Email ElizabethCat Litter Box and Selling Your Sacramento Home
I should have one more litter box than I do. I’m not following the guidelines for a cat litter box and selling. The rule is one litter box for each cat and then an extra box. This isn’t a rule designed by the manufacturers of litter boxes, as you might suspect. Although, they probably endorse it because it’s definitely to their advantage to make you buy as many litter boxes as possible. One litter box can last a lifetime, so it’s not like there is a huge motivation to buy a bunch of litter boxes. But the fact remains we have 3 cats and 3 litter boxes, and nobody wants to look at litter boxes. Not me, not house guests / visitors and certainly not prospective home buyers when touring a Sacramento home to buy.
Back when I was selling my own home and had only one cat, where to put the litter box was a huge concern. With 3 cats, it’s even worse. First, you can’t just go moving litter boxes around the house. Oh, no, no, no. Cats hate change. And they have ways of showing you their displeasure, in case you’re thickheaded. You’ve got to plan ahead. If you’re thinking about selling your home in Sacramento, deal with this litter box issue upfront, way before you go on the market. You should find the least offensive and most hidden place to put your litter box. Back in Minnesota, I used to keep the litter box in the basement but when home showing, the box was less conspicuous under my dressing table and out of view.
I also put my cat into a crate when home buyers came over. I put a big note on the crate too that warned: Don’t Pet the Cat! That’s because Brandon, a ruddy Somali, would literally knock the glasses off your face. To say he did not like strangers would be like saying it gets hot in Sacramento in the summer. You have no idea until you experience the phenomena.
There was that time I had been standing in my front yard, talking to the neighbors, when a real estate agent was inside showing my home. I could hear him knocking on the glass windows, and I thought he was showing the buyers the sturdiness of the dual pane. I had no idea my cat had actually trapped the three of them in a corner of the living room. When the agent didn’t stop knocking on the glass, I went inside to check and found them huddled in terror. Meow, said Brandon. He was sitting on the floor looking innocent.
From that moment forward, I had to lock up the cat during showings.
There are a huge variety of cat boxes available nowadays. The litter box you might use for every day use might not be the litter box you want to use when showing your home for sale. Just remember, out of sight, out of mind. Especially people who don’t much like cats will not want to look at cat litter. So, you might want to consider a covered cat box. There are cat boxes that automatically flush and sort of look like toilets. You need a water source like the valve for your toilet or washing machine to which you attach a t-connector. You also need a place to dispose of water, like a toilet or laundry box in the wall with a drain pipe.
Just make these changes before putting your home on the market. Give your cats plenty of chances to adjust to the changes. Because the last thing in the world that you want is for a a potential home buyer to open your front door, take a whiff and say, “Oh, cats live here.”
A Sacramento Real Estate Agent Answers Her Phone
Some real estate agents work on the weekends, and some agents do not. But that doesn’t stop the buying public from calling a Sacramento real estate agent. So, if you’re a real estate agent and you don’t want to work, you generally don’t answer your cellphone. Typically, the agent who doesn’t answer her phone is the agent who gets too many phone calls.
This Sacramento real estate agent receives a ton of phone calls. All the time, not just on the weekends. My telephone number is everywhere. It’s hanging from sign riders swinging in the breeze on dozens of For Sale signs throughout Sacramento and our four-county area. It’s published in MLS. I put my cellphone into Zillow, Trulia and just about all of the major websites. If a person wants to find Elizabeth Weintraub, learn about real estate or short sales, I’m very easy to find.
And I answer my phone. This fact astonishes people. A Sacramento real estate agent who answers her phone? They often say when I answer my phone that they did not expect to find a real live person on the other end. I tell them I can hang up so they can call back and go to voice mail if they like, but no, they will put up with talking to me if they have to do it. If I get a real crackpot on the phone or somebody who won’t shut up, I am capable of politely explaining that I have to go, and I hang up myself. But that doesn’t happen very often. And every once in a while I get a telemarketer. When I do, I report those callers to the government’s Do Not Call List.
But yesterday, in the middle of a quiet October Sunday afternoon, my cellphone rang. My husband and I were both reading. The wind picked up slightly. It was forecast to rain. Skies were overcast. I answered the phone.
Caller: I’m calling about Lockwood.
Weintraub: Yes. (He sounded like a really old guy.)
Caller: I’m calling about Lockwood.
Weintraub: Yes. (I set down my book and sat up. OMG, I’m thinking, is the home on fire? Is this person calling to tell me the wind just blew off the roof?)
Caller: I’m calling about Lockwood, can you hear me?
Weintraub: Yes, I can hear you. May I help you?
See, this is the part where normally a person would ask a question. They might ask if the property is still available, or how many bedrooms it has or whether there is a pool.
This is a property that I’ve sold 3 times as a short sale. All 3 escrows were at the same price but the first 2 buyers were flakes in my book because they didn’t close. It’s been listed for 10 months. It’s unusual to get a call on a property that’s been pending for a while like this one.
I asked the caller again if I could help him. He seemed agitated. Maybe he couldn’t hear very well? Oh, no, maybe somebody kicked in the front door or swiped the lockbox? Maybe he’s a real estate agent who is very angry that he can’t show the home because there is no lockbox?
He yelled at me: “What can you tell me about it?”
Well, I could tell him a lot but I won’t because none of it matters. What matters is the home is in escrow and closing this week so he can’t buy it, but if he’s interested in this neighborhood and price range, maybe I can help him? So, I tell him the home is pending and ask if he’d like information about other homes in the area.
Instead, he blurted out: “Why isn’t there a sold sign on it?”
Because we don’t do those things anymore. Especially not on a short sale. Everything is published online.
He screamed an obsenity and slammed down the phone. This is why a Sacramento real estate agent doesn’t like to answer the phone. See, a real estate agent’s life isn’t always glamorous, even if she does answer her phone.
Painting the Interior of Your House Before Selling
I was so broke when I painted the interior of my first house that I used printer’s ink instead of paint. I had access to three containers of printer’s ink in red, blue and yellow, so I did what any normal kid in 1967 would do. I painted the ceiling blue and mixed the yellow and red to do the walls. The problem with that was I did not mix enough orange so after I finished 3 walls, I ran out of “paint.” I also did not mix the colors proportionately so I could not duplicate the color. Not to mention, I did not own the home, which meant my landlord forced me to repaint prior to vacating. Have you ever tried to cover up deep blue printer’s ink?
There are consequences if you mess up painting the interior of your house. Especially if you ever want to sell that home. While it is true that you should paint your home the colors you love, if you’re gonna go all hog wild, then you’ll have to repaint before you sell or you’ll pay for it in the sales price the buyer will offer.
It’s not cheap to hire painters. A professional painter will charge you $300 to $500 or more per room. This means many people decide to paint their home as a do-it-yourself project. They think: how hard can it be to hold a paint brush? First, it’s hard to paint a straight line and tape will rip the paint off your walls. Second, you can streak the walls, end up with bubbles, dirt in the paint, raise the hair of the surface you are painting and / or splash paint everywhere, not to mention you can step in it or, worse, your cats can step in it and track painted pawprints on your furniture.
The only thing worse than that is to paint the interior of your house the wrong color. Today, white is out. Neutral colors are in. It’s what we call “coffee and cream.” Builder neutral eggshell is not very pretty but it sure beats bright purple.
Not every wall has a straight corner these days, either. You look at homes in Natomas or Elk Grove subdivisions, and all of the corners are rounded. If you want to transition colors between rooms, you need to figure out how to draw a straight line at the corner. Let’s just say very few people can do it. In fact, I haven’t seen one, and I’ve sold a lot of homes in Natomas and Elk Grove.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, all of our neighbors painted the interiors of their homes the same colors. Green was the color of choice for the living room. It was calming and peaceful. Plus, when my brother’s chameleon escaped from his cage, you couldn’t find the critter because that slimy amphibian would blend right into the walls. Our one bathroom was pink. Pink towels, pink toilet cover, pink rugs and pink four-inch tile matched the pink walls. The kitchen was a cheery yellow to compliment our yellow formica-and-chrome kitchen table. My brother’s bedroom was boringly blue, my parent’s bedroom was earthy and brown, and the girls’ bedroom was lavender. Every room was a different color.
Those colors are disastrous today. Before you put your home on the market, ask your Sacramento real estate agent if you should repaint. Ask me, I’ll give it to you straight and tell you whether that bright red wall in the dining room needs to be a different color.
What is a Short Sale BPO?
Back in the olden days of real estate, before short sales in Sacramento, you almost never heard the term BPO if you weren’t working in the REO market. The REO market means “real estate owned” and it’s an acronym. Refers to bank-owned foreclosure homes. But BPO can also apply to a short sale.
The way it works is this: When a Wall Street bank worth billions wants to know how much a Sacramento home valued at multiple hundreds of thousands is actually worth, instead of hiring an appraiser — a person most likely with a college degree, who has specialized training, knowledge and the experience to conduct real estate appraisals and receives a fee of $400 to $500 for this service — this bank instead might hire a Sacramento real estate agent, a real estate agent who quite possibly could have dropped out of high school and never sold a lick of real estate a day in her life, and pay this agent fifty bucks to do a BPO.
This is the infinite wisdom of our banks that helped to get us into this miserable state of affairs in real estate to start with. What what are ya gonna do?
Now that we have short sales, banks use the same principle to determine value. They hire a real estate agent to do a BPO. This acronym stands for Broker Price Opinion. Whether the home is valued by an appraisal or by a BPO understand one thing: they are both a matter of opinion. Albeit the appraisal is a bit more complex and calculated, but it’s only as good as the comparable sales that are used, in the opinion of the appraiser.
You ever notice how two people can look at the same thing and see completely different things? One person might look out the door and say, “It’s raining.” Another person might see clouds on the horizon, the sun peeking through and say, “It’s a beautiful sunny day.”
Nonetheless, the bank will accept the short sale BPO and base its decision, in part, on whether to approve your short sale on this price. But it’s only good for 3 months. After 3 months have come and gone, that value vanishes and becomes questionable, so the bank will want to acquire a new short sale BPO. A really clever bank negotiator who never wants to close a file can continue to let BPOs expire and drag the file on and on and on into infinity and beyond, Buzz Lightyear.
Get Your Short Sale Package Upon Initiation
Did you miss the earthquake drill yesterday? We were sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room when 10:18 had come and gone. Darn it. But then, until my husband told me about the earthquake drill, I had not heard about it. That’s because I don’t hang out on social websites during the day. Nope, this little hamster on the hamster wheel is busy wheeling and dealing in short sales and Sacramento real estate. Nose to the grindstone and all of that.
Still, I managed to miss observing the drill. Because if I had known about it, I would have wanted to observe. Certainly, nobody in the doctor’s office was doing a duck-and-cover. You’ve got to ask yourself, though, did anybody really believe that diving under your desk with your hands over your head would protect you against a bomb? A nuclear bomb? No, in the 1950s, you just did what you were told and you didn’t question it. It’s life experiences like this, the duck-and-cover, that has prepared me for my career-turn to a Sacramento short sale agent. It takes a special kind of person, I’m convinced.
Take a short sale package, for example. Way back in the early years of short sales, like 2007, I used to hand out short sale packages in advance to my clients. Sometimes, I would email the packages. Mostly these were financial P&Ls like a 710. Today, we have a ton of options at our disposal, but I don’t routinely send out a short sale package before we open the short sale file. The reason I don’t is because I don’t want my sellers to do any more work than they have to do. I want to limit the pain.
Not only do the requirements change from day to day, but the forms change, too. There is a short sale in Lincoln that I’ve sold 4 times now. The first 3 packages did not include this particular financial, but the present sale does. You may wonder why did Wells Fargo not require this and now it does? Legal crap. Sometimes, it’s one word in a document that changes.
It’s not just a Wells Fargo short sale in which the required forms and documents can morph. Bank of America has changed its third party authorization more times than I can count. I’ve run out of fingers and toes. So, when I don’t give you a short sale package in advance to complete, it’s not because I’m failing to be proactive or shirking my duty. It’s because I don’t want you to have to fill out one package and then be told you need to complete a different package. Especially those arm’s length affidavits that require a notary. I’m trying to save you time and agony. Because heaven knows there is enough agony in a short sale as it is.
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