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How to Lose Your Dream Home in Sacramento
There are times in this business when home buyers ignore the essence of time and wrongly believe that they have all the time in the world to decide whether they want to buy a particular home in Sacramento. The constant that is sure to happen, even if a home has been on the market for a year, is the minute one home buyer decides she might want to buy it, so does another. I can’t explain how or why it happens but it does.
It’s not a trick. It’s not a listing agent trying to get more money for her seller. Nothing up my sleeve, I swear.
Such was the situation with a home that closed escrow this month. I first started talking with the seller about this home a year ago. He is retired and volunteers on government issues in Washington, D.C. He had never seen the home, and it has always been a rental property for him.
I inspected the home in Sacramento and found the living conditions to be substandard. The carpeting required replacement, the walls and cabinets needed repair and paint. Bottom line, the only way he could sell that home for a decent price would be to get the tenant out and fix it up. His property management company wasted about half a year to remove the tenant. No idea what’s so hard about giving 60 days to move.
I sent a handyman over to fix up the home and get it ready for market. First buyer in escrow could not qualify for a loan, some little glitch at the last minute prevented him from closing. Back on the market. A few months later, another buyer made an inquiry and wrote an offer through their agent. Although I warned the buyer’s agent that the seller would want list price, the buyer had other ideas.
It took the buyer another week to write a series of counter offers and to eventually end up at the place where the buyer should have been in the beginning. We asked for list price and no concessions. Pretty simple. But the buyer wanted to negotiate. By the time we got to the third offer with the buyer, or maybe it was the fourth offer, I don’t recall, I had uploaded all of the paperwork to DocuSign for the seller.
At that very moment, a full price cash offer arrived for this home in Sacramento. Cash is not always king anymore, but a full-price cash offer does tend to rule.
So, the moral of this story is the seller elected to ignore the first buyer’s final offer, which met all of his demands, and accepted instead the full-price cash offer. Those buyers were so close to buying what they continued to insist was their dream home. They lost it. One minute they were celebrating that the seller was about to accept their offer, and the next they were crying. I felt empathy for them because they were a young family with another baby on the way, but I didn’t represent them. I represented the seller.
How to Save Money When Selling Your Sacramento House
Hire a pro to truly save money when selling your Sacramento home.
If you’re interested in how to save money when selling your Sacramento home, this blog is for you. This is a true story. By paying attention to gut instincts, these particular home sellers hired the best Sacramento real estate agent and made almost 10% more by selling their house through me. They almost didn’t. They were about to hire some agent they stumbled across by accident or whose name was printed on a bus bench. I don’t know how they found her, but she wanted to sell their house for about 10% under market value. Oh, she had some investor who would pay cash and it would quickly close, and there were other stories involved, to which I didn’t pay any attention because it was all garbage. Dual agency, too.
This is what happens when sellers are chasing down some random discount agent to sell a house. They might save a percent on the real estate commission on the front end but they can lose it on the other end in far greater numbers. If you truly want to save money when selling your Sacramento home, you’ll hire a more expensive agent.
The sellers called me because they were feeling uneasy about the agent they were about to hire and talked to an agent they trusted in Benicia about it. She suggested they call Elizabeth Weintraub for a second opinion. When I told the sellers they could sell that house for a higher price, for a lot more money, and still receive multiple offers, their eyes bugged out. They looked at me like I just landed in a spaceship in their backyard.
After all, this other agent had said, blah, blah, blah. Why was my advice different? Good question.
I didn’t ask them to take my word for it because they didn’t know me from anybody. I’m just an agent who pulled up in a foreign sportscar and was walking around waving a clipboard like I owned the place. I showed them a list of sales within a half-mile radius, houses just like their house, similar square footage and age, and explained why I gave the price a little push. My logic and explanation made sense to them. They signed the listing paperwork. Now they are actually going to save money.
We went on the market on May 21, received many excellent offers, and we had to cancel the upcoming open house. I love it when that happens. The sellers countered the offer they liked best and we closed on June 18th, fewer than 30 days later. No hassles. I helped the sellers through a minor hiccup after the home inspection — as this is the point where many buyers try to renegotiate — but the sellers had me looking out for their interests, so they prevailed. It’s a good thing they hired the best Sacramento real estate agent to represent them. I feel good about the closing because I know that my decades of experience added immensely to their bottom line net profit.
If you want a professional job, you should go to a professional agent to save money when selling your Sacramento home.
5 Ways to Get Your Sacramento Purchase Offer Rejected
We have weeks in Sacramento real estate during which I stare at my offer tracking sheets to count the number of offers that are excellent examples of how not to write a purchase offer to buy a home in Sacramento, also known as how to get your purchase offer rejected. You see, one of the benefits of working with the Elizabeth Weintraub Team is that I provide useful information to my own team members. I often advise my team how other listing agents look at purchase offers — because I know how I look at them — and offer tips about what NOT to do. How not to get an offer rejected. Which is why so many of my team member’s purchase offers are accepted.
Because when an agent is working with a buyer as a buyer’s agent, often the focus is directly on that buyer. The buyer’s agent can be so wrapped up in what her buyer wants and in trying to fulfill those requirements that an agent can forget how her or his actions and words appear to the parties who can make or break that Sacramento home purchase.
- The first rule is do not argue with the listing agent. I don’t care if that listing agent is dumber than a bag of rocks, don’t argue. There is a big difference between arguments and negotiation. Don’t try to explain a “cash offer” for example to the listing agent as there is hardly a Sacramento real estate agent alive today who doesn’t know the advantages of cash over financing, even though it is always all cash in the end.
- The second rule is don’t insult the seller. If you think the house appears cluttered or dirty, for example, don’t demand that the seller “wash the floors” and take all personal items with them. Our California purchase contract already addresses debris. Wash the floors? Seriously? And how does one wash carpeting? Tear it off the floor and toss it into the washing machine?
- The third rule is send all of the documentation that is necessary in order to submit a purchase offer. And, for heaven’s sakes, try to submit this paperwork in one file in the manner specified in the multiple listing. If the paperwork is incomplete, the purchase offer is incomplete.
- The fourth rule is don’t submit a lowball offer when the seller has received multiple offers. You would think this would be such an obvious rule, but gah, it is not. I suspect some agents do this anyway to “teach a lesson” to their buyers so hopefully on the next purchase offer the buyers will be more reasonable.
- The fifth rule is don’t submit a lowball offer while also breaking rules 1 through 4. This is worse than 3 strikes and you’re out. Why do you think the sellers would want to consider your lowball offer that insults them, makes unreasonable demands and is incomplete?
It’s tough in some Sacramento neighborhoods right now to buy a nice home. Don’t make it so much harder on yourself than it needs to be.
When a Sacramento Real Estate Agent’s Reputation is All That Remains
It wasn’t that the buyer’s agent forced me to open Microsoft Word — which takes so much longer than any of my other applications to load, patience, patience, to find the document in which I record decades of unpleasant transaction notes — it was that many real estate professionals may now associate this particular agent’s name with unethical real estate practices. After the day is said and done and the years are over, and all the crazy people have crawled back into their caves, the reputation of a Sacramento real estate agent might be all that lingers.
An agent’s reputation should be fiercely maintained.
Successful agents, for example, are often slid under a microscope to study. Sometimes these agents are unjustly attacked by other real estate agents for stupid reasons, mostly because competitors become jealous. It’s the nasty underbelly of the real estate business and a silent consequence of success. Aspiring agents admire success but it can also be a tug-of-war internally for them. Regardless, we all need to treat each other with respect. As REALTORS, we must adhere to the Code of Ethics.
To be kind, some agents can experience, let’s say, a lapse of better judgment.
For me, I don’t look so much at what other people say when they screw up, I look at what they do. If a buyer’s agent calls me to talk about a client’s offer, spends a long time discussing the buyers’ love affair with the home but fails to mention that the agent has written a second offer for that buyer, well, not only is it considered unethical, but that kind of practice could be against the law. Buyers can’t buy two homes if they can’t afford to buy both. Lawyers can scream this until the cows come home and agents don’t listen.
As what happens in these types of problematic situations is both offers tend to get accepted. At that point, the buyer’s agent had another open window to say, hey, I have something to disclose. But no, the agent’s lips are zipped until the buyer bails on both accepted offers. Ordinarily, a listing agent wouldn’t even know this has happened, but when she discovers it — and the truth often manages to come out — she’s not the only person. Both sets of sellers know, and so do all of their friends. The people at title and escrow know. The other agent whose seller received a cancellation knows. All the people that agent knows know. And so on.
This is how a buyer’s agent’s reputation can turn into mud.
And for what? A pair of buyers who bailed on the buyer’s agent and decided not to even to move to Sacramento after all?
Red Flags on Purchase Offers for Sacramento Homes
Every Sacramento listing agent owes a fiduciary to her sellers to try to ensure that the offer the seller has received is a bonafide offer, especially those that seem a little bit weird. I’m not about to say that all out-of-area buyers, especially those from the Bay area, are crooks or are not to be trusted, but I have seen my fair share of purchase offers that require additional scrutiny and most of them seem to stem from the Bay area. To be fair, though, there are crooks right here in Sacramento, and there are doofus real estate agents right here in town who enable them.
Part of my job to my sellers is to look for what can go wrong and advise accordingly. The first red flag I might see in an offer is due to the fact the agent might not read the MLS listing nor adhere to the requirements. I suspect they do not always read all of the instructions because they either don’t have full access to MLS, they are confused, inexperienced, or they just didn’t bother to look for attachments. Some agents probably do not want to comply, so they simply ignore the requirements.
The second red flag is the offer itself might appear as a template. This means all of the standard information is typed in a different font, often an odd color, and a different point size, and the pertinent data such as property address and sales price do not match. Agents use this procedure when they are creating multiple offers and throwing those offers to the wind. They think nobody notices this.
The third red flag is the offer might be missing information. Certain boxes might be left unchecked and blank lines will be incomplete. Attention to detail is not always a strong suit among thieves, perhaps the APN number is missing or the agent’s license number is not there, which are important items to include.
The supporting documents are often a mishmash of papers tossed together. The proof of funds might not contain the buyer’s name. The earnest money deposit might be from a new stack of checks, numbered in the low 100s and containing no date nor identifying information. The pre-approval letter is most likely outdated if not expired.
You might ask yourself why do they bother to do this? What is the point? The point is the investors think they are clever and smart to lock down as many properties as they possibly can while they figure out which ones they might want to buy. They might make offers on 10 or 20 listings but be able to buy only one. This practice is not advised and many lawyers say it is against the law, but when has that stopped the crooks?
When you look at all of this damaging evidence, coupled with the fact the agent has not shown the home to the buyer, these are not really offers. If you need further proof, just ask the agent a question such as did you show the home? The agent won’t reply. And there you go.
