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Should a Listing Have a Pending Sale Sign?
Should a listing have a pending sale sign in the yard? It depends. We have a Sacramento listing that recently had five offers. We are pending sale and have two back up offers. One of these two buyers signed a back up addendum and a multiple counter offer form. This buyer is ready to go into a sales contract if the first offer fails for any reason. In this case, the seller wants a pending sale sign in the front yard as soon as possible. The home sold in 5 days, so sellers are thrilled and want the neighbors to know how fast it sold.
So in contrast, if we did not have multiple offers, the answer to, should a listing have a pending sale sign in the front yard, is no. We get calls daily from people driving by our listings. If a pending sale sign were in the yard, they would never call us as inquiring minds want to know. In essence, a pending sale sign stops the phone from ringing.
A friend of mine, Realtor Kim Pacini-Hauch, had a large property for sale on the river. A gentleman had flown into town for business. He was driving out along the river on the Garden Highway one sunny afternoon. He saw her for sale sign and called her. She drove out immediately to show it to him as he was flying out at 8:00 PM. She wrote a contract on the house and sold it on the spot. It was $3,725,000. He told her he was not looking online had just been driving an area he thought was beautiful. Without a for sale sign, or if the property had a pending sale sign, he would not have called either way.
The moral of the story is if pending sale sign were posted in the yard, he would not have called Kim. A back up offer is always warranted. If the property had been a pending sale, she would have shown it. As we say in Sacramento Real Estate, ” it is never over until it is over,” so sellers should always take a back up offer.
If you would like to have a pending sale sign placed in your yard, call us today Weintraub & Wallace at RE/MAX Gold, 916-233-6759.
— JaCi Wallace
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!!
Mortgage Brokers Play Dialing for Dollars With Sacramento Agents
People often stutter all over the place when I answer my phone. They freely admit that I have freaked them because I, a Sacramento real estate agent, answer my phone. This is odd to them. Maybe they were hoping and praying that they’d reach voice mail when calling Sacramento agents, I dunno. Callers often begin the conversation by apologizing and stumbling over their words after they realize that my greeting, “Hi, this is Elizabeth,” means I am not a robot or a recording. Nope, hey, this is a real, live human they are talking to, and I’d like to know what I can do for them.
Can’t say there aren’t times when I wish I had not answered my phone. Lately, lots of mortgage brokers have been calling, asking if I would like to refer business to them. They call me because they know I am a top producer among other Sacramento agents. But that’s about as far as the thought process takes them. If they were to think just a few steps ahead, they would figure out that a top producer is a top producer because she has an established network base supporting her. That network includes a favorite mortgage broker or two.
Why would I need more services when I’m perfectly happy with what I’ve got? And if I wasn’t satisfied, would I choose some yo-yo I don’t know who called me out of the blue? Is that how a top producer in Sacramento real estate stays a top producer, grabbing a support system at random? The better place to find business is among brand new agents. But they don’t think about any of that.
A mortgage broker called yesterday as I was driving down Business 80 and trying to stay out of the way of freeway lunatics who go a million miles an hour where the freeway splits to get on Highway 99. They are in such a rush to get out to Elk Grove that they pose potential risks to the rest of us, who are trying to cut over to Highway 50 to go to Land Park or Midtown. Don’t even get me started on trying to merge to get off on 16th Street or 10th Street, which is like taking your life literally in your hands as those very hands are placed on the steering wheel, without enough time, as any good Catholic can attest, to temporarily lift even one hand to perform the Sign of the Cross before merging from Highway 50.
This mortgage broker was driving by my listing sign in Antelope, and that was her excuse or reason for calling. I informed her it was pending. We have an accepted offer. Then, she decided to argue and tell me there was no pending sign on it; therefore, it must be for sale. Many, many Sacramento agents do not use pending signs. We have the Internet. That’s where people go for information and, real estate professionals, especially, don’t get their information from property signs. I assured her the home was definitely pending.
Then I asked if she was new to the business, because she sounded like she could be a new mortgage broker. Nope, she’s been in the business, she claimed, for 14 years. She carried on with her questions, asking when I would be holding an open house, because: “like I said, I was driving by the listing in Antelope,” and this is when it suddenly became evident that what was clearly irritating her now was this asshole agent — whose silent car ride she had interrupted by her urgent need to talk about this Antelope listing — was not listening to her. How dare I? After all, she called me.
But interrupt her, I did. There will be no open house because the listing is PENDING. I did not add: like I said.
We never got to the part where she asked me to refer clients to her. Thank, goodness. Because this Sacramento agent suddenly had to say goodbye.
