Email ElizabethWeintraub’s 2013 Real Estate Predictions
This Sacramento real estate agent and About.com homebuying expert finished her 2013 real estate predictions and forecast yesterday. It seemed like December 1 is a good target date to try to hit every year. It provides a healthy amount of time for people to argue with me before I head off to — this year it will be French Polynesia — my holiday vacation. And every year I get the same question: Elizabeth, how do you know this stuff?
I know this stuff because I look at the way things are going and I predict they will continue to move in that direction. Most of the time I am 100% on target with my forecast. Sometimes, things take a right or left turn or spin around and blow up, but not very often.
For example, one of my predictions is home prices will rise in 2013. They’re going up now in most major metropolitan cities. It doesn’t mean we have a recovery. It means inventory has shrunk and demand has grown. We’ve run out of homes to sell and buyers are clogging up the streets. I throw a home on the market and it’s like tossing bread crumbs to starving pigeons. They swoop down in droves and peck each other, jockeying for position to get a nibble.
Last year in my real estate predictions I talked about short sale fever. Oh, darn, there goes that song again in my head, White Line Fever. Nevertheless, I was spot on about that. Short sales took over and surpassed the position occupied by the foreclosure market. Many of the REO agents turned to try to do short sales. I don’t really agree that an REO agent is a good candidate to do a short sale because the qualities that make an REO agent successful are pretty much the opposite of the qualities inherent in an excellent short sale agent. 2013 will pretty much continue to be the year of the short sale.
The year 2013 will be an interesting ride. It marks my 39th year in the business. If you’re looking to buy or sell in Sacramento, Yolo, Placer or El Dorado County, rattle my cage. The Elizabeth Weintraub Team is well positioned to handle all of your real estate needs.
The Lengths Some Sacramento Investors Will Go
When I started in real estate in the 1970s, I represented mostly investors looking to buy a rental home. I also cultivated investors by showing regular homeowners how they could tap the equity in their homes to buy investment properties. It was a completely different world of real estate back then. You may find this difficult to believe, but I never asked my investors for their opinion or how they would like to write a purchase offer. I bought all of their properties in my name as assignee using promissory notes. The world of Sacramento investors has changed a bit.
The premise back then was as a real estate broker I could better negotiate and ferret out the good deals for them. After I bought the property, I assigned it to my investors, they put cash into escrow and we closed a week later. I received a commission and they got the property. It was a strange way to do business but it worked for many years.
One of the advantages to this system was I could act very quickly when a new home came on the market. Back then, we didn’t have computers. MLS books were printed once a month with weekly updates. Real estate agents found homes for sale through networking and the daily newspaper. It’s hard for me to even imagine doing business like that now. It seems so dark ages, like etchings on a cave wall, to think about having to stop at my office or a telephone booth if I needed to make a phone call.
Today in Sacramento the market is desperate. Sacramento investors are nearly hysterical. And first-time homebuyers are in tears. The problem is no inventory, and it’s getting worse as we head into the time of year that is generally the slowest — December. Five years ago there were almost 10,000 homes for sale in Sacramento County. I just ran a search in MLS, and we have 1,373 residential homes for sale in Sacramento County. We have 5,162 homes in escrow with accepted purchase offers. But most frightening is over the past 30 days during the month of November we have closed 1,370 homes. That’s only the number of homes that have been reported and many companies lag MLS input by a few days, so that number will increase by the time all is said and done.
We have less than 30 days of inventory. There is nothing to buy and the demand is extremely high. To say it’s a seller’s market is like saying we have a little rain here in Sacramento right now. We have a torrential storm.
Investors have figured out what they need to do is target the top producers. They are calling the biggest listing real estate agents in Sacramento and begging for first chance at writing an offer. I rank up near the top so they are calling this Sacramento real estate agent. One of them, and I won’t tell you who it is, called yesterday. They offered to kick back 66% of the commission to me if I would give them an edge in negotiations and make suggestions as to how they could beat out their competition.
I don’t think they were prepared for my response. That’s because this approach must work with other real estate agents or they wouldn’t be doing it. I said: “You know, it sort of sounds like you guys are asking me to compromise my fiduciary and give you a leg up in exchange for additional compensation. To grant favors. To ensure you win the purchase offer. I know you probably don’t mean it that way, but that’s exactly how it sounds.”
Their response:“I take it you’re not interested.”
Bingo.
If you’re looking for a Sacramento real estate agent to sell your home, give Elizabeth Weintraub a jingle at 916.233.6759. I answer my phone.
School Teachers Can Do a Short Sale
One thing that this Sacramento short sale agent is blessed with is super nice clients. All of my clients are really nice. But some of them are exceptionally nice, over-the-top nice, the kind that if you turned to talk to them while waiting in line at the grocery store you might feel embarrassed because you’d end up hugging a total stranger out of the blue — THAT kind of nice. And I am not a huggy-feely type of person. I am more of a firm handshake type of person.
This particular seller and her husband are high school teachers. They are super sweet, sensitive and caring. They started their life together as a young family in this home in Rancho Cordova. As the years passed, they, like many new families in Sacramento, outgrew the tiny 2-bedroom, 1-bath home.
They bought a larger home in a nearby community and rented out their former residence. Unfortunately, the rent did not cover the mortgage payment and unexpected rental expenses. But they could still get by because they both worked over the summer months at a summer school. When the economy crashed, they lost their summer employment. Expenses mounted. Like so many homeowners in Sacramento, they did not count on the value of the property falling as well. They had hoped if they ran into difficulty that they could sell the home. But selling this home was not an option because they were underwater.
We began this Rancho Cordova short sale in May. The market was very hot in Sacramento in May. Not as sizzling hot as it is now, but it was a strong beginning of our seller’s market. We received a ton of offers and had to sort through them all. One offer stood out from the rest. The offer was from a real estate agent who was trying to buy a home for her son and his fiancé who were beginning their own family. The lender in this situation was Sun Trust (notoriously slow), and there was a second lender that was demanding more than the first loan would allow. The buyer agreed to hang in for the duration and not cancel. Bingo, that’s our buyer.
It took us 7 months to negotiate and close this Rancho Cordova short sale. We were rejected once because the lender could not understand that teachers live on 10 months’ of income in a 12-month calendar year. An important thing I have learned over the years as a Sacramento short sale agent is not to give up. Not to throw in the towel. Especially NOT when sellers are counting on you and the buyers are counting on you. If there is a shred of hope, you find a way to get the message through, and you close.
Wishful Thinking Won’t Close a Short Sale
I’m not from Missouri, so you don’t have to show me the money. But I do have built-in radar that makes me question certain things. If something seems off, I tend to explore it. That’s my nature. I grew up with the expression: Question authority, because I lived through the 1960s. You will notice I did not say I completely recall the 1960s, but I did survive those years.
Today the expression is: Question everything. When one is a Sacramento short sale agent, one tends to question everybody and everything anyway because a real estate agent has a legal fiduciary to her client. I look at what people do and not so much what people say. Sometimes, agents can be bamboozled. Some of them so badly want to hold a deal together that they’ll let things slide and they’ll believe their own wishful thinking. For example, I am working on a short sale in which the buyers were unwilling to meet the bank’s demands. They sent a signed cancellation. Then, after talking with a third-party vendor for Bank of America, I was able to get the bank to agree to look at a different solution.
I presented this solution to the buyers in the form of an addendum. That was a couple days ago. The buyer’s agent says the buyers will sign the addendum. Every time I ask him for it, he says it is coming and he is working on it. But the addendum has not arrived. There comes a point in which somebody needs to be the grown up in this situation. Today is that day. We need to examine the facts. The facts are we have a signed cancellation. We do not have a signed addendum. We have a verbal that the buyers will sign the addendum but the addendum is not in my hands.
It’s nothing personal, but that short sale is going back on the market today. My advice to my sellers is to sign the cancellation and find another buyer who is willing to perform. As a professional courtesy, we gave the buyer’s agent until 9 AM today to produce the document. If it shows up, the home won’t be released to inventory, but I am not holding my breath. I wish people would do what they say they will do. But that’s what they call wishful thinking. If you’re looking for a short sale in the Sacramento area, call me.
Two Loans on a Short Sale for Luxury Homes
Having to deal with two loans on a short sale is always a bit tricky. I’ve yet to encounter a dual loan short sale slam dunk, and I’ve closed hundreds of short sales over the years. Over the last 12 months alone, not counting my regular equity sales, this Sacramento short sale agent has closed 138 short sales. Not one involved an easy second loan to negotiate. They are all a pain in the butt. But I do them because they come with the territory. I’m not about to decline a listing just because it involves a little bit of extra work. After all, I sell short sales. By the very nature of the transaction, a short sale is a lot of extra work over a regular sale.
I can share with you one such solution to the two loans on a short sale problem involving a luxury home sale. Upper-end short sale homes are handled differently than entry-level short sales. I just closed a short sale home in Roseville with a $1,000,000 first mortgage and a $300,000 second mortgage. Both were held by the same lender. This is important only to the extent that two loans on a short sale, held by the same lender, does not necessarily mean the investors for each loan are the same. The investors can be different. Plus, the junior loan can be managed through another department in a different state.
The second loan was hard money. Lenders aren’t always flexible with a demand for a hard-money second. That’s because these loans carry recourse in California. A lender could just wait for foreclosure, get wiped out and then pursue the seller for the deficiency. This is why it’s important to consider a short sale for hard-money loans because the rules governing short sales are different. When a short sale is approved, under California state law, the lender must forgive the deficiency and waive the right to pursue the seller.
In this particular instance, since both lenders were the same, the second lender might not have had a legal right to pursue the seller in the event of foreclosure because there’s a little known law that excepts those instances. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. But that’s neither here nor there, and I am not here to give legal advice. If you want legal advice, you must ask a lawyer.
In this luxury home short sale in Roseville, the second lender wanted a lot more money than the amount the first lender would approve. Most first lenders will authorize payment from proceeds somewhere from 6% of the unpaid principal balance up to $8,500 maximum. There are a few exceptions, and I’ve seen banks authorize a payment of 10%, but in this instance, the second lender demanded a big chunk of change. Peanuts as compared to the deficiency balance, but it amounted to a lot of money. The seller can’t pay it. California Civil Code 580e prevents a seller contribution. But the buyer can pay it providing, and this is the tricky part that you can’t overlook, the first lender approves. We negotiated the payment and reduced it but it was still almost $20,000. Since the first lender was the same lender as the second, the first lender approved the payment.
This was a good deal for the buyer because the buyer really wanted the house and was picking up the home for about 50 cents on each dollar of debt. We suspected a buyer contribution was a distinct possibility when we chose the buyer for this short sale. We asked the buyer: If push came to shove would the buyer step forward? Because you never know exactly what a short sale bank will do. When you think you know, that’s when you get into trouble. But this buyer agreed to discuss if the issue came up. It did, they paid it and we closed.
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