Email Elizabethsacramento home buyers
How Many Agents Can A Sacramento Home Buyer Hire?
The consensus seems to be lately that if one Sacramento real estate agent is good to have in your corner as a Sacramento home buyer, then 5 Sacramento real estate agents would be 5 times better, right? Just hire them all and ask all 5 of those agents to beat the bushes searching for homes for you, right? This is what some Sacramento home buyers believe. It’s also probably why they aren’t buying any homes. Hiring more than one agent is just not a good idea.
Buyers don’t seem to understand that the answer to how many real estate agents can you work with is one.
If a Sacramento home buyer is unhappy with her agent, then the solution is easy, fire the agent. But if the buyer is happy with her agent, why would she call another Sacramento real estate agent and try to put that agent to work for her? I refuse to work with other agent’s buyers, but not every Sacramento real estate agent operates in the same manner. Some don’t care if they are wasting time or interfering in another agent’s transaction. If a buyer looks hard enough, a buyer will find some desperate agent somewhere who will let ethics slide in hopes of putting together a deal.
The bottom line is there are no secret listings, really. Everybody gets their listing information from the same sources. True, I might tell some of my buyers about a new listing before it is official in MLS, but these are buyers who are exclusive to me and my team. At Lyon Real Estate, for example, we have the right to withhold listings from MLS for 3 days and put them into our internal database.
But please, don’t ask me to step on the toes of another agent just to bring some Sacramento home buyer who is not loyal to either of us a transaction — because that’s not how most of us do business. Pick an agent, and when your agent does a good job for you, stick with that agent.
Don’t Make These Sacramento Home Buying Mistakes
It can be a slow process, trying to buy a home in Sacramento, but it’s even slower if you don’t know where you want to live. Home buyers just starting out might have unreasonable expectations, and those types of expectations can lead to disappointment.
Before engaging a buyer’s agent to show homes, it’s common for buyers to identify and target a few communities. Agents can be a great resource, but buyers should really ask an agent to show homes when the buyers are ready and able to write a purchase offer. That’s not to say that an agent can’t help buyers to choose a place to live because that’s what we do. However, there are plenty of open houses every Sunday in Sacramento where buyers can go to look at homes, talk to other agents, get a feel for neighborhoods, without a personal escort.
Agents don’t hold all of the information anymore regarding homes for sale, but we do have access to MLS, which a buyer does not. We can send a buyer listings in certain areas defined by custom searches or however a buyer would like to receive the information. The best home buying website is generally the buyer’s agent’s own website or a feed directly from MLS.
Here are some of the common home buying mistakes I’ve heard about over the past few weeks that can easily lead to disappointment and frustration:
- Looking at homes with sales prices way above the buyer’s affordability point. It makes no sense to look at homes priced at $400,000 if your pre-approval letter maximum is $300,000.
- Dragging your agent through the same square-foot model home over and over, which a buyer does not like. If you really hate that closet and bathroom, it won’t look any different in the same model with different paint on the walls.
- Expecting a buyer’s agent to immediately respond to your email questions about new homes you just found on another website when she is showing homes to another client for a few hours.
- Asking personal questions of a seller to satisfy idle curiosity that have no bearing on whether the home is suitable for you and your children.
- Finding a home that fits your needs and pricing but not buying that home because you wonder if there might be some other home that is better for you. There is always another home.
Bottom line, if a home buyer needs to personally inspect 200 homes before buying a home in Sacramento, that buyer is probably not yet ready to buy a home. And that’s OK. But let your agent know and discuss expectations before asking an agent to show homes.
Can You Buy a Preforeclosure Home in Sacramento?
Lots of preforeclosure buyers contact this Sacramento real estate agent because I post my goofy-ass face on other real estate websites and often participate in online discussions about homebuying in my spare time. My husband doesn’t understand why I do it. He thinks I should do something else with my free time like going out to dinner or hiking in the foothills or searching the Internet for great airfares to Iceland. But then he didn’t understand why I agreed to be on a House Hunters show about short sales, either.
Most normal people, when they are away from work, focus on other things, stuff that is more fun to them. They lead what is known in some circles as a balanced life. Then there are those of us that belong to that special breed of craziness, those of us who are actually doing a job we completely love to the point that it’s totally fun and not work. We are passionate about our work. If that work also involves short sales, foreclosures and preforeclosures, it’s just that much more interesting.
Any person with reasonable intelligence (and some with less than that) can be successful in real estate and sell a home. Some of us go a step or two beyond because that’s what buyers want from us. They want us to possess the skills to buy a foreclosure, buy a short sale or buy that terrific preforeclosure home they saw advertised on another website for some ridiculously low price.
The problem with that is the pre-foreclosures are not for sale. These are homes made public because the sellers are in default. It’s not that easy to buy a preforeclosure but it can be done under certain circumstances. It’s recognizing those certain circumstances that make the difference.
For most Sacramento home buyers, though, buying a preforeclosure will never happen. That’s because they don’t really want a pre-foreclosure, they just think they do. What they want, what they really, really want is a good deal. That’s not necessarily a preforeclosure.
Sacramento Home Buyers Need a Reality Check
How does a seller today know if she has a real buyer who has made an offer? There are a lot of Sacramento home buyers wandering around who apparently look like a buyer, walk like a buyer, squawk like a buyer but they are not buyers. I wish there was some kind of test we could give them. As a buyer’s agent there probably is, but there is not from the listing agent’s point of view. That’s because the listing agent has no conversations with the buyer and no direct contact. We can obtain a preapproval letter, many of which are useless, and an earnest money deposit, but it still doesn’t mean the buyer is a buyer.
Now, you would think a real estate agent would engage in a lengthy conversation with a potential buyer, but the truth is most do not. A buyer calls an agent, asks to see a property and then writes an offer. In some ways, the agent is an order taker. Doesn’t question. Doesn’t probe. Just writes the offer and keeps her lips zipped.
You know, that’s not the way I was trained in real estate many years ago. I was always taught that we as real estate agents should form a relationship with our clients, counsel and advise them, ask questions, try to do what is best for the client, not just say “press hard, third copy is yours.”
Keeping buyers in escrow is a difficult job, even in a seller’s market. You might think that a buyer would not cancel escrow simply because there are so few other properties available. To cancel is to take a chance on buying nothing for a long, long time. Because there is not much available for sale in Sacramento. Pickings are slim and few between.
There are a lot of Sacramento home buyers but there doesn’t seem to be very many who are actually performing. The fallout rate seems to be much higher than it needs to be. We’ve got a lot of buyers begging for a home but shortly after they go into escrow, they cancel. For no other reason than cold feet. I eye them more suspiciously now. I question the quality of prospective buyers at the moment.
It would be nice if we could put potential Sacramento home buyers into an X-ray machine like the ones at the airport. Step in, put your feet on the footprints, raise your hands over your head and hold still. BZZZT. Nope, you’re not a buyer. You’re not going through Security to escrow. You can stuff your passport back in your pocket, grab your luggage and go home.
Sacramento Home Buyers and the Light Fixer
What is too much work for a first-time home buyer in Sacramento? I always follow up on my listings by emailing buyer’s agents after a showing. I thank them for showing my listing because I am grateful for their efforts. Also, I realize it’s tough being a buyer’s agent today. Buyer’s agents have to write a lot of offers and face a lot of rejection. When I ask buyer’s agents to tell me what their buyers thought of the home, sometimes they say their buyers felt the home required too much work. It makes me wonder how a buyer who has never owned a home before knows how much work it needs. Or, is the work required merely an overblown perception?
It’s no secret that most home buyers want a turn-key home. They don’t want to do anything but move into it, like it is a rental. They also want a good price, sometimes an unreasonable price, which is why some buyers gravitate toward short sales and foreclosures. But the days of those below-market values are gone. Poof. Over. Short sales and foreclosures, like any other home in Sacramento, are selling at market value and, in many cases, way over market value.
That’s if you can buy a home. Some buyers can’t. There are not enough homes for sale for every aspiring home buyer in Sacramento today. So, if a home needs a little bit of work, why not find out how much work it needs? Maybe it’s not as expensive as you might think. For example, maybe it needs paint. High quality paint costs about $25 a can, cheap paint is $10 a can. You need 2 cans of paint to paint an average bedroom. Maybe it needs a $50 light fixture? That involves connecting the black wire to the black wire, and the white wire to the white wire, and the ground to the neutral. It’s not that difficult. But don’t take my word for it. And don’t touch electrical without turning off the power.
Why not buy yourself a home improvement book and learn how to maintain your home? Take care of the smaller projects yourself. If you’re in the market to buy your first home, believe me, something eventually will break or go wrong, and you’ll find great relief in knowing how to fix it.
I have written a series of articles about Buy, Fix and Sell, involving my own personal experiences of home buying.
