About Being a Sacramento REALTOR First

This Sacramento Realtor receives a lot of unsolicited mail at the office.

Because I write a daily Sacramento real estate blog, which often contains consumer awareness information, exposes criminal wrong doings, real estate scams and the slippery slope of masked intentions behind the ways some companies try to take advantage of Realtors, I seem to have built a fan base across the country as a compassionate Sacramento REALTOR who leads a double life as a consumer advocate. This means people send unsolicited letters and packages through the U.S. mail to my office, sometimes anonymously, like I’m going to take issue with other evil doings and write about it.

First and foremost, my job in Sacramento is that of a Sacramento REALTOR. I list homes and sell those homes, and my Elizabeth Weintraub team member agents show homes. We hold open houses. We network with other California agents, employ extensive marketing, hire at our expense professional photographers, consistently create new techniques to sell Sacramento real estate and, well, the list goes on and on. The point is I am a Sacramento REALTOR first. A writer second. And, although I am paid to write content about homebuying for About.com, that is not my primary occupation and my writing is not pro bono work.

Some of the stuff I receive in the mail is interesting but that’s about as far as it goes. To write about any of it, I would need to be fair, to call the offender to report that side of the situation and, frankly, I’m not about to do it. So please stop mailing me stuff, well, unless it’s Kistler chardonnay. I will accept any free contributions of Kistler Vineyards chardonnay to our wine collection that anybody would like to send for nothing in return.

Besides, I have enough of my own crazy stuff to discuss. Like next month I plan to write about a wild scheme I discovered going on right here in my own back yard, perpetrated by one of those individual brokerages; like if I’m gonna find a problem with an agent, that might be the place to look, at the guys who are unsupervised, versus the larger brokerages, which routinely update agents about real estate law and procedures. If you think I am unfairly pointing to the one or two-person operations as problematic, I can tell you I used to work in those ranks, so I know first hand. Further, full disclosure, not every single mom-and-pop shop is that way.

When I started in real estate in the 1970s — yes, that’s not a typo — I worked for almost 9 years at my own company, which I immediately bought after obtaining my own broker’s license from the broker, an electrician by trade, IIRC. I erroneously believed that holding a real estate broker’s license meant I could do just about anything my mind could conceive. That real estate practice, looking back, often bordered on practicing law. I’m lucky I emerged a better agent from that period, to say nothing of the fashion, egads, those shoulder pads and hairstyles . . .