Farm to Fork in Sacramento Real Estate

Flexibility is the name of the game in today’s Sacramento real estate, the farm to fork capital in California. If you’ve absolutely got to net a bazillion dollars for your home in order to sell it, this might not be the time for a home seller in Sacramento to be on the market. Unless you don’t care how long your home sits on the market and, in that case, the buyers will — they tend to avoid looking at homes with long days on market. Those homes hold appeal like stale bread.

Sellers don’t write the rules anymore because it’s a more balanced real estate market in Sacramento. The faster a seller catches on to market swings, the faster her home will sell. The low hanging fruit easily falls first but the rest must be yanked off the stems. Here’s a tip: don’t study stats on Sacramento real estate market movement from last spring or this summer or even early fall. Look at what the market is doing right now, this very minute, and you’ll find your answers to market movement. Then, put a fork in it.

Every so often, we run across a seller who says he needs to sell his home at list price. We might receive an offer from a buyer who wants to pay a little bit less, which is not unusual in the market today. This same buyer might also demand a big closing cost credit on top of a price reduction from market.

This situation is a bit like oil and water. You can shake it up, but let it rest a few days in escrow and it separates again.

Throw into the mix a seller who declares that the net profit must be X, and that’s a salad going nowhere. Some sellers think a solution is to reduce the agents’ commissions, but that is not a reasonable expectation, either. You don’t ask an agent to provide superior service, to bring a buyer to dinner, and then kick him in the gut when he performs.

Real estate agents are just the waiters. We bring you the food, we pour your wine, we pick up your fork when you drop it on the floor. You should not refuse to tip us because your steak was too well done.