I wanted to stay socially relevant. After trying to upload a few photos and making a mess out of it, I have given up. Just leave me to uploading photographs of homes I list in Sacramento to MLS and other websites such as Zillow and Trulia and let me be content with that. Let me blog. Let me write for About.com about homebuying. Let me send my new listings and my personal blog to Facebook for you. Let me send a Tweet every day to Twitter.com. You want to chat with me, you can pick up the phone or send me an email or a text message. I am simply unwilling to communicate with you through Facebook. If that’s blasphemous to you, I have no regrets. You can go listen to Barry Manilow. You should go “like” the Facebook page for Led Zeppelin.
That’s what you get from a Sacramento real estate agent who would throw away Led Zeppelin. However, there is one exception. That’s when some clever soul creates a Facebook parody, and it’s so accurate that you can’t stop laughing. If you have been glued to Season 3 of Downton Abbey, I suggest you check out this website If Downton Abbey Took Place on Facebook. You can thank me later.
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