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How Long Should Sellers Wait To Sign a Purchase Offer?
Like Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman, I find humor in some situations that others don’t find amusing at all. One of my favorites is when sellers feel offended because they are asked to make a decision to sell within a specified time period. Some sellers think that when they receive a purchase offer, they should be able to table it, to wait a few weeks or so before responding. Where do they get this?
Knowing that home sellers can be like this, when I write an offer for a Sacramento home buyer, I generally give the sellers ample time to respond. I don’t want them to feel pressured or rushed. Back in the old days, like in the 1970s, I used to write my purchase offers to expire “upon presentation.” But sellers are more finicky these days.
Imagine how a guy feels when he asks his girlfriend to marry him and she says, “Let me think about it.” If I were a guy, I’d be crushed. Of course, if I were a guy, I wouldn’t ask my girlfriend to marry me unless I knew she would agree. The secret to winning a bet is to make sure you’re right in the first place. Eliminate the odds.
Like the time I was lying on the beach in Orange County with one of my ex-husbands and a plane flew overhead. I said, “Hey, there goes a 737.” He disagreed. He said it was 747. We argued — see, there’s a reason he is one of my ex-husbands. Finally, we made a bet. If he was wrong, he had to bathe my cat, Ashli. That was my terms, and I don’t remember his because I won the bet.
But it’s kind of silly to wait more than a few hours before responding to an offer. If a seller doesn’t like the terms of the offer, then make a counter offer. Do something. Don’t just sit on it. An offer is not just a piece of paper. It represents buyers who are in agony.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
The Press Say If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out
Don’t deviate from the plan. That’s my motto. Because I’ve learned that 9 times out of 10, if I make an exception to the way I do business, it comes back to bite me. In other words, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Once you’ve got a system that works, stick to it. Don’t back down. Ever. The day you do, you’re screwed.
But I know that you won’t listen to me because sometimes I don’t even listen to me. I’ve been known to break my own rules. But at least I know better . . .
In the fall of 1998, it was cold in Chicago. I grabbed my then-boyfriend’s hand, pulled my fox fur collar closer to my neck and we scurried along Michigan Avenue. The wind was blowing in over the lake. Brrrr. You might think that Chicago is called the Windy City because it’s windy, but that’s not the case; Chicagoans say it’s named the Windy City for its windy blow-hard politicians. We had flown in from Minneapolis and were headed for that famous building with a sculpture of a rabbit drummer in front — I believe, if memory serves, it was the John Hancock Center.
My husband was and still is a journalist. He just doesn’t work for anybody now. Like many journalists who hailed from Chicago, he cut his teeth by working at the City News Bureau. It has a fond place in his heart. Rough, rowdy and real. In 1998, the City News Bureau was closing after more than 100 years of service, and we were going to the top of the John Hancock building to attend a farewell party. It was bittersweet for many alumni in attendance. The slogan that every beat reporter knows and repeats from the City News Bureau is: “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out.”
I latched on to that phrase because I know it is true. It’s good to be skeptical. Like Dr. Gregory House says, “Everybody lies.” It’s even more important to be skeptical as a Sacramento short sale agent — or any kind of Sacramento real estate agent, for that matter.
I received a very attractive offer last week from a buyer’s agent on one of my Sacramento short sale listings. Everything about the offer screamed take it. It was well written. Healthy earnest money deposit. The buyer’s agent and the buyer promised to wait for short sale approval. It was above the asking price. However, the buyer’s preapproval letter did not match the loan amount. It was for less.
When your mother says she loves you, check it out. We wrote a counter offer asking for an updated approval letter that reflected the loan amount. No, problem, the agent scoffed. The buyers are fully qualified. I was tempted to let it go but I didn’t. Don’t deviate from the plan. Guess what? The buyers did not qualify for the higher amount. No joke. Especially in a short sale, you do NOT want to find out the buyer is unqualified upon short sale approval.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
Dealing With Negatives in a Sacramento Listing
Some Sacramento real estate agents don’t want to say anything to a home seller that sounds negative about a home. I suspect they are afraid of offending the seller. Besides, lots of sellers don’t notice the negative aspects of their home, especially after a number of years go by. They get used to it, whatever the problems are — deferred maintenance, dated condition, undesirable location or bad layout, to name a few.
I’ll tell you who will immediately spot those problems, though, and that person is the buyer. Those problems will become drawbacks, obstacles to overcome in order to sell. If a seller and her agent do not address the negative aspects, the home won’t sell.
Of course, you know me, as a Sacramento real estate agent, I have no problem being straight with a seller. Nobody ever accuses me of skirting around the bush. I lay it on the line. It’s not always a comfortable thing to do, to be realistic and share bad news with a seller. But it’s necessary to properly do my job. I’ve got to tell sellers the bad stuff and then devise a plan to overcome a buyer’s objection.
Don’t ever bring up a problem without offering a solution — that’s my M.O.
I do that partly by figuring out who the buyer will be and appealing to what is important to that buyer. If an agent or the seller don’t know who the buyer is, how can the agent create a home marketing plan to target those specific buyers? The other thing I do is find out why the seller bought the home. Because the reason that seller bought is the same reason a new buyer will. The last thing is to address the negative. Quickly. And offer a solution for overcoming that drawback.
What Neutral Carpeting Means to a Sacramento Seller
I receive a lot of interesting emails from readers all over the country. I do my best to answer questions. Many of those questions center on short sales, probably because I write a lot about short sales and have personally sold hundreds of short sales. But since selling short sales takes up a small portion in retrospect of my annual real estate sales, I also field questions on other activities such as selling homes in Land Park and home listings throughout Sacramento that are not short sales.
I’ve been in this business almost 40 years. Not many agents can say that. But some things that were true 40 years ago are still true today. Take neutral carpeting, for example.
A reader from my About.com homebuying site wrote to me in quite a huff. She was a bit perplexed that I had not yet answered her inquiry, which I had not received because so much of these types of inquires go to spam. She had a “very important question.” She and her husband had been engaged in “repeated discussions” regarding the color of the carpeting for their mother’s home. They were preparing the home for sale and could not agree on which colors constitute neutral coloring. She did not understand the word “neutral.”
At first blush, one might wonder how a person could be confused. But the more I thought about it, it’s not so unusual for some individuals, especially those from other cultures, to be perplexed. Some of us live in a white-bread world. No color at all. But other cultures are awash in color and relish color. Color is treated as a daily substance. It’s water for the thirsty, spiritual for the soul and serenity for sleep. Color brings the world alive.
However, when you are selling a home, neutral is the recommended choice of color, especially for carpeting. It evokes no emotion and does not detract from the home’s features. It presents a clean slate, a home you can move in to immediately and decorate to your preference. It’s a light beige, a sheer coffee-cream, sandy fair-skinned brown, boring pale tan, much like the photo above. Above all, it is not white.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
Don’t Burn Bridges During Escrow
Your first instinct is not always reliable. I’ve learned that over the years. While I often rely on my intuition, I don’t always grab the first instinct that pops up. For example, when I put on my reading glasses this morning to peer at my monitor, my vision was blurred. My first thought was perhaps this is my free flashback. Ha, I would imagine that. But when nothing further happened, I realized that I had forgotten to remove my contacts before going to bed.
A friend called yesterday to talk about her horrible real estate transaction. She shared details about all the nasty things the buyer and the buyer’s agent had done to her since entering escrow. It was pretty clear she despised these people, and I didn’t blame her. “I was going to leave the buyers all the furnace filters,” she hissed, “But now I am taking them.” Well, I offered, make sure you don’t leave behind any aluminum foil or bottles of Windex, either. Leave the scum nothing. That made me laugh, but she wasn’t laughing. She was still furious.
I’m a firm believer of not burning bridges if one can help it. We’ve all had to deal with difficult people in our lives. We can’t change them. The only thing we can change is our attitudes.
As a Sacramento real estate agent, I advise my sellers to be nice to their buyers as well, regardless of how the buyers behave during escrow. For one thing, the sellers might want their mail forwarded. And I try to not transfer any frustrated feelings that I may be experiencing to my clients. It’s part of an agent’s job to be a buffer, not a buffoon.
While Elizabeth is on vacation, we are revisiting her favorite blogs from previous years.
