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Why Other Curtis Park Agents Gave This Seller a Higher Price
A seller in Curtis Park wants to put her home on the market next year and is looking for a Sacramento real estate agent now. She is calling agents to find out how how much her home is worth today. Listing now or waiting for spring is a hot discussion for many sellers at the moment, but the fact remains the price an agent names today is not the price the home will be worth next spring. That home in Curtis Park could be worth more or it could be worth less.
Plus, if it’s a Curtis Park home that few people want to buy due to location, condition or the seller insists on an over-the-top-of-market price, it could not sell at all. That’s always a very real possibility that few want to face.
I am always happy to talk with sellers who have future plans and are not ready to act right now. For one thing, if they are calling a bunch of other real estate agents, it’s probable many of those agents won’t still be in the real estate business by the time the seller is ready, which certainly decreases my competition — day after day I receive notifications via LinkedIn of agents who used to work in real estate and have since taken jobs in other industries. But I also want to remain in sellers’ minds when they are ready to list a home.
If they forget my last name, they can do something simple like go to Goggle and put in Elizabeth and Sacramento Real Estate, and out of the top 5 hits, four will be me. Or, they can just search on the keywords “Elizabeth Sacramento,” and in the middle of links for the incredibly delectable Ginger Elizabeth chocolate store in Midtown, they’ll find my website. It’s easy to find Elizabeth Weintraub on Google.
This particular seller remembered my name, though, because she contacted me a second time. By now, she has talked to other real estate agents, and she says two of them gave her a higher price than I did, and they both outbid each other. It’s so frustrating when this happens because I don’t want to say anything bad about another real estate agent, and I understand why they feel the need to falsify information to the seller, but to intentionally lie is considered unethical.
They don’t see it as lying. Because that would make them bad people. They see it as being overly optimistic. They hope if it doesn’t sell at the price they name, well, the seller will be willing to lower the price.
The seller doesn’t see it as lying because she just wants the top price and doesn’t really understand, I suspect, that she sets the price, not the agent. The price has to be based on something, though, such as comparable sales, what similar homes have sold at and not plucked from thin air simply to try to win a listing.
I suggested the seller call a couple more Curtis Park agents to see if she can’t push the price up. Get a couple more bidding against each other to try to win the listing. I was kidding with her, of course, because the price is really whatever the buyer will pay. I don’t choose the sales price. I give sellers enough information as to why I believe a certain home sales price will work, and I substantiate it by identifying homes within a 1/2 mile radius that are the same condition, location, type and age, and similar square footage.
The seller chooses the price and the market takes it from there. Buyers for a home in Curtis Park have the final word.
Remember, the seller has the first word, the agent second. The seller always picks the price. Sellers should choose an agent they like and trust and not the agent who pops up waving her bidding fan sporting the highest number, like at an auction.
Should NAR Rank Real Estate Agents?
All holy heck broke loose recently over the National Association of REALTORS endorsing an AgentMatch ranking system, which matches visitors to its website with real estate agents who belong to NAR. It’s a way to rank real estate agents. There has been a lot of yelling and screaming about it. The main problem is a good portion of agents would receive no leads. By a good portion, I’m talking about 90 to 95% of all real estate agents.
These are agents who also pay dues to be a member of the trade association, NAR. A trade association which allegedly believes some of its members deserve more recognition than others. Never before, really, has an agent’s production been made public knowledge. It’s like taking the curtain off income and letting everybody know exactly how much real estate agents make. Some of us make millions and some of us make thousands. Nobody in either camp really want this information to be public knowledge because, quite frankly, except for the IRS, it’s nobody’s business.
Some of the ranking criterium will depend on income (number of homes sold) but it also shows ratios, which are often useless and market dependent. Further, the rankings reflect days on market for listings, as though that has something to do with the real estate agent’s performance. We are not magicians. We cannot waive days on market nor decrease days on market. Anybody who has ever had to interview a real estate agent realizes that.
But overall, it basically says a consumer should chose a top-producing agent. You would think that would delight this Sacramento real estate agent because I rank fairly high and would receive a ton more leads, but it’s unfair. I’m sure NAR will find a way to make it fair such as by charging agents more money to be listed or some such, just like other real estate websites do now. If you see an agent showcased on Zillow or Trulia, trust me, the agent paid for that privilege.
In the end it comes down to how smart are consumers, how mad are real estate agents and how determined is NAR?
Predictive Analysis for Sacramento Real Estate in 2014
When it comes to the Sacramento real estate market for 2014 and NAR’s new focus group for Predictive Analysis, I say Predictive Analysis, my schmalysis. For starters, it’s sort of an oxymoron. For enders, it’s supposed to “solve complex problems in the housing industry,” among other remarkable features and benefits. It promises to help us all make better data-driven decisions.
If you want to know where the real estate market in Sacramento is going, you really don’t need to look any further than Trendgraphix and your own front steps, providing your home is for sale. As a consumer, you can read what the top-producing agents in the industry have to say about their business. Because I sell more homes than a good real estate agent on an average day, I see an abnormally high number of real estate transactions in Sacramento. We are the people media turn to when they want to know what’s happening in Sacramento because we have our fingers emerged in real estate every single day.
I use my knowledge to help my clients make decisions. I can pretty much accurately predict where the market is moving because I note trends. The secret is what happened yesterday is fairly certain to happen today, to more or less the same degree. And what happens today is more or less certain to happen tomorrow.
A spike is unpredictable.
To help our clients, what a Sacramento real estate agent (and agents everywhere in America) need to do to is a) listen to them, b) provide them with information to make educated decisions, and then c) make it happen. Just like we’ve always done.
But if NAR wants to call it Predictive Analysis and sell snake oil to us off the back of a truck, though, I’m predicting we’ll buy it.
Photo Galleries of Homes in East Sacramento and Elsewhere
Every morning, before I start my day as a Sacramento real estate agent, I clear all of the spam and junk emails from accounts and try to respond to the people who contact me out of the blue. This is the thing about writing online articles and blogging for so many years is you never know when a person will read a piece and believe it was just published. That’s timeless writing, and evergreen, and while some things are very specific and change from year to year, stately mansions and historic homes tend to inhabit a sacred spot on earth.
Today a writer thanked me for publishing homes in NW Portland. I love Portland to pieces, and not just because we really don’t have to be on the lookout at all times for Wesen or because Portlandia is so hilariously amusing, but because it’s a great city. Sacramento often looks to Portland as a model city: modern, ahead of its times, progressive. And it boasts several historic districts.
Historic district preservation has its foes and its supporters in Sacramento. The supporters are generally people who love homes. I’m not in real estate just to list and show houses, I do it partly because I love homes. Period. All kinds of houses. I had dollhouses as a kid; I built playhouses out of discarded composition shingles at building sites, and I even once drew a diagram of a floor plan in the street in front of my house. I used drywall chalk. I lived in a new subdivision called Heritage Homes in the then Village of Circle Pines, Minnesota, and homes were still being built around us for years after my family moved from Saint Paul.
I drew a floor plan with bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. I had wanted my younger sister to go into the woods and play, but she didn’t want to let go of her teddy bear, and she couldn’t take it with us, for some reason. So, I put her teddy bear in the bedroom in the middle of the street and locked the imaginary door. Of course, when we came back from playing in the woods, her teddy bear was gone. She still speaks to me, though.
Here are photo galleries of homes in Sacramento, along the northern coast of California in Mendocino and in Northwest Portland, Oregon. I hope you enjoy them.
Homes in East Sacramento, Sacramento, California
Homes in Land Park, Sacramento, California
Homes in Mendocino, California
Homes in Portland, Oregon’s Nob Hill Neighborhood in NW Portland
Tax Evasion, Cash for Keys and Bill Bryson
Some concerned citizen and friend to a certain individual who had his home foreclosed upon sent me an email about cash for keys. So often these emails are from the individuals themselves — those who are directly affected by their own actions — but they are disguised as a mother, a girlfriend or a neighbor who is seeking an answer. They ask questions that make me wonder if they made it past the sixth grade.
The problem with relying on what you learned in school is so much of it is garbage. And that’s assuming in the first place that a) you paid attention in school and b) you absorbed the information given and c) you still remember any of it, especially when you get to that certain age in life. Finding out the real facts about what went on in history is a bit disturbing; it’s little like finding out everybody lied to you about Santa Claus.
No single person wrote a high school-mandated history book, and when you get committees involved, things get twisted. Oh, nooooo, we can’t put that negative thing in the book. So we’re spoon-fed a lot of fabricated details and shown only the bright and positive sides of our historical figures. If you really want to know the truth and what happened, you’ve got to read and you’ve got to give a crap, which a lot of people don’t and don’t.
So, this blog is not for those people who don’t and don’t. It’s for those of you who do and do. I am wholly engrossed in One Summer: America 1927, by Bill Bryson. Not just because I enjoy Bryson’s sense of humor, although, to be honest, he could write about a day in the life of an earthworm and I would read it. It’s about Charles Lindbergh’s extraordinary flight to Paris; how Commander Bryd never made it to the North Pole; what a slob and disgusting man the otherwise singularly talented Babe Ruth was; the illiteracy, stupidity and anti-semitism of Henry Ford; the idiocy and profitability of Prohibition; why the greatest flood ever in America of the Mississippi River carried so little weight at the time; and how it’s a major miracle that our country’s leaders managed to shepherd America, stay out of jail and survive the year.
Of course, I’m only halfway through, so I’m probably not even hitting the highlights. The other thing that strikes me about this book is its parallels to modern life. So many things remain the same. Just the names change.
Above all, the book serves as a reminder that it wasn’t being a cold-hearted murderer or a crook that brought down Al Capone. It was tax evasion that put that guy behind bars. His lawyers could argue all they wanted that the government should not be condoning criminal activity by partaking in its profits through taxes, but it didn’t work.
Just like it’s tax evasion facing the guy with the cash for keys question. He wanted to know if after his friend’s home was foreclosed upon and the bank came out to offer the tenant cash for keys, if he would have to pay taxes on the money he did not allegedly receive. Shortly after that email, I received another asking if the recipient must report the cash for keys payment as income.
He probably didn’t appreciate my sense of humor when I said if money rained down from the heavens and he picked up $20 bills in the street, that’s income, even if he did nothing to earn it. I didn’t explain that the bank reports cash for keys payments to the IRS and probably issues 1099s, because people who have to ask that kind of question probably don’t file a tax return.
But I am a Sacramento real estate agent; I’m not a tax accountant. Ask your tax accountant for advice, and pick up a copy of Bill Bryon’s: One Summer.
