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The Unique Difference an Experienced Sacramento Listing Agent Makes
These tips for choosing a Sacramento listing agent can make your life easier.
From many home sellers’ point of view, they really don’t know what a Sacramento listing agent does to sell a home because all they see is the peripheral stuff. When the home first goes on the market, they see the for sale sign in the yard, maybe open house activity on Sunday, strange business cards showing up on the kitchen counter, ripe for drawing mustaches on. After an offer is accepted, there is an escrow, disclosure paperwork, an appraiser, and some guy who doesn’t wear booties and tracks mud everywhere traipsing through tearing the house apart. Maybe a pest inspector who might cause you to run screaming into the yard with a baseball bat: hey, moron, stop poking holes in my house!
The sellers might even believe they are doing all of the work because they have to pack up the house and move. Their Sacramento listing agent is not in the dining room helping them to roll crystal stemware in bubble wrap. They don’t see what is really happening, but if their transaction closes smoothly, it’s most likely due to the efforts of their listing agent.
My clients generally know exactly what I do as their listing agent because I tell them as we go along. I try to keep them informed of my activities. There are some Sacramento listing agents, for example, who won’t tell a seller that an offer is about arrive for fear that the seller will build expectations and be disappointed if the buyer later changes her mind. I try to put myself in the sellers’ shoes, and I would want to know this information. It doesn’t mean I email a seller with the good news that an offer is in the works, but I let them know it’s a possibility and why it might not happen.
My sellers know I’m on their side and say it the way it is. Which is why I actually told a seller yesterday that I am sorry to see their home sell. OK, I was half kidding. They laughed because they understood. I’ve been working on it for a long time and have become intimately familiar with the property, am used to checking on the stats daily in my MLS reports, drumming up feedback from buyer’s agents’ showings, taking photos out of order to tweak and rearranging the order, lining up open houses, moving up the ranking on other websites by publishing more data, blogging about the home and its features, checking the comparable sales and new listings every week and working other angles to sell the home, relentlessly searching for untapped strategies.
Now the home has left my active inventory and moved into pending status. I’ve already anticipated all the ways things can go wrong in underwriting, the possible challenges of inspections and handled them in advance. Smoothed out almost every possible wrinkle because that’s what 40 years of real estate experience from this Sacramento listing agent buys my clients. I take the hell out of the transaction for them. Of course, they don’t realize this when they choose me to be their Sacramento listing agent, and they might never know what hell could happen because it generally doesn’t.
My continual goal is to find a way to convey this to a seller who is on the fence about whom to choose as a Sacramento listing agent. I am fiercely dedicated 100% to my clients. It shows in the work I do and the delighted reviews I receive. There is a difference among Realtors.
How Experience Can Trump a Neighborhood Specialist When Selling Homes in Cameron Park
A photo collage of multiple homes you may find in Cameron Park, CA. © big stock photo
Repetition in real estate leads to experience and experience leads to smooth transactions, whether I’m selling homes in Sacramento or 30 minutes away in Cameron Park in El Dorado County. Although, I have been in the real estate business for more than 40 years and have no idea, really, how many homes I have actually sold, I stopped to take a look in MLS this morning at my sales since 2010. Just over the last 5 years. Yikes. More than 500 homes, and almost 400 of them were my listings.
That’s invaluable experience for a seller to obtain. That’s also a lot of homes to price correctly.
When I list a home, I visually inspect and walk through the home, typically with the seller at my side but not always. Sometimes sellers live out of state, so I might take along my iPad and FaceTime with them. I pay attention to detail, to what a buyer might object to or fall in love with. I look for defects. You’d be amazed at how complacent people can become, and after they live with a problem for a while, it fades into the background so they don’t even notice it anymore.
I spotted a repair situation when I listed a home in Cameron Park and discussed ways to fix it. Even gave the seller a list of contractors she could contact. We would still need to disclose the repair but at least it wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Then we talked about price.
Now, at first the seller was probably a little bit skeptical. As a top producer Realtor, I don’t sell a lot of homes in El Dorado County, much less record numbers of homes in Cameron Park, and I am not a Cameron Park specialist. Yet, that was not a drawback for the seller because when push comes to shove, when an agent has sold as many listings as I have, that experience counts more than having “neighborhood specialist” experience. Agents call themselves a neighborhood specialist if they’ve sold 2 homes.
Whom would a seller rather hire?
The question at the time of listing was whether to list over a certain price point or under it. Given market movement, I predicted we would receive multiple offers if we priced at the $X99,000, which was top of market but under the next hundred thousand mark. Sure enough, we picked up another 4% through a multiple offer situation and that meant an AS IS sale, too, no additional costs to the seller nor request for repairs after the home inspection. A smooth sailing closing. The seller was moving out of state and did not need more pressure.
Not to mention, it is highly doubtful a “discount” agent would have produced the same results. Hire experience. It pays in ways you can’t begin to imagine.
The Value of an Experienced Sacramento Real Estate Agent
Do you ever wonder about the experience levels of some of the professionals you pay? Not to knock medical assistants or dental hygienists, but don’t those TV ads trying to lure deadbeats educate aspiring students bother you somewhat? They make me want to ask my doctor’s assistant where she went to school and what she did before she became a medical assistant. Most of us probably want to believe our doctor’s assistant went to college, earned a degree, on top of fulfilling a calling to the medical profession, a passion to help people, and is dedicated to medicine. I don’t know if you get that with a 6-month course and education financing through HSBC.
Yet many people would never in a million years ask a Sacramento real estate agent how long she has been in the business. They are about to spend or receive the most money they will probably ever see in one lump sum in their lives. Do they check out the real estate agent they are about to hire?
Not that length in the business is a sole determining factor because a person can be a real estate agent for many years and do no business at all. Holding a real estate license doesn’t make a person a real estate agent. Renewing said real estate license doesn’t make a person a real estate agent. I’m not a big fan of the alphabet letters either. The certified-whatever designations. That’s probably because many years ago I was involved in the seminar business, and I know that seminar companies are in the business of selling seminars. In other words, an agent can pay for a real estate designation. It doesn’t mean the agent learned anything. It also doesn’t mean the company that awarded the designation taught an agent anything.
Real estate agents learn on the job. End of story. They learn by selling homes in Sacramento, for example. The more homes a person sells, the better that real estate agent becomes — or you would hope. An experienced real estate agent is a different kind of real estate agent.
Every real estate transaction is different. That’s what makes being a Sacramento real estate agent exciting. It’s what motivates me to turn on my computer and go to work every single day. It’s always something new. A new challenge, new people, new events. And when you throw a short sale into the mix: an opportunity to practice patience, improve tolerance and to solve difficult problems.
Everybody is welcome to hire a novice, but why? Novices will cry and moan and say everybody has to learn somewhere. But do you want them practicing on you? You have a choice when you hire a real estate agent. We’re not all the same. I will close over $30 million in sales this year. I sell more than 100 homes a year — so I must be doing many things right. I believe experience is important. If it matters to you, let’s get together. You can read client reviews of Elizabeth Weintraub and decide for yourself. I have pages of recommendations. What you see is what you get.
