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Another Curtis Park Home Closes Despite Initial Seller Mistake
There are many valid reasons Realtors get paid so much.
I can tell my real estate clients that experience matters, and being a top producer makes a difference when selling, say, a Curtis Park home, but sometimes they wrongly believe the only difference between agents is the amount of real estate commission, so they don’t listen. They have to find out the hard way.
Never burn bridges, is my motto. I also don’t like to cross bridges twice, but sometimes we end up doing exactly that. I recall clearly standing on the front steps of this Curtis Park home with the seller and talking about selling the home. He asked how much I charged, and I told him my fee is 6%. Same fee I’ve charged for the last 40 years.
He balked and said he could hire a discount agent who would do all the same things for 4%. No, you can’t, I blurted. You think you can because they are telling you that story, but you can’t. You can’t hire a top producer with more than 40 years in the business, a Realtor who sells on average 1 to 2 homes a week because that kind of Realtor charges more.
I’m worth it, I promised. I will save your ass during the home inspection. A discount agent might not have the skills or experience to deal with inspection issues, and you’ve got an older home, too. You will fall out of escrow and you won’t close. You’ll make more money with me, even though you’re paying me more.
He hired that discount agent anyway. His escrow blew up and he didn’t close. So he called me back, and I listed his home, and it closed this week. The buyers purchased the home in its AS IS condition and paid another 4% over list price. I’d say I did a good job for this seller. If you want to sell a Curtis Park home or a home anywhere in the Sacramento Valley, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
How Much Sacramento Agents Earn
How much Sacramento agents earn can fluctuate from year to year, based on the market.
A real estate agent’s salary, how much Sacramento agents earn in a year, can be a staggering amount of money or just enough to squeak by, and there doesn’t seem to be as much in the middle as you might think. Of course, there will always be those envious individuals who think agents make too much money for what we do, but those people don’t work in real estate and have little idea of what’s involved in the business. Rarely, though, do I meet a person who is concerned that I might not make enough money or end up with no commission on a transaction, and worries out loud about it like a client I met with last night in Midtown.
She was concerned it might take me 6 months or longer to sell her home in Midtown. Maybe it will. It’s a unique property. Maybe it won’t. It will take as long as it takes to find the right buyer. I promised to create a customized marketing plan for this seller. She didn’t want to me to spend a lot of time working on selling her home in Midtown and not get paid. You’ve got to adore people like this, even if that sort of thought process is unnecessary.
The thing is I don’t think about how much about how much money I earn. It is not my focus. Some wise person once said if you focus on your passion, the money will come. It is true. I love my job and don’t really envision my tasks and duties as work, per se. It’s just something I am driven to do. Attack my income, though, try to tell me I should cut my commission, and daggers fly. With precision. A person does not try to tell me I am not worth what I charge and still work with me. I run into people from time to time who want to cut off their noses to spite their faces. They are not my client base. They don’t know what they don’t know.
But I rarely run into a client who worries about how much Sacramento agents earn, concerned that we don’t make enough or won’t make any money. I explained to the seller in Midtown in part how I have been working on selling a home in Elk Grove now for almost a year and a half. Went into escrow yesterday. I don’t give up. Hey, I used to sell a lot of short sales, more than any other agent in a 7-county area over the last 10 years. Because I don’t focus on the money. I focus on my sellers. I make my sellers happy because of my job performance. The home in Elk Grove had issues that needed to be resolved, and some of those issues required time to pass. I stuck with it because I made a commitment.
They all eventually close. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. But they will close. Every sale is unique. I’ve heard of agents who drop sellers and cancel listings because it involves too much work or they become disillusioned. They no longer believe in the process. Those agents are idiots.
I never worry about much Sacramento agents earn or my personal income. Depending on market conditions, my annual income can fluctuate. It never falls flat. I’m too busy selling Sacramento real estate. I can sell some homes in a week and another house could take a year or more of concentrated effort. It makes no difference to me.
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.
Commission-Gate and the Sacramento Real Estate Agent
Who knew that selling Sacramento real estate was likely to turn into its own little Commission-Gate? Over my past 40 years in real estate, this was a first for me. Now, we know buyers are a bit desperate vying for certain homes, and agents can be all over the map when trying to help them buy those homes, too. But holy moley, you don’t throw a bag of money at the listing agent, for heaven’s sake. No, I don’t want to see the gold watches pinned inside your coat, button yourself up and get outta here.
Let’s set aside the fact that it’s against the law, probably violates the Code of Ethics, and it breaches an agent’s fiduciary relationship with her seller, and look at what buyers or their agent — hard to say where the idea originated — were coming from. See, Mikey here really wants this house, see. Poor Mikey and his dame, they just wanna buy a house, and they know it’s uncool to be packing heat. They don’t wanna wear no bracelets, much less end up in the stinkin’ meatwagon heading off to the Big House; so, instead, see, they’re just gonna sweeten the deal with moolah.
I can’t believe a buyer’s agent asked this Sacramento real estate agent yesterday to accept a kickback on the commission. She offered 25% of her commission to me as a bonus if I would just get her buyers into that house. What?
Yeah, my jaw is still hanging open. I had to tell her to hang on her to cabbage and just write the best offer that her buyers could write. I’m nobody’s stool pigeon but I’m kinda floored that she had the gall to ask such a thing. Is this Chicago? What’s next? No, I’m not going there because sure as crap somebody will try to do it if I say it. I’m not putting ideas into anybody’s head, not even as a joke.
This market is not bringing out the best in people. Some real estate agents are becoming forgetful. To some, the Code of Ethics is something dark and murky, in their past; they’re too busy crawling over dead bodies to get to that pile of gold. We simply cannot set aside our professionalism because the market is hard or inventory is low. I find this kind of behavior troubling because it reflects poorly on all of us.
