Email Elizabethsacramento real estate agent
Is There a Real Estate App for That?
We all hate to face the fact, I suppose, that sometimes there is just not a real estate app for a Sacramento real estate agent. A conscientious real estate agent follows up, though, and never lets any sellers or buyers fall through the cracks, and that includes new business. For a long time, I had been guilty of letting new business fall by the wayside and die, even though I’m the kind of busy agent who is very detail oriented and pays attention the world around me. My solution for tracking business, staying on top of my files, was years ago to create systems, the kind of complicated systems with cross-checks.
You know how it goes in life, you’re driving along the freeway, for example, and somebody calls with information and, if there is note-taking involved, you might think: Oh, I’ll remember that, no problem. Except, of course, it is a problem because once other information finds its way to wiggle into your brain, the box that particular data was comfortably resting in gets shoved way to the back of the attic, where the dustballs reside. Phone rings again, dog>squirrel>gone.
My husband, a former journalist, has it engrained to carry a pen and pad, even though he no longer writes for a newspaper. That doesn’t do me any good, though, if he’s not sitting in the passenger seat. I’ve solved that problem, the need for a paper and pen, by a) printing map directions, even though I use GPS and b) tracking vehicle mileage in a book, with extra pages I can rip out. See, you can’t have a Plan A without a Plan B as backup. I always have something in the car to write on, and sometimes I end up writing on my car seat because I’m looking at the road. What was the last number? Oh, yeah, it’s here on the headrest, a number 9.
Now, of course, the trick is to get this information into a format where I won’t lose it. And this is where a third party is helpful. Yup, an actual real live person to keep track of this stuff and a system in which to do it. My particulars for selling Sacramento real estate are too specific for any one app to take care of what I need. Sometimes, what a busy agent needs is a virtual assistant utilizing an organized system to keep things from falling through the cracks.
I’ve already got a fabulous transaction coordinator on my team who handles the paperwork for my clients and makes sure every I is dotted and every T is crossed before we close escrow. But I needed a way to help me track my own business, and to assist my team members. I am really excited to have found a virtual assistant to close the cracks and make us all more productive and focused. Because some things, there’s just not an app for.
A Short Visit to Dunsmuir, California
On our way home to Sacramento from Mt. Shasta yesterday, we stopped by the ambrosial town of Dunsmuir, California. The front desk clerk at the Mt. Shasta Resort told us she lives there and was a bit hesitant in trying to recommend the town to us when we asked about it. I think she didn’t want to appear as though she was boasting in case we didn’t like the town and would somehow hold her responsible for her personal recommendation.
She was really nice to us. One thing I noticed about the people we encountered in Siskiyou County is they are incredibly polite and nice, well, except for the housekeeping police at Mt. Shasta Resort. Here is an example of the niceness in people: the clerk at the Sacred Mountain Spa had a difficult time figuring out a 20% tip for us. I tried to offer a bit of assistance by suggesting that it’s easy to just double 10%, you know, move the decimal point and then double it. She countered by sharing with us that she always leaves $10 and thereby most likely overtips but she doesn’t mind being generous; she doesn’t have to think about tipping or math, and it seems simpler to her. I can see where that approach would work in Dunsmuir, not so much at Ella in Sacramento.
If you like trains, you’ll like Dunsmuir and maybe the Dunsmuir Railroad Depot, the woman at Mt. Shasta Resort finally threw out there. There is a historical area on Sacramento Avenue that runs along the train tracks, but if you read a real estate ad for a home for sale on Sacramento Avenue, it will describe that location as being across from the river, which it also is, but it neglects to mention that between your new home and the gorgeous river lies the rail yard. Of course, I had to stop by a few closed real estate offices to peruse the homes for sale in the windows to see if my estimate of value for those homes was on the mark. I had guessed $150K and sure enough, a few along Sacramento Avenue were for sale at $159,000. See, you can take the real estate agent out of Sacramento, but you can’t take the real estate out of the agent.
Much of the downtown area appears built on a hill. The homes on one side of Dunsmuir Avenue are elevated from the street and the homes on the other side are situated lower than the street, so low that you have to take stairs to get to them, which I imagine means they might fight water retention during a hard rainstorm.
Much smoke in the area from lightning fires prevented us from completely enjoying the tremendous mountain views as the haze was a bit intense. But the weather was warm and the streets quiet. My husband had to stop to take a photo of the assumed food battles between the Pizza Factory and the Burger Barn. We both loved the throwback to our childhoods: the obscure Pacific Bell telephone booth situated on the main drag, Dunsmuir Avenue.
The phone had a dial tone, too, in case you’re wondering. It was a free phone sponsored by some of the businesses in town. Directions on the wall provided the extensions that would be important to people in town to reach such as Social Security, coupled with an extension to obtain a credit card. Any person wandering down the street who had a sudden urge to get a VISA card could pick up the phone to apply. I noticed, though, it was missing an extension for pizza delivery from the Pizza Factory.
Signs about town warned of the dangers of squeezing fish. Like me, you might ask, why would anybody squeeze a fish? Toilet paper, yes, fish, no. But that’s not such a dumb question if you’re participating in the catch and release program, and I’m not talking about jail time. Other signs pointed to fines of $25 to $200 for not picking up dog poop. There will be no dogs running loose in Dunsmuir, and you can’t bring your dog into every restaurant either. Civilized people live in Dunsmuir, I’ll have you know.
We can recommend the Dunsmuir Brewery Works for lunch, in case you’re ever driving by this part of the world and yearning for craft beer, juicy brats with the yummiest mustard seed varieties in a side of potato salad or maybe a mixed garden salad with heirloom tomatoes from next door, topped by adobo chicken. The flies are a bit crazy out on the patio, but large umbrellas keep the beating sun off your head and really, what else could you want?
The Trouble With YOU, Sighs Trulia . . .
“The trouble with YOU,” sighed my Trulia rep Charis, “is you want to make our website work according to Elizabeth Weintraub.” That accusation, which is certainly true enough and made me laugh, came about because I made mention of the fact that Trulia “was broken.” It’s broken because the website won’t do what I expect it to do, and no matter how much this poor woman (who doesn’t even work at Trulia anymore) had to say in its defense, it just doesn’t change that fact.
As a result, I have had to figure out how to manipulate the data in Trulia and make it work the way that I need it to work. It means that some of it needs to be tweaked on a weekly basis. If I sob and plead enough I can get my homes in Sacramento featured. The reps have been very kind to apply patches to my listings. My point is if Trulia wasn’t broken, though, they wouldn’t need to apply a patch.
Also, if Trulia wants to grab our listings and put our information on its website to generate content and assist to monetize Trulia, the listings should work and appear correctly. In my mind, Trulia probably ought to conform to its content generator’s needs and to assist real estate agents, not the other way around, because we are mavericks, an unruly bunch. But I suspect we are all willing to give an inch if Trulia will. Of course, if I were Trulia brass, I might be tempted to view agents as that buzzing sound we used to hear generated by honeybees, before they were all dying off due to climate change. I know how agents are viewed. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole.
Instead, you know what I really love about Trulia? I like the fact that when I’m searching for oceanfront property in California, I can go to the map and navigate all along the coast, for as far as I can drag and still retain the strength in my right finger to click the darn mouse, from the Oregon border all the way to Baja. This way I can click on every listing I can find on the ocean and drool. Other people might surf porn or shift through pages of Jimmy Choo shoes, but someday I will move to the ocean and I like to dream about oceanfront homes.
The thing with this type of searching is I am not serious at this point. If I was serious about buying a home on the ocean, I would not look on Trulia. Because Trulia doesn’t have every listing, it takes too long to upload new listings so I could miss an opportunity, and many of the available listings are actually sold. I would search in the MLS that only agents can access (our mothership) and hire agents in other cities. But I might start my search on Trulia to determine trends and find top agents.
See, Trulia, I have developed patience; after all, for 8 long years I negotiated and sold hundreds of short sales — which sprang up outta nowhere and hung around way too long. If that doesn’t teach patience, I’m not sure what does. So, I waited 2 days for my listing to show up in Trulia in order to claim it. Two days. It never appeared. We have an open house scheduled tomorrow, so I had no choice but to input that listing manually if I want buyers to see it. I realize that’s a rebel’s way to do it, and I’m messing with your system, but like any top Sacramento real estate agent, I do what it takes to give my sellers an edge.
Image:Trulia
MetroList in Sacramento Could Use Updated Technology
I wish MetroList would be more like me but if wishes were fishes most of us wouldn’t eat. When it’s 9:30 AM and you’re still on the computer typing away in your nightgown and you haven’t had breakfast and you’re starving to death, I would say that is most likely the sign of a dedicated real estate agent. If you ask my husband, he would say something different. He would use other adjectives and nouns, which I won’t mention.
If said husband walked into a certain home office and said his doctor ordered him to go immediately to the E.R., that same pertinacious real estate agent might have to download stuff to a flash drive or upload documents to the cloud before she could confidently grab her laptop computer and hightail it to Mercy Hospital before said husband croaks right there under the ceiling fan.
If it’s 3 PM and a lunch salad sits lonely and forlorn, half-made on the kitchen counter, because every time said real estate agent stops what she is doing to chop veggies her email dings with an urgent matter, that’s an agent who just can’t get off her computer. Some days are like that. Some days are not.
If every single day delivered 7 AM to 7 PM constant high pressure, I’d go insane. But fortunately, they do not. And that’s what makes being a Sacramento real estate agent interesting. There is variety. Intense situations, followed by a calmness. Who needs to be bipolar? (No offense to bipolar people.)
This morning MetroList totally messed up on-market listings. I heard it was a coding that caused the problem. Why-oh-why is a major software conglomerate like MetroList, on which millions of people depend, relying on a wonky plugin? No idea. But it prevented two new listings from going live last night so my photos did not download nor did the listings. You can’t always depend on MLS and technology. It seems real estate tool providers are always the last to adopt new systems. Yet, this is where much of the money is, in real estate, and the worker bees get crap.
But you can depend on this Sacramento real estate agent to be glued to her computer and responsive to callers, even if MetroList is down.
When Will New Homes for Sale in Sacramento Be Listed?
Near the end of August every year, this Sacramento real estate agent begins gearing up for the fall real estate market by listing more homes for sale in Sacramento. Normal people, on the other hand, are winding up family vacations, buying school gear and getting ready for Labor Day celebrations. Not busy real estate agents because we are not necessarily normal. We are loaded with listing appointments on our calendars to meet with sellers getting ready to list their homes for sale in Sacramento.
This is the second swing and revived housing interest period in town. The Sacramento real estate market is different from other parts of the country in that even with four seasons, the weather is so mild that we don’t deal with snow or much of a down market as the year winds down. Our fall real estate market generally starts off with a bang and then fizzles around Thanksgiving. If there is any time of the year that is a good time for vacation, and that’s questionable, December is generally the best time to escape for a Sacramento listing agent.
That’s because we work our tails off from January through November. But the second biggest months past the spring market are typically September and October. If you haven’t been able to sell your home all year, maybe it’s time to take a fresh approach? Re-list as a new listing at an improved price? Make a few repairs? Some homes take longer to sell than others, especially if they are unique and appeal to a smaller pool of home buyers.
I have new homes for sale in Sacramento coming on the market around Labor Day. A duplex in Fair Oaks, an affordable ranch home in Parkway Estates, a single-level in Natomas, a gorgeous waterfront home in the Pocket, among others. If you’re looking for a home to buy in Sacramento, why not use that first week in September to find the perfect home? This is typically when new inventory opens, not to mention, we desperately need more homes for sale in Sacramento to meet demand.
