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Don’t Make These Sacramento Home Buying Mistakes
It can be a slow process, trying to buy a home in Sacramento, but it’s even slower if you don’t know where you want to live. Home buyers just starting out might have unreasonable expectations, and those types of expectations can lead to disappointment.
Before engaging a buyer’s agent to show homes, it’s common for buyers to identify and target a few communities. Agents can be a great resource, but buyers should really ask an agent to show homes when the buyers are ready and able to write a purchase offer. That’s not to say that an agent can’t help buyers to choose a place to live because that’s what we do. However, there are plenty of open houses every Sunday in Sacramento where buyers can go to look at homes, talk to other agents, get a feel for neighborhoods, without a personal escort.
Agents don’t hold all of the information anymore regarding homes for sale, but we do have access to MLS, which a buyer does not. We can send a buyer listings in certain areas defined by custom searches or however a buyer would like to receive the information. The best home buying website is generally the buyer’s agent’s own website or a feed directly from MLS.
Here are some of the common home buying mistakes I’ve heard about over the past few weeks that can easily lead to disappointment and frustration:
- Looking at homes with sales prices way above the buyer’s affordability point. It makes no sense to look at homes priced at $400,000 if your pre-approval letter maximum is $300,000.
- Dragging your agent through the same square-foot model home over and over, which a buyer does not like. If you really hate that closet and bathroom, it won’t look any different in the same model with different paint on the walls.
- Expecting a buyer’s agent to immediately respond to your email questions about new homes you just found on another website when she is showing homes to another client for a few hours.
- Asking personal questions of a seller to satisfy idle curiosity that have no bearing on whether the home is suitable for you and your children.
- Finding a home that fits your needs and pricing but not buying that home because you wonder if there might be some other home that is better for you. There is always another home.
Bottom line, if a home buyer needs to personally inspect 200 homes before buying a home in Sacramento, that buyer is probably not yet ready to buy a home. And that’s OK. But let your agent know and discuss expectations before asking an agent to show homes.
How to Work With Emotional Real Estate Agents
Do you ever have days when you feel compelled to tell some whiny person to just put a sock in it? I’m not talking about my husband, in case he’s reading this and wondering. It’s the buyer’s agents who can get all excited and turn into white knight agents, turning up the volume and drama over some piddly little thing, when the agent hasn’t even spoken to the buyer. A Sacramento real estate agent can’t take this kind of stuff personally because it’s not personal. It’s some other agent’s misaligned ego that’s doing the talking.
This is not to say that to be successful in real estate that an agent needs a skin as thick as an Everglades alligator. To the contrary, good real estate agents need a really big heart and hearts can be broken. More important is the ability to put situations into perspective, to be calm, rational and think things through before reacting.
I suspect that the aforementioned is called adulthood, although I’m not really sure. Because not having any kids to use as a measuring stick, I’m not certain I have fully developed into an adult. The days all sort of look the same to me, and then one day I look in the mirror and I’m over 60. Unsupervised because my parents are dead and gone. Nobody to account to but myself.
People tell me I have an even temperament. Probably because I am not the type of person to explode as my immediate reaction to something seemingly stupid — even if inside my brain I’m thinking WTF, I don’t say it until I’ve thought through the situation. Like, take a buyer’s agent who asks me if the seller will accept, oh, say, $50,000 less on a brand new extremely well priced listing. An agent will ask that question because buyers asked.
Instead, I wonder why that agent has not studied the comparable sales in the neighborhood. I wonder why the agent hasn’t taken the time to educate her client. I wonder why the agent is in real estate, and how long it will take before she ends up behind the counter at Starbucks. But I don’t say any of those things. I just ask why. Asking questions is the best way to diffuse potentially explosive situations. It’s also a good way to find out what another person is really thinking before jumping to conclusions.
How Responsible is a Sacramento Agent Whose Client Cancels?
There are Sacramento real estate agents who believe it is the other agent’s fault when a party to a real estate transaction cancels. I noticed this a few weeks ago when one of my sellers accepted an offer, and the Sacramento agent who wrote it seemed familiar to me. Like we had worked together in the past, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So, I asked her if there was a reason her name rang a familiar bell with me.
Immediately, the agent apologized for her former client’s behavior. As though what had happened carried a stigma of some sort. I didn’t even recall the transaction. I searched for her name on my computer and found a sale in which she had submitted an offer, but I could not recall any details. It was a few years ago, and hundreds of real estate closings later. Whatever happened was water under the bridge.
I don’t believe it’s the other agent’s fault when a client cancels. Maybe that’s because I have sold hundreds of homes in Sacramento and, as a result, I realize that stuff happens — stuff that we can’t always control. Once, I had a seller start to cry when I brought him an offer. It was full price, everything he wanted. But that’s when the reality hit. He was too emotionally attached to his home and had relied on other reasons, things he had used as an excuse to sell, and he had talked himself into putting his home on the market. However, when it came right down to it, he didn’t really want to sell.
Was I going to beat him over the head and say: See ya in court, buddy? To a man who is in love with his house and made a mistake? That’s incredibly stupid on so many levels. I released him from the listing.
Agents we remember who “did us wrong” are agents who are unprofessional. Those who don’t return phone calls or, worse, scream into the phone, or refuse to submit required documentation, intentionally thwart transactions. Not agents whose sellers or buyers cancel an escrow. Sacramento real estate agents tend to hold other agents accountable for honesty, ethics, and doing the best job that they can. Not for how their clients react.
Agents this Sacramento agent remembers are those with whom I close escrow, not the others. Some agents who work with me end up in multiple transactions with me. They know I will be professional. That’s a good thing.
Why Buyer Feedback From a Sacramento Agent is Crucial
An agent who sells real estate in some other state said that he doesn’t “waste time” anymore responding to agent requests for feedback. His position is if an agent didn’t know enough about his marketplace or his listing, it was not that agent’s job nor anybody else’s job to educate the guy. You know, that kind of thinking seems sort of narrow minded to me. I’m glad he doesn’t sell real estate in Sacramento.
Agent feedback is often crucial on so many levels. Take for example the seller who thinks her home is worth more than it is actually worth. Watching days on market accrue might mean little to the seller. The seller might point her finger at the listing agent and demand to know why the agent isn’t doing more to market her home, when the real problem is the sales price is too danged high. Well, agent feedback, email after email after email, filled with buyer’s agents all saying the same thing speaks volumes.
Sometimes, an agent will point out a defect that nobody else can put a finger on. The listing agent might suspect there is something odd about the home, but neither she nor the seller can readily identify it. Not every person looks at a home in an identical manner. Take pet owners, for example. We don’t often notice smells from our own pets, but a person who doesn’t own a pet, bingo, they’ll immediately notice a scent.
Other times an agent might tell me that it was beginning to rain, so she closed a window. I can pass on that information to let the seller know we are looking out for her. It’s not just me, it’s my coworkers, the agents with whom I am proud to associate. We can all make each other look good and watch out for each other.
My clients appreciate the fact that I send them comments from agents who have showed their home. Is it too much to ask a buyer’s agent to share her buyer’s thoughts with a fellow agent? Especially when a seller has gone that extra step and allowed strangers into her home via a lockbox while she was at work. Lockboxes are a convenience for buyer’s agents, and sellers don’t have to utilize them.
I always try to provide buyer feedback to a listing agent if I am asked for an opinion. It only takes a second to click “reply” and type a line or two. I figure it’s a small thing, and it can mean so much to a listing agent. We’re all in this business together. No agent is an island, and I don’t care how successful she is. I hope the agent who refuses to give buyer feedback never finds himself in the position of listing a home.
Why Multiple Offers Are Wrong
It’s not that I don’t trust people; it’s that people can’t always be trusted. Which isn’t necessarily the same thing. When you’re a Sacramento real estate agent like me — and been in the business since kids wore bellbottoms — you see enough to question what seems odd to you. People take that as mistrust, but it’s just enough usually to put my radar on alert. It’s the reason I was accepted into law school in my younger years. I am naturally inquisitive. The oddball in any equation is often suspect for a reason.
Sure enough, the offer that stood apart from all of the other offers this weekend for that home in Elk Grove did not make it past a 24-hour period. It’s not that the purchase offer crumbled and fell, it’s that it was most likely falsely presented in the first place. A statement in MLS informed buyer’s agents that all offers would be reviewed on a certain day at a certain time. This put buyers on notice that all offers would be given an equal opportunity for presentation. Therefore, by extension, a buyer who was not willing to wait for a response by that certain day should not submit an offer. To submit an offer without an intent to wait could very well invalidate the good faith covenant inherent in purchase contracts.
Whether a buyer realizes it or not, a buyer can make only one offer for a home in Sacramento. Some agents will tell buyers that they can make as many offers as they want and those agents would not only be wrong but they could be subject to discipline. If a buyer does not have the financial means to purchase every home a buyer writes an offer to buy, the offers are not real. There are laws that prohibit writing pretend offers. Buyers writing multiple offers they can’t afford to all buy is a big, huge, no-no. It’s also unprofessional, and fiduciary could be called into question as well because who would advise a buyer to break the law?
Yet, that did not stop an agent and Elk Grove buyers from writing more than one offer for a home in Elk Grove, offering as a lame excuse the buyers did not want to wait. This intent was undisclosed. This agent does not work for Lyon Real Estate, thank goodness. I can’t tell you which company but it wasn’t Lyon. I love working with Lyon real estate agents. I know they have been trained and they are supervised. Any little problems that could ever pop up are handled in a prompt and efficient manner. We have great management and communication among our agents at Lyon Real Estate. I can always trust a Lyon agent to do the job correctly.
When agents don’t respond after being informed their buyer’s offer has been accepted, that’s the first sign something is amiss. I didn’t hear from this buyer’s agent for more than 24 hours. A full 24 hours was also enough time to negotiate another offer. Of course, unknown to me, the agent could have dropped dead from a heart attack and been found lying splattered in the street somewhere, but that’s a long shot, don’t you think?
In any case, I have 3 very happy buyers this morning who have a renewed chance to buy a home in Elk Grove. If you read yesterday’s blog, 35 offers for a home in Elk Grove, you’ll see my gut said we should have countered all four offers. That was my suggestion. It’s not that I don’t trust people; it’s that some prove unworthy of trust. Being cautious is always wise in my playbook.
One deal is not worth a reputation. The shame is some agents never learn that lesson.
