Email ElizabethHappy New Year From Bora Bora
Our beach view welcomes a Happy New Year from Bora Bora.
This is the day to begin learning where the lucky 1 and 3 keys are located on the keyboard and how to write 2013 on my checks. That still leaves the other two components of the date to mess up, though: the day and the month. I often get all 3 wrong. I have no concept of time. Probably because I have no children, no little benchmarks to tell me how old I am getting and how much time has already elapsed. Not to mention, being a Sacramento real estate agent means every day is fun, exciting, challenging and new. So why make a New Year’s resolution?
Why not resolve every day to do your best? To make the changes daily in your life that bring you the most rewards and happiness because if you’re not happy, what is the point of wallowing in unhappiness? What purpose does misery serve? Who needs adversity? If you’re not happy where you live, then make plans to move. Call a real estate agent.
How would you like to be Michael Schoonewagen, the general manager of the St. Regis at Bora Bora? We enjoyed cocktails with Mr. Schoonewagen last night, alongside 100 other guests at the St. Regis as we kicked off New Year’s Eve celebrations. Mr. Schoonewagen says he gets to move to a different country every few years. We approached him after his introductions and speech to hand him a card. On the card, we commended our butler, Kostantin, and our room service fellow, Sebastian, both of whom has provided exemplary service during our visit.
My husband started to say that he felt it was important to share a different kind of voice, apart from those who complain, but I’m not sure it came across the way it was intended because Mr. Schoonewagen responded as though my husband was saying the St. Regis must receive a lot of complaints. Mr. Schoonewagen began to defend that allegation. See, this is the problem when one person speaks two languages against a person who cannot. But what was interesting was the happiness ratio. Mr. Schoonewagen said 97% of the guests at the St. Regis are very happy. All of the time.
Even though, as he pointed out, there is no cinema, no theatre, no entertainment on the level to which we are accustomed in the states. I grabbed Mr. Schoonewagen’s arm and asked him to please shush up and stop filling my husband’s head with those thoughts. But it was too late. My husband had already figured it out. He’s a smart guy. It’s no secret that there is no city life here in French Polynesia on Bora Bora. So, it just means one needs to have two homes, that’s all. If you have to live in a city. As Mr. Schoonewagen pointed out, Bora Bora is only 5 hours by air from Hawaii. This time next year, you could be saying Happy New Year from Bora Bora
Goodbye to 2012 Sacramento Real Estate Market
This past year of 2012 could have been the best of times and also the worst of times but I’m not saying which. No sense making a proclamation. I will say for many sellers of short sales in Sacramento, the year was bitter sweet. It’s a relief to eliminate a financial burden, an albatross around the neck. For many, the road to a short sale was anything but comfortable. Nobody wants to come to the realization that it’s time to get rid of the house. The house they so desperately wanted to buy when it was purchased.
I’ve worked with sellers this past year who did not do a short sale. Believe it or not. Some of my clients were traditional sellers, that is sellers who had equity. Even the clients who were moving out of state, looking forward to a new life elsewhere, were not exactly ecstatic to be forced to release their home by selling it to a complete stranger.
It’s a little odd working with sellers who are not thrilled to be selling. It’s not like the old days, the days of the 1970s . . . and thank god I don’t have to listen to Barry Manilow anymore . . . the days when sellers were making money hand over fist. Sellers were selling even if they didn’t have to sell because there was too much money in their home, equity that was burning a hole in their pockets. They wanted to see it up close and personal. Cash in fist. Selling was a good way to capitalize on their equity.
So was creating paper. I worked with sellers who became buyers by creating a promissory note and recording a trust deed against their residences. These prom notes were often straight notes, without payments and accruing, often annually compounding, interest. Sellers used these prom notes as down payments on other homes, which also carried straight notes secured to them as part of the financing. This was like putting a roulette gun to their heads and not pulling the financial trigger for a few years. Maybe there was a bullet in that gun, maybe not. Riskier today than it sounded back then.
It’s much more straight forward these days. Although, in Sacramento’s frantic real estate market, I have been able to squeeze out a few sales this last quarter for sellers that were not short sales and probably would have or should have been if they had been listed with somebody else. Fortunately, we were able to stretch that sales price far enough to make the home sale an equity sale. That’s the advantage of hiring a Sacramento real estate agent with her finger on the pulse of the Sacramento real estate market. The market shows no signs of letting up. The tide is still rolling in.
Yup. Twice a day in French Polynesia, where I will watch fireworks tonight. Happy New Year to you!
The Best Part for a Short Sale Agent
I’ll cut right to the chase. The best part of a short sale for a Sacramento short sale agent is at closing — but the reason why it’s the best part might surprise you. A fellow short sale agent friend in Virginia says one of her associates reports that she dreads closing a transaction. This agent says when a transaction closes, it means she is in the unemployment line. Out of work. Searching for new business. Depressed. That’s crazy. Because closing is the best part of the short sale for the short sale agent.
It’s not the money. Heaven knows it’s not the money. Short sale agents do 2 to 3 times the work in a short sale over a regular equity transaction for the same amount of money. Why would anybody in her right mind do 2 to 3 times the work for the same amount of money or, even less, because sometimes in a short sale an agent has to discount her commission or kick back some of it to make the deal work for the bank and the seller. What kind of fool would willingly do that? Who knocks herself out like that?
For starters, it’s because that’s where much of the business lies in Sacramento. Something like 1 out of every 3 escrows is a short sale. So, if an agent doesn’t work in the short sale end of the business, she’s missing a lot of business. If an agent specializes in short sales, like this Sacramento short sale agent, she gets a lot of business.
One thing is identical across the board. When the short sale closes, and I get to make that last phone call to the seller to say it has closed, well, that is truly the best part. I can hear the sighs of relief over the phone. The giddiness that it’s over. The happiness of being able to put the ordeal behind.
Because I am in French Polynesia right now, I have missed calling my sellers at closing. I have no cellphone in this part of the South Pacific. My TC calls to let them know; I send an email. But sending an email is not the same thing. It’s especially rewarding the last few days of the year, when sellers are worried about year-end reporting and income taxes like now. I had 4 closings on Friday and I’ll have another 6 or so on Monday. So, my TC gets all of the fun at the moment. She deserves it. She works just as hard and rarely gets to hear first hand how happy sellers are when a short sale closes.
Photo: Sunset in Rangiroa by Elizabeth Weintraub
A Trip from St. Regis to Bora Bora
The passenger boat from the St. Regis to Bora Bora leaves for the mainland base on Bora Bora twice in the morning. We read this in the literature left in our room. They also provided us with an entire schedule that showed us the time of the stops at Matira Beach and Vaitape for our return trip. We trusted this information, especially since the passenger boat left the dock from the St. Regis at the time scheduled. Little did it dawn on us to verify the return time. Because we had the schedule. The official schedule.
Because of our limited French, it is sometimes difficult for us to carry on a conversation with a person who can speak two or more languages while we can speak only one language, and we probably don’t do a very good job at that in their eyes. You know what the French think. Our taste in music sucks, we have no fashion sense, and we wouldn’t know a good truffle if we ran into it sideways.
The other night at dinner our waitress was explaining the rolls. We have seeded, raisin and nut, and white, she said. What? She repeated the choices. I questioned, “Raisin and nut?” Plop. She put the raisin and nut bread on my plate. I did not want raisin and nut. She obviously did not want to discuss what raisin and nut bread was doing filling up a spot in our bread basket that could have been occupied by sourdough or wheat. But what do I know? I am an American, and from California, no less.
There is not a lot to do in Matira Beach except eat, swim and watch pregnant dogs drop massive amounts of steaming poop on the beach. In Vaitape, you try to stay out of the street and avoid getting runover. Vaitape has a lovely grocery store, Chin Lee, which is owned by a woman. She plays very loud music right by the lottery tickets. I don’t know how that loud loud music helps to sell lottery tickets but I suspect it does. It makes people dance down the aisle, even people searching desperately for dried prunes.
Bloody Mary’s, that popular tourist spot, is closed for renovation. We bought a few postcards, walked around Vaitape for a while and then grabbed a taxi for Matira. Matira Beach is billed as one of the most stunningly beautiful beaches in the world. It’s a public beach. The view is spectacular.
We sat at the spot designated in our literature at the Intercontinental Hotel, which at one time was probably the Matira Hotel from the sign out on the road. No bus came. The appointed time came and went. The staff at the Intercontinental called the St. Regis for us and then assured us the bus would come. Where have I heard this type of empty promise before? My mind was clicking through my memory banks. Oh, yes, I know why this sounds familiar. This is like when a short sale bank negotiator says the file will be approved after we submit one more HUD with one tiny little change. Yeah, right.
I’ve got a bus schedule I’d like to give you from the St. Regis to Bora Bora.
The bus did not come. When we were 5 minutes from the boat departure back to the island, we called our butler, Konstantin. He came to the rescue. I will send you a cab, he says. The vehicle that arrived appeared to be driven by somebody’s aunt, but we did not care at that point. When we got back to our hotel room, Konstantin had had delivered a bottle of champagne on ice. Next time, he says, before you venture away, check with me. Yes, Konstantin. We will. It would be awful to have to spend the night at the Intercontinental. They have horrible beach chairs and no tips on their pool cues!
Just Stage That Home
Hotels could use a little help from the home staging industry. When we were first escorted into our villa at the St. Regis by our butler — I still can’t get used to Konstantin as our personal butler, it seems so unnecessary and pompous — as he opened the door he beamed, “Welcome home.” And he had both TVs blaring, in the living room and the bedroom. This did not feel like my home. It felt like I was intruding into somebody else’s home.
Staging a home is crucial to setting the mood for a sale. The easier buyers can view themselves as living in the home, the faster that home will sell. Buyers generally don’t spend as much time inside the home as people think. You’ve generally got about 2 or 3 seconds in each room to make an impression. A buyer pokes in her head and goes down the hall.
This morning a reader from my About.com homebuying site asked if he should stage his 8,500 square-foot home. He thought the home showed better vacant. Well, I haven’t seen the condition of his furniture, but I doubt that is true. He went on to say that most TV shows seem to favor vacant homes. At first blush, I want to scream: Stop watching those shows. They are TV, for goodness sake. I’ve appeared on some of those shows, and they are television, not real, created for entertainment, fabricated. If you want to learn something, go to school. Read a book. But don’t watch TV.
But I’d be talking to a door. And an unadorned door at that. I wanted to say hey, just stage that home.
I explained to him that the guys from TV shows have a hard time talking people into letting them intrude into their personal space. Nobody wants a film crew in their bath or bedroom. They worry about being judged or criticized, not that they have anything all that personal to protect in privacy. It’s much easier to get permission to film a vacant home.
And, having sold my own 8,600 square-foot home, once upon a time, I can tell you that almost every home, large or small, will sell faster and for more money if it is staged. It’s not a question of whether you should stage a home. Just stage that home.
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