Email Elizabethsacramento real estate agent
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.
How Old is That Sacramento Real Estate Agent?
Birthday cake from my husband several years ago.
OK, what I want to know is who did a search in Google for How Old is Elizabeth Weintraub? My analytics for my website shows me the search parameters that people look for when they land on my website, and I swear to God, that’s what somebody searched for yesterday. It made me laugh. Because first off, who gives a rats? And second, why would anybody look for that kind of thing?
I suppose it could be worse, they could be doing a dead person search for Elizabeth Weintraub on that Find a Grave website.
Most people who come to my website are looking for an agent in the Sacramento area to either help them sell a home or to buy a home. I work in a four-county area, with the bulk of my sales in Sacramento. It’s kind of hard to search for a real estate term in Sacramento and not land on an article I have written, either on my website or at About.com. I post 3 blogs a day on my own sites, another 3 blogs per week at About.com, plus I try to write at least one article a week at About.com, in addition to selling real estate full time and ranking as the number one top producer agent at Lyon Real Estate for Sacramento County (out of almost 1,000 agents). The stats at Trendgraphix show that no Lyon agent sold more homes than me last year in Sacramento County.
I know, it’s like when do I sleep? I’m also writing a new book that I’m tentatively calling Half Built, based on a period of my life from 1994-95. You’d be amazed at what a person can do who is focused, dedicated and hard-working. If you’re looking for a real estate agent in Sacramento, please call me at 916.233.6759. I’d love to help.
As for my age, I’ve been involved in real estate for 40 years.
Home Buying and Selling at the Same Time in Sacramento
For the past 8 years, the market has been so depressed in Sacramento that it was fairly uncommon to find anyone buying and selling a home at the same time. That’s because many sellers were doing a short sale or had walked away from their homes due to the falling market, while other sellers didn’t have the equity they desired. It was actually the perfect time to sell a home and move up because the move-up price was so much lower back then but people feel uneasy during challenging times and tend to do nothing.
Now that we have a somewhat stabilized market and prices have increased over the past several years, in some areas as much as 40%, there is more movement. Much of it, surprisingly, is in downsizing. Sellers are taking their equity and moving it into a smaller home. But they still need have a plan for home buying and selling at the same time if they don’t want to move twice.
There are many ways to accomplish this task, but the most common way to buy a home contingent on selling an existing home is to use a Contingency of Purchase addendum to the purchase contract. Agents would be wise to thoroughly read and familiarize themselves with this particular document because it has changed, and I’m not kidding you, it is complicated. It is so complicated that recently Sacramento real estate agents argued over its contingency period because it appeared unclear.
The COP by default will allow the seller to keep her home on the market during the contingency period of 17 days. It gives the buyer 17 days to get her home into escrow. If during this time period of 17 days, the seller receives, say, a non-contingent offer, the seller is free to ask the existing buyer to remove the contingency to sell. If the buyer refuses, the seller can give the buyer 3 days and then cancel the buyer so the seller can accept the new offer. It’s a first right of refusal clause for a buyer.
Confused yet? It’s almost an art to engage in home buying and selling at the same time.
Of course, it’s easier for a buyer to first sell her home, put it into escrow, and then look for a home to buy, contingent on her home closing escrow. Or, a buyer can sell her home, close it and rent back for a while as she looks for a new home to buy. Or, a buyer can enter into a long escrow period, say 60 days, to give her plenty of time to buy another home.
However, with limited inventory on the market, the buyers with an existing home who will have the easiest time are those with cash in hand after closing or a loan preapproval letter and no home to sell (or a home she doesn’t need to sell to buy). Yet, it’s not impossible to project a successful outcome for home buying and selling at the same time. You just need to hire a real estate agent who knows how to do it for you. You can call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I answer my phone.
Punxsutawny Phil Predicts 2014 Sacramento Real Estate
Punxsutawny Phil says this is the week in Sacramento real estate in which the rubber meets the road. When the market starts to hop like mad. Because finally, all of those winter vacations are pretty much over, the holidays are gone, the Super Bowl is finished — well, I heard it was finished in the first 12 seconds of the game, but I don’t follow football so I would not really know. But I do know almost everything there is to know about Sacramento real estate. Not ashamed to admit that.
2014 Winter Carnival in downtown St. Paul, MN
We can now freely hold open houses and not be freaking out over which football teams are playing, and whether visitors will come to the open house. The weather will begin to warm up a little bit, although we still desperately need rain, and I don’t care if it rains during an open house because people will still go out to look at homes in the rain. We are not wimps in Sacramento. We don’t cower in a little rain. Look at these photos of the Winter Carnival in St. Paul yesterday shot by my sister, Margie. It was 8 below zero.
2014 Winter Carnival Como Park, St, Paul, MN
On top of this, new listings are coming on the market. This Sacramento real estate agent has got about a dozen in the pipeline that I’m working on, and it’s these listings that will make up some of the March to May closed sales. You might think that May is a good time to go on the market, but actually May is a good time to close escrow. All of the activity for the next 3 months mostly originates in February. Think about that if you’re considering selling your home this spring. And be happy you don’t live in St. Paul, Minnesota where, dare I say once again just to remind you, it was 8 below zero yesterday.
Sure, we’ve got holidays this month but they’re not the type of holidays to interfere with real estate. I’ve got news for you: Punxsutawny Phil, the groundhog who saw his shadow yesterday, he wants you to buy a house. So do Presidents Lincoln and Washington and Obama. It’s the American thing to do, to own your own little piece of real estate, your own heavenly spot on earth.
Call Elizabeth Weintraub, your Sacramento real estate agent, at 916 233 6759. I answer my phone.
Photos: Margie Burgard, St. Paul Winter Carnival 2014
The One Thing a Seller Needs to Sell a Sacramento Home
The one thing sellers need to sell a home in Sacramento.
What does every home in Sacramento need to have to sell to a first-time home buyer who is obtaining financing? You might think the home needs a roof, and you would be right about that. Others might guess a floor and walls, and you’d be partially correct about that answer. Somebody else might suggest a kitchen, and while a home needs to have a sink and stove, it doesn’t need what you might call a full-blown kitchen or even a door to close off that kitchen area. The answer is every home needs a carbon monoxide detector.
Those carbon monoxide detectors have become the bane of our existence for a Sacramento real estate agent. I knew it when the law was passed that this would somehow trickle down to become the listing agent’s responsibility, even though it’s on the buyer’s behalf. Because although the law says homes are required to have a carbon monoxide detector, there are no carbon monoxide detector police about to crash that home and give the homeowner a ticket for not having a CO detector.
I imagine if the home burned down, and the insurance company could prove there was no carbon monoxide detector in the home, that the insurance company could find a way to reject a claim. But when a buyer pays cash and does not insist on a carbon monoxide detector, well, nobody will stop a seller from closing escrow without installing them.
The other question that comes up is how many carbon monoxide detectors are required in California for a home? Are they like smoke detectors and you need one in every bedroom? Nope. The law seems pretty clear that you need a carbon monoxide detector near the bedrooms. If you have a two-story house with a bedroom on the first floor, you need to install a carbon monoxide detector on each floor. If it is new construction, a carbon monoxide detector is required on every floor.
This might lead you to believe that if all of the bedrooms are upstairs you need only one carbon monoxide detector, as long as your home is not new construction. While, that might be the strict interpretation of the law, my experience shows that an appraiser will probably see this differently and most likely will require that the home have two carbon monoxide detectors. A third, if there’s a basement.
So, do yourself a favor. If you’re putting your home on the market in Sacramento, just make sure you have a carbon monoxide detector on every floor. The appraiser has the last word.
Here is handy fact sheet from C.A.R. about Carbon Monoxide Detectors in California. If you’re looking for more tips from this Sacramento real estate agent, feel free to call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
