Email Elizabethfind a sacramento realtor
Do You Know Why You are Calling This Sacramento REALTOR?
Elizabeth Weintraub, Sacramento REALTOR, at antique phone booth in Dunsmuir, California
When a Sacramento REALTOR answers her phone all day long, she tends to engage with a wide assortment of callers. It doesn’t seem to work the other way around because most other people do not answer a phone call. It’s far too inconvenient to talk on the phone for many people. Texting or emailing is preferred today. People don’t want to hear the sound of each other’s voices, I suspect. It’s an intrusion. Therefore, if I want to ensure that I most likely will NOT engage in a conversation, all I have to do is tap my phone and call somebody. That phone call will go to voice mail where I can chat to my heart’s content and leave a message that will get ignored.
I get communication coming at me from all angles every single day. Text messages that show up on my computer if I’m at my home office, and simultaneous text messages appear on my cell. Ditto for emails, although the push generally comes through my computer, and they come from 3 accounts, plus there is a fourth account I check a couple of times a day. And there is always the ringing phone of opportunity. In my drawer is the graveyard of used Bluetooth devices, at least a half dozen. I am using a new Plantronics device that engages once I insert the piece into my ear, which is very handy. Plus, if I’m in the midst of a manicure, it offers hands-free answering.
Because I answer my phone, it’s the luck of the draw what I get. Often lately it’s other real estate agents asking if some random listing belongs to me. They can retrieve this information from MLS but they don’t bother. The main reason they are calling is because their buyers found a property online and spotted my name and phone number or the buyer ended up on my website. It’s common for agents to look up a property address on their own cellphones and end up on my website as well. If they belong to the 90% of the agent population who don’t sell very many homes, they are probably unfamiliar with how mobile websites work and simply do not understand why the listing does not belong to me. I continue to insist the listings are not mine but they don’t grasp the notion. It can progress to the point where I have to look up the address in MLS and give these agents the listing agent’s contact information just to get rid of them.
Still, it’s good news that I enjoy a big presence online. It means that the Weintraub listings I do have receive excellent exposure, and they are posted everywhere. You can’t tool around online and not find homes for sale listed by this Sacramento REALTOR.
I get my share of spam calls, especially from Homes dot com and I continue to file reports at the Do Not Call Registry. I ask Homes dot com not to call me, and I tell them I am on the DNC list but they call anyway. Blocking callers doesn’t always work. They are relentless. You know who else is relentless? My Elizabeth Weintraub Team members. They try to call and email and text every single person who contacts us to buy a home, and they follow up like no tomorrow. Which is why we don’t need the new Zillow service, recently offered to certain top real estate agents for free (at the moment, it’s sorta beta; if it works out they’ll probably charge for it).
A real estate agent called yesterday to ask if she could book my services to stage a home. This was a strange and puzzling call. Well, she had read an article I had written for About.com about Home Staging and decided, for some odd reason, that I was a home stager. I guess she missed the print at the bottom identifying me as a broker-associate in Sacramento at Lyon Real Estate. I shared the news that I am a Sacramento REALTOR and asked if she knew what that meant. Hey, you never know where people register on the bell curve.
I also referred the caller to a home stager in Sacramento, but the agent said she had already tried that company and those home stagers were booked for this week. Well, yes, you have to give home stagers some notice. It’s called planning your listing. The good home stagers are always booked. Still, these types of calls don’t stop me from answering my phone. Ya gotta maintain a positive outlook about it and keep that sense of humor.
Lockboxes, Taxes, Lawyers, and Sacramento Realtors at Ella Dining
Efficiency in real estate means spending the limited amount of time available in any given day in a productive manner, with the goal in mind that those efforts will benefit all of those involved. I’m just the kind of Sacramento Realtor who tries to be as efficient as possible. It could mean I spend 3 hours at a lunch at Ella Dining downtown catching up with another Realtor, an old friend and, when she is late, texting her explicit directions about where to meet the Valet and which one-way street to use as an approach.
This is one of the reasons I love going to Ella Dining for lunch. Yeah, drawback, it is downtown Sacramento, land of the one-way streets with the Capitol smack dab in the middle cutting off access to many east-west streets, but I don’t rely on Siri to get me there because, believe it or not, Siri doesn’t know where to find Valet. Apart from the food, which is spectacular, and the ambiance, which is captivating, and the service, which is unprecedented, I don’t have to figure out where to park, nor spend time driving in circles searching for a darn parking spot. I can run late, zoom up to Valet, hand over the keys and be done with it.
A 3-hour lunch gives the Valet plenty of time to make copies of all of my house keys, run over to my house and burglarize it, snatch all of the quarters from my parking meter tray, and be back in time to deliver the vehicle after dessert. I don’t care; life is short and then you die. Enjoy the time you have.
After driving to Vineyard to pick up a lockbox, I pulled up yesterday with one minute to spare to meet my reservation time at Ella Dining. My Vineyard clients seemed very happy after closing and said they received the absolute highest price possible for their home. Their escrow was smooth without hiccups. They had selected me in the first place among a plethora of Sacramento Realtors and they also are fans of my articles on About.com. There are no better sellers to work with in the world than sellers who intentionally weed through the inventory of agents in Sacramento and carefully and thoughtfully choose a listing agent. Many of those types of sellers are lawyers, too, and I love them to pieces, love working with lawyers. My favorite kind of client is a lawyer.
Since I was out in Vineyard to pick up a lockbox, it seemed best to use that time of travel to stop by my CPA’s home office, which is also in Vineyard, and deliver our tax folder in person. It beats photocopying all of the documents, finding a large envelope, weighing the contents, calculating postage and taking it to the post office. My CPA is one big joker. When he’s not tweaking digits, he’s joking around. His answer to almost every question is a one-liner, bada bing. I couldn’t help but wonder how my clients would view me if I acted like that. Good thing I don’t.
How to Find a Sacramento REALTOR on the Internet
How to Find the Best Sacramento Realtor
The internet has finally become ubiquitous. When you think about it, it only took about 25 years, — which to me, of course, seems like yesterday because at my age I have little concept of the passing of time. All the signs are there. First, you had Al Gore raising a ruckus, followed by people like my dentist who, same age as me, hauls in a clerical worker to “pull up the Google” and search for an image to find types of teeth. Then there is About.com, which recently notified all of its Experts, including this Home Buying and Selling Expert, of a corporate decision to eliminate our email addresses, because they are unnecessary.
Just about everybody has an online presence today who needs it in one form or another. Although, there are people who avoid social media on purpose because it’s a time suck and wouldn’t dream of maintaining a website or blog for any reason. For example, I use Facebook when I’m bored, which isn’t very often, but I don’t devalue those who are addicted. Everybody has their own thing. In my spare time, I like to blog and write articles. Facebook, not so much.
When I think back to my first online experience, in 1991, stuff is absolutely more colorful and fast as lightning today, but it’s still just a transfer of information. Now we have instant access to anything we want to know. We don’t have to look it up in an encyclopedia when we have Siri and Google, just like we don’t have to stop at a pay phone to make a call. Why, you can be out to dinner with your partner and notice an unusual object or hear a song or simply think of an obscure question, and bam, you can use your phone to get an answer. Immediately. Because you can’t wait until after dinner.
If the real estate curious want to find a Sacramento REALTOR like me online, all they have to do is search on Google. In fact, many searches for Elizabeth Weintraub point to my website when people just type my name into a Google search bar. Even if they misspell my name, it will still direct them to me and provide a way to contact this agent, either by phone or email. So I don’t really have to publish an actual email address anywhere. Not on About.com, not on my website, and not in my blog. There is always an envelope to click that will send me an email.
The good thing is having no email at About.com now means my spam will be dramatically cut. With the internet, one almost doesn’t need an email. Landlines are vanishing and almost everybody has a cell to accept text. I don’t care how my clients find me, just as long as the search to find a Sacramento REALTOR ends on my website so I can showcase my successful 40 years of expertise in real estate.
