Expert House Hunting Tips Serve Sacramento Home Buyers

Elizabeth Weintraub’s house hunting tips leave no stone unturned.

Below are a few house hunting tips that I developed for use when working with Sacramento home buyers, but they can apply to most home searching efforts in California and probably outside of the state as well. The first tip is to know what the buyer would like to buy and needs to buy. Likes and needs are two different things but if we can accomplish both, then buyers have found the perfect home.

Little is worse than managing an irritated buyer, I imagine, who might say something like: the house is a total disaster — because the agent showed her relocation buyer the wrong home. Yet, that seems to happen on a regular basis around Sacramento. It is as common as a summer day in Sacramento topping 100 degrees; I often receive feedback on my listings from agents that indicate the agent should never have showed that home to that particular buyer.

Some of the reasons agents show homes that do not fit their buyer’s requirements are:

• The agent does not know the neighborhood and therefore does not know what to expect from certain price points. For example, if an agent spots a 3,000 square foot home in Midtown that is, oh, let’s say priced at $525,000, that’s because the home is a fixer.
• The agent does not read the marketing comments in MLS nor the confidential agent remarks in the listing, which typically set forth expectations and provide a wealth of information.
• The agent does not understand the buyer’s wants and needs.
• There is nothing else available in the buyer’s price range. Otherwise, how does that explain an agent, say, showing a 600-square-foot home to parents with many children? Yet, that happens. And the feedback is, no surprise, oh sorry, the home is not big enough.
• The agent doesn’t have enough experience to know how to offer variables and solutions to help a buyer expand her horizons and / or parameters.

My house hunting tips are to thoroughly investigate available properties. Before showing, the professional buyer’s agents know almost everything we can possibly discover about that home. We know, for example, how long the listing agent has been in business and how many homes she typically sells, and at what percentage from list price. We know how long the seller has owned the home and the approximate unpaid mortgage balance. We know how many days on market it took to sell the home the last time it was on the market, which signifies appeal.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg; we study the photographs to look for defects and, if possible, we preview. A home buyer’s time is valuable and top agents know that maximizing showing times is paramount. One of my best house hunting tips is for the buyer’s agent to call the Sacramento listing agent. Yes, phone to ear. Call. Old fashioned stuff that still works.

And let’s not forget our party girlfriend: Google.

If one can find the seller on Facebook, often an agent can read all about his plans to sell and hopes for a new home or whether he has been transferred out of state, getting divorced or, say, borrowing to meet the demands of a bail bond. It’s amazing what people disclose through social media. If you need a professional buyer’s agent, call the Elizabeth Weintraub Team at 916.233.6759.