Email Elizabethmls
Sacramento Real Estate Agents Who Resist Change
Most people dislike change or the unfamiliar, especially certain Sacramento real estate agents, I’m guessing. A while back an agent got his knickers into a twist because I called him to find out why he left my lockbox open. It was pretty easy to figure out who did it because the SUPRA online system stores contact information, including time and date stamp; it tells me when any of my 70-some lockboxes are accessed.
At first, the agent denied the accusation. When pressed and presented with evidence, he became agitated and admitted he probably did leave it open but he had a good reason. (There is never a good reason to leave a lockbox open unauthorized.) His reason was he was confused. He had never showed a home which had 2 lockboxes, one for Supra to open to retrieve the code and the second for contractors, in which the key was stored. So, it was all the listing agent’s fault and not his. Ya gotta love the logic. Sometimes I use this system because it’s convenient for contractors: those people who do home staging, or maybe employees from pest companies, roof inspectors, home inspectors, handyman, what have you, who need access to the home.
It is also required by our MLS. Our MLS forces agents to use SUPRA lockboxes if an agent wants to advertise a listing as having a lockbox. Pretty clever, that MLS business alliance. In other words, a Sacramento real estate agent is not allowed to put on a contractor’s box and state the home is vacant with a lockbox and provide the code. It’s governed and stipulated that way at most associations. Otherwise, agents would buy contractor’s lockboxes because they cost roughly one-third the price of SUPRA lockboxes. They’ve got almost ten grand of my money — $10,000 that could have been invested in an aging barrel of Maker’s Mark, but no, I have lockboxes.
Although I like the SUPRA lockboxes because it allows me to follow up on listings and obtain buyer feedback after an agent shows a home I have listed. It provides greater security for my sellers because only agents can access those boxes. However, if contractors need to access the home, for example, I will also attach a contractor’s box to the property. It allows me to better devote my time to marketing the home, following up on showings and tracking open houses than standing on the front steps waiting for some guy to show up so I can open the door. Yet, two lockboxes are still very confusing for some buyer’s agents.
The biggest problem I see with buyer’s agents is not the fact that they can get confused over lockbox instructions, it’s that they don’t often read the entire MLS listing before taking action. They are so excited that their buyer wants to write an offer, they don’t always take the time to peruse confidential agent remarks or note the type of financing that is offered. They waste a lot of time writing offers that have little chance of acceptance because of this little quirk.
I wish I could digitally manipulate my listings. I would put big red arrows and circles that draw attention to specific information for agents, maybe include a few starbursts.
This morning I received an offer that was sent to the wrong agent last night. Three specific lines in the agent remarks state where and how to send the offer, yet they were overlooked. On top of this, the email from the agent said her buyer had seen the property and was very interested in owning it. Except the property is located in a gated community and there are no showings allowed. It’s enough to make one wonder if the buyer’s agent mixed up the address of the property and perhaps wrote the offer for the wrong home.
On top of this, it was an FHA offer, and the property is not listed with FHA terms and the seller cannot accept an FHA offer because an FHA offer is not allowed on that particular home. That was a lot of work for the agent to go through to write an offer, provide supporting documentation on behalf of the buyer, get the purchase offer signed and then deliver it to the wrong agent when there is no way the offer can even be countered.
All of which could have been prevented if the agent had just given that MLS listings one more glance before writing the offer. Are there attachments to the listings? Long gone are the days when all homes are listed with identical terms. Almost every listing is as unique as the sellers are unique.
My policy as a real estate agent is not to fight change, I embrace it.
MetroList in Sacramento Could Use Updated Technology
I wish MetroList would be more like me but if wishes were fishes most of us wouldn’t eat. When it’s 9:30 AM and you’re still on the computer typing away in your nightgown and you haven’t had breakfast and you’re starving to death, I would say that is most likely the sign of a dedicated real estate agent. If you ask my husband, he would say something different. He would use other adjectives and nouns, which I won’t mention.
If said husband walked into a certain home office and said his doctor ordered him to go immediately to the E.R., that same pertinacious real estate agent might have to download stuff to a flash drive or upload documents to the cloud before she could confidently grab her laptop computer and hightail it to Mercy Hospital before said husband croaks right there under the ceiling fan.
If it’s 3 PM and a lunch salad sits lonely and forlorn, half-made on the kitchen counter, because every time said real estate agent stops what she is doing to chop veggies her email dings with an urgent matter, that’s an agent who just can’t get off her computer. Some days are like that. Some days are not.
If every single day delivered 7 AM to 7 PM constant high pressure, I’d go insane. But fortunately, they do not. And that’s what makes being a Sacramento real estate agent interesting. There is variety. Intense situations, followed by a calmness. Who needs to be bipolar? (No offense to bipolar people.)
This morning MetroList totally messed up on-market listings. I heard it was a coding that caused the problem. Why-oh-why is a major software conglomerate like MetroList, on which millions of people depend, relying on a wonky plugin? No idea. But it prevented two new listings from going live last night so my photos did not download nor did the listings. You can’t always depend on MLS and technology. It seems real estate tool providers are always the last to adopt new systems. Yet, this is where much of the money is, in real estate, and the worker bees get crap.
But you can depend on this Sacramento real estate agent to be glued to her computer and responsive to callers, even if MetroList is down.
A Sacramento Short Sale Lifespan
For the first time in my life, which is almost since the dawn of humankind, MLS has not immediately loaded on my computer when accessed. I have an internet connection. MetroList is just not responding. It won’t open in Safari nor Firefox. It partially loaded in Firefox and then quit. There is no joy in Mudville; it’s trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P and stands for poop, and the Grinch has stolen Christmas.
We count on things in our life to always be there for us and never change. To work when we expect them to work. But that’s not how life works. Stuff goes wrong. People let us down; they die.
But Sacramento short sales can go on practically forever. I have a few I’ve been working on now for more than a year. A short sale doesn’t die. It doesn’t blow up. It doesn’t just go away and, in some cases, the short sale bank won’t even file a foreclosure notice. It’s not having the Notice of Default filed that can keep a short sale alive and pumping out blood long after the arteries have been sliced.
This is the little known secret that agents don’t realize. Once a bank says NO to an agent, many will give up. Not this Sacramento real estate agent. I keep on pushing until either the seller collapses from exhaustion or the bank says: All right, you got it. Here is your short sale approval. Few sellers are outright rejected in this day and age. This is not 2005, Dorothy.
If you want to work with a Sacramento short sale agent who has closed hundreds of short sales, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916 233 6759. I really doubt you will find an agent in the Sacramento Valley who knows more about short sales.
A Tip for Sacramento Listing Agents About Showing Followups
My personal belief, as a top-producing Sacramento real estate agent, is every single one of my sellers deserves to hear about all of their showing activity. I mean, just put yourself in your seller’s shoes. Your home is for sale, you see business cards on the table when you come home so you know agents have shown it, but you hear nothing from your Sacramento listing agent about those showings? You would have no idea about what’s going on if your agent doesn’t follow up.
And that is not a good place for a seller to be. That, people, is a place of anxiety. My intentions are to never make my sellers anxious or stressed out. Part of my job as their listing agent is to make the process of selling a home in the Sacramento Valley move as smoothly as possible for my sellers, with the fewest hiccups and disruptions.
For example, even if I have nothing to say, if for some reason there has been no showings for a week and not much has happened in the neighborhood, I still try to check in with my sellers and provide them with updates, even if it’s nothing more than # of hits in MLS. For crying out loud, something probably sold within 6-block radius or a new home came on the market, and sellers might want to get that information from their Sacramento listing agents. You think?
I am constantly analyzing why a home might not yet have an offer. The difference between me and another agent is I try to share those thoughts with my sellers — to come up with a new strategy if my existing strategy is not giving us the results we want. With some homes, we just need to wait, be patient and continue present marketing because there might not be as many home buyers in that particular price range.
But to not follow up after an actual showing by a buyer’s agent with buyers in tow, well, that’s unthinkable in my book. Following up with the buyer’s agent is easy, yet many agents don’t do it. They say buyer’s agents don’t respond, and that’s true, some of them don’t. But some provide valuable buyer feedback. By contacting buyer’s agents, I’m also giving them my email address so they can quickly address a concern their buyer might have had but they didn’t yet have time to ask me.
Here’s how Sacramento listing agents can do it. Go to MLS and click on your listing to open it. Click on the box that says “SUPRAweb Showing Activity,” which is located under the row of photos on the very left of the page. That will open a small window in your browser showing all of the activity for that particular home. Don’t stop there. Instead, click on Log On to SupraWEB, on the right-hand side. Sign in with your user name and password.
This will take you to your Showing Dashboard, which reveals all the showings for all of your listings. You can change your dashboard date range but I keep mine set to the past 2 days because I constantly check this dashboard. Right there, in front of your face, are the emails, times accessed and all of the information you need about every single buyer’s agent who showed your listing. Click on the email, and it will automatically open an email for you to send the buyer’s agent a message.
And there you have it. Now you have no excuse not to keep your sellers updated with feedback from agents who have showed their homes. This makes your sellers happy, both of you informed, and it gives you a chance to build a rapport with the buyer’s agent.
Question Home Equity by Marilyn vos Savant
I grew up with the expression: Question Authority, but as the billboards around Sacramento seem to imply, today’s message is more along the lines of Question Everything. It’s not that people don’t always tell the truth; it’s much more complicated. In part, it’s whose perception of truth is the truth, and it’s also human error, among other things. The human error doesn’t always originate at the source. Let’s not even start talking about FOX News.
For example, when I enter a listing into MLS, I am not the person typing the data entry. An error could happen at that level. Ultimately, I am responsible for checking the contents of my listings; however, I also send the link for a new listing to my sellers so they can double check the information as well. You can never have too many eyes on a document to verify information.
However, I noticed this weekend an entry in the Ask Marilyn column by Marilyn vos Savant, whose claim to fame is a high IQ. It asked how co-owners of a home worth $200,000 with $10,000 in equity must divide the asset. Ms. vos Savant went into great depth explaining loan balances and various options available should an unpaid loan balance be higher or lower than market value, but she ignored the equity position entirely.
The fact is if a person has $10,000 in equity and a home is worth $200,000, that means the encumbrances are $190,000. It’s simple math. The equity is already computed and disclosed. The discussion should have been centered around how to divide the $10,000 of equity: $5,000 for you, $5,000 for me. If you want the house, you’ll give me $5,000. If I want it, I’ll you $5,000. If we plan to sell to a third party, we don’t have enough equity to pay a commission, so we’re hosed.
Which just goes to show that there are times you can’t even trust the words in front of your eyes. Something was missing in that column.
