Email ElizabethThinking About Selling a Home in Sacramento?
Selling a home in Sacramento seller’s market can be a bit daunting. All of your real estate activity should be timed to coincide with the best time to go on the market to garner maximum exposure, and an experienced Sacramento real estate agent can be invaluable to you in that regard. Not only do you want to receive an exceptionally good offer, which is highly doable in a seller’s market, but most people want to quickly sell. You know who wants to sell the fastest? The people without equity, and that means a short sale seller.
See, putting your home on the market right now is kind of like tossing a piece of bread in the air to a flock of seagulls. That chunk of bread will never hit the ground. If you’re selling with equity and don’t mind the traffic of Grand Central Station, you can take your time, position your opening market day and employ a bit of strategy to get a bunch of offers. You’re going for price. You’re hoping for an all-cash offer and to avoid having to rely on an appraisal. Appraisers are all over the board right now.
If you’re selling a short sale though, that’s a totally different approach. You don’t need a bazillion offers. You need one committed buyer with a strong offer meeting market value who will close. That’s it. Not 55 offers, like I hear that some sellers are receiving. That’s insane, and there is absolutely no logical reason for it. A short sale seller with 55 offers is a seller whose agent is a butthead.
There are some communities in Sacramento in which this real estate agent won’t even put up a For Sale sign. That’s because I can’t trust agents not to use a lockbox without discretion in those areas even if I do not disclose there is a lockbox. Yes, believe it, it’s so bad — no For Sale sign! Can’t chance it. What happens is an agent is out showing property, and they drive by a brand new listing sign. Oooo, their buyer points at the house and asks to see it. The buyer’s agent, instead of calling the listing agent for information and looking up the listing on MLS, might just stop the car and look for a lockbox. Are they supposed to do this? No, they are not. But they do it.
Buyers are desperate to buy a home. I imagine at least half of the buyers out looking at homes this month will not buy a home. That’s disappointing. We need more inventory. If you’re thinking about putting your home in the market in the Sacramento Valley, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916-233-6759. It doesn’t matter if you have equity or if you need to do a short sale, I’ve got strategies and proven plans to make your home selling process as profitable and painless as possible. I will customize a home selling strategy for you that fits your personal situation. It doesn’t get any better than that.
This Sacramento real estate agent sold over 150 listings last year. More than $32 million in sales. More than 100 of those listings were short sales. Other agents hate it when I say this but it’s the truth: in this business, you can hire experience and a proven track record for the same price as a brand new agent! Which do you deserve?
The Main Reason for a Preapproval Letter
A stack of 700 francs from French Polynesia sits on my desk. Primarily because I can’t throw them away, and I don’t know what else to do with them. They are pretty much worthless. People who exchange money for a living don’t want them because they are coins. If I were back in Bora Bora, these 7 coins might buy me two diet Cokes. But here? Nuttin’. Just like some home buyer who wants to write an offer without a preapproval letter — that kind of purchase offer would be worthless, like my pile of francs.
Yet, I know that home buyers struggle with the issue of obtaining a preapproval letter. Heck, even my neighbor doesn’t understand why she should get a preapproval letter. She says when she finds a home she wants to buy, she’ll get a letter. This is why she might not ever buy a house, though. Because by the time she finds something to buy, there will be a dozen other home buyers wanting to buy the same house, and no seller in this market will accept an offer without a preapproval letter to accompany that offer. So, my neighbor is at a huge disadvantage. She doesn’t want to hear about the market in Sacramento or how to buy a home in Sacramento. She has her own ideas about how it’s done, none of which are working out very well for her.
After all, she only buys a new home once every 30 years. We Sacramento real estate agents write offers for clients every week. Real estate is our business. We want to help our clients not hinder them.
This is a seller’s market in Sacramento. No inventory. Lots of buyers. This market is very tough for buyers. It’s more important now than ever to get a preapproval letter before buying a home. Not only does it tell you how much you qualify for, which doesn’t mean you have to go for the max, btw, but it assures the seller you have the means to close. It says you are serious and not some lookie-loo. Besides, sellers don’t accept offers without a preapproval letter. The preapproval letter is not for your agent. It’s for the seller.
The question might be where does one get a preapproval letter from? For starters, it should be from the lender where one intends to get a loan. Moreover, it should be from a lender who can perform. The two aren’t necessarily the same. Lots of home buyers want to go to their own bank or their own credit union to get a loan, and that’s probably the worst place to go. The reason is there is no guarantee that their own lender will perform. They all have access to the same bag of money, basically, but some lenders guarantee performance and some do not.
Why is performance important? Because a purchase contract is typically written for 30 days. That means the buyer must close escrow within 30 days of the seller’s acceptance or the contract expires. If your bank can’t close on time, the seller has the right to cancel. And you know what? With prices going up, sellers are canceling contracts that have expired. Yup! I’ve had it happen twice when representing the seller. The other agent’s buyers struggled to close because of this or that or some other thing and asked for an extension. Instead, my sellers canceled. The buyers had no say at that point. The contract time period had expired and it was within the seller’s rights to cancel. Do you want to lose your home because your lender can’t close on time?
You might want to ask your agent for a couple of recommendations. Real estate agents know which lenders perform because they work with those same lenders over and over. In case you’re thinking that agents get kickbacks or some other kind of incentive to recommend a lender, think again. That’s against the law. The only reason for an agent to recommend a mortgage broker or lender is performance. Period.
Travel Tips: Don’t Use Citicards
I look out on that travel horizon, and I see a long road between now and August for this Sacramento real estate agent. That means I will most likely have a lot of work to finish before the end of summer. August will be my next vacation. I do not look forward to the end of summer because summer is my favorite season, even though I live in Sacramento, one of the hottest cities in America. As one of my clients once said, if Sacramento’s spring weather carried through into summer, it would be just like living in Carmel and our homes would cost a million bucks or more. Well, not quite because it’s a 100 miles to the ocean, not 100 yards.
For my clients, though, the fact that I have no vacations planned for a long, long time is good news for them. Although, with WiFi available almost everywhere, yes, even on a remote atoll in the middle of French Polynesia like Rangiroa, it’s not always evident if I am in town or if I am gone; I still pay attention to my real estate business and my clients. Unless I tell them I am out of town, my clients believe I am always in Sacramento.
You know who does know when I am gone? My credit card companies. I have learned, for example, to call Citicards and tell them when I am going and where I am going. To give them advance notice of my whereabouts. VISA and MasterCard especially (I don’t know about American Express or Discover) are cracking down on credit card fraud. They track individual accounts, so if they spot unusual activity they might not authorize the transaction without speaking to the customer.
A tip for travel: Always call your credit card company before you go out of town if you plan to use your credit card elsewhere. Tell them when you are leaving and when you will return.
Yet, that doesn’t always work, and I am living proof. Even though I called Citicards and told them where I was going on vacation, when I checked out of the St. Regis Resort in Bora Bora, the credit card company flagged my account and froze it. Sometimes, it’s not a good idea to have Big Brother watching you. It’s kind of creepy. Especially after you’ve put them on notice.
This is the second time Citicards has done this to me, which means I will no longer use their card for major purchases. The line has to be drawn somewhere. They say they are protecting you but both you and I know whose butt they are protecting.
Photo: by Elizabeth Weintraub, cruise ship in Papeete
Sending Short Sale Offers to the Bank
I recall way back when short sales first started in 2006 the confusion among real estate agents over sending short sale offers to the bank. Some real estate agents believed that every offer should go to the bank. That’s only because they did not think through the facts. First, the bank does not own the home. Some agents were used to dealing with REO banks and thought a short sale was handled the same way. In an REO, the bank owns the property because the home has already been foreclosed upon and title has been delivered to the bank.
Moreover, some people erroneously describe a foreclosure as the home “going back to the bank.” The home doesn’t “go back” because the bank never owned it. The bank has a security interest in the home but not a real property interest. The home is owned by the homeowner. It is still owned by the homeowner during a short sale.
Second, banks must approve a short sale and agree or counter the terms in the accepted offer. This does not make the bank a party to the real estate transaction, however. It makes bank approval of the short sale a contingency of the purchase contract.
The only offer that should go to the bank is the accepted offer. If the seller wants to accept a backup offer and send the backup offer to the bank, the seller is generally free to do so. In that event, the bank will ask the seller which offer the seller wants to accept. At that point, the seller can certainly point to the backup offer. It is not customary for the seller to send a backup offer to the bank. As long as the submitted offer is reasonable — an offer the bank is likely to accept because it is at or near the comparable sales — that’s the offer that is likely to win approval. That’s the offer a Sacramento short sale agent submits at the seller’s direction for approval.
Banks don’t want to be in the real estate business, too. They have a hard enough time determining fair market value without us Sacramento short sale agents giving the banks the right to weigh the merits of each individual offer. But that’s not stopping a few enterprising entrepreneurs from starting up high-tech platforms that allow banks to receive all offers ever submitted by nitwits. I won’t do them any favors by naming those companies because I just hope in all that is halfway sane in a short sale that it never happens. For everybody’s sake.
A New Tech Gizmo for This Sacramento Real Estate Agent
Thoreau was not talking about voice recognition software when he advised us to simplify, simplify. But I am considering buying it to make my life easier. Ah, the things we can’t do without these days. As an extremely busy Sacramento real estate agent, I spend a great deal of time talking to my cell phone. The problem with that is it types the weirdest things, sometimes using swear words that it didn’t learn from me, so I don’t know where my phone got it from. It must be sneaking off to pool halls late at night while I think it is charging. Although, actually the problem isn’t so much that it types weird crap, it’s that I click so quickly that I can click send when I don’t mean to.
Uh, oh. I hate that. That’s how I get into trouble. That’s when I have to actually call the person I just sent the nasty message to and explain I did not really say: screw you and the horse you rode in on, I meant to say: she’d love to give you the refrigerator.
Much of the time when I’m sending a text message or email via my phone to someone like my Transaction Coordinator — to a person who knows me well and the types of things I’m likely to say — I don’t even fix the mistakes, though. I just let them go through knowing that she will most likely figure them out. I suppose this drives her nuts. But she does a good job at figuring out the messages I am trying to convey. If my phone types: pls ask the cellar to shove it, she knows I meant for my phone to say: please ask the seller to sign it. Or, maybe that’s why my next door neighbor just listed with ZIP Realty . . .
The other day I found myself holding my iPad in two hands and shaking it. For just about 2 seconds there, I suspect I was trying to erase the screen, like it was an Etch-A-Sketch. Even more irritating, I was ready to send an email yet nothing was typing. I talked and talked, and it just sat there. That’s because I was working so quickly I temporarily forgot the iPad wasn’t my phone. Talking to it was not going to make it type anything. Gizmos can be frustrating. They all don’t do the same thing, even though they all meet up briefly through the “cloud” together.
However, my husband shoved his phone under my nose the other day and asked me to say something I would normally say to my phone. So, I said please find out from the bank negotiator when we will receive the short sale approval letter and whether it will come when pigs will fly, and it typed it precisely. I was amazed. Dragon software. That seems to be the answer.
So, if you find yourself talking to your iPad, don’t feel bad about it. It can happen to any of us. And you kids, get offa my lawn!
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