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One Way to Handle Christmas
My family was so poor in the 1950s that my drunken excuse for a father always bought our tree at a huge discount on Christmas Eve. After the bars closed. He told us kids that Santa Claus brought it at midnight, along with all of our presents. In a way, it was pretty cool because I never knew for certain whether it might be Christmas when I woke up. Stumbling around the corner, tightly clutching my robe — due to the fact that all of the heat was turned off at night and you could see your breath in the morning — I first sniffed the scent of pine needles before spotting all the decorations, the tree, and the half-chewed ribbons on the presents under it, and our dog, Lulu, slopping all of the water out of the tree stand. Christmas was a big deal.
Before global warming, we almost always had snow for Christmas in Minnesota, mounds and mounds of white, covered in a thin glaze of sugar, gleaming in the winter sun. Then, I grew up and realized how cold it is in Minnesota: bone-chilling, with iced earlobes that hurt like hell from frozen metal earrings, and snot-freezing in your nose, kind of cold. I moved to Colorado and then eventually to California, the land of Santa Clauses tied to palm trees.
I still carried on the tradition of Christmas. Some years I would fly home to Minneapolis, back when airline travel was glamorous, the golden era. Women wore hose and white gloves and little hats. I flew on the discounted student travel fare, which meant I could share the same space as those who paid 75% more and still smoke out my brains. Seats were roomy and comfortable. Today, the airlines have made travel so completely hellish that you pretty much are forced to fly business or first class if you don’t want to be stuffed into a can of sardines with the lid rolled up and locked.
If I didn’t fly home, I decorated the house and bought a Christmas tree. For my first Christmas away from home and on my own, I insisted on trudging through the woods to find a wild tree, chopped it down and hauled it home. As the years progressed, I was content to stop by a local Christmas tree stand and buy the biggest tree I could find, slap it on the roof of my car, tie myself in so I couldn’t open the doors and drive home with it.
After 30 years of this nonsense, I felt an urge to graduate to the (heaven forbid) artificial tree, but it had to be all white, flocked and enormous, which I figured would save me money year after year. As with most purchases that lose luster after a while, I began to yearn for a new tree, one not quite so big and not flocked (dropping bits the cats puked), and just plain green. A plain, artificial, green tree.
When that got to be too much work, I downsized to the four-foot tree you can buy at Target, the kind that comes with all of the lights attached, so all you have to do is a buy a box of miniature bulbs for decoration, the very same tiny bulbs the cats will knock off and bat around the house, right after they try to run up the tree.
After my mother died and we moved to Sacramento, the thought crossed my mind that we could get a smaller tree, perhaps the 10-inch-high standard issue desktop tree, but that seemed a bit ridiculous. Besides, by now I had married a Weintraub who did not share my Christmas tree traditions, which were dwindling, or personal views of Christmas, none of which was religious.
Instead, it seemed to make more sense to take a winter holiday over Christmas. Every year we go away on an extended vacation to some place exotic and warm. For many years, it had been trips to the Hawaiian Islands. In 2009, we toured Viet Nam and Cambodia. Last year it was French Polynesia. No tree. No presents. No glitz. No commercialism.
Tomorrow we go to the Florida Keys and new people move into our house to care for the cats in our absence. I wonder if our house sitters will miss the Christmas tree and decorations? They never say anything about it. I suppose they think we are both Jewish.
When the Mortgage Loan Officer Comes a Callin’
As the holidays draw near and business slows a little bit . . . seems like the perfect time for mortgage loan officers to jump on the horn and start dialing-for-dollars every top producer Sacramento real estate agent who answers her cell. Which means they probably don’t get an opportunity to talk to very many real estate agents in the Sacramento Valley, except for me. Because I do answer my cell.
The story is always the same. They are calling because they all of a sudden noticed that I close an unusually high volume of homes in Sacramento — much more than the average agent — so they figure, I suppose, that if they could align themselves with a winner, why, they would be a winner, too. Because most of these guys and, for some reason, they are almost always men, don’t have enough real estate business. Some of the mortgage loan officers, apparently, are relatively new to the mortgage loan business.
They are smart enough to figure out that they need to give an agent an incentive to work with them, but not smart enough to figure out that the agent didn’t become a top producer without a strong mortgage loan officer or two or three at her side. We’ll give you lots of seller and buyer leads, they promise. Yeah, because they have so many leads right now that they need to call a Sacramento real estate agent and beg for business, right?
Do I look like a person who fell off a turnip truck? Do they even know what that phrase means?
Why doesn’t their manager or mentor explain that a new mortgage loan officer starting out in the business would do better to match himself to a brand new agent? They can pick and choose a promising agent, a hard-working agent, and then go up the ladder with a soon-to-be top achiever, instead of banging their heads back and forth in the door jamb.
Because there is nothing a Sacramento real estate agent likes better than to answer her phone and find out it’s a solicitation call. I wish them Happy Holidays, but I can’t help them. Besides, I am off to the Florida Keys to continue my real estate business from this year’s winter getaway on the water. I’ll chat with clients while flamingoes strut about in the sand, but God help the phone solicitors.
Why Do People Start a Real Estate Career?
Few people know that I bought my first real estate brokerage at age 26. That’s sort of an anomaly, especially for a woman back in 1978. It’s even odder today because there are so few young people in real estate. Why, according to the National Association of REALTORS, the median age of a real estate agent today is 57. I imagine, however, that due to the troubled state of our economy, that median age is about to change.
Why do people start a real estate career? I’ll tell you why but agents aren’t gonna like it. They go into real estate because they can’t get a job doing anything else. That’s the truth. They are misfits. They either can’t conform to the outside workplace or else they can’t get a job.
It used to be mostly the rebels who sought out real estate careers, because in the 1970s, an agent didn’t need even a high school education. It was only over the past dozen years or so that education requirements for brokers were put into place. Today, to get a real estate license in California, apart from passing an examination, applicants must also complete a series of 3 real estate classes and be fingerprinted / checked by the F.B.I. As long as a person doesn’t have an arrest record (and there’s some question about that), just about anybody can get a real estate license.
I came into the business because I was already had a real estate career as an escrow officer. I was swamped revamping deals by helping agents salvage their blown-up transactions due to 18%-and-rising interest rates when I suddenly realized I was on the wrong side of the business. On top of this, I had completed real estate and escrow courses, carrying 20 credits a year, through a community college in Orange County, California, while working full-time at a title company. Not your normal Sacramento real estate agent entry to the business.
But today, we have a wide spread of unemployed people, kids graduating from college who can’t find a job, no matter what. Kids struggling to make it through college who can’t graduate because they can’t get into the necessary classes. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the over-50 group getting laid off. Companies can hire cheaper labor if they can dump expensive overhead. There is little loyalty between employees and corporations. It seems that the majority of people employed full-time are those in-between the 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds.
This means we’ve got this huge group of young people and all of us older people who can’t find work. I see that Warren Buffet is concentrating on young people, trying to pull them into the business. That’s a smart move. That’s what I’m telling my niece to do. Go into real estate. Start a real estate career. She might find that she has a passion for the business. She’s outgoing, personable, smart and hard-working. She seems to gain considerable personal satisfaction from helping other people.
The money is nothing to sneeze at, either.
You hear that, Laura?
Do Sacramento Buyer’s Agents Push Up Home Values?
Here is a new dig about real estate agents that I haven’t heard before. A potential seller of a home in Land Park called to talk about her overpriced home and how it got that way. During the conversation about how and why she paid too much for it — which I’ll get to another day in another blog — she mentioned that she was trying to buy a home in East Bay. When I mentioned I have a close friend who works in her targeted city and she might want to contact that agent to see homes, the caller threw out this crazy idea.
What I believe she was saying is that she doesn’t trust real estate agents, which is too bad. Because there are many excellent real estate agents in the business, and not every agent should be painted with the same tainted brush due to a few bad apples. This home buyer was reluctant to work with a Sacramento buyer’s agent who is a neighborhood specialist, i.e. an agent who works and lives in the neighborhood. Her feeling was the agent would try to drive up prices in the neighborhood by making her pay more for a home.
In other words, she believed the agent would not in good faith negotiate on her behalf in order to make the agent’s own home worth more. What? First, I told her, understand that agents are highly unlikely to try to push her to pay more to increase an agent’s own home value because they’re just not that diabolical. Second, comparable sales are good for only 3 months and unless a person is selling her home within that 3-month period, that sale won’t matter one little bit. A home that sold last year has no bearing on home values this year. Not to mention, one home sale does not increase the value in any given neighborhood.
What buyer’s agents want first and foremost is to make their buyers happy. They want satisfied buyers, buyers who are thrilled with the purchase of their new home and with the agent’s performance. Also, because they are home buyers who someday will be a seller, and the agent wants to eventually list the home as well. Agents want clients for life.
Buyer’s agents who are REALTORS have a fiduciary to the buyer and must hold that buyer’s interests above their own. Not only that, but Sacramento buyer’s agents want to get paid. They want to close the transaction but not at all costs. They are more focused on bringing together a buyer and seller on price than on manipulation of said price. A Sacramento buyer’s agent will do everything in her power to represent the buyer to her fullest and best abilities. Moreover, that neighborhood specialist will probably know more about the neighborhood than an out-of-area agent, which would be to her advantage!
A client called a few days ago to ask if I remembered her. I recognized her voice immediately. I also have Caller ID (ha, ha). She bought a bank-owned home in College Greens 5 years ago, and today it is worth considerably more than she paid for it. Location is everything, I reminded her. She bought in an excellent neighborhood and on a highly desirable street. She was just calling to say thanks for the holiday card. It was delightful to chat with her.
That’s the kind of happy buyer I want. It’s the kind of happy buyer just about every Sacramento real estate agent is after.
Success is Focusing on the Joy
Sometimes, people tell me that my blog is just what they need to read for that particular day, and I hope today’s blog is that inspiration for some of you. Today I want to talk about focusing on the joy.
One of my Elk Grove sellers called yesterday after putting her home into escrow to personally say thank you for the wonderful job of negotiation — which was appreciated by this Sacramento real estate agent. Everybody likes to be appreciated. I am especially thrilled when my clients are thrilled. It makes what I do meaningful and worthwhile. It also validates that all real estate agents are not the same, something often overlooked in this industry.
There are those in the public who believe all agents are identical to each other, and therefore, we should all be paid as little as possible, because they sadly believe that what agents do is something a trained monkey can do. It’s an insulting attitude toward agents, but I can’t help what other people believe. It’s also craziness. Get this, I have had a former client once ask me to cut my already approved commission and yet spend more money to sell his challenging and overpriced property. They don’t get it. No matter what we do, we can’t force them to get it. But we can spend our time instead focusing on the joy.
Downer and negative attitudes, well, that’s OK because there are plenty of sellers who work from a different framework. It’s human nature to gravitate toward people who like and trust you. How do companies attract loyal and dedicated employees? They treat them well, show respect and value their contributions to the company. How many companies do you know of nowadays that do that? They don’t denigrate and expect an employee to perform well. ‘Cuz employees will quit and walk off the job.
Except real estate agents. Real estate agents take more abuse than most because there seems to be more of it going around. Tempers flare. Unreasonable demands made. Particularly near the holidays. Fortunately, I don’t encounter rude or demanding people very often and, if I do, I manage to stay clear. My sellers are delightful; I’m happy to say. It gives me great pleasure to call them with good news. I spend my time focusing on the joy.
Like this morning, I was able to call a single mom and let her know that not only is her short sale approved by both lenders, but she’ll receive $3,000 at closing, and we are closing the day after Christmas. I have one more Happy Thanksgiving call to make this morning as well, to say the nervous buyer has finally emerged from underwriting and his loan will close. This is a special business for those of us who harbor the right attitude and surround ourselves with fabulous people.
Successful people tend to concentrate on focusing on the joy, what brings them joy. Happy Thanksgiving.
