Email Elizabethsacramento real estate agent
What a Sacramento Real Estate Agent Can Do That You Cannot
Everybody likes the convenience of looking at stuff online but when it comes to an important matter such as buying a home or selling your house in Sacramento, the smart consumers call a Sacramento real estate agent. That’s because everybody needs a real estate agent, whether or not they realize it. You need a professional who is active full-time in the business, has access to information you don’t and can tell you things you don’t know. You don’t know it all online. Ever. It’s an illusion if you think you do.
Take it from somebody who has been down that path. The local Goodwill in Sacramento has a plethora of designer shoes donated by me, for example, that hurt my feet. They looked gorgeous online at Nordstrom but those Jimmy Choo sandals were painful, regardless of how many pieces of mole skin I glued. You can’t even buy socks online and hope to find conformity among multiple packages. Because things are manufactured in lot numbers, mostly in China, and even though a piece of clothing might originate from the same manufacturer, identical size, same material, it will fit differently when plucked from random shelves.
I love the idea that I can explore winter vacations online. But I would never book a trip without going through my travel agent. Sure, I can spend countless hours at TripAdvisor reading how much one guy loved a hotel and the next traveler two hours later despised it; I can go to another website to study traveler’s photos of hotel rooms and not the glammed up wide-angled and air-brushed shots. I can do a ton of homework about where I may want to stay at exotic destinations, but ultimately, I will rely on my travel agent. My agent has the knowledge, the connections and my agent has the deals.
When my husband and I decided to book a trip through the Alaska Inside Passage and chose our ship, we still called our travel agent. He said Alaska was not his specialty, and he referred us to an Alaska expert who booked our adventure even though I had already selected the travel dates, the route, the airlines and class, the ship and cabin. She was a gem. I noticed a week before our departure that the rates for the owner’s cabin had been lowered to the same amount we paid for a forward cabin. When I mentioned it, she called the ship and got us a lower rate. This travel agent called to confirm our return trip for us and discovered the route had changed, and we couldn’t get home as originally planned. She was able to reroute us and force the airlines to get us home on time. Invaluable.
Professionals don’t cost you money, they save you money. If you’re not a real estate agent, you don’t have all of the answers, but a veteran real estate agent does. You can’t even begin to predict what could go sideways in your transaction because you’re not in the business. Just when you think you’ve found the perfect home online, I might know what’s wrong with that perfect home and you don’t. Or, I might have knowledge of a home coming on the market tomorrow that you do not. And better, I know how to make sure you are the lucky buyer whose offer is accepted, plus I’ll do my damnedest to make sure you close without a hitch.
Nobody needs more problems in life. We’ve got enough just the way it is. Hire a professional Sacramento real estate agent.
Winter Months for Sacramento Real Estate Offer a Window
There’s a hard rain gonna fall, and I’m not talking about the drought in Sacramento but am instead focused on the real estate market coming up over our winter months. Some people are likely on the fence about whether this is a good time to sell and also buy a home. They wonder whether spring would be a better time, when there is typically more activity, more inventory and higher prices. There is one thing you probably haven’t stopped to consider: interest rates.
Interest rates will lead the real estate market next year in 2015.
When the Fed stopped buying bonds, that’s the long-awaited signal that interest rates will begin to rise. Rates have been artificially suppressed for years. They’ve been held down to stimulate the housing market and the economy but we’re just sitting on a ticking bomb. Sooner or later we have to lift our big fat butts off the rates. 2014 rates are already ahead of the average annualized percentages from 2013. And they will continue to go up.
People forget what a normal real estate market is like. They forget when 9% was considered a very attractive interest rate, or maybe they weren’t born yet. As a real estate agent, I have worked through real estate markets in the late 1970s when interest rates hovered at 18%. Interest rates have a huge affect on a home buyer’s purchasing power. Buyers are often too focused on sales prices when they should also pay attention to interest rates.
If a home seller waits until spring to sell her home and buy another, she might get a little bit more for her existing home, but that upleg, her new home, if she’s moving up, will also under those circumstances cost her more. There is no tradeoff there. Economists are predicting a slowing market for next year with appreciation edging toward 4% to 5%, if we’re lucky. If not, prices might remain stable.
But the one thing that is more likely to move than anything else is your interest rate. Consider this, every 1% increase in an interest rate will roughly lose a home buyer about $25,000 of purchasing power. A 1% bump means you may no longer qualify to buy that $300,000 home and must consider those in the $275K range. It’s not like the old days when you could wait for rates to fall and refinance at a lower rate. Those days are gone. Your window of opportunity is today.
Tale of a Short Sale in The Rivers of West Sacramento
Homes don’t come up for sale very often in The Rivers in West Sacramento, that subdivision known as the Lighthouse Marina (misspelled in many public records), which helps to produce high demand for these homes. It’s a very pretty gated community, featuring an assortment of maple trees and other landscaping approved by the HOA, The Rivers.
Thank goodness the U.S. Government isn’t in the habit of donating armed military tanks to HOAs because The Rivers would surely delight in owning one. Lord help you if you have a tree in your yard that is not approved by the HOA, or if you try to hold an estate sale, because it’s not allowed. They take their business of uniformity very seriously in this community, and it’s a comfort to those who live there, so I’m not knocking it.
I sold a home on Fountain Drive right on the levee last year which was one of several short sales. This particular home had been a model home and originally sold at roughly $1.5 million, IIRC. With the down market, it sold at $460,000.
It did not surprise me when I received another listing this summer in The Rivers that was slated to be a short sale. A beautiful home of almost 5,000 square feet located on a premium lot that was once a golf course and now a park. Tremendous views. When I first listed the home, the sellers of another home called to ask if they could buy it as a contingent sale. I offered to list their home, but they couldn’t act fast enough and another cash buyer swooped in to make an offer on my listing.
The sellers accepted that offer, and then we had to do battle with the buyer for another week just to pull a proof of funds. The buyer could not understand why the short sale bank refused to accept the offer without their proof of funds, and they continued to submit paperwork that did not conform — trying to make a round peg fit into a square hole, which does not work on a short sale. They dinged around in escrow for 2 months, long enough for us to get a confirmed price, which they refused to meet.
Back on the market again, and this time the first set of buyers who could not act fast enough came back into the picture. They had now hired a real estate agent, a neighbor, which was OK with me. I don’t care who buys the property, and I don’t need every listing in Sacramento. I’m not that kind of agent. They would not receive any “special treatment” whether they were my buyers with a second listing or another agent’s buyers, so it did not make any difference to this Sacramento real estate agent.
I know there are agents who don’t understand nor agree with that kind of philosophy. They would have jumped on this like hot fudge on a sundae. They would have grabbed that listing, grabbed these buyers as their own, and made a ton of money from it because that’s their focus. It’s not my focus. My focus is exceptional service with integrity. Sometimes, it means I miss a few bucks here and there, but so what.
About this time I did receive a call from another couple of buyers who were very insistent that I represent them in dual agency. I flat out refused these people. They hinted that they expected a discount on the price and they assumed that by working with me, I would gladly give it to them — that I would lower my ethical standards for a paycheck — which is insulting on so many levels. People like that don’t see it, though. They can’t see past their own greed.
It was a little risky with the contingent buyers, but it was a measured risk and I knew their agent would sell their home. By the time Wells Fargo insisted that we resubmit without the contingency, they sold their home and were approved to buy this short sale in The Rivers. We closed escrow without a hitch, and the sellers could not be more happy / relieved. The buyer’s agent was a sheer delight to work with as well. Many of the windows in that home were defective, and she worked with the manufacturer to get them replaced for free. Remember that if you are buying a home that is still under a builder warranty.
Which reminds me, I forgot to ask the sellers for a review. I’m confident they’ll give me 5 stars.
How Sacramento MetroList iBox Exchange Affects Home Sellers
The reason Sacramento real estate agents are getting hosed by MetroList is because . . . well, I’m not really sure of the explanation that MetroList gave me when it called to discuss my “hatchet job of MetroList.” There was much blabber about blubber: how large our MetroList is and how many lockboxes we have in our system, and how none of us will really know exactly what went on behind the scenes and never will know because it’s confidential and not for public knowledge.
It’s a secret organization we Sacramento real estate agents are required to belong to if we want to conduct business, and we’re not entitled to know what goes on. MetroList would like you to know, though, that the deal it got “beats all other deals in the long run.” Even though many other MLS systems in the country negotiated a 1-for-1 exchange. We are instead offered a 2-for-1 exchange and we should be grateful, sighs MetroList.
In case you don’t know, when an agent exchanges her 2 lockboxes for one lockbox, that lockbox is considered a leased asset. The way this information was initially presented was confusing, and it made it sound like the agent might be responsible for the lease payment, but actually it is MetroList that will pay on the lease. Through 2020. It claims that all other MLS’s are in the same boat on the SUPRA lockbox exchange program in that they are all leased lockboxes. The agents don’t own them when exchanged. The difference between those MLS’s and our MetroList, claims MetroList, is our MetroList told us we don’t own the lockboxes.
Was that disclosure by mistake or on purpose? It doesn’t matter. We can complain all we want, and march up and down in front of MetroList offices at 1164 National Drive carting picket signs that read: MetroList Lockbox Ripoff! 2-for-1 Unfair to Agents! Highway Robbery MetroList! and it won’t do anything except get you on television. And people say that Elizabeth is a bad influence.
The situation is we real estate agents are unhappy about it, we’re losing half of our lockbox inventory, and according to MetroList it’s better than it could have been, and when you think about it, it’s probably all SUPRA’s fault.
On the other hand, here are some tips for exchanging your lockboxes at the MetroList iBox exchange:
For starters, they are heavy. I own roughly 70 lockboxes. With a torn rotator cuff, I can’t carry them. But my team member Josh Amolsch is kind enough to offer his assistance and transportation. At first, I considered using my red Radio Flyer wagon, but then I came up with a better idea. Rolling luggage! Pack those suckers as tightly as possible and I might be able to fit them into several Victorinox dual caster rollers. Those things are built like steel. I have a feeling Building C is a long ways from the parking lot at Cal Expo.
Second, MetroList printed material says we should expect to wait 90 minutes to exchange 10 lockboxes. I suspect that’s because there is a separate lease agreement for each lockbox, but they don’t really say. But it does make me suspect that it could take all day to exchange my lockboxes, so I have swapped my appointment time with another agent, which means I can be at CalExpo early in the morning on another day. I guess I should pack lunches and drinks. I wonder, can you bring in bourbon into Cal Expo or do you have to buy it there?
Third, there will be two days my home sellers might have no lockboxes. Because I will need to divvy up the south part of the Sacramento Valley from the north to efficiently collect all of my lockboxes; but don’t fret, I will note MLS showing instructions. I probably own enough contractor’s boxes to install those on my active listings for showing in the interim. The best idea I’ve come up with so far is to label envelopes with each address, insert keys and seal the envelope for replacement storage until I get my new Supra iBoxes.
There is always the option during the MetroList iBox exchange to leave keys for pending listings in my office for pick up at closing, and I imagine many agents will select that alternative, which will be an inconvenience for many of us. But the way I look at it is we probably won’t have to go through this again until at least 2020 when the lease is paid off by MetroList. Then again, that didn’t stop me from upgrading to the iPhone 6. Just sayin’.
Update: In a surprising turn of events, MetroList just announced agents will not be required to exchange their lockboxes, and we can continue to use our existing lockboxes until the boxes, themselves, no longer work.
You can read more about the actual lockbox exchange itself at Cal Expo in this next blog, the Upside and Downside to the MetroList iBox Exchange at Cal Expo.
Raising the Sales Price When a Home is Overpriced is a Bad Idea
Raising the sales price when your home doesn’t sell because it’s priced too high for the market is a screwball strategy that some sellers employ for various unknown reasons. Well, if you ask the seller he might say that a home down the street, for example, was just listed at a higher price, which in his mind would justify the price increase, even though it’s the wrong way to look at it. If anything, an overpriced home down the street will make a reasonably priced home sell faster.
Homes that are for sale in Sacramento are not necessarily homes that are for sale. The list prices of those homes are pretty much meaningless and carries little weight if there are no offers. A sales price is an enticement, like bait on a fishing hook, but there is no guarantee a fish will bite it. Not only that, but it might be a plastic lure disguised as a tasty treat. Not every home that has a for sale sign in the yard is a home that is for sale. That’s where home buyers’ and home sellers’ perceptions can slide sideways.
What matters are the pending sales and the sold comparable sales because those are the homes that real home buyers have purchased. Those prices are indicative of the marketplace. They show what another home is worth.
Then, you’ve got condition. A home in poor condition will not be attractive to many first-time home buyers. Investors in today’s Sacramento real estate market want a good deal, and to the investors I talk with and receive offers from a “good deal” means paying less than market value.
Bottom line is in today’s fall Sacramento real estate market, when you’ve hauled in a big fish and it’s flopping about in the boat, the thing to do is knock it over the head. You don’t throw it back in the water when you plan to eat it. You don’t say you need to catch a bigger fish if it meets minimum catch guidelines. And you don’t raise the sales price because you don’t have any offers.
Give home sellers enough time, and they’ll come to that conclusion on their own. The thing is they generally end up paying for those decisions.
