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Selling One of East Sacramento Homes for Sale 95819
There are times in a real estate transaction that we look back and try to figure out what we could have done to make the sale move more smoothly, and such is the case with selling one of East Sacramento homes for sale 95819. The home was perfect in every way except it was a bit “location challenged,” which some homes in East Sac can be. Doesn’t mean a home in a not-so-exciting location won’t sell if the price is right and the timing is right. They all will eventually sell.
But it does mean that we aren’t always as selective as we can be when it come to choosing a buyer. You can sort of get the luck of the draw. Of course, in retrospect, a more experienced mortgage lender would have spotted the difficulty facing this particular buyer immediately and rectified it before going into escrow. It’s not that the buyer wasn’t qualified, it was a small problem of being on title to another property that wasn’t his –which amounts to a huge problem with the file is kicked out of underwriting, where it had no place being in the first place until the situation was resolved.
It took us almost 3 months to close this home in East Sacramento 95819. During that time, we left the home on the market as a “pending, bring back up-offer,” yet no other offers surfaced. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try for the sellers’ sake.
This situation involved the buyer’s relative refinancing the home the buyer was on title to. He couldn’t qualify first go-around, which is why the buyer initially was on the title to that home because the strength of his credit helped the relative to qualify. I personally had my doubts the relative would qualify now. By some miracle, though, he did. So we waited 30 days to find out the buyer could not qualify to buy this home due to being on title to another home. Then we waited another 30 days for the buyer’s relative to refinance.
At last, we could finally focus on this particular escrow. To compensate the sellers for waiting, the best we could do was ask for the earnest money deposit to be released as a non-refundable deposit. At least the sellers would have the deposit in their own bank account, was my reasoning, in the event we had to cancel the transaction.
I realize there are East Sacramento agents who think all is well that ends well, but this was a nail-biter transaction to the very end. I was informed that we could not record on the day we had planned because for some reason the buyer had obtained a pest report that included the detached garage. I quickly drew an addendum that removed the garage from the pest. I called in a favor to a pest inspector I personally know at that pest company and asked for a revised pest report for just the house and a completion. Had it in my hot little paws within an hour. And that’s how we managed to close and just under the wire.
I am taking the seller out for a bourbon lunch next week at Ella. We both earned it. The motto of this story is a buyer is only as good as the mortgage lender who qualifies the borrower.
East Sacramento Home and Josh Amolsch on FOX 40 News
And to think that some agents pooh-pooh open houses in Sacramento, yet my open house at an East Sacramento home got a little bit more exposure than expected. The FOX 40 news reporter Doug Johnson asked me yesterday what time we hold open houses in Sacramento. It sorta depends. I held open four of my listings yesterday, and the customary time for me is typically 2 to 4 PM. But sometimes we’ll throw in an extra hour and do a time slot of 1 to 4 PM, especially during Lyon Real Estate’s Extravaganza Open House weekend, which is company-wide once a month and yesterday.
Too late, the reporter said. He needed footage for the 4 PM broadcast and into the night. Oh, wait, we have an early open house at the affordable remodeled home in East Sacramento at 1732 51st Street. That home is $330,000, and it was open from 11 AM to 1 PM. My team member Josh Amolsch was scheduled to host that open house. I quickly called Josh.
Yeah, he got 20 minutes’ notice. But that’s how it goes in this business. I often get interviewed by the media due to my reputation and exposure in Sacramento. Sound bites, Josh, think about sound bites. We discussed a few things he could say. Short, sweet, informational, pithy, that’s what news reporters want. I figured they were probably piggybacking off the Sacramento Bee’s article yesterday on the front page about how first-time home buyers are getting squeezed out of the marketplace.
It’s true, if you’re thinking about buying a home in Sacramento, you better hurry up. Once interest rates start to rise, it will be much more difficult to find an affordable home due to our higher prices achieved during recovery.
Very important, try to stand near our For Sale sign in the yard, I suggested to Josh. If people are interested in buying that home in East Sacramento, we need to make sure they know how to get in touch with us. Well, they weren’t filming near the sign but Josh did ask them to capture the sign with their cameras, and sure enough, that For Sale sign with the phone numbers for Elizabeth Weintraub and Josh Amolsch in front of the East Sacramento home is what starts off the video: Owning a Home is Becoming More Difficult in Sacramento.
We also captured a few interested home buyers for that East Sacramento home. Gosh, I hope one of them makes an offer today!!
CITI Almost Thwarts Short Sale of East Sacramento Home
Do you know how hard it is to keep up a seller’s spirits in an East Sacramento short sale? I try very hard to make sure the first buyer we go into escrow with is the buyer we will close escrow with the first time around. I never want to say to a seller: “Look, we’ve got approval twice already, I am confident that buyer #3 will close this time.” Because sellers get exhausted when short sales drag on and on due to buyer cancellations. Not every seller has the wherewithal to hang in there. Some just give up. Throw in the towel. Walk away.
That’s why it’s important to close escrow with the first and only home buyer. It’s how we closed escrow yesterday on another East Sacramento home. This was a buyer who really fell in love with the home. Almost every agent says her buyer loves the home when the offer is presented, but buyers and agents tend to change their tune as the short sale progresses. The engagement process is often all fun and sparkly but some lose enthusiasm along the way. Not this buyer. She was a real trooper. She waited 6 months for this short sale to close. Homes in East Sacramento are worth the wait.
First, the bank decided it wanted a higher sales price. It’s the bank’s prerogative. Often when a home doesn’t move for whatever reason and we end up reducing the price, the banks put the price back where it was in the first place or close enough to it. That’s why it’s extremely important not to price an East Sacramento home too high when you’re deciding on a short sale price. But you don’t want to be too low because you might attract a buyer who can’t afford to increase her price if the bank demands it. It’s like Goldilocks: for homes in East Sacramento you want to be priced just right.
Then, when the buyer’s appraiser did her appraisal, she did not read the purchase contract. The buyer’s agent gave her a copy of the purchase contract and the price increase, but the appraiser was either too busy or she simply ignored the information. Pricing homes in East Sacramento is an art. Not every appraiser is up to snuff. Her appraisal came in at the list price and not the appraised price. It was $15,000 too low. This held up the closing while we scrambled to assemble comparable sales and push the buyer’s lender to reassess.
The second lender, Citimortgage, now One Main Financial, demanded an excessive amount to settle. Wells Fargo met most of the demand except for the last $1,200. It always seems to come down to $500 or $1,000 when we come to a standstill at the OK Corral. You gotta wonder what is wrong with these corporations that they would let a deal blow up over a few dollars, but they do and they will. I guess if you looked at $1,000 x 10,000 deals, that’s $10 million. But the buyer agreed to pay it out-of-pocket. Bless her sweet little heart.
Citimortgage had refused to extend this escrow. Because the appraisal review delayed the closing, we were past our approval letter date. By all accounts, the short sale had expired. We begged and pleaded but CITI denied our requests. They’d only given us 2 weeks in the first place, which is virtually impossible unless the buyer had moved forward on the loan as I had suggested and she, thank goodness, had complied. In the end CITI relented and gave us an extra 24 hours, which we managed to meet.
I like to examine my closings afterward to figure out what this Sacramento short sale agent can do to improve future closings. After 35-some years in the business, I still try to learn. Nothing is ever perfect. In this East Sacramento short sale, if I had changed the listed price in MLS, I could have prevented a clueless appraiser from making a mistake. I am reluctant to change a list price in the middle of an escrow just in case it falls out, but now that we have a seller’s market in Sacramento, there is really very little risk to increasing the sales price during escrow. And it just might avoid a future problem when the next appraiser screws up. It’s smart to be one step ahead at all times. That’s what I strive for.
