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Listing a Sacramento Short Sale From Anywhere in the World
The problem with some short sales today is if they take too long to negotiate, the value of that short sale could go up and the bank could want more money. This was not a problem with Sacramento short sales in 2012, but this year some banks are asking for updated BPOs before the 90-day mark. Not to mention, once a short sale is approved and falls apart, there is no guarantee the next go-around will mirror the first. A smart Sacramento short sale agent knows this and takes precautions.
We are closing a short sale next week that came into my sphere sometime around Thanksgiving of last year. The seller called to complain about his agent — for what, I don’t recall — and asked if I would agree to take his listing. He had approval from the bank, too, but at the last minute something went haywire. I agreed to take the listing once the seller and his listing agent terminated the existing listing and removed it from MLS.
I should point out that the reason a seller is unhappy with a real estate agent sometimes lies with the seller and not the agent. I am typically hesitant to pick up a listing from a disgruntled seller because that seller could be the problem. One thing being in real estate for so long teaches me is there are a lot of nut-jobs in the world and people who don’t take their medication. On the other hand, about 90% of all Sacramento agents sell fewer than one home every two or three months, so what does that tell you? But, in this particular instance, my gut instincts told me the seller was not at fault. I told him to let me know when he was ready to go on the market.
You know what day he was ready to go on the market? Christmas day. Yup, Dec. 25th. And there I was: lounging about in my gorgeous overwater bungalow, watching the waves gently lap the piers, gazing at brightly colored fish swimming about under my glass floor. I was on vacation at Rangiroa, the second largest Atoll in the world, located in a remote chain of archipelago islands called the Tuamotu in French Polynesia. This is a place where it’s a miracle we were able to connect to the internet through satellite. It was a slow connection, and proved too much to smoothly connect to CAR’s antiquated ZipForms.
Even though the internet was sporadic, I received the email from the seller asking to go on the market. I managed to whip up all of the required listing documents through a combination of working with my dedicated team members and emailing forms to prepare and forward. One of my team members volunteered to go over to the home on Christmas and shoot photos and send them to me. I then uploaded all of the documents to DocuSign, my seller signed, and we went on the market the day after Christmas.
You can count on Elizabeth Weintraub. I take care of my clients no matter where I am in the world.
. . . Part II of this Sacramento Short Sale to follow on Monday.
photo: Gauguin’s Pearl Farm on Rangiroa, by Elizabeth Weintraub
Travel Tips: Don’t Use Citicards
I look out on that travel horizon, and I see a long road between now and August for this Sacramento real estate agent. That means I will most likely have a lot of work to finish before the end of summer. August will be my next vacation. I do not look forward to the end of summer because summer is my favorite season, even though I live in Sacramento, one of the hottest cities in America. As one of my clients once said, if Sacramento’s spring weather carried through into summer, it would be just like living in Carmel and our homes would cost a million bucks or more. Well, not quite because it’s a 100 miles to the ocean, not 100 yards.
For my clients, though, the fact that I have no vacations planned for a long, long time is good news for them. Although, with WiFi available almost everywhere, yes, even on a remote atoll in the middle of French Polynesia like Rangiroa, it’s not always evident if I am in town or if I am gone; I still pay attention to my real estate business and my clients. Unless I tell them I am out of town, my clients believe I am always in Sacramento.
You know who does know when I am gone? My credit card companies. I have learned, for example, to call Citicards and tell them when I am going and where I am going. To give them advance notice of my whereabouts. VISA and MasterCard especially (I don’t know about American Express or Discover) are cracking down on credit card fraud. They track individual accounts, so if they spot unusual activity they might not authorize the transaction without speaking to the customer.
A tip for travel: Always call your credit card company before you go out of town if you plan to use your credit card elsewhere. Tell them when you are leaving and when you will return.
Yet, that doesn’t always work, and I am living proof. Even though I called Citicards and told them where I was going on vacation, when I checked out of the St. Regis Resort in Bora Bora, the credit card company flagged my account and froze it. Sometimes, it’s not a good idea to have Big Brother watching you. It’s kind of creepy. Especially after you’ve put them on notice.
This is the second time Citicards has done this to me, which means I will no longer use their card for major purchases. The line has to be drawn somewhere. They say they are protecting you but both you and I know whose butt they are protecting.
Photo: by Elizabeth Weintraub, cruise ship in Papeete
Arrival at The St. Regis at Bora Bora
Ants, teeny-tiny, itty-bitty ants are crawling around my keyboard. They are zipping in and out, over and around. They are doing somersaults in delight. And I’m just thankful they are not those little lizards. My husband says I should AEL — Always Expect Lizards. But they still freak me out when they show up unexpectedly. It’s not like they crawl with a purpose. They are not determined lizards. They change their mind in a flash about the direction they are headed and all of a sudden, there they are, looking up at you quizzically, like a bank short sale negotiator who doesn’t bat an eyelash over taking 6 months to process a short sale.
Today we are at the St. Regis at Bora Bora. Air Tahiti does not fly directly to Bora Bora from Rangiroa, although it does fly from Bora Bora to Rangiroa. I was told by a tour operator in the islands that our vacation needed to “progress,” to get substantially better, which is why we could not fly the other way around. Which meant to get to Bora Bora from Rangiroa, we needed to return to Papeete on Tahiti, retrieve our luggage, and then go back through Security to board a flight to Bora Bora.
I did not see how it could get any better than Rangiroa. Our overwater bungalow at Kia Ora was stunningly beautiful, modern, and it had just been remodeled. What could possibly be better than looking out on the warm sapphire waters and endless horizon? First, there is no bumpy van ride from the airport to the hotel. In Bora Bora, you are transported via a yacht. Second, I can’t say the view at Bora Bora is any better. On the one side we have the island, and on the other we have the mountains, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that view. The water is a pale pearly greenish blue. Although, you can see a portion of your neighbor’s bungalow, which you could not at Kia Ora. I feel homesick for Rangiroa already. I felt a strong connection to that atoll.
However, our overwater bungalow villa at St. Regis at Bora Bora holds no candle to Kia Ora. We have our own bedroom, which is enormous, lots of island thatch, wood, bamboo, ceiling fans, cathedral ceiling and sliding doors to the deck. A separate bath is also enormous with a walk-in open shower and a rainshower head as big as a Super Bowl pizza, situated next to a sunken and jetted tub, plus wood floors, dual stone sinks. There is requisite glass-in-the-floor windows, too. But we also have a separate living room / dining room. We had to take a golf cart shuttle to get here from the restaurant last night because it is so far away from the lobby. I bet it’s a 3/4 mile. Most guests grab bicycles. But a nice unexpected feature is the fact we have our own butler. He offered to unpack for us last night.
Would you let a butler unpack your suitcases?
Our butler motioned toward the table where a tray of chocolates and a box of chocolates and a bottle of champagne awaited consumption. But the ants had gotten to them first. That’s what we got for going to dinner before settling in. I am thankful that my cold has pretty much cleared up, and our sunburn pain has been minimized somewhat. Not enough that we could, say, enjoy a Swedish massage, but we’re here for two more weeks. Stuff can change.
The Blue Lagoon and Bird Island at Rangiroa
My sister in Minnesota sent an email yesterday to say that she was expecting to receive a ton of snow shortly and temperatures were slated to break a 90-year record low. Then, this morning, she said the newscaster misread her prompter. Apparently, the record low temperatures were only going to be beat those from the ’90s, not from 90 years ago. Of course, to that weather girl it probably seems like 90 years ago because she was most likely learning how to read and write in the 1990s.
It’s all in your perspective, I guess. When I was in school, a hundred years ago seemed like an eternity and today it’s like yesterday. Well, today it is almost is like yesterday. The older we get, the more time is put into perspective. Just like the more experiences we have, the greater our perspective because we have more information to draw upon.
I was thinking about a person’s perception of paradise. Tropical paradise, in particular. There are some people in this world who don’t give a hoot about a tropical paradise, people like my husband. People like this typically can take or leave paradise. Some of them actually hate it. My mother intensely despised the tropics and was very attached to freezers. The kind of freezer that I was supposed to strike with a table knife after placing inside steaming ice-cube trays filled with hot water to melt the accumulated ice. But I love a good tropical paradise. I prefer to think of myself as a more normal and balanced person.
In fact, I would like it if I was given a long assignment to search out the best tropical paradises in the world and to write about them. But no, I am simply a Sacramento real estate agent; an agent who sells a lot of short sales and hence can afford to go on vacation in French Polynesia this winter and leave her cats in the hands of housesitters.
Yesterday, we took a super long boat ride across the inside waters of the atoll, Rangiroa, from the town of Avatoru to a place called the Blue Lagoon, or Lagon Bleu. It’s a lagoon within a lagoon. How cool is that? We also visited Bird Island at Rangiroa.
It made me wonder how many shades of blue are there in the world? That’s what you think when you first step foot on the island and lay eyes on the most beautiful blue waters in the world. Azure. Soft blue pastel. Turquoise. Jade. Hypnotic and brilliant blues and greens. This is after dragging your bony and sunburned knees through the water to get past the reef and onto land itself. There is no sandy beach on which to land. The water is almost waist deep, and you’ve got to wear some type of foot covering for protection. Lemon sharks are circling you as well, but they didn’t seem hungry yesterday.
The guys from the boat loaded a huge cooler onto top of a surfboard anchored in the bay and dragged it to shore. It was filled with chicken, fish, salad fixings and stuff to drink. The crew set up a barbecue stand while the rest of us mostly swam around in the lagoon. A few brave souls ventured across the long reef to Bird Island. My husband and I were two of those. The water was littered with what looked from a distance to be gigantic dog turds, but they were actually black sea slugs. We were not about to step on them. We were also careful not to step on the coral and clams and other sea life, so it took us about 30 minutes to cross from the Blue Lagoon island to Bird Island. Like with most things, it’s not always about the destination, and it’s more about the journey. I just wished my journey would speed itself up a bit because I could feel the heat of the sun baking my back. Why did I not think to put sunscreen there?
I walked around the entire island, shuffling though shore waters when navigation on land became too difficult. My husband got lost halfway around. At one point I thought about going back to look for him but then I realized if he was hurt or having some kind of emergency, I could not possibly drag him back to the island by myself, so I should get help instead. He saw it as I left him there to die on a tropical paradise island.
What is wrong with that, I ask. There are worse places in the world to die than the Blue Lagoon or Bird Island at Rangiroa.
Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa
Dolphins jumping in Tiputa Pass at Rangiroa
You think the holidays are a quiet time in real estate, but even if a Sacramento real estate agent is on vacation in French Polynesia, stuff can happen in monumental fashion. For example, I’ve been gone for only 5 days and during that period of time I’ve had:
- an Elk Grove home fall out of escrow and go back into escrow
- to rescue a pending cancellation due to changing buyer’s names on the deed at the 11th hour
- receipt of four short sale approval letters on four separate short sales to process
- a stove removal by a short sale seller that should not have been removed, times two.
- a demand for an elevation certificate spring out of nowhere
- to refer a seller to a short sale lawyer because I believe the lender lost the prom note
- and numerous inquiries about buying and selling homes in the Sacramento region
Yet, nothing insurmountable and that I can’t handle from French Polynesia. That’s because I have two invaluable things: 1) The internet. 2) The Elizabeth Weintraub Team. And quite frankly, I am completely confident my team members could handle any emergency that pops up — I think they like to humor me by keeping me involved.
I am replaceable.
What is not really replaceable is the rate at which we over-fish our oceans. The ice that is melting at our poles is not replaceable. The level at which our seas are rising is pretty alarming. The gradual warming of our temperatures around the world is disturbing. Bees and butterflies are in peril. When you put these things into perspective, my challenges seem somewhat miniscule.
We walked from our hotel about a mile down the road to Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa yesterday afternoon. I was hoping we would see tigersharks but we spotted instead dolphins jumping. This is one of the spots in the Rangiroa atoll that has broken and lets water flow from the Pacific into the lagoon and back out to sea again. A large freighter came through in the morning to dock inside the lagoon and left through Tiputa Pass in the afternoon. Below are a few more photos:
dolphins jumping at Tiputa Pass, Rangiroa, Adam Weintraub
