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If You’re Tired of Your Sacramento Agent
It seems like lately I’ve been contacted by sellers and friends of sellers who want to cancel their existing listings and list with me. For whatever reasons, they are unhappy or they feel like they are not getting the service they expected. Sometimes, this is the fault of the listing agent and sometimes it is not. I won’t know until I actually talk with the sellers and hear the story. However, there are always two sides to a story.
Like yesterday, a seller contacted me to say she wanted to buy a home in East Sacramento. Apparently, she is selling a home in Natomas and has decided that she and her husband should try to buy a short sale in East Sacramento, a home priced around $300,000 to $400,000 that would actually be worth $500,000 to $600,000. Yes, I know what you are thinking right now, dear reader. You are thinking that I should have hung up the phone or not corresponded with this particular person, but President Obama says we should be nice to people who have mental deficiencies. That a mental disease is not a reason to shun people or pick on them or discriminate against them.
I wanted to make sure I heard this person correctly and to double check if she had indeed put her home on the market in Natomas. So I queried as to whether she was asking me to list her home in Natomas and buy a new home East Sacramento. She replied that her home was already listed by an agent but her agent was too busy to help her buy a home in East Sacramento.
That didn’t make sense. Agents are rarely “too busy” to help a client. It’s what we do for a living. We sell real estate. Even if an agent was otherwise occupied, perhaps taking a vacation, for example, an agent would refer the client to another agent who had time. There must be something else going on. So, I asked the person to give me her agent’s name and phone number.
That was the last I heard from her.
Generally, I will call other agents before accepting a listing. Just to hear the other side of the story and to assure the agent that I am not in the business of soliciting other agent’s clients. That’s not how I do business. I don’t swipe somebody else’s clients. Most of the time what I discover is there is a lack of communication. Sometimes, the relationship terminated due to agent ineptness or carelessness or inexperience. But rarely is it malicious as people sometimes suspect.
If I spot a listing that is on the market for a few days and then canceled, generally, that’s not a listing I want to take. It’s a clear signal there is something wrong, and let’s just say it’s not the agent.
When You Think the Location in Sacramento Doesn’t Matter
The seller who made an appointment with me to assess her home and its value canceled last week. She called to say another agent had persuaded her son to list with that agent so she did not need to speak to me. She further elaborated that the agent had greater exposure. Hmm . . . what was the comparison? After all, in 2012, I ranked as the #2 agent at the #1 company in Sacramento. It’s difficult to put a real estate phrase into Google without finding my name. But then I dropped the matter. I did not want to list a house that was slammed up against the freeway all that badly. Not as badly, apparently, as the agent who pushed for the listing and came up with whatever was said.
Nope, I will give it to my sellers straight. I don’t need to fabricate numbers or paint a rosier picture of myself than what exists. You get what you see with this Sacramento real estate agent.
As real estate agents, we can’t always choose which properties we sign on to sell. Well, sure, we sign the listing agreement, and we don’t have to do that. We could turn down the listing, and some agents will turn down certain types of listings. Sometimes, agents won’t take listings under a certain dollar value or in a certain neighborhood, but I don’t discriminate. I will list and sell just about anything that is located anywhere. It’s all real estate. Some sales are just more challenging than others. Sure, I love that beautifully staged home in Granite Bay, but I’ll also list that water-logged, varmint-infested roach motel. I’m flexible — like a round peg in a square hole.
Just this morning, I explained to a seller that he shouldn’t get upset with me because I was not the agent who sold him the house, which is located in about the worst location possible in Sacramento. The only worst kind of location, would be next to garbage dump. Location is everything in real estate.
People forget. They get caught up in the excitement of buying a home and they don’t stop to think about location. The next time location pops into their head is when they are trying to sell. That’s when they realize the home they bought is not in a desirable location. Homes in desirable locations quickly sell. Homes in not so desirable locations take longer to sell and sell for much less than others around them.
The time to think about location is when you buy that home.
The Sacramento Real Estate Agent Who Shows 3 Homes
Not every home that comes on the market these days is a highly desirable home in a hot location. Some of them are ordinary homes in Sacramento, owned by sellers with a little bit of equity who might need every scrap of equity they can squeeze out. Every once in a while, one of these sellers might be close to short sale status but would be willing to pay a couple of dollars just to close the transaction. These homes seem to be overlooked by buyers or possibly used by real estate agents as “the home not to buy.”
Back in the old days, and quite possibly even today as I type, real estate agents used to show 3 homes:
- A home the buyer cannot afford
- A perfect home that meets the buyers’ needs
- A home so horrible nobody would ever want to live in it
And they would show the 3 homes in the above order. Because when the Sacramento home buyer falls in love with the first home, it can be heart-breaking to realize that it’s just a dream, and the buyer can’t really afford to buy that home. It’s similar to the concept that HGTV uses on House Hunters, except 2 of those homes are often not for sale. After the buyer’s heart is broken, it’s on to tour the home that’s perfect.
The buyer can’t believe her good luck. Everything is exactly the way she thought it would be. The living room is in the front, she walks through the formal dining — past the two rooms she will never ever use in her lifetime — and into the kitchen with the Wolf 6-burner stove — a stove she will never turn on, but wow, it looks magnificent. Which reminds, did you hear that Burger King is now delivering to select areas in Sacramento? Yes, it is true.
While the buyer is salivating over the perfect home, the agent takes her to the home nobody would ever live in. Maybe it’s nestled next to the train tracks, or under the freeway, or across the street from a graveyard, by a school, or maybe the home is just a mess inside, with torn-up carpeting, Corian counters and half-chewed cabinet doors in the kitchen. Most buyers do not want to buy a fixer these days and, if they do, they will discount heavily for repairs that they have no idea how to undertake or what the repairs will actually cost.
So, then the buyer goes to the agent’s office and triumphantly declares she will buy house number two.
Sometimes, though, your number just comes up. Sometimes, in this limited inventory marketplace, we run out of the homes that are too expensive and the homes that fit a buyer’s every requirement. Sometimes, all that is left are the unique homes with a defect. Did your agent show 3 homes? Think about it.
And that’s when we’ll get three offers in one day on the same house.
An Unusual Saturday for This Sacramento Real Estate Agent
It is not usual for me to meet with clients nor attend a listing presentation on a Saturday. I generally use this day for writing my blogs, articles and newsletters for my homebuying website at About.com. In between, I answer calls about listings, book future appointments, so it’s not like I’m totally tuned out to my Sacramento real estate obligations, but it’s mandatory that I set aside a little bit of time in schedule to write.
However, today, I have three appointments. They could not be scheduled at any other time, so I had to squeeze them into my Saturday. If I were a less organized person, this would not be possible, but I am flexible enough to be able to make last-minute changes. In fact, I seriously doubt another agent in Sacramento could survive the fast pace of my real estate business yet still maintain time to focus on each client individually like I do. Not one of my clients ever feel as though I don’t have enough time for them, because I make time for every client.
I’m meeting first with a couple who have a fourplex in downtown Sacramento, and I’ve already received preapproval on their short sale. I wanted to make sure they had no worries nor concerns when we go into the short sale. This meant juggling a few events for them so it better met their personal schedule. We have a preapproved price, so we’re basically meeting to shake hands face-to-face and sign the listing paperwork. This will go on the market on Monday.
Next, I have a seller who needs to sign a purchase contract and has no access to a fax machine nor a printer. She cannot scan documents. She could pop in to any of our 17 offices and I could email the documents to that office, but she prefers to come to my office, and that’s OK. I will bring the purchase offer with me and highlight the places where she needs to sign, just so we don’t miss any of those all-important initials.
Ending my day is a listing presentation for a seller in the Pocket. My team member Barbara Dow was out showing homes yesterday and called this seller to make an appointment to show her home. The seller said there were no showings. Apparently, the seller told her she was so mad at her agent that she had just dumped her agent. I asked Barbara to give me the phone number, and I checked MLS. Sure enough, the listing had been withdrawn. So, I called the seller and said: “Hey, I hear you’re looking for a real estate agent? Well, guess what? I am a Sacramento real estate agent! How lucky is that?”
I can always write tomorrow.
How to Keep a Home on the Market in Sacramento After Offer Acceptance
I am finding that overall, many buyers are not very committed in our Sacramento real estate market. That’s a good reason to keep the home on the market after going into contract. Part of the reluctance to commit, I’m supposing, comes from the fact they feel pressured with multiple offers happening on such a large number of homes, and it’s frustrating that they have very few homes from which to choose. This is a scary market for first-time home buyers. We’ve never had a market like this in my lifetime before in Sacramento.
We have low prices but they are moving upwards quickly in some neighborhoods. Interest rates are historically low, around 3.75%, which is just incredible. A buyer’s purchasing power is immense. They can buy twice the home for half the money today, as compared to 7 years ago. But they have also witnessed first-hand the crash of the real estate market, and some of them feel very uncomfortable navigating in unchartered waters. It’s not unusual to go into escrow one day and then have the buyer cancel the next. This is why you want to keep the home on the market if at all possible without immediately jumping into pending status.
Home sellers in Land Park had this happen to them a while back. They negotiated in good faith an agreed-upon sales price and were relieved and thrilled that their home was sold. But, the following day, the buyers bailed. They didn’t give a good reason. See, that’s the thing, in California, a buyer can pretty much cancel a contract for any reason within the inspection period which, by default, is 17 days.
The next time we received an offer, the sellers were more cautious. The buyers wrote a clean offer, but until they removed the contingencies, the buyers could easily cancel. Their agent wrote an addendum containing verbiage about cancellation that was already preprinted in the purchase contract, and that’s part of what made the sellers worry. Agents don’t always think about how their addendums will be perceived by the sellers when they are trying to appease the buyers. But if the buyers require reassurance about cancellation rights, this makes the sellers understandably nervous. So, the purpose of the addendum backfired.
How to fix it was my quandary. Part of the solution was to keep the home on the market in active status. Once a seller takes a home off the market and then puts it back on the market, buyers begin to wonder what is wrong with the home. Why didn’t the buyers want to buy it? Did they uncover something horrible about the home? Is there a structural defect? When the truth is half the time “back on market” status is just due to flakey buyers: you’ve got the blind leading the blind. It’s much better to keep the home on the market for a while.
In a seller’s market, removing a home from the market takes it out of inventory, and it’s difficult to drum up enthusiasm for the home if it goes back. Especially in a seller’s market, it is much better for the seller to leave the home on the market in active status. However, a Sacramento real estate agent must present a true picture in advertising. This means we have to tell buyers that we have an offer. I accomplished that by adding a Pending Rescission modifier to the active status. In the confidential agent remarks, I suggested that agents write a back-up offer subject to the cancellation of the existing offer.
The sellers received a back-up offer, too. That’s because everybody wants something that somebody else wants. That’s a true principle that applies to real estate.
The sellers countered the buyers that they would leave the home on the market and remove it once the buyers had removed their contingencies. This way, everybody won, and the sellers felt more agreeable to accepting the offer.
If you’re looking for an experienced Sacramento real estate agent who puts her clients’ needs first and foremost, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
