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How to Save Money When Selling Your Sacramento House
Hire a pro to truly save money when selling your Sacramento home.
If you’re interested in how to save money when selling your Sacramento home, this blog is for you. This is a true story. By paying attention to gut instincts, these particular home sellers hired the best Sacramento real estate agent and made almost 10% more by selling their house through me. They almost didn’t. They were about to hire some agent they stumbled across by accident or whose name was printed on a bus bench. I don’t know how they found her, but she wanted to sell their house for about 10% under market value. Oh, she had some investor who would pay cash and it would quickly close, and there were other stories involved, to which I didn’t pay any attention because it was all garbage. Dual agency, too.
This is what happens when sellers are chasing down some random discount agent to sell a house. They might save a percent on the real estate commission on the front end but they can lose it on the other end in far greater numbers. If you truly want to save money when selling your Sacramento home, you’ll hire a more expensive agent.
The sellers called me because they were feeling uneasy about the agent they were about to hire and talked to an agent they trusted in Benicia about it. She suggested they call Elizabeth Weintraub for a second opinion. When I told the sellers they could sell that house for a higher price, for a lot more money, and still receive multiple offers, their eyes bugged out. They looked at me like I just landed in a spaceship in their backyard.
After all, this other agent had said, blah, blah, blah. Why was my advice different? Good question.
I didn’t ask them to take my word for it because they didn’t know me from anybody. I’m just an agent who pulled up in a foreign sportscar and was walking around waving a clipboard like I owned the place. I showed them a list of sales within a half-mile radius, houses just like their house, similar square footage and age, and explained why I gave the price a little push. My logic and explanation made sense to them. They signed the listing paperwork. Now they are actually going to save money.
We went on the market on May 21, received many excellent offers, and we had to cancel the upcoming open house. I love it when that happens. The sellers countered the offer they liked best and we closed on June 18th, fewer than 30 days later. No hassles. I helped the sellers through a minor hiccup after the home inspection — as this is the point where many buyers try to renegotiate — but the sellers had me looking out for their interests, so they prevailed. It’s a good thing they hired the best Sacramento real estate agent to represent them. I feel good about the closing because I know that my decades of experience added immensely to their bottom line net profit.
If you want a professional job, you should go to a professional agent to save money when selling your Sacramento home.
This Agent is Accepting New Home Listings in Sacramento
It’s been a stressful couple of months in Sacramento real estate lately as this listing agent has been focused on winning challenge after challenge. It can take a slight toll. In the middle of all of this action, it’s important to pause and assess the housing market to best advise my clients. This is when I often head for a massage. It’s nice to feel a human touch on my skin. To unwind and relax. I visited Images Salon on Riverside next to Vic’s Ice Cream in Land Park yesterday and was delighted. Ten times better than the place not to have a massage in Land Park.
I’ve got 12 escrows pending to close before my birthday this month, and once I realized how many were already sold, it’s made me more excited to work even harder to sell the remaining few I have and to gather more listings. I have a small number of homes in various stages of prep and, after a manicure, pedicure and haircut, these will be available for sale, but I am also accepting new home listings in Sacramento to sell over the summer. Moreover, believe it or not, I am working on the Sacramento fall real estate market.
It’s always a cycle in real estate, and it’s a balancing act to make sure my home listing inventory is not more than I can personally handle. For example, a few years ago, I had 70 listings and that was about the maximum this agent can comfortably handle, but today that number of home listings is small enough to count on two hands. That’s because inventory has been dramatically reduced in Sacramento. Plus, it’s rare to tackle a short sale anymore; those days are gone. Compared to a few years ago, I feel almost like I am on vacation, if it were not for the constant challenges of pending escrows. Any agent can flip a home into escrow but getting it closed is where the true professionals shine. To better explain cycles, let’s look at the housing market numbers in Sacramento:
Studying the Trendgraphix chart above and searching MLS, one can really notice the cyclic trends. For example, at the moment, the number of residential home listings for sale in Sacramento per the MLS are 3,253. The number of pending sales, which include a handful of pending short sales, are 2,908. That means we’re still running out of homes to sell. It’s a drought, although not as severe as our water drought.
The first thing I notice in the May Trendgraphix report above is the column for May looks very similar to the column for October of 2013. But what is different about it is two-fold. First, the pending sales in October were quickly moving down as fewer homes were selling. However, the pending sales in May are continuing to move up, a trend that began in January and shows no signs of slowing! Closed sales fell off slightly in May, probably due to the flakes and unqualified buyers, but I predict that June closed sales will correct. Second, our pending sales exceed those closed. It’s been that way all year.
You don’t see the smaller details, but as a busy Sacramento real estate agent, I can tell you that our inventory over the past year and half has doubled. We moved from 1 month of homes for sale to a little over 2 months, but that it still not enough home listings to sell. Our days on market has increased to 31, meaning buyers are taking longer to make the right choice. Home buyers are also hitting prices harder as homes are selling on average at 98% of list price. A buyer might say that sellers are 2% overly optimistic, but as a listing agent I know it’s the other way around.
If you’re looking to hire the best Sacramento real estate agent you can find, your best bet is to call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I’m presently accepting new listings. Will your home be sold by Elizabeth Weintraub next month? There’s one way to find out.
Chart: Trendgraphix
Do Sacramento Agents Discount Real Estate Commissions?
Just because a real estate commission is negotiable doesn’t mean I am willing to cut a deal for a stranger. Heck, I don’t even make deals for friends because I don’t have any friends selling real estate in Sacramento. But even if I did, they would still pay me for my services. Real estate commissions must be negotiable in order to comply with the Sherman Act, but it doesn’t mean a real estate agent needs to offer a discounted commission. Yes, you can negotiate with this Sacramento real estate agent, and I’ll cut right to the chase here, my answer is no.
Not only do I charge the same percentage that I have charged since I started in this business way back in the days of bellbottoms and Beatles, but I am doing a bazillion times the work since then. I have two rules that I work by that are completely inflexible:
No discounts and
No assholes.
See, I can’t always choose the agents on the other side with whom I work nor their clients, and some of those people might be assholes, but I can choose my own clients, which is why I don’t work with the assholes. If you’re an asshole, you can go work with some other agent.
I have to save my asshole interrogating energy to work with the other side.
Would you want an agent who eagerly said Sure, I’ll give you a big fat discount? Because that kind of agent might do the same thing when you get an offer. Put pressure on you to accept a lowball offer. When I receive a purchase offer, the first thing I often think is: how is the other side putting the screws to the seller? Is the offer on the level and clean? I’m not eager to jump into escrow unless the seller is excited and the offer warrants it. Because I don’t really care about me. I care solely about what the seller wants.
Sometimes clients ask me if I will reduce my commission when they are faced with a price reduction. Although I can vaguely see how they might come up with that idea — for example, they are reducing the price so I should come down — they are not looking at the fact that by the mere percentage calculation, I am already hit by a reduced compensation. Lower sales price X percentage rate = lower fee. I share the loss with them already. I know they don’t mean to say that they want to penalize me nor do they want me to work less. They want me to work even harder. And I do. That’s my job. To sell their home.
But don’t ask an agent to give you top-notch performance and then work for less because it doesn’t work that way. Most of us earn our commission, one closing at at time. If 1% separates you from the best in the business, you’ll probably lose a lot more than THAT down the road because it means you think we are all the same. We are not all the same. All agents are not created equal.
Why Some People Hate Their Real Estate Agents
If you hate real estate agents, get in line; lots of people do and, as agents, we’re not supposed to talk about it. They say the easiest person to sell to in the world is a salesperson because salespeople are gullible (they believe their own lies), which makes them susceptible (an easy “mark”), and a Sacramento real estate agent is no exception. The third-party vendors to real estate agents realize this as do the trade associations who pander to us. I also realize it when I work with other fellow agents because there are telltale signs that give it away.
I use it to my advantage when I spot it. I can’t help myself. It’s just lying there like bundles of thousand dollar bills on a sidewalk. I could lay out all of those signs for you but it wouldn’t really make much difference because I find the tendency is then to separate one of those peculiarities, focus on that one thing, and one sign by itself is not enough to deserve a bad rap except maybe that REALTOR Badge graphic. I’m bringing this up to help explain why some people dislike and even hate their real estate agents. It’s because they feel like they’re being played and being sold to.
Nobody wants to feel like they are being manipulated, even if they know they are, they don’t want to personally feel those grabby little fingers of lies. It makes them uncomfortable. It’s much better to be straight with people and tell your clients what they don’t want to hear as long as it leads them to the direction they want to go.
That’s where I come in, and one of the reasons I sell so much real estate in Sacramento. I will tell my sellers and buyers what they don’t want to hear. But I try not to be rude about it, and I also want to give them what they want. They want an agent who is smart, pays extreme attention to detail but doesn’t sweat the unnecessary stuff, is empathetic to their situation and cares about them. Somebody else once said that a client won’t care about how much you know until you show how much you care about them. When you naturally care about other people, this is easy to do.
I am reading a book I love called #GirlBoss, written by my freaky twin sister Sophia Amoruso, CEO of Nasty Gal. She doesn’t know she is my twin sister — and she’s also 32 years younger than I am — but we’ve led parallel lives in many ways. She discovered what is unique about her, stayed true to it, and her company has revenue exceeding $100 million. But that’s not the only reason to listen to her. She has common sense, probably realizes it is the best of the 5 senses. A great sense of humor, too, the second most important sense.
I am unique in how I sell real estate as well; it’s how I got to where I am. I relate to people both emotionally and intellectually. That’s a weird combination. I also filter out the noise. Stuff that doesn’t need to enter my brain doesn’t get in there. I focus on what my client wants and on getting it for my client. If you need to hire a Sacramento real estate agent, you’ve come to the right blog. Send me an email above by clicking the envelope titled email or pick up any old phone and call. I still answer my cell, 916.233.6759.
The Best Sacramento Listing Agent Asks Questions Like This
It’s a sorry state of affairs in this real estate market when a Sacramento listing agent holding a pending offer questions another agent with a pending listing to inquire if her sellers are in contract with the same buyers. Yada, yada, yeah, it’s confidential information but agents can still confirm the fact. I’m just saying it’s sad that an agent nowadays is put in the position of having to ask the question in the first place. It’s part of doing a fiduciary for the seller.
Sure, most transactions are straightforward and everybody is honest and ethical. Unless they are not. I’ve run across so many screwball escrows lately that my head is practically spinning. There was the guy who tried to buy a home and actually finagled his way into a contract when he had no money, no job and a police record. Then, there were the many buyers who wrote multiple offers all at the same time, locked down the properties and then subsequently canceled them all. Not to mention the cash buyers whom, at the last minute, developed cold feet.
There are so many ways that working with an experienced agent in Sacramento can pay off for a seller that I can’t even count them. Because of the volume of business that I do, I see a tremendous amount of purchase offers pass through my computer every year. I pay close and careful attention to each one of them, too.
Somebody asked me the other day, a seller whose home I’m listing next month, if I was too busy for her. I don’t know if she got that idea from a competing listing agent or if she came up with it on her own, but I am never too busy, and that’s the secret to my success. I don’t take on more listings than I can handle. Like I replied to this seller, a while back I was handling 70 to 75 listings at a time and doing a damn fine job if I say so myself. My clients agree, too. Today, my active Sacramento home listings number closer to 25, because the market is much slower.
The thing is I use my 40 years of experience to help my sellers. That’s an inherent quality they can’t buy or easily find elsewhere. My clients expect me to go beyond the norm. If I receive paperwork that makes me ask questions because I spot a red flag, you can bet I will get to the bottom of it. I see that action as part of my job and in good conscience I cannot let these types of questions go unanswered.
