Losing the Attitude Helps to Keep it Real in Sacramento Real Estate

Ya gotta lose the attitude to keep it real in Sacramento real estate.

A home seller from Lincoln mentioned yesterday that he has sold a handful of homes over the past couple of years and bought a home about a year ago, and he has never had such a smooth and easy transaction as he did selling a short sale through me. I called to congratulate him on closing his short sale. I sold the home almost immediately, it comped by the bank at the sales price, and we received a very fast approval, within about 10 days. He sounded almost astonished that he could say that his short sale was so much smoother than compared to a regular transaction. I guess you could say he was very pleased with my performance as his short sale agent.

I try to let buyer’s agents know when they call me that I am very experienced with Sacramento short sales, because that fact will tend to put their minds at ease and calm any fears their buyers might have about buying a short sale. Because after all, why would you buy a short sale if you could buy a home that was NOT a short sale — as a regular home would close much sooner. And there aren’t as many short sales nowadays as there were a few years ago. People need reassurance, and I get that.

The words I never utter, under any circumstances, are: don’t you know who I am? Because that sounds so pretentious, self-absorbed and sorta cocky. That’s something that Reese Witherspoon would say and did, evidently, when pulled over by the cops for speeding. That’s something a mortgage lender asked the other day when he whipped off an email: Do you know who the clients are? Doesn’t he? I guess it’s not Reese Witherspoon. I offered to let my transaction coordinator look it up for him. Even though his boss earlier that day had admitted they were no longer the mortgage brokers on that particular transaction. Criminy, guys, let it go. Try losing the attitude.

I say to people I have a dubious honor — because I don’t really know if it’s an honor, it wasn’t something I set out to achieve — but when I looked at the numbers, they were staring me in the face. The numbers from Trendgraphics reflect that I have sold more total short sales in a 7-county area than any other Realtor in Sacramento, a record that has continued to grow since 2006. That’s in addition to my regular real estate business in Sacramento.

Still, it was nice to hear from my home seller in Lincoln that I had exceeded his expectations. It doesn’t matter to me who my clients are — short sales or million-dollar owners — I treat each and every one of their files as though it is the one project I’m working on. It’s just the way I’m wired.