West Sacramento Police Demanded Listing Agent Stop Selling House

I was lucky they didn’t draw my face on their target practice.

It’s not every day the West Sacramento Police call me up and demand that I stop selling a house in West Sacramento. But that’s exactly what happened with this property. It wasn’t an easy sale to start with but very few are these days. The seller lived out of area and her family occupied the home. Her mom, daughter and son, and a few others. When I stopped by to shoot photos, the family was a bit uncooperative, and the daughter accused me of throwing her grandmother into the street. But the seller wanted me to sell the home, so sell the home I did.

We put it into escrow with an agent I knew from Folsom. His buyers were very excited. About this time is when a detective from the West Sacramento Police called. He insisted I cancel the escrow and remove my sign from the yard. And he wasn’t nice about it, either. He was demanding, beligerent and abrasive, but I’ve known worse in my life and he didn’t frighten me. I explained it’s not up to him to insist I cancel a listing. My contract is not with him. He insisted there was a criminal act happening, which sounded odd to me because even if the daughter filed a complaint doesn’t make it so. Where is the court order? Who has convicted her?

I wonder if the West Sacramento police aren’t a bit like the Wild Wild West. Yolo County is different than Sacramento, that’s for sure. Perhaps he thought agents are stupid because he’s married to one, LOL. I kept the listing. But weeks dragged by and the occupants were not allowing access to the buyer nor the buyer’s agent. In fact, the son had to cut the fence with a pair of wire cutters just so I could get inside the yard to obtain my lockbox. The buyer eventually canceled, and I forgot about the listing.

Fast forward to last month, a year later, and I received a call from a guy who found the listing in Zillow. Say what you want about Zillow advertising homes that are sold or unavailable, but this guy noticed the listing in Zillow had changed to a preforeclosure. That means there was a Notice of Default filed. I called the seller. Hey, big changes. Everybody had moved out, they are all friends again and everybody in the family is happy. All the charges had been dismissed, and there was a lot of kumbaya.

Only problem — we were very close to the auction date. Still, I know how to deal with these things. We ignored the lowball offers. Instead, we pulled a rabbit out of the hat and sold that house to an investor for cash. Closed a few days ago. I saved that seller from foreclosure. She got a little money, too. You’ve got to wonder why people don’t call. If I hadn’t called her, she would have had a foreclosure on her record. Well, it beats having the West Sacramento police call again.