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Some Sacramento Home Buyers Should Not Buy a Home
A good reason not to buy a home in Sacramento is a buyer might not be able to afford it. Looking at the situation purely from a financial point of view, it should not be that difficult for some Sacramento home buyers to understand why a seller would refuse to make a home “affordable” for them by discounting the sales price below market value. Especially an investor who looks at his investment the same way one might consider shares of stock: it’s impersonal, and the only thing that matters is whether the price has gone up or down.
Non-affordability is not an argument nor a negotiation tactic. If you’re standing by the entrance to a freeway with a sign that says Will Work for Food, it’s possible a passerby might offer you a job or a good-hearted driver might flip you a twenty, but asking for charity when you’re buying a home is not quite the same thing. Yet, that doesn’t stop buyers from requesting it. Further, a refusal does not mean the seller is a meanie and big ol’ grouch, either.
An agent asked my seller yesterday to “have mercy” for his buyers, because they are young, with a small family, struggling and pregnant. These stories have a time and a place, we encounter them every day, but do they pertain to housing, to Sacramento real estate? Are sellers heartless, cruel and without compassion if they don’t reduce a sales price so cash-strapped buyers can purchase a home that is outside the boundaries of their financial reach?
I wonder if buyer’s agents should push a product that people can’t afford to buy? Not every buyer needs to own a home. Not every buyer should own a home. Maybe, just maybe, the buyers should not buy a home. There is no shame in renting a home, and millions of people are tenants. If people did not want to rent a home, there would be little reason for investors to buy single-family homes or condos as a long-term hold investment.
Yes, I realize just about every Sacramento real estate agent you run into will say you should buy a home. But maybe you should not.
When Sacramento Home Buyers Cancel a Contract
Delivering bad news to a seller in Sacramento is every bit as horrible as shooting antibiotics down your cat’s throat. You know it’s gotta be done, and you’re the one who’s gotta do it, but it’s not pleasant. I don’t know a Sacramento real estate agent alive who wants to tell her seller a buyer has gone sideways and fallen off the edge of the cliff, but so many of them are not watching where they’re walking these days. They seem to be unsupervised.
La-dee-la-dee-la-dee-dah, oops, over the cliff. It’s almost like a video game. Not real.
I blame it partly on DocuSign. It’s so easy to sign a residential purchase contract these days, why, you can sign on your cellphone. Blip, blip, done. It’s easier than buying a latte-half-soy-pumpkin-caramel at Starbucks. With whipped cream. Except by the time you finish consuming that 800-calorie fat bomb, at least you feel satiated. When Sacramento home buyers sign a purchase contract, it’s much more forgettable.
Oh, did I buy a house this afternoon? Slaps forehead. How silly of me. No, sorry, I didn’t want to buy a house. I wanted tickets to the TBD fest. Clicked the wrong thing. Please cancel the contract.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when I find myself grilling buyer’s agents about how much time they have spent with their buyers, how well they know them. Agents tend to use the term “client” rather loosely. Some stranger calls, asks to meet at a home and, around 2:00 AM, after the bars close, that person decides to sign the RPA waiting patiently in DocuSign, is that person a client? Or, is that a person we’ll have to chase around for the next couple of weeks to get the cancellation signed because her intentions to buy a home were never there in the first place?
Perhaps buyer’s agents should discuss next steps and consequences, and help a buyer figure out if the buyer truly wants to purchase a home before presenting a buyer with click here.
Where You Will Find Your Dream Home in Sacramento
Thinking about a dream home in Sacramento?
Buyers who are looking for a home in Sacramento tend to end up on my Sacramento real estate website because they find the link for homes in the area where they want to live leading to my site. I am not sure why my website tends to rank higher in Google than others but it’s a site I’ve worked very hard to support, and I’ve protected my domain name from inception.
I also create a lot of content for my readers that they find useful. I blog about what happens to me from day to day as a Sacramento real estate agent and woman over 60 who can’t believe that nobody has yet written the book: Shit That Happens to You When You Get Old. This drives readers to see what I’ve been up to. Recently, I’ve added a “subscribe to” link directly to the right of my blogs so my readers can enter an email address and voila! My blog will appear in their email every morning, no more clicking around. But they know that they can always visit my website to find a home in Sacramento.
I love to connect online, reach out to clients and showcase my sellers’ homes to a local as well as nationwide market. Every so often I’ll get an email from an agent who works at any of the smaller competing brokerages around town. They write to say that when they type the address of their listing into Google, some random home in Sacramento, my website pops up. This upsets them to no end, and they accuse me of theft, as though I had anything to do with their non-ability to maintain and promote an online presence.
Every home that is for sale in MLS throughout the Sacramento Valley is on my website, just like you’ll find on any other agent’s website through an IDX. The fact that an address entry into a search engine also directs buyers to my website is a credit to the fact that I am a top producer in Sacramento who sells a ton of homes. I’ve also been writing online for years. I am tough competition for other agents.
Yet, that’s a great benefit to my sellers. If they list with another agent, though, that home in Sacramento could very well be showcased in Google with a link to my website, so they may as well list with this Sacramento real estate agent to start with.
How to Help Senior Real Estate Clients Use the Internet
When people my age complain about using the internet, I like to point out that this Sacramento real estate agent has been online for 23 years, having first signed up for a Bulletin Board in 1991, at which time my first sentence ever composed online was swiped from Steve Martin: I was born a poor black child. That experience prepared me for eWorld in 1994 using my very own 900-baud dial-up modem. I was so excited. I wasn’t using the internet much for my real estate business back then, it was much more a network of people, unlike the spam and mass product marketing of today.
It takes a while for some older people to become comfortable using a computer. Of course, I can recall when we had no computers. And then in the 1980s when only secretaries used computers, which forced us Type A personalities to say, oh, crap, just give it to me and I’ll do it. I bought my first IBM clone in 1988 and promptly took the computer apart to examine its hard drive, and then put it back together again. I read the DOS Bible at night to understand how they worked.
I used one of the first voice mail systems to run a pet recovery business on the side, called Pet Crisis Hotline. But I didn’t use a computer for real estate.
When Apple pulled the plug on eWorld and shut it down, I was devastated. Completely crushed. That happened, I believe, around 1995 – 1996. We knew it was coming because Apple informed us of that impending doom. It meant eWorld users would have to switch over to AOL, which would cost twice as much and we didn’t know anybody at AOL. Waahh. It was a strange new land.
I try to use my former experiences when I work with senior real estate clients who struggle with the computer. They don’t know how easy they have it because they don’t know how hard it used to be. Before Xtree came along, we had to use DOS all of the time. That was like slumping through the mud in a Goldie Hawn GI uniform, crying in the rain. Real misery. I have known real misery, and I never want my clients to know it.
When I first introduce my senior real estate clients to DocuSign, for example, I upload a one page form I created entitled TEST, with their name on it; it’s personalized to make it friendly. I walk them through how to set up a signature and sign that initial test page. Then, when we get an offer, their information is already in the DocuSign system and it’s easy-peasy for them. There is no heart attack panic to get it signed or computer crash concerns.
If you’re looking for a Sacramento real estate agent who shows compassion, even if her senior clients are not tech savvy, you’ve come to the right place. Let my experience guide you. Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
What Kind of Sacramento Real Estate Agent Does That?
It’s not unusual for an agent to hire this Sacramento real estate agent, or for any of my clients to have held at some point in their lives a California real estate salesperson license, because roughly 1 in every 35 people in California has a real estate license. Having passed the real estate exam and being entitled to practice real estate for 4 years, however, is no guarantee of knowledge, and it certainly does not reflect experience, yet there is a certain comradery among us agents.
I say this because I just closed a real estate transaction in Fair Oaks for a couple of sisters, one of which is a real estate agent. They found me online and read many of my blogs, articles on About.com, and were impressed with my decades of experience. But they still wanted to interview several other agents. Actually, I don’t know if they ever did because after they hired me it didn’t matter. I presented a strong case to choose me over another agent they were considering because I have a strong case to present. I don’t have to sugarcoat any facts or make myself sound better than I am to attract clients.
After the sale of this particular duplex closed escrow, I called to let the sellers know I had received confirmation of closing. It’s important that I speak directly to the sellers when a transaction closes, even if we’ve been communicating all along through email or text. I don’t want take a chance of a technology failure to deliver the news. So, I do the old-fashioned thing: press my Bluetooth earpiece and demand a phone call.
Sellers often like to reminisce during these types of conversations, and this seller was no different, even though she was a real estate agent. She said that what I did to truly earn my commission in her eyes was how I handled the situation when we received an offer that was $9,000 below list price. I advised her to issue a counter offer at list price because I believed she could get list price.
I didn’t deliver this advice off the top of my head. I studied the way the offer was written, reviewed the proof of funds (it was all cash), looked up the history and production of the buyer’s agent, analyzed the deposit check, among a myriad of other things that I do upon receipt of a purchase offer. Sellers pay me to think, not to react without consideration. I’m not a messenger, I am a negotiator. Given the present inventory on the market, and the attractive price of this duplex, I believed the seller could demand list price so that’s what I advised her to do, to counter back to list price. Which was accepted, btw.
There is a fine line between telling a seller what to do and advising a seller. I am not a White Knight Agent. I don’t make decisions for my clients. I deeply care that my clients are informed, and I deliver my advice based on experience and knowledge. I’ve worked with agents who get themselves all worked up into a lather and somehow superimpose themselves into the escrow, which creates horrible nightmares. I don’t lose sight of my position nor fabricate answers for my clients.
The seller asked out loud yesterday, after her reflection on events: What kind of agent does that? What kind of agent tells a seller she should counter? I guess this one. She seemed to be blown away that a Sacramento real estate agent would actually do what is best for her client. Although, I don’t really understand why. We have a fiduciary to our clients. It doesn’t matter to me if the seller wants to accept a purchase offer or send a counter offer or ignore the offer as long as the seller is happy. I suppose I should ask her for a review.
