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The Jelly Belly Factory Tour in Fairfield
It is possible for a Sacramento real estate agent to have too much fun? From champagne and lobster at Rue Lepic, to Van Morrison in Nob Hill, to the Grace Cathedral, to the Jelly Belly factory, to Thomas Dolby at the Crest, I’m pretty much exhausted. That’s not counting Thursday night at the Club Fugazi to catch Beach Blanket Babylon. Which means I am happy it’s Sunday, and I have a day to catch my breath before jumping with both feet into Monday.
Usually, I go nowhere. I do nothing really exciting. I am not one of these let’s go out and party guys. Way too old for that. My idea of a good time is to list a home for the maximum a seller can realistically expect to receive and to exceed my seller’s expectations. My passion is real estate. After that, I’d just as soon curl up on the sofa with a purring cat and watch Boardwalk Empire, as my husband occasionally massages my feet.
As a result of the past couple of days, though, I managed to receive an offer for a home in Elk Grove from a very motivated buyer, complete most of my holiday shopping in Haight Ashbury and shove an entire bag of Jelly Bellies down my throat. OK, we picked up some fudge, too.
If you’ve never done the Jelly Belly Factory Tour on your way back to Sacramento from the City, you owe it to stop in Fairfield. An agent at another real estate brokerage called and asked me what I was doing. “I’m putting on my Jelly Belly hat,” I responded, which was indeed my activity when I answered my phone. Oh, says he, you must be in Fairfield. This is a favorite activity for families with kids, but you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy the tour.
Being a Saturday, we didn’t get to see a lot of production in the factory, but you could smell the bubble gum scent wafting in the parking lot, which was being processed in a small part of the factory. Not really my favorite. President Reagan’s favorite, they remind you, was licorice. Seems sort of boring, especially since you can get licorice in other forms. I lean more toward cherry or cinnamon flavors. An added bonus was the fact we received samples of Jelly Bellies along the tour and a free bag at the end. The tour itself involved gazing mostly at production lines and conveyor belts that were not moving or staring at a video screen showing a variety of brightly polished Jelly Bellies rolling along.
An astonishing part of the tour was the number of robots in production. Real, actual robots. They wouldn’t let us take photos, and I wasn’t about to risk my free bag of Jelly Bellies to violate that policy, or I would show you. We watched robots picking up crates of Jelly Bellies from one conveyor belt and setting them on another conveyor belt. I wondered how many jobs were replaced by those robots. It was like something out of The Jetsons. And don’t you hate it when the only futuristic thing we can ever compare anything to is the Jetsons? A goofy cartoon from the 1960s?
I believe you would like the Jelly Belly Factory Tour. But go during the week, when there is more to see and probably fewer crowds. You’ll find the Jelly Belly Factory at 1 Jelly Belly Lane in Fairfield, just off Interstate 80. Reduced hours on the weekends from now until the end of 2013, due to the holidays.
What it Means to Be a Motivated Seller in Sacramento
It’s not unusual for sellers to ask a Sacramento real estate agent to please tell buyers that they they are motivated sellers. They think that the term “motivated seller” is a code phrase for something important and immensely material to their marketing. I suppose they get this idea because they see the words “motivated seller” in other agent’s listings and think we speak some kind of silent language to each other.
They’re not completely wrong. Agents do engage in conversations with other agents that sound completely foreign to the public. We burn sage and dance naked under full moons, too, but I’m not telling you where. However, the truth is most sellers have no idea what “motivated seller” really means. It doesn’t mean what they think.
First, let’s look at why they think they have to say it. Some sellers believe that even though their home is on the market, some buyers and their agents might wrongly presume that the sellers don’t really want to sell. The reason that buyers and their agents might presume a seller might not want to sell is because the price of that home could be unreasonable or, in some instances, absurd. So, sellers want to assure buyers that they are not unreasonable, they are not absurd, and they really do want to sell even though it might not appear that way because, guess what? They are motivated sellers.
Every seller on the Sacramento real estate market is motivated or they shouldn’t on the market. An agent who slips “motivated seller” into a listing is typically telling other agents in that agent-speak-code that their seller is priced too high and will not reduce the price. It is the agent who is desperate. The agent desperately wants an offer, any offer, even a lowball offer, so they can take that offer to the seller and beat the seller over the head with it until the seller lowers the price.
It could mean the motivated sellers are stubborn, cagey and inflexible. The listing agent might be hoping that other agents will shock the seller into reality.
A motivated seller who is motivated to sell presents his home in the best possible light, and chooses a sales price a buyer is willing to pay. He doesn’t have to advertise that he is motivated because his home listing and sales price will say it for him.
Crooks and Real Estate and the Internet
My husband used to cover criminal courts as a beat newspaper reporter in Chicago, and he says crooks get caught because many crooks are stupid. Can’t say that I know very many crooks, if any, but my personal feelings are if a person is stupid enough to be a crook when the other choice is to not be a crook, it seems likely that the person is stupid enough to make a stupid mistake.
I’m not talking about the people who are starving for a baloney sandwich and nobody will give them any money as they stand begging at the corner of the freeway, so they swipe a loaf of bread from the corner grocery; I mean the guys who would knife you in an alley and grab your wallet, along with your wedding ring. Or, kick in the door of your home and run off with your big screen TV after pulling out all of your copper plumbing.
Speaking of which, another seller in Sacramento just had his AC unit stolen from the yard while selling his home. I mentioned this to sellers yesterday as I listed their home in Elk Grove. Some people install cages over their exterior AC units. But this couple have a neighbor who kind of sounds like Gladys Kravitz, so they will probably be OK. I have neighbors like that in Land Park, and one of them is a retired police officer. There was once a time when you didn’t want anybody poking a nose into your business, but not so anymore.
Which brings me to the point, and I apologize for the long-about way I went to get here, that not only are we dealing with real-life crooks in Sacramento who are in our faces, but we have crooks who run amuck all over the Internet. These people don’t think of themselves as crooks, which makes it even more challenging. However, they swipe content that belongs to the person who wrote it and post it on their website as original content. That qualifies for crookism.
Now, I think it’s bad enough when a Sacramento real estate agent, for example, hires a professional writer to write a blog for that agent, because that’s not what blogging is about and it’s misrepresentation in my book, but it’s a hundred times worse when they intentionally swipe content.
Imagine my surprise this morning when I came across a response in Trulia that was copied and pasted by an agent in San Francisco, and it was my words that this agent swiped. Not only that, but it was my words from a response to another post I made on Trulia. So, he stole the content from the same website that he plagiarized. Where I, the original author, would likely spot it.
I noticed it because I recognized my own words. Most people don’t write like I write. I string phrases together and use certain words in a way that other people don’t. It’s one of the reasons why About.com hired me. I have a unique voice. And when somebody tries to take it from me, I will put a stop to it.
You can’t take photographs or words or articles that you find online and republish them. Everything online is copyrighted, and to reprint, a person needs permission. You can’t just give credit to the person who wrote the piece, either without obtaining permission. Getty Images is suing a real estate agent because she re-blogged (with permission), another agent’s blog (not mine), and the image in that blog belonged to Getty Images.
The moral to all of this blathering is help the hungry, don’t swipe AC units, and don’t steal online material.
Why Sacramento Listings Are Withdrawn, Canceled or Expired From MLS
Not to have a single withdrawn, canceled or expired real estate listing in today’s Sacramento real estate market is completely impossible among top producers, yet some websites rank agents by percentage of listings sold. If a Sacramento real estate agent had only two listings a year — and that’s about the number of listings that most agents list — and she sold one and the other seller canceled, the agent would show a 50% ratio, which is really bad.
There are many reasons why a home listing in Sacramento might not see its way to closing, and most of those reasons are out of the agent’s control. Let’s take a look at withdrawn or canceled listings, for example. This is excluding a canceled listing that comes back on the market with a new MLS number to reset the days on market, or is off the market for a spell during a winter vacation or improvement project. Typically, 3 things cause a canceled listing:
- Insanity
- Exhaustion
- Overpriced
Insanity. When an agent deals with a large cross section of the population, she is likely to encounter a few sellers who suffer from sort of mental incapacity. They could be completely psychotic or simply bipolar but not every seller is balanced. Is it the agent’s fault that she doesn’t have time to administer the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test prior to accepting the listing?
Exhaustion. This happens more frequently during short sales because these types of transactions take much longer than other types of home sales. If the buyer, for example, drops dead or buys another home (same thing to the seller, basically), thereby canceling, the short sale can start over. There are many reasons for short sale rejection, and sellers need patience to eventually close. Some sellers give up the fight and choose foreclosure.
Overpriced. This is the most common reason for a withdrawn, canceled or expired listing. It is the worst mistake a seller can make, but sellers choose the sales price. When a home doesn’t sell due to price, sellers become angry at themselves and some of that anger ends up hurled in the agent’s direction, too, because who wants to squirm in their own hostility all by themselves? Misery loves company.
There is a guy in my real estate office who makes a very good living by working with withdrawn, canceled and expired listings. He spends all day in a space about the size of a phone booth calling these sellers. Can you imagine his phone conversations? The guy has got to be an armadillo in disguise or a saint, I’m not sure which.
In any case, all of these canceled listings can affect an agent’s percentage performance on some websites, and percentage of listings sold is not an accurate indicator of the agent’s actual performance.
A Tip for Sacramento Listing Agents About Showing Followups
My personal belief, as a top-producing Sacramento real estate agent, is every single one of my sellers deserves to hear about all of their showing activity. I mean, just put yourself in your seller’s shoes. Your home is for sale, you see business cards on the table when you come home so you know agents have shown it, but you hear nothing from your Sacramento listing agent about those showings? You would have no idea about what’s going on if your agent doesn’t follow up.
And that is not a good place for a seller to be. That, people, is a place of anxiety. My intentions are to never make my sellers anxious or stressed out. Part of my job as their listing agent is to make the process of selling a home in the Sacramento Valley move as smoothly as possible for my sellers, with the fewest hiccups and disruptions.
For example, even if I have nothing to say, if for some reason there has been no showings for a week and not much has happened in the neighborhood, I still try to check in with my sellers and provide them with updates, even if it’s nothing more than # of hits in MLS. For crying out loud, something probably sold within 6-block radius or a new home came on the market, and sellers might want to get that information from their Sacramento listing agents. You think?
I am constantly analyzing why a home might not yet have an offer. The difference between me and another agent is I try to share those thoughts with my sellers — to come up with a new strategy if my existing strategy is not giving us the results we want. With some homes, we just need to wait, be patient and continue present marketing because there might not be as many home buyers in that particular price range.
But to not follow up after an actual showing by a buyer’s agent with buyers in tow, well, that’s unthinkable in my book. Following up with the buyer’s agent is easy, yet many agents don’t do it. They say buyer’s agents don’t respond, and that’s true, some of them don’t. But some provide valuable buyer feedback. By contacting buyer’s agents, I’m also giving them my email address so they can quickly address a concern their buyer might have had but they didn’t yet have time to ask me.
Here’s how Sacramento listing agents can do it. Go to MLS and click on your listing to open it. Click on the box that says “SUPRAweb Showing Activity,” which is located under the row of photos on the very left of the page. That will open a small window in your browser showing all of the activity for that particular home. Don’t stop there. Instead, click on Log On to SupraWEB, on the right-hand side. Sign in with your user name and password.
This will take you to your Showing Dashboard, which reveals all the showings for all of your listings. You can change your dashboard date range but I keep mine set to the past 2 days because I constantly check this dashboard. Right there, in front of your face, are the emails, times accessed and all of the information you need about every single buyer’s agent who showed your listing. Click on the email, and it will automatically open an email for you to send the buyer’s agent a message.
And there you have it. Now you have no excuse not to keep your sellers updated with feedback from agents who have showed their homes. This makes your sellers happy, both of you informed, and it gives you a chance to build a rapport with the buyer’s agent.
