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How to Know if Your Sacramento Home is Priced Right
If your Sacramento home is priced right, you will receive an offer.
Sellers sometimes wonder if their Sacramento home is priced right. Even though a Sacramento Realtor may explain how comparable sales work, how we arrive at pricing, it’s not unusual for sellers to be confused or to disregard the comparable sales. After all, if a buyer pays cash, the comparable sales are not always that important since there will be no appraisal. Believe it or not, not every buyer is concerned as long as the price pencils out or otherwise makes sense to them, especially if the buyers are from the Bay Area, like many of my buyers seem to be. They think our prices in Sacramento are remarkably affordable compared to the Bay Area, and they are.
You might wonder how a person could shrug off the comparable sales and proclaim they don’t matter, but then you are probably not in Sacramento real estate and you don’t deal with those sellers from another planet. I’ve had sellers scream that they did not care what the numbers showed, they wanted a certain price and if they could not get that price, then they weren’t interested in selling. Fine, I’ll go to the next amusement park ride and stand in line.
As a standard of practice, I always try to pass on all showing activity results during my listing period to the sellers. This can result in sellers getting very excited when they hear that a lot of buyers have showed up on a doorstep. They need a perspective. Following is how I explain the situation when a seller asks if all the action we’ve been receiving on showing a home means we should raise the price, because the seller now wonders if the Sacramento home is priced right. Normal reaction.
- If we receive 5 offers all over list price, then your home is priced too low.
- If we receive one offer less than list price and one offer at list price, then your Sacramento home is priced right.
- If we receive no offers after 3 weeks of showings, your home is priced too high (or something else is wrong)
In other words, it’s pretty much impossible in a seller’s market to price a home too low because the market itself will dictate the price. It’s finding that sweet spot, that place in pricing strategy that will generate a purchase offer. If it’s working, don’t mess with it. If you want assurance that your Sacramento home is priced right, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I’ll be happy to list your home and sell it at top dollar for you. It’s what I do.
The Tower Bridge of Sacramento in Winter
Crossing the Tower Bridge in winter from West Sacramento into Sacramento.
Riveted, bolted steel make up the bridge towers. Steel frames stuffed with concrete serve as the Tower Bridge counterweights, a technique used in the Oakland Bay Bridge; it is the counterweights hidden inside the towers that give the Sacramento Tower Bridge a sleek, beautiful appearance. No matter how many times we cross the Tower Bridge in Sacramento, it never loses its allurement. Designed by Alfred Eichler, the bridge was designed to lift on two separate electric motors from the middle, horizontal to the water and parallel to the towers, instead of at an angle, which gave it a more likable picture-postcard display.
After weather related delays and over-cost production, the bridge opened in December of 1935. The deck of the bridge now rises 173 feet to allow the passage of boats in the Sacramento River. This is important to Sacramento as the river flows from the Klamath Mountains, north of Redding, to the San Francisco Bay. The Tower Bridge serves as a landmark in Sacramento. We like to think that others outside of the city recognize the structure, but many people do not. It is a thing of beauty to us. So much that we argued in depth in 2001 over the color to paint the bridge. We settled on Gold. Some compared the outcome to baby poop, but on a good day, the gold glitters across the water.
Raised lift of the Sacramento Tower Bridge, January 24, 2016, by Elizabeth Weintraub
We were driving home from the movies in Davis, home to Land Park yesterday, and approached the Tower Bridge just as the lift went up. You can see the Tower Bridge lift in the close-up photo above, shot yesterday. The photo at the very top is leaving the bridge, driving into Sacramento, and you can easily spot the Capitol bathed in natural sunlight at the end of the street.
I list and sell a lot of homes in West Sacramento, so I have reason to often cross the Tower Bridge, if not driving to Davis to take one of our cats to the vet. I never get tired of admiring its exquisite beauty. It’s so charismatic to me that I’ve used it as a backdrop on my website.
An interesting note from history was to mark the opening of the Tower Bridge in 1935, the city released 1,000 pigeons, the original Twitter.
Below is one of my favorite photos, which I shot from the top of the levee bike trail near the Holiday Inn on Capitol Avenue last summer. It shows the Tower Bridge as it spans the Sacramento River.
Tower bridge early summer in Sacramento from the banks near the levee bike trail.
Photographs: © Elizabeth Weintraub
Reasons to Validate Overpriced Listings in Sacramento
A luxury home on the water in Sacramento, by Elizabeth Weintraub.
A pile of newsletters travel through my email each week, many of which I do not open. I just look at the headlines. I send out my own newsletter every week to thousands and thousands of subscribers. About.com will not let me tell you how many subscribe to my homebuying newsletter, but it’s an astonishing number. I don’t know why people care what I have to say or why they even read it. Some send me emails that say they have no interest in real estate at all, they just want to see what I write. Which floors me.
Lately, the sentiment I see throughout the real estate industry appears centered on overpriced listings. Much of it is giving advice to sellers but mostly to their agents. This advice is do not overprice and do not take an overpriced listing. In some ways, this is very insulting, and I’m gonna tell you why.
The notion that we as real estate agents, for example, are the Know-all and Be-all in real estate is absurd. You heard me. Yes, we are real estate professionals but that doesn’t mean we know exactly how much a home should sell for. Because we don’t. We know the price that is likely to attract a potential buyer; we know how much previous buyers have paid for similar homes. We know what is in pending status and the inventory on the market now, but we do not have a crystal ball. We are also not appraisers, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.
As a listing agent, I can help a seller to choose a sales price, but I do not choose the price for them. I am a Sacramento listing agent who works at the discretion of the seller. The seller has a very high percentage stake in the sales price, more than 90%. My stake is a relatively small slice of the pie. My job is to sell the property. I market real estate to buyers. I am a salesperson. The day a listing agent forgets that is the day an agent should quit.
Agents: I say who died and made you ruler of the universe? I want to grab these people by their shoulders and shake sense into them. It is silly to proclaim to the world that you and only you know the magical list price number for a seller. You don’t. You don’t really know how much a buyer will pay until you try to get it. You don’t really know how much a home will appraise for until an appraiser appraises it.
I have sold homes in my life that never in a million years should have sold at some of the prices they sold at, according to regular comps. There are many ways to evaluate a sales price. I tend to get the price the seller expects. Because that is my job. My job is to sell real estate in Sacramento. I am very clear and focused on that job. If I believe I can sell it, I’ll take the listing.
I recently had another home in Sacramento appraise at a value that astounds the neighbors. It astounded me that a buyer was willing to purchase the home under the terms and conditions it required, including price. Not only was the buyer willing to pay that price, but the home appraised at that price. I listen to my gut instincts, but I also listen to the seller. Then I formulate a marketing plan, and I sell that home. Real estate is not a black-and-white business. It’s a moving business. Constantly in motion. Like the Everglades.
While Elizabeth is in Cuba, please enjoy this previously published elsewhere blog.
Kicking Those Last Few December Closings into 2015
December closings are often tricky around the holidays.
My December focus, along with packing for our trip to Cuba and closing on our Hawaii house, is basically getting my last December closings sewed up in 2015. I’ve got 6 listings right now that I had initially hoped might close this month, but two have already rolled into January, which is OK. TRID regulations affect a few things but mostly it’s the same as always: last-minute issues popping up that the loan officers should have taken care of at inception and did not. When you’re a Sacramento listing agent like me, these loan problems are out of my control because I represent the seller, not the buyer.
There are some things I can handle with great efficiency, however. For example, yesterday a buyer’s lender required an addendum specifying a small change. I immediately whipped out the document in ZipForms, uploaded it to DocuSign, called my seller and while I had her on the phone walked her through signing the document and then emailed it to the buyer’s agent. I texted the buyer’s agent to let her know we needed the document signed and, in fewer than 15 minutes, the loan processor held the executed document in her grubby little paws.
That means one file will most likely close right away in my December closings, followed by another, leaving two escrows yet to close. The odds of closing over the remaining 7 business days are high enough on the remaining two that I imagine they will close this year, but it’s still nail-biting time. To close, you’ve got to have people on the job who care if it closes, who make it their personal project to close, and finding those kind of people in this day and age of people hating their shit jobs is really difficult.
It makes me think back to when I was an escrow officer in the 1970s. The reason I stood out among the sea of escrow officers is because I invested my time into closing, especially December closings. I studied each file, dotted each I and crossed every T, and often ended up going above and beyond what was expected me of me at that time to close. So many workers meander through workdays; they punch a clock, do a job and go to lunch, and they don’t care whether the work is finished or how many lives their performance affects. It’s just a paycheck.
Some Sacramento Realtors believe if they can flip a transaction into escrow, everybody else will force it to close. It works that way for some agents but that kind of cavalier attitude has never quite settled in with me. If I can interfere, find a way to make it close sooner for the parties involved, that’s what I do. The last few days of this month are often brain aneurysm avoidance days, but I certainly hope to bring my last few December closings in on time.
The Unique Difference an Experienced Sacramento Listing Agent Makes
These tips for choosing a Sacramento listing agent can make your life easier.
From many home sellers’ point of view, they really don’t know what a Sacramento listing agent does to sell a home because all they see is the peripheral stuff. When the home first goes on the market, they see the for sale sign in the yard, maybe open house activity on Sunday, strange business cards showing up on the kitchen counter, ripe for drawing mustaches on. After an offer is accepted, there is an escrow, disclosure paperwork, an appraiser, and some guy who doesn’t wear booties and tracks mud everywhere traipsing through tearing the house apart. Maybe a pest inspector who might cause you to run screaming into the yard with a baseball bat: hey, moron, stop poking holes in my house!
The sellers might even believe they are doing all of the work because they have to pack up the house and move. Their Sacramento listing agent is not in the dining room helping them to roll crystal stemware in bubble wrap. They don’t see what is really happening, but if their transaction closes smoothly, it’s most likely due to the efforts of their listing agent.
My clients generally know exactly what I do as their listing agent because I tell them as we go along. I try to keep them informed of my activities. There are some Sacramento listing agents, for example, who won’t tell a seller that an offer is about arrive for fear that the seller will build expectations and be disappointed if the buyer later changes her mind. I try to put myself in the sellers’ shoes, and I would want to know this information. It doesn’t mean I email a seller with the good news that an offer is in the works, but I let them know it’s a possibility and why it might not happen.
My sellers know I’m on their side and say it the way it is. Which is why I actually told a seller yesterday that I am sorry to see their home sell. OK, I was half kidding. They laughed because they understood. I’ve been working on it for a long time and have become intimately familiar with the property, am used to checking on the stats daily in my MLS reports, drumming up feedback from buyer’s agents’ showings, taking photos out of order to tweak and rearranging the order, lining up open houses, moving up the ranking on other websites by publishing more data, blogging about the home and its features, checking the comparable sales and new listings every week and working other angles to sell the home, relentlessly searching for untapped strategies.
Now the home has left my active inventory and moved into pending status. I’ve already anticipated all the ways things can go wrong in underwriting, the possible challenges of inspections and handled them in advance. Smoothed out almost every possible wrinkle because that’s what 40 years of real estate experience from this Sacramento listing agent buys my clients. I take the hell out of the transaction for them. Of course, they don’t realize this when they choose me to be their Sacramento listing agent, and they might never know what hell could happen because it generally doesn’t.
My continual goal is to find a way to convey this to a seller who is on the fence about whom to choose as a Sacramento listing agent. I am fiercely dedicated 100% to my clients. It shows in the work I do and the delighted reviews I receive. There is a difference among Realtors.
