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Myths About Sacramento Home Staging
Lots of people, apparently, want to know how Sacramento home staging works, especially those people who don’t live in Sacramento or are not professional real estate agents, because I get those calls every week. I’ve discovered there are some weird misperceptions about home stagers. The first is some people tend to believe that Sacramento real estate agents offer this service, when little is further from the truth. I wonder if they get this idea from HGTV? We can recommend expert home stagers, but we don’t do the work ourselves.
That would be like asking us to direct and produce a movie. We might enjoy stuffing popcorn into our mouths and gluing our eyeballs to the silver screen as we observe Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Ellar Coltrane slowly age over 12 years in that haunting movie Boyhood playing over at the Tower Theatre, but we don’t even know which direction to point a movie camera. It doesn’t mean we don’t recognize a good movie, connect with the content, scenery, acting and appreciate the aesthetics, but we don’t make movies. Holding an iPhone to video your cat chasing chicken treats is not directing a movie, which is what it would be like if a real estate agent suddenly decided to stage homes. Trust me, you want your Realtor to wear one hat. A real estate agent hat.
I have written many articles about home staging because I understand how staging works, but I do not possess that artistic ability nor the specialized training, and I don’t belong to the home stagers association. I sell real estate in Sacramento, and I’m a top producer real estate agent — that’s my shtick. You want top dollar for your home and to sell it as quickly as humanely possible, I’m your person. I market. I price right. I network; I don’t stage.
The second myth I hear from some people is they somehow hope that a Sacramento real estate agent will pay for the seller’s home staging. I don’t know of any agents in Sacramento who pay for their seller’s home staging, and that has never been my practice. That’s akin to washing the windows or fixing a hole in the roof, we don’t do it. The fee for Sacramento home staging is the seller’s financial responsibility. The seller will typically get more money if the home is staged, so it’s to the seller’s advantage to stage it.
For example, I recently sold a home that comped out at the top end, the very top end, at $250,000. We put it on the market with the home staging in place and immediately received an offer of $265,000. Now, the price to stage this home was roughly $1100 a month. Was Sacramento home staging worth it to this seller? What do your instincts tell you? As veteran agents, we learn over the years whose home staging sells and whose doesn’t.
Not every home needs to be staged and not every room needs home staging. Your Sacramento real estate agent can tell you whether your home needs staging. Maybe it doesn’t. She can also advise as to whether you need to play up the dramatics in every single room. That’s just the starting point. As we move through the sale process, sometimes we add other pieces of the puzzle to make the sale. I’ll even help a seller to rearrange her furniture, but I don’t pretend to be something I am not. I know what I am: a top notch Sacramento Realtor.
Hi, Elizabeth, I Am Looking at Your Website . . .
The caller starts out: “Hi, Elizabeth, I am looking at your website,” to which my immediate response lately has been to cut them off at the pass:“Well, get the hell off of it and don’t come back.” You might think whoa, what if that caller was a potential client, but I assure you it is not. It’s a telemarketer who heard Sacramento real estate agents have deep pockets and, trust me, she wasn’t looking at my website, she was staring at a computer screen with thousands of telephone numbers of Sacramento real estate agents.
Because for every phone call like this that I answer, there are also dozens of home buyers calling every day searching homes for sale in Sacramento, and they want to make an appointment to go look at homes or they want to talk about putting their home on the market. Talking to a telemarketer eats up precious moments in my life. I could be talking to a client instead and should be. I’m one of those agents who really doesn’t mind talking on the phone. Here’s a bit of a secret: sometimes, I even call other agents and speak directly to them instead of sending a text or email, imagine that!
Heck, I grew up with a party-line in my house, and I’m not talking about dancing about with lampshades on our heads. This was a 1950’s thing in which more than one household shared the same telephone line. Each had a special ring so you could tell if the call was for you, but you could also just pick up the receiver and listen to your neighbor’s scintillating phone conversation, like, I’m gonna be home late, honey, so put the tuna casserole in the ‘frig. I’m so happy now to have my very own cellphone in 2014 that drops calls left and right.
It’s kinda creepy to get these sort of telemarketing calls, though. What’s next?
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m standing in your bathroom wearing your panties.”
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m in your bedroom petting your cat.”
“Hi, Elizabeth, I’m in your kitchen drinking your bourbon.”
Well, that last one will get me home in a jiffy.
I had just listed another home in Elk Grove yesterday, one of those emergency listings that pop up sometimes out of nowhere and require immediate attention. It was really hot by 10:30, and I had arrived at the home in Elk Grove around 9 AM to shoot photos and complete my visual inspection. At first I tried to remove the old listing sign post from the yard, but at my age, I’m likely to throw out my back so I gave up on it. Been there and done that.
Driving down I-5 on my way back to my home office, what do I get but another telemarketer trying to sell me SEO services. I’ve been doing my own SEO for a decade already, just by writing articles that are important to buyers and sellers. You can read some of those on homebuying.about.com. But I also write blogs and contribute in community forums, and it’s kinda hard to go anywhere online and not find this top producer Sacramento real estate agent and her listings.
I’m probably turning into Andy Rooney in my old age. Except he was a bit nicer about his crankiness, I suspect, whereas I tend to really lay it out there. I make other people laugh, too, by it. When I told the caller I was on her Do Not Call list, she said they don’t have that kind of list where she works. Hello? Do you work in America? I suspect the federal government would like to know about this company.
And I’m sorry that these people have to work as a telemarketer. I guess it beats hanging out on the street corner and panhandling or working at McDonald’s, which is the threat I hear that some of these private colleges make to potential suckers, er, students. I get they are just trying to make a living. Maybe they should go into real estate? This is where all of the misfits go.
About Writing a Real Estate Blog
The oddest thing I have discovered is that some people, and I won’t tell you who they are, binge-read my Sacramento real estate blog. They start by reading about a certain topic, must develop a curiosity about the forward and backward buttons, so they start clicking and they don’t stop. It becomes a marathon. A real estate blog reading marathon. Now, I have a hard time believing that any individual can be so interested in the inner workings of my twisted nature or that anybody could possess a sincere desire to learn more about how to prepare a home for sale that a person would devote so much time to my dribble, but it doesn’t mean they don’t do it.
Funny thing is I have had people tell me they have had no interest whatsoever in something I had to say but couldn’t stop reading my real estate blog. I’m left to conclude they must find stuff I say amusing, or maybe I lead such a weird life, so completely different from their own that they like to view from the outside what goes on in somebody else’s life. Kinda like watching Reality TV, probably, without the coaching and do-overs and horrible people.
I’ve appeared on several TV shows in my life, and they are not as interesting to do as you might think. There is a lot of sitting around and a lot of Take 2, Take 3, Take 4, Take 5 and they keep doing it. That fresh, energetic explosion needs to be replicated over and over, and that’s really difficult to be spontaneous on demand. You have to think to yourself, what was I thinking about, what was my motivation, why did I do that? And then try to do it again, but it comes across as insincere and limp. Or, it does for me.
Which is probably why I will never make it as an actor. I’m a little old for that now anyway. Although I always did want my own home improvement TV show. A do-it-yourself TV show for women who use power tools. That idea had alway been simmering in the back of my mind, but then I got swept up and carried away in Sacramento real estate, and I’ve never looked back. I don’t want to be a celebrity anyway.
I intensely dislike doing seminars, too. Because when you’re on stage and you stop speaking, there is silence in the room. You’ve got to always be thinking about the next thing you’re going say, and that’s way too much work. I prefer dialogue to monologue. It reminds me of the van driver who transports tourists in Maui along The Road to Hana. This guy must talk non-stop for 8 hours straight. It has to be funny, engaging and interesting banter. Not only that, but he has to repeat it day after day, week after week and month after month. The same conversation every single day. That’s worse than having to eat Ralston Cereal for breakfast every day until you die.
Bottom line I can’t sing, either; I can’t act, I can’t draw anything but stick people and I can’t tap dance. I really possess zero artistic abilities except an eye for beauty and a desire to write. The next best thing is selling Sacramento real estate and writing a real estate blog.
Elizabeth Weintraub on Agent Panel at Zillow Event
Zillow has graciously invited this Sacramento REALTOR to appear on its agent Zillow panel this Thursday, September 11th, at the Courtyard by Marriott near Cal Expo. They are calling it The Sacramento Zillow Select Summit, and the program itself runs roughly from 10 AM to noon. I don’t have all of the details, but I imagine guest speakers will present a market overview, vendors will pump wares, and the agent panel will answer questions from a moderator about working with Zillow leads.
I suspect they asked me to appear on the agent panel because I am a top Sacramento real estate agent in real life as well as on Zillow. Today my Zillow profile shows I have sold 105 homes over the past 12 months. I support Zillow because I like its online format. It’s now about the biggest real estate site on the internet. To concentrate my online presence, I had to pick years ago between Trulia and Zillow, and I chose Zillow. Just lucked out with that selection. Because I’m the kind of person who when faced with the choice between picking heads or tails in a coin toss will almost always make the wrong guess. I’m rarely lucky with even odds.
The moderator is Brad Andersohn, who is in charge of Zillow Academy. Brad also used to work at Active Rain, which is where I got to know him a little bit before he left for Zillow. He once asked me to participate in an agent webinar for Zillow, and I gladly accepted his request. He’s such a friendly, nice guy who is passionate about his career. Who doesn’t love Brad?
I have been an early adopter of Zillow, ever since it first popped into being. I eventually signed up in 2006 and created a profile because the one thing I truly crave is information about real estate. I’ve watched it evolve over the years and today it has more listings and data than ever, including predictions about how much your home in Sacramento might be worth years from now. Not that I put a lot of stock in those predictions but it’s fun in much the same manner as to watch that coin-operated fortune teller at the Cliff House in Ocean Beach spit out a fortune on a tiny piece of paper. Sadly, they’ve since moved that antique to Pier 45, in case you’re wondering, but it still works. I’ve been to visit it. Just like I’ve been to visit the stuffed giraffe Zarafa at a museum in La Rochelle, France — some things are worth the journey to see, but I digress.
Afterward, there is a free lunch and an interactive session for an hour. But you need to first get a free ticket at the link above.
I’m gonna try to get all of my new listings put together before Thursday so I can focus on this event. Every so often, busy agents should probably stop work and give back to the real estate community. I work too much to ever be a mentor to individuals who are not on my team, but I can share in a group setting. The Zillow Summit will be fun and educational, and all of my team members are attending. Hope to see my other Sacramento agent friends there, too.
Then it’s back to selling Sacramento real estate. If any day is good for a real estate agent to break away for a couple of hours, though, it’s a Thursday.
Working With Bad Home Sellers Is Not On My Agenda
When you get to be as old and cranky as this Sacramento real estate agent, one of the benefits of still working successfully in the field of real estate is the fact I get to choose my clients, which means I don’t have to work with bad home sellers. Newer agents sometimes have to work with sellers they would rather not be involved with and other agents have skins as thick as a crocodile, so these guys don’t care if they are treated badly as long as they get paid. These are the “laughing all the way to the bank” agents.
But I’m not one of those “laughing all the way to the bank” agents because I prefer to laugh during other times in my life. We’re all different. I am actually envious of agents who can work with just about anybody regardless of temper tantrums and abuse. You can run into obnoxious people anywhere you go: the grocery store, an elevator, a garden center, driving down the freeway, the bars and pool halls of Midtown Sacramento, and you can just ignore the occasional jerk.
It’s harder to do that in real estate because it’s not always obvious. There are bad home sellers all over the country. Agents from Oregon to Florida have shared their stories with me, and you can read about it in the above link to bad home sellers.
Basically, I treat people the way I would like to be treated. With courtesy, professionalism and tact. But every so often I run into a monster, some creep who is demanding and ugly. I just don’t work with those people. I might refer them to another agent outside of my office, or I might tell them I can’t work with them at all. I certainly don’t want my team members to work with an individual who would cause them misery.
People don’t like to be rejected though. So, I can’t just say get outta my face, even though I might want to, because there is no reason to stoop to that level. But I can say that the home sellers I work with are simply delightful and enjoyable. There are no bad home sellers in the bunch, and I’m often dismayed when a transaction closes because our intense interaction comes to a close. So, yes, I don’t make as much money as I probably could if I worked with everybody I met. And that’s perfectly OK. I make enough to rank in the top agents in Sacramento.
