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Some Sacramento Home Buyers Should Not Buy a Home
A good reason not to buy a home in Sacramento is a buyer might not be able to afford it. Looking at the situation purely from a financial point of view, it should not be that difficult for some Sacramento home buyers to understand why a seller would refuse to make a home “affordable” for them by discounting the sales price below market value. Especially an investor who looks at his investment the same way one might consider shares of stock: it’s impersonal, and the only thing that matters is whether the price has gone up or down.
Non-affordability is not an argument nor a negotiation tactic. If you’re standing by the entrance to a freeway with a sign that says Will Work for Food, it’s possible a passerby might offer you a job or a good-hearted driver might flip you a twenty, but asking for charity when you’re buying a home is not quite the same thing. Yet, that doesn’t stop buyers from requesting it. Further, a refusal does not mean the seller is a meanie and big ol’ grouch, either.
An agent asked my seller yesterday to “have mercy” for his buyers, because they are young, with a small family, struggling and pregnant. These stories have a time and a place, we encounter them every day, but do they pertain to housing, to Sacramento real estate? Are sellers heartless, cruel and without compassion if they don’t reduce a sales price so cash-strapped buyers can purchase a home that is outside the boundaries of their financial reach?
I wonder if buyer’s agents should push a product that people can’t afford to buy? Not every buyer needs to own a home. Not every buyer should own a home. Maybe, just maybe, the buyers should not buy a home. There is no shame in renting a home, and millions of people are tenants. If people did not want to rent a home, there would be little reason for investors to buy single-family homes or condos as a long-term hold investment.
Yes, I realize just about every Sacramento real estate agent you run into will say you should buy a home. But maybe you should not.
When Sacramento Home Buyers Cancel a Contract
Delivering bad news to a seller in Sacramento is every bit as horrible as shooting antibiotics down your cat’s throat. You know it’s gotta be done, and you’re the one who’s gotta do it, but it’s not pleasant. I don’t know a Sacramento real estate agent alive who wants to tell her seller a buyer has gone sideways and fallen off the edge of the cliff, but so many of them are not watching where they’re walking these days. They seem to be unsupervised.
La-dee-la-dee-la-dee-dah, oops, over the cliff. It’s almost like a video game. Not real.
I blame it partly on DocuSign. It’s so easy to sign a residential purchase contract these days, why, you can sign on your cellphone. Blip, blip, done. It’s easier than buying a latte-half-soy-pumpkin-caramel at Starbucks. With whipped cream. Except by the time you finish consuming that 800-calorie fat bomb, at least you feel satiated. When Sacramento home buyers sign a purchase contract, it’s much more forgettable.
Oh, did I buy a house this afternoon? Slaps forehead. How silly of me. No, sorry, I didn’t want to buy a house. I wanted tickets to the TBD fest. Clicked the wrong thing. Please cancel the contract.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when I find myself grilling buyer’s agents about how much time they have spent with their buyers, how well they know them. Agents tend to use the term “client” rather loosely. Some stranger calls, asks to meet at a home and, around 2:00 AM, after the bars close, that person decides to sign the RPA waiting patiently in DocuSign, is that person a client? Or, is that a person we’ll have to chase around for the next couple of weeks to get the cancellation signed because her intentions to buy a home were never there in the first place?
Perhaps buyer’s agents should discuss next steps and consequences, and help a buyer figure out if the buyer truly wants to purchase a home before presenting a buyer with click here.
What Happens If You’re Turned Down for a Mortgage?
When I reflect on my earlier years in real estate, way back to some of the first homes I ever bought in my life, it amazes me that I did not know if I would get turned down for a mortgage. That thought just never occurred to me, although in retrospect I don’t know why not. I suspect that my reasoning was I had a job, a steady income and I could afford to make the payments, even if it meant I would have to eat Ramen noodles.
That’s not the case in mortgage land anymore. Borrowers can’t just decide that they can afford to buy a house and go do it like charging that Jimmy Choo bag to your Nordstrom credit card. Nowadays, a borrower needs to prove that she can qualify for a mortgage, and she might get rejected. The qualifications levels are more stringent, ratios are tighter, rules stricter.
This means it makes a lot more sense to get a preapproval letter before one starts house hunting. Not only does it give a borrower peace of mind, but it means a person won’t dash out, find the perfect home, fall madly in love with it, and then be informed she can’t have it. It also gives the seller a sense of security that once she accepts the purchase offer, the buyer will be able to perform. Desire and ability are two different animals.
But a preapproval letter, unless it’s been through underwriting, is really more like a pre qualification letter. It’s just a general idea of what a person can do. It’s still no guarantee that a borrower won’t get turned down for a mortgage. As a top listing agent in Sacramento, I see many so-called preapproval letters instantly ignite in flames before my eyes just as we are getting ready to close. There are so many things that can go wrong in underwriting it can make your head spin.
A preapproval letter does not mean you won’t get turned down for a mortgage. It’s a good idea to work with a top-notch mortgage lender.
The Comparison Between Sacramento Real Estate and Pastries
Sacramento real estate is bit like pastries.
Selling Sacramento real estate is a little bit like selling pastries. Everybody always wants the cherry beignet or creme brûlée, and they walk right on by the original glazed creme doughnuts or cinnamon rolls. Sell out of the chocolate-sprinkled pastries, and people go wild and keep calling, wanting to know when you’ll get more chocolate sprinkles. Or, maybe it bothers me more than I let on that Doughbot has closed its doors over on 10th Street and W.
The thing is once a home goes into escrow, it seems everybody wants it even if for months nobody wanted it before. Bam, pending sale and buyer’s agents start calling to see if the seller won’t at least allow one more showing, puhlease. They want to know how the sale is moving. If we don’t have a release of contingencies on file, we don’t really know for certain how the sale is moving.
The truth is I can’t predict whether a buyer will close escrow on a Sacramento real estate transaction. I can call the loan officer to ask if the buyers have actually filled out a loan application and submitted tax returns, and that’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t assure anybody that the buyer will close. Buyers have a way of freaking out lately, maybe more so than usual. Sacramento real estate has been a bit squirrelly over the summer.
It’s almost like I want to ask the buyer’s agent, are you certain your buyer wants to buy a home in Sacramento? Because a signed purchase offer for that piece of Sacramento real estate is NOT that assurance. It should be, but it’s not. Further, I would like to shelter my seller from any disappointment these types of situations can generate. But we can’t protect them from buyers who will change their minds.
Their agents aren’t likely to ask if they are certain. Their agents are more likely to say sign here and here,?and thanks for the earnest money check. Not because they’re ruthless or whatever, it’s because they often wrongly assume that because a buyer signs a purchase offer that the buyer really wants to buy the house. So, I don’t know how solid an offer is and there is no way I can accurately or honestly tell a buyer’s agent if it’s worth pursuing a pending sale.
If the buyer doesn’t want the chocolate eclair but prefers the creme brûlée, then by all means, put a backup offer on the creme brûlée but that chocolate eclair, I tell you, is mighty tasty. I encourage you to call Elizabeth Weintraub for all of your Sacramento real estate needs.
Is Your MetroList Rapattoni Client Portal Broken?
Tech Support at Rapattoni report the Rapattoni client portal is broken and is not working correctly all over the country — not just in Sacramento. Listings vanish before our client’s eyes. That doesn’t make us feel any better to know we are not alone with a broken client portal. Not every real estate agent has a problem, either, with the client portal from Rapattoni; it’s sporadic. For example, this Sacramento real estate agent doesn’t have that problem. I set up client portals to test the issue and they worked for me, but one of my team members continually struggles. He’s a young, techie guy, too, just in case any readers are wondering about the ever-ubiquitous operator error.
We called MetroList, which didn’t seem to be aware of the problem until we talked with Rapattoni. The Support team at Rapattoni confirmed that client portals are not working for other real estate agents as well. It’s odd that it works for some and not all, but that seems to be the case. My team member was also able to show the Support employee at Rapattoni how to duplicate the issue of vanishing listings.
A broken client portal is very frustrating for our real estate clients. They don’t have the kind of patience that Rapattoni possesses. They want their client portals to work, and they want them to work today. There seems to be no definitive deadline as to when Rapattoni will fix the problem.
I can’t send clients to iHomefinder searches because those are broken now, too.
MetroList is a monopoly. We Sacramento real estate agents are forced to rely on and exclusively use MetroList. There is no other system we can use. It’s not like we can call up Apple and ask them to fix the Rapattoni problem. We can’t go to Google to complain. We’re pretty much stuck with it. And since it doesn’t seem to affect a large number of agents, our priority level is low.
But I’d still rather talk to MetroList than listen to a Sacramento home buyer rant and rave because he’s already bought a home and wants to know why my team members at Lyon Real Estate closed down his client portal access. Because, dude, you already bought a house, that’s why. You’re in escrow. Looking at homes to buy is over. Standard real estate practice 101. You want to screw around online, hang out on Zillow or Trulia and look at shit that’s not for sale. You’re not singled out.
And neither are we. We continue to wait week after week for Rapatonni to resolve the broken client portal issue. Until then, we will probably drive to your home to hand deliver listings if that’s what it takes. We go that extra mile. That’s just the kind of Sacramento real estate agents we are.
