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How to Unwind After a Long Day of Sacramento Real Estate
Flowers in bloom near WPA in William Land Park, by Elizabeth Weintraub
The flowers are in bloom on many of the trees, bushes and vines in Land Park, especially over the arches past Fairytale Town. When I ride my bicycle past the WPA Rock Garden, the scent of springtime flowers flows through the air, and it’s unmistakably sweet smelling. This is the second stretch of my bike ride where I can pick up great speed and shift from 5th to 6th and eventually 7th gear as I go down the hill and onto the road that continues around the golf course.
The bike ride takes me 35 minutes from my home in Land Park, down Riverside, around the entire perimeter of William Land Park and back, regardless of which side streets I might explore. I basically face one stoplight on 8th Avenue by Vic’s Ice Cream to circumvent and the other street detours help me to avoid the lights.
Father hugging daughter, his face illuminated, William Land Park, by Elizabeth Weintraub
This is my way of unwinding after a long day of Sacramento real estate. Sometimes, I take a break in the middle of the day and hop on my bike, too. The only problem is the wind hits the space between my bluetooth Jawbone and my jaw, separates the device from my face, causing noise and static on the other end. I have a handy dandy rack for my cellphone right on my handle bars.
I guess most people would say I should just enjoy the ride and forget about answering my phone. But that’s about as useful as telling a dog not to eat the steak you just threw on the floor.
Arches overlooking William Land Park behind WPA Rock Garden
I’m thinking maybe I should shop for a new bluetooth device. One specifically made for talking on your cellphone while riding a bicycle. The new ERA Jawbone isn’t it because it’s too small and the smaller they make them, the less effective they seem to be. I had Jawbone replace my device but it didn’t improve reception, and I’m now sending it back. If you have any ideas for a good bike-riding bluetooth, let me know.
W X Downtown Freeway Closing Coming to Land Park
Highways and roads in Sacramento like the W X freeway, for the most part, are in far better shape than say those in Minnesota. There is a standing joke in Minnesota that there are two seasons in that state: winter and road construction. But we don’t have to deal with huge potholes and overpasses collapsing in Sacramento, just the impatient jerk-offs who tailgate.
A jerk almost hit me while my husband and I were at PetSmart in Natomas this week. Apparently, this guy in a white pickup truck thought my husband was driving too slowly, so he sped around us. My husband honked at him because he should not have passed us doing 55 in the parking lot entrance. Then, as we were walking in the crosswalk up to the sidewalk of the shopping center, the pickup truck circled back around and missed hitting my huge butt within inches as it zoomed by again. Looked like it was on purpose to me.
I realize that the Natomas Marketplace can drive just about any sane person crazy but this was a bit nutty. Hey buddy, it’s not our fault your wife left you, your dog hates you and you’re out of Budweiser.
Just wait until the construction begins, though, on the W X freeway closing in Sacramento in a few months. They call it the W X freeway because it parallels W and X Streets. During May and June, we’ll have lane closures, from 14th Street to 26th Street, which stretches through downtown / Midtown / Land Park and Curtis Park. Caltrans is spending $46 million to fix the crosstown highway. Plans are to alternate lane closures in one direction at a time, so some hours eastbound traffic will have more lanes than westbound, and vice versa.
I wish the WX freeway closing would fix that horrible onramp problem at Riverside. My neighbor’s husband in Land Park was killed in a terrible traffic accident while merging at that spot. He crashed into a telephone company cable truck and died instantly. When merging from the Riverside onramp, you’re fighting traffic in the right lane, which is trying to get off on Highway 99; the middle lanes are heading for Interstate 80 and the far left lanes to Highway 50. This interchange is a nightmare.
It’s not much better merging to get off heading westbound to Land Park from Business 80, either, and trying to exit on 16th Street or 10th Street. My husband won’t even drive in that direction because he doesn’t want to merge and take a chance on death. He exists on 26th. I’m more of a risk taker, and my Porsche has more horsepower than his Prius, so I’ll do it, but I don’t much like it either. You’ve got to speed up to cross, and sometimes the traffic in front of you is at a dead stop. But that’s the beauty of living in Sacramento, more people = more problems.
I usually drive from my home in Land Park to my real estate office at Lyon in Midtown Sacramento in 8 minutes by taking the W X Freeway and cutting over to Business 80, but now I guess I’ll use the surface streets. Another minute or two on my travel time is not gonna kill me, but getting on the W X freeway closing might.
Do Sacramento Buyer’s Agents Push Up Home Values?
Here is a new dig about real estate agents that I haven’t heard before. A potential seller of a home in Land Park called to talk about her overpriced home and how it got that way. During the conversation about how and why she paid too much for it — which I’ll get to another day in another blog — she mentioned that she was trying to buy a home in East Bay. When I mentioned I have a close friend who works in her targeted city and she might want to contact that agent to see homes, the caller threw out this crazy idea.
What I believe she was saying is that she doesn’t trust real estate agents, which is too bad. Because there are many excellent real estate agents in the business, and not every agent should be painted with the same tainted brush due to a few bad apples. This home buyer was reluctant to work with a Sacramento buyer’s agent who is a neighborhood specialist, i.e. an agent who works and lives in the neighborhood. Her feeling was the agent would try to drive up prices in the neighborhood by making her pay more for a home.
In other words, she believed the agent would not in good faith negotiate on her behalf in order to make the agent’s own home worth more. What? First, I told her, understand that agents are highly unlikely to try to push her to pay more to increase an agent’s own home value because they’re just not that diabolical. Second, comparable sales are good for only 3 months and unless a person is selling her home within that 3-month period, that sale won’t matter one little bit. A home that sold last year has no bearing on home values this year. Not to mention, one home sale does not increase the value in any given neighborhood.
What buyer’s agents want first and foremost is to make their buyers happy. They want satisfied buyers, buyers who are thrilled with the purchase of their new home and with the agent’s performance. Also, because they are home buyers who someday will be a seller, and the agent wants to eventually list the home as well. Agents want clients for life.
Buyer’s agents who are REALTORS have a fiduciary to the buyer and must hold that buyer’s interests above their own. Not only that, but Sacramento buyer’s agents want to get paid. They want to close the transaction but not at all costs. They are more focused on bringing together a buyer and seller on price than on manipulation of said price. A Sacramento buyer’s agent will do everything in her power to represent the buyer to her fullest and best abilities. Moreover, that neighborhood specialist will probably know more about the neighborhood than an out-of-area agent, which would be to her advantage!
A client called a few days ago to ask if I remembered her. I recognized her voice immediately. I also have Caller ID (ha, ha). She bought a bank-owned home in College Greens 5 years ago, and today it is worth considerably more than she paid for it. Location is everything, I reminded her. She bought in an excellent neighborhood and on a highly desirable street. She was just calling to say thanks for the holiday card. It was delightful to chat with her.
That’s the kind of happy buyer I want. It’s the kind of happy buyer just about every Sacramento real estate agent is after.
Photo Galleries of Homes in East Sacramento and Elsewhere
Every morning, before I start my day as a Sacramento real estate agent, I clear all of the spam and junk emails from accounts and try to respond to the people who contact me out of the blue. This is the thing about writing online articles and blogging for so many years is you never know when a person will read a piece and believe it was just published. That’s timeless writing, and evergreen, and while some things are very specific and change from year to year, stately mansions and historic homes tend to inhabit a sacred spot on earth.
Today a writer thanked me for publishing homes in NW Portland. I love Portland to pieces, and not just because we really don’t have to be on the lookout at all times for Wesen or because Portlandia is so hilariously amusing, but because it’s a great city. Sacramento often looks to Portland as a model city: modern, ahead of its times, progressive. And it boasts several historic districts.
Historic district preservation has its foes and its supporters in Sacramento. The supporters are generally people who love homes. I’m not in real estate just to list and show houses, I do it partly because I love homes. Period. All kinds of houses. I had dollhouses as a kid; I built playhouses out of discarded composition shingles at building sites, and I even once drew a diagram of a floor plan in the street in front of my house. I used drywall chalk. I lived in a new subdivision called Heritage Homes in the then Village of Circle Pines, Minnesota, and homes were still being built around us for years after my family moved from Saint Paul.
I drew a floor plan with bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. I had wanted my younger sister to go into the woods and play, but she didn’t want to let go of her teddy bear, and she couldn’t take it with us, for some reason. So, I put her teddy bear in the bedroom in the middle of the street and locked the imaginary door. Of course, when we came back from playing in the woods, her teddy bear was gone. She still speaks to me, though.
Here are photo galleries of homes in Sacramento, along the northern coast of California in Mendocino and in Northwest Portland, Oregon. I hope you enjoy them.
Homes in East Sacramento, Sacramento, California
Homes in Land Park, Sacramento, California
Homes in Mendocino, California
Homes in Portland, Oregon’s Nob Hill Neighborhood in NW Portland
The Direction a Sacramento Home Faces
When I counsel home buyers for Land Park, one of the questions I typically ask is which direction they prefer their Sacramento home to face. It’s a facet of home buying they might not have previously considered. Then it hits them, yes, the direction a home faces is a preference. The direction of their new home is a choice, a selection. The orientation of real estate is important.
In the northern hemisphere, southern exposure gets the most sun, when the sun moves from east to west. But the way the streets are laid out in Sacramento, especially in the core areas close to downtown such as Midtown, Land Park and Curtis Park, many streets run east and west. This means most of the homes in Land Park face north or south.
However, in East Sacramento, many streets run north and south, so those homes typically face east or west. If your Sacramento home faces east or north, the front part of your home will receive the morning sun and the back yard will be hit by the hot afternoon sun.
One of my Land Park neighbors behind me wants to rebuild a shared fence. Her dog has a habit of jumping over the fence. Well, that and the fact the fence is falling down. It doesn’t matter much to me since that fence is located behind our garage. But the type of fence matters to my husband because he maintains several raised-bed vegetable gardens back there.
The neighbor asked if it would be all right to build a fence higher than six-feet, and I gave her the go-ahead. Then my husband had a chat with her, because he was worried that an additional foot of fencing would block part of the sun from his garden. He suggested she top it off with chicken wire. When she shared that bit of information with me, I couldn’t help but laugh. I suspect my neighbor was a bit horrified by that suggestion. Chicken wire isn’t exactly visually appealing. I think lattice would look better.
However, my husband is right about one thing. (Quick, call out the media.) A higher fence on a southern property line would throw shadows on that part of the yard. So, if you’re looking at homes in Land Park, consider which way the sun moves. You may prefer to buy a Sacramento home where the master suite is shaded in the afternoon, with a sunny morning breakfast nook. Or, you may prefer a back yard with a northern exposure, especially if you do a lot of late afternoon entertaining. But look out for those neighbors who tell you to put up chicken wire.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
