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Goodbye to 2012 Sacramento Real Estate Market
This past year of 2012 could have been the best of times and also the worst of times but I’m not saying which. No sense making a proclamation. I will say for many sellers of short sales in Sacramento, the year was bitter sweet. It’s a relief to eliminate a financial burden, an albatross around the neck. For many, the road to a short sale was anything but comfortable. Nobody wants to come to the realization that it’s time to get rid of the house. The house they so desperately wanted to buy when it was purchased.
I’ve worked with sellers this past year who did not do a short sale. Believe it or not. Some of my clients were traditional sellers, that is sellers who had equity. Even the clients who were moving out of state, looking forward to a new life elsewhere, were not exactly ecstatic to be forced to release their home by selling it to a complete stranger.
It’s a little odd working with sellers who are not thrilled to be selling. It’s not like the old days, the days of the 1970s . . . and thank god I don’t have to listen to Barry Manilow anymore . . . the days when sellers were making money hand over fist. Sellers were selling even if they didn’t have to sell because there was too much money in their home, equity that was burning a hole in their pockets. They wanted to see it up close and personal. Cash in fist. Selling was a good way to capitalize on their equity.
So was creating paper. I worked with sellers who became buyers by creating a promissory note and recording a trust deed against their residences. These prom notes were often straight notes, without payments and accruing, often annually compounding, interest. Sellers used these prom notes as down payments on other homes, which also carried straight notes secured to them as part of the financing. This was like putting a roulette gun to their heads and not pulling the financial trigger for a few years. Maybe there was a bullet in that gun, maybe not. Riskier today than it sounded back then.
It’s much more straight forward these days. Although, in Sacramento’s frantic real estate market, I have been able to squeeze out a few sales this last quarter for sellers that were not short sales and probably would have or should have been if they had been listed with somebody else. Fortunately, we were able to stretch that sales price far enough to make the home sale an equity sale. That’s the advantage of hiring a Sacramento real estate agent with her finger on the pulse of the Sacramento real estate market. The market shows no signs of letting up. The tide is still rolling in.
Yup. Twice a day in French Polynesia, where I will watch fireworks tonight. Happy New Year to you!
The Blue Lagoon and Bird Island at Rangiroa
My sister in Minnesota sent an email yesterday to say that she was expecting to receive a ton of snow shortly and temperatures were slated to break a 90-year record low. Then, this morning, she said the newscaster misread her prompter. Apparently, the record low temperatures were only going to be beat those from the ’90s, not from 90 years ago. Of course, to that weather girl it probably seems like 90 years ago because she was most likely learning how to read and write in the 1990s.
It’s all in your perspective, I guess. When I was in school, a hundred years ago seemed like an eternity and today it’s like yesterday. Well, today it is almost is like yesterday. The older we get, the more time is put into perspective. Just like the more experiences we have, the greater our perspective because we have more information to draw upon.
I was thinking about a person’s perception of paradise. Tropical paradise, in particular. There are some people in this world who don’t give a hoot about a tropical paradise, people like my husband. People like this typically can take or leave paradise. Some of them actually hate it. My mother intensely despised the tropics and was very attached to freezers. The kind of freezer that I was supposed to strike with a table knife after placing inside steaming ice-cube trays filled with hot water to melt the accumulated ice. But I love a good tropical paradise. I prefer to think of myself as a more normal and balanced person.
In fact, I would like it if I was given a long assignment to search out the best tropical paradises in the world and to write about them. But no, I am simply a Sacramento real estate agent; an agent who sells a lot of short sales and hence can afford to go on vacation in French Polynesia this winter and leave her cats in the hands of housesitters.
Yesterday, we took a super long boat ride across the inside waters of the atoll, Rangiroa, from the town of Avatoru to a place called the Blue Lagoon, or Lagon Bleu. It’s a lagoon within a lagoon. How cool is that? We also visited Bird Island at Rangiroa.
It made me wonder how many shades of blue are there in the world? That’s what you think when you first step foot on the island and lay eyes on the most beautiful blue waters in the world. Azure. Soft blue pastel. Turquoise. Jade. Hypnotic and brilliant blues and greens. This is after dragging your bony and sunburned knees through the water to get past the reef and onto land itself. There is no sandy beach on which to land. The water is almost waist deep, and you’ve got to wear some type of foot covering for protection. Lemon sharks are circling you as well, but they didn’t seem hungry yesterday.
The guys from the boat loaded a huge cooler onto top of a surfboard anchored in the bay and dragged it to shore. It was filled with chicken, fish, salad fixings and stuff to drink. The crew set up a barbecue stand while the rest of us mostly swam around in the lagoon. A few brave souls ventured across the long reef to Bird Island. My husband and I were two of those. The water was littered with what looked from a distance to be gigantic dog turds, but they were actually black sea slugs. We were not about to step on them. We were also careful not to step on the coral and clams and other sea life, so it took us about 30 minutes to cross from the Blue Lagoon island to Bird Island. Like with most things, it’s not always about the destination, and it’s more about the journey. I just wished my journey would speed itself up a bit because I could feel the heat of the sun baking my back. Why did I not think to put sunscreen there?
I walked around the entire island, shuffling though shore waters when navigation on land became too difficult. My husband got lost halfway around. At one point I thought about going back to look for him but then I realized if he was hurt or having some kind of emergency, I could not possibly drag him back to the island by myself, so I should get help instead. He saw it as I left him there to die on a tropical paradise island.
What is wrong with that, I ask. There are worse places in the world to die than the Blue Lagoon or Bird Island at Rangiroa.
Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa
Dolphins jumping in Tiputa Pass at Rangiroa
You think the holidays are a quiet time in real estate, but even if a Sacramento real estate agent is on vacation in French Polynesia, stuff can happen in monumental fashion. For example, I’ve been gone for only 5 days and during that period of time I’ve had:
- an Elk Grove home fall out of escrow and go back into escrow
- to rescue a pending cancellation due to changing buyer’s names on the deed at the 11th hour
- receipt of four short sale approval letters on four separate short sales to process
- a stove removal by a short sale seller that should not have been removed, times two.
- a demand for an elevation certificate spring out of nowhere
- to refer a seller to a short sale lawyer because I believe the lender lost the prom note
- and numerous inquiries about buying and selling homes in the Sacramento region
Yet, nothing insurmountable and that I can’t handle from French Polynesia. That’s because I have two invaluable things: 1) The internet. 2) The Elizabeth Weintraub Team. And quite frankly, I am completely confident my team members could handle any emergency that pops up — I think they like to humor me by keeping me involved.
I am replaceable.
What is not really replaceable is the rate at which we over-fish our oceans. The ice that is melting at our poles is not replaceable. The level at which our seas are rising is pretty alarming. The gradual warming of our temperatures around the world is disturbing. Bees and butterflies are in peril. When you put these things into perspective, my challenges seem somewhat miniscule.
We walked from our hotel about a mile down the road to Tiputa Pass in Rangiroa yesterday afternoon. I was hoping we would see tigersharks but we spotted instead dolphins jumping. This is one of the spots in the Rangiroa atoll that has broken and lets water flow from the Pacific into the lagoon and back out to sea again. A large freighter came through in the morning to dock inside the lagoon and left through Tiputa Pass in the afternoon. Below are a few more photos:
dolphins jumping at Tiputa Pass, Rangiroa, Adam Weintraub
Sacramento Home Buyers Need a Reality Check
How does a seller today know if she has a real buyer who has made an offer? There are a lot of Sacramento home buyers wandering around who apparently look like a buyer, walk like a buyer, squawk like a buyer but they are not buyers. I wish there was some kind of test we could give them. As a buyer’s agent there probably is, but there is not from the listing agent’s point of view. That’s because the listing agent has no conversations with the buyer and no direct contact. We can obtain a preapproval letter, many of which are useless, and an earnest money deposit, but it still doesn’t mean the buyer is a buyer.
Now, you would think a real estate agent would engage in a lengthy conversation with a potential buyer, but the truth is most do not. A buyer calls an agent, asks to see a property and then writes an offer. In some ways, the agent is an order taker. Doesn’t question. Doesn’t probe. Just writes the offer and keeps her lips zipped.
You know, that’s not the way I was trained in real estate many years ago. I was always taught that we as real estate agents should form a relationship with our clients, counsel and advise them, ask questions, try to do what is best for the client, not just say “press hard, third copy is yours.”
Keeping buyers in escrow is a difficult job, even in a seller’s market. You might think that a buyer would not cancel escrow simply because there are so few other properties available. To cancel is to take a chance on buying nothing for a long, long time. Because there is not much available for sale in Sacramento. Pickings are slim and few between.
There are a lot of Sacramento home buyers but there doesn’t seem to be very many who are actually performing. The fallout rate seems to be much higher than it needs to be. We’ve got a lot of buyers begging for a home but shortly after they go into escrow, they cancel. For no other reason than cold feet. I eye them more suspiciously now. I question the quality of prospective buyers at the moment.
It would be nice if we could put potential Sacramento home buyers into an X-ray machine like the ones at the airport. Step in, put your feet on the footprints, raise your hands over your head and hold still. BZZZT. Nope, you’re not a buyer. You’re not going through Security to escrow. You can stuff your passport back in your pocket, grab your luggage and go home.
The Hobbit and Sacramento Real Estate
One of the requirements to be a writer — what they call an “expert”– at About.com, is to be passionate about your topic. You have to be able to write, of course, and have something to say, naturally, but that passion (expressed through dedication, intense commitment) is completely necessary. Passion is also the necessary ingredient to being immensely happy and content in your job. If you find yourself consumed, driven, and almost half nuts about a particular topic, that might qualify you to write for About.com.
My topic is home buying and home selling. I can’t help it, I love real estate. I love everything about real estate. The people, the homes, the financing, the excitement, the challenges, the battles, the history, the future. It’s given me independence and extreme satisfaction in my chosen career. I started in real estate when I was in my 22, and I’ve been happily married to it in some form or fashion ever since. This year, I will sell over $30 million as a Sacramento real estate agent.
Real estate has become my Hobbit, the foundation for some of the other stories in my life. We saw the movie The Hobbit yesterday, and my husband shot a photo of me with Gandalf. The Hobbit is being shown in theaters all over Sacramento, but if you want to see it in 3D and high-speed (48 frames per sec), you need to see it at Century Stadium. It’s been more than 45 years since the nuns at The Home of the Good Shepherd in St. Paul first read that book to me, but I do not recall much of that movie in the book. Oh, how us poor souls who read expect screenplays to faithfully follow the book, and film entertainment often crushes those silly expectations.
Here are a few highlights without spoilers: I had to laugh when Thorin knocked on the door. It was why, hello, yes, here I am, the hunk of the movie. And he swaggered into Bilbo Baggin’s home. I thought Cate Blanchard was going to throw Gandalf to the ground with her mind and molest him right then and there. I kept waiting for it, but it didn’t happen. There were many battles. One after the other. We were in the theater for days. Some people went to sleep and snored. Oh, wait, that was on the screen. And then, at the end, there was no end. Because we have 2 more movies. And there you have it. The complete description of The Hobbit.
Don’t get me wrong, I was entertained. But last night while I was thinking about The Hobbit, I suddenly realized I have two more reasons to buy a home to add to my article of 8 reasons to buy a home. I finally have 10 reasons. I had tried to come up with 10 reasons when I originally wrote the piece in 2006, but 8 was all that popped into my brain, so that’s what I ran with. But now I have 10. And it’s because of The Hobbit that I thought of them.
Reason #9 is Security. Because nobody can kick you out of your home, as long as you make your payments. Your landlady can’t come along one day and tell you she’s decided to rent to her son. Or remodel. Or sell the home. Because it’s your home.
Reason #10 is Stability. With today’s widely used amortized loans, your mortgage payments, the principal and interest, stay the same over the term of your loan. They don’t go up when interest rates go up, and they don’t fluctuate. The state of the economy has no affect on your mortgage payments. Nobody will raise your rent.
