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Affordable Home for Sale in The Pocket of Sacramento
6985 Waterview Way in the Pocket is for sale at $349,000.
If you’re looking for an affordable home for sale in The Pocket on a quiet street with little through traffic, this Sacramento Realtor has an amazing gem for you. First and foremost, it is priced at $349,000, which is a price you can’t really beat for a home of this caliber, size and location. It’s not a misprint. But there is a reason for the price, and the reason is the home could use new flooring and paint.
Even though I stated exactly that in the marketing comments, I still received a few calls yesterday from agents asking why we didn’t disclose it was a cosmetic fixer. I don’t know what to say without sounding snarky about it. I mean, how hard is it to read: home needs flooring, paint and updates? I know my photography can make any home look beautiful, but I thought the photos were fairly straight-forward.
Living room features a fireplace and vaults with beams.
It’s a buyer’s point of view, btw, that says the home needs updates. From the seller’s point of view the home is fine and functional just the way it is, thank you very much, and I can see that point of view. Unfortunately, some of today’s buyers simply demand the granite counters and the new cabinets that all the flipper investors install. But one could pay over $400,000 for a home like that in this neighborhood.
This is a perfectly lovely home that has been neglected and could use attention. Flooring is not terribly expensive, and paint is certainly affordable. You love hardwood floors? Hey, here is your chance to put them in. Can’t afford hardwood? The new laminates are incredibly realistic and affordable. A 203K FHA loan could help with repair costs for a buyer, so don’t think you have to pay out of pocket. You can finance the future repairs into your existing mortgage today.
Call Dan Tharp at Guild Mortgage: 916.257.1470, and he’ll tell you all about the benefits of an FHA 203K.
This new listing has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, is 1,670 square feet per the assessor, a single-story ranch built in 1976. The seller might very well be the original owner. You’ll love the open floor plan, the kitchen overlooks the dining area and family room. The family room features a vaulted ceiling with a scattering of real wood beams.
Call your Sacramento Realtor, Elizabeth Weintraub, at 916.233.6759 for a private showing today. 6985 Waterview Way, Sacramento, CA 95831. Listed exclusively by Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate at $349,000.
How to Find Listings in Sacramento
The days of posting paper listings in Sacramento are pretty much over.
It’s a good thing that I enjoy talking with people because I have a lot of buyers calling asking where they can find listings in Sacramento. They’ve been looking online at various websites, many which contain conflicting data on homes for sale, and they often think I am the listing agent. Sometimes I am the listing agent. I list a lot of homes in Sacramento. I’m a top producer. But more often than not they are finding the listing elsewhere, spot a name on that website they recognize, like Elizabeth Weintraub Sacramento Realtor, and they call me. Which is muy bien.
There are homes in East Sacramento that I seem to know more about than I probably should by now. Lots of calls on those listings. And another recently that has been on the market near Natomas for something like 672 days. It was first listed by an agent who has it listed now, but there was another agent in the middle who had it listed for a while. When the listing was withdrawn by the first (now present) agent, there must have been some sort of spiff because the listing agent left a photo of the chicken coup in MLS as the main photo and stripped out the others. Not only that, but the marketing remarks, an MLS violation, noted the seller had canceled the listing and did not wish to be resolisted [sic] to relist.
If I have enough time to talk with callers about their home buying needs, I will try to assist but some buyers don’t really want any help. They just want to call listing agents about listings, thinking the listing agent will force the seller to sell the home for less, which really doesn’t happen. That’s basically a myth. They also think they can find every listing in Sacramento and don’t realize they can’t. They will snort, “We’ve bought and sold homes before,” as though that means they thoroughly understand real estate in their small corner of the world, this complicated industry that I’ve been part of for more than 40 years.
The Best Place to Find Listings in Sacramento
Without a direct paid subscription to MLS or access through an agent who will set up a portal for them, buyers are stuck scratching the dirt for listings. Like a hungry chicken. Pollo hambre. It’s a lot of work to call agent after agent and ask about listings when the listings are not the agent’s listings, and the buyers don’t want to work with a buyer’s agent. They could simplify their lives, and make it so much easier on themselves to work with a buyer’s agent, but they seem hellbent on finding their own listings in Sacramento, which means they will miss some of the best homes available.
By the time they discover an outdated listing on a third-party website, that home might be sold. That’s how fast homes are selling in Sacramento this spring. Buyers should do themselves a favor and call a buyer’s agent to get listings matching specific criteria directly from MLS through a Sacramento Realtor. Or, they can continue to beat heads into the ground. Which is fine with us because it’s less competition for our own home buyers, whom we treat like solid gold.
How Many Listings Should a Sacramento Realtor Carry?
The number of listings might have little bearing on a Sacramento Realtor’s ability to service.
A question that really has no bearing on reality but I get asked it often enough all the same is: Elizabeth, how many listings do you have? For starters, I suspect people want to use the answer as a quantifier. If you have one or two listings, you look like a loser in some people’s eyes. If you have 200 listings, you could look like a person who doesn’t have time to brush her teeth much less pay attention to her clients, and that assumption could be way off base, too.
What makes a difference, though, is in what position are those Sacramento listings? By that I mean are they pending, pending short lender approval (which is different than a pending sale), active contingent, pending bring back-up, active release clause, an active short sale or simply an active listing? I generally carry about 25 listings at any given time, but the active listings, the homes that take up most of my time, might only range from 3 to 5. I typically sell my active listings pretty quickly because I do things right. The short sale listings require a lot more time on the market because today’s buyers tend to pass those by.
A few years back, like 2010 or 2011, I carried on average about 75 listings in various states of status. Talk about stress. I am conscientious, though. When I worked on that amount of inventory, I was often out of bed by 4 or 5 AM and hard at work. I do what it takes, and that’s what it took to keep my sanity and my sellers happy with my performance. Now, that my inventory has fallen by about two-thirds as the number of homes for sale overall in the Sacramento Valley have slipped, things are fairly normal and quiet for me. It’s almost like being on vacation.
I realize for another Sacramento Realtor, 25 listings might seem like a horrendous number, but for me, it’s just business as usual. I can sleep in until 7 AM now. That’s a luxury. There is no question what my focus is for the day. I don’t spend much time on looking for business because business comes to me. I’m very fortunate that way. Many other real estate agents spend at least half of their time prospecting for clients, but I don’t. Some choose to work only part-time. I work full-time. My time is focused 100% on my clients and my listings.
Keeping track of 25 files and maneuvering moving targets is easy for an organized person to do. Besides, many decades ago, like in the 1970s, I was a certified escrow officer, and I used to work on a caseload of 60 to 80 files at a time. If you think handling a real estate file as an agent is time consuming, try being an escrow officer. Escrow is where I developed my organizational skills, and that ability has served me well as a top producer Sacramento Realtor. I try to treat each of my clients as though they are my ONLY client, because if I don’t, that’s exactly what would happen.
I am never too busy for a client. Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I answer my cell.
Where Do Buyers Find Homes for Sale in Sacramento?
Where do you find homes for sale in Sacramento online? Which website is best for listings? We’ve got website wars going on in which the Realtor dot com website is advertising that it has more homes than the popular Zillow and Trulia, and it does, but it seems to me that Realtor dot com lost its effectiveness years ago, back when it controlled the entire market. From where I sit, Realtor dot com had its chance and blew it. It’s a long road to retrieve the power it once possessed.
Some might argue it’s because it let its monopoly go to its head and invariably some other business gained a foothold and isn’t letting go. I have no idea. I just know that most of the home buyers I talk to do not use Realtor dot com to search for homes for sale in Sacramento.
The best place to get your homes for sale in Sacramento is from your own Sacramento Realtor. That’s because Realtors have online access directly to the mothership, our MetroList. You can get listings from a public website via MetroList MLS but it won’t be as detailed or customized as you can get from your own agent. Plus, some of its information in the listings are cut off, like my name, Elizabeth A. Weintraub, for crying out loud, because certain MetroList fields are not designed to handle very many characters. I’ve put MetroList on notice; it doesn’t change.
You also can’t find a Realtor at Realtor dot com. Well, you can, but it will take you forever. For starters, fill in Sacramento for the search field city and Realtor dot com will tell you there are 2,027 Realtors in Sacramento. Then, hit the search button and Realtor dot com will bring up 3,438 Realtors. Does Realtor dot com know how many Realtors are in Sacramento? Can you rely on the homes for sale search link if it can’t get one simple search field right? Not to mention, many of the random names and links that appeared when I tried to search were entries without a photo of the Realtor. Not very enticing.
Zillow and Trulia have the pizazz, and no matter what a Sacramento Realtor tells a buyer and no matter how many private emails a Realtor sends, a buyer’s curiosity will almost always win out. They can’t help themselves. They have a computer or an iPad or a mobile device and they will search for homes online with or without an agent. They might hope there could be that one **special** home that is not listed in the emails from their agent. There might be. Especially among the Coming Soon homes in Zillow.
But eventually, those Coming Soon homes will go online and they’ll get the listing from their own agent. Because most homes for sale in Sacramento generally end up in MetroList.
Every so often I’ll get a Sign Call. This is when a buyer passes by a home for sale in Sacramento, spots my real estate sign and calls me. I have so much information on that sign, and so many ways to get instant data without calling that I’m always astounded when buyers call. They can access a virtual tour by texting a code from the sign, or taking a photo of the QR code or by calling an 800 number. They can call the big honkin’ telephone number of the closest Lyon Real Estate office, prominently displayed. They can call the first agent listed on the sign rider, which is one of my Elizabeth Weintraub Team members, always ready to show homes. And, then, they can call me, the listing agent. I’m like the bottom of the barrel.
I wonder why they aren’t looking online. I wonder if they are working with a Realtor. They ask me for the sales price and I ask if they’re looking for a home. They say no, they are not. I share the sales price with them and then they ask for the square footage. I ask if they want to sell a home, and they say no, they do not. Then they ask for the number of bedrooms. Finally, after I am drilled with a series of these types of questions I ask why, why do they want to know? What possible difference could it make in their lives to find out the number of bedrooms in some home when they are not a buyer nor a seller, and apparently don’t know anybody who is?
Are You Struggling to Buy a Home in Sacramento?
Team Weintraub is kicking butt and taking names this month. We always do well in Sacramento real estate, but it’s refreshing and even more exciting to excel in a market that is tougher than nails at the moment. It’s super hard to buy a home in Sacramento during a seller’s market. Especially when we have so many buyers vying for the same listings. But the Elizabeth Weintraub Team seems to possess the knack, the expertise and, honestly, just the good fortune, I suspect, to be winning multiple-offer situations.
Part of this could be because we know what is important to sellers and we give it to them via the offers we write for our buyers. We know how to satisfy what sellers want. The reason we know this little fact is because I personally list and sell a ton of homes in the Sacramento area, and I freely share seller expectations with my Team Weintraub members. When you know what sellers want, you know how to write a purchase offer that will give the buyer an edge over all of the other buyers. Plus, everybody knows we perform on our word. We are accountable for our actions.
It also helps to know what a strong listing agent expects, and it starts with a clean offer. No missing pieces, I’s dotted, initials in place, earnest money deposit, proof of funds, and a preapproval letter — not from some fly-by-night place. I swear, the other day I hear from a mortgage broker that his buyer who is about to close escrow has had a short sale a short time ago and now can’t qualify for a conventional loan. Well, I’ve got news for ya buddy, the buyer never could qualify for a conventional loan under those circumstances and that question should have been asked in the interview / application process and, if it was, you should have known Freddie Mac would require seasoning on those gift funds. Ack.
The offer should also be submitted to the listing agent within the time frame for acceptance. Some agents openly invite multiple offers by specifying a time for offer presentation in MLS, but that’s not a practice this Sacramento Realtor endorses because it turns off some agents and buyers. Not everybody is competitive nor enjoys competition like some of us, and I’m not naming any particular name here like myself; but the point is I don’t want to discourage any buyers from writing an offer on my listings. Besides, nothing looks goofier than touting all offers will be presented on Sunday and here it is two weeks later and the home is still for sale.
Every first-time home buyer has a chance to buy a home in Sacramento, even in a multiple-offer situation. The mindset is not to think about all of the other offers and focus solely on what you are able to do. If you want to buy a home and to align yourself with an experienced real estate team like the Elizabeth Weintraub Team, then give us a jingle at 916.233.6759.
