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California Garage Door Openers Must Work in a Power Outage
An interesting item tucked away in the local section of the Sac Bee yesterday says California garage door openers must work in a power outage. Automatic garage door openers not operating during a power outage has spurred this effort to save lives. Apparently, during the 2017 wildfires in California, 5 people died because they could not get their garage door open after losing electrical power. This is a new law governing garage door openers sold after July 1, 2019. The new Senate Bill 969 passed the Senate 39-0 and the House 65-7. Our governor signed it into law on September 21, 2018.
Who knew? I sure didn’t hear about this. You’d think that the California Association of Realtors would have published information about this upcoming change. Well, of course, there is still time; but after a bill is signed into law, it’s kinda late to oppose or offer additional insight. The whole reason CAR exists is for political adversary.
Still, it will be a difficult law to impose because it will take a while for things to shake out. The law states a garage door opener sold after July 1, 2019 must include a backup battery. It is the backup battery that can then take over during a power outage and supply power to the garage door opener. I can see it now, nobody will test their backup batteries and they will run out of juice without anybody knowing it. However, the civil penalty is $1,000 if your brand new garage door opener does not work with a backup battery.
Sure, some people will say, hey, can’t you just yank the red cord? That disconnects the garage door opener and frees it so you can manually lift the door. Although the problem with that is some older people cannot manually lift their garage door. If there was ever a reason for seniors to hit the gym, this could be one motivator. I know the day is bound to arrive when I won’t be in a position to open a garage door without help. Unlike my broker friend Barbara Todaro in Massachusetts. She is my heroine.
Are you wondering how will this new law making garage door openers work in a power outage will affect a Sacramento Realtor? It won’t at the moment. However, next year, if a seller replaces her garage door opener after July 1, 2019, it better utilize a backup battery. Or, unless a Realtor is selling a home built after July of 2019, which could happen in our Sacramento resale market a year from next summer. This is one of those new law changes we need to be aware of and make our sellers aware.
This new California law that garage door openers must work in a power outage made me think about 1996, when my husband and I built a 24 x 24 garage. With our own two hands. One of the most enjoyable times of my life and, based on his “I hate wood” mentality, the worst for my husband. Yes, this is a photograph above of me pounding 2x4s.
The Best Colors to Paint the Interior of Your Sacramento Home
Are you wondering about the best colors to paint the interior of a house in 2018? You’ve come to the right place. Sellers choose colors that are comforting, supportive of their life style and reflective of who they are as an individual. When a Sacramento listing agent marches into the living room to announce that the seller’s choice of color will cost them hard equity when selling, sellers might not agree. And, it’s OK if they don’t agree. Perfectly fine. Nobody is forcing them to make repairs to enhance their value. If a buyer writes a lower offer because of the paint colors, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Sellers, due to their emotional attachment to the home, don’t always see things as clearly as a Sacramento Realtor. Still, the best we can do is inform, educate, and let the sellers make the choice that best fits for them. We can’t make that decision for them.
Probably the worst color to paint any room in the house is a brilliant white. It tends to kill the space. Especially if other colors are missing in the room. The result can be bland, dead, non-exciting. Reminds me of the people in white on the HBO series, The Leftovers. My team member, exclusive buyer’s agent Amy McMullan, says: “You can paint walls gray, throw up subway tile next to a hardwood floor and you can sell that all day long to Sacramento buyers.” We know because we’re out there in the trenches.
When my parents were raising their children, they had specific ideas of colors for each room. My parents’ best colors to paint the interior were 1950’s pastel. Pink for the bath, living room was green, kitchen yellow and bedrooms brown, blue or rose. Then, the 1960s and 1970s fell into place and everything was more vibrant. Orange became wildly popular. Over the years, white faded in and out until it finally vanished about 20 years ago. Taupe or light brown, coffee and cream dominated after our horrible hunter green and mauve stage of the early 1990s.
Today, gray or greige (a grayish beige) are the colors of choice. However, light tan is still popular. If you like, you can read an article by Zillow boasting how 7 colors made certain houses fetch higher sales prices. Be aware that much of the data is more general, not local to Sacramento. When you’re wondering about the best colors to paint the interior of your house, it should be a decision based on what local buyers want. Ask your Sacramento Realtor.
Realtor Ethics Violations Not Available to the Public
While I hung out in Hawaii last week, Ken Harney from the Washington Post contacted me about Realtor ethics violations and the new policy changes at NAR effective this January. The new policies now allow for publication of Realtor ethics violations, meeting certain criteria. Supposedly, this is so agents can find out which other agents have been found guilty of violating the Realtor Code of Ethics. However, the information is not available to the public.
Well, I’ve got news for ya. Most Realtors already know who the perpetrators are.
Ken Harney had made a comment that alluded to the notion paid subscribers of certain websites could monitor or change their online reviews. Which is not really true. I know for certain that many popular websites publish anything any member of that websites cares to write. Especially when the person writing the nastygram is not a client of the agent, makes up some crap, and you can’t get rid of it. Take Zillow for example. A poster of a review needs to satisfy only two conditions: to NOT be a real estate professional and to establish an account on Zillow. Then the reviewer can write anything that pops into her head, sort of like Trump, and the victim can’t take it down.
Harney says you can look at reviews or no reviews on Realtor.com; however, I don’t ask clients to post a review there. Because it’s not as widely read as Yelp or Zillow. You can’t ask clients to post their reviews everywhere for you online. Realtor.com is on the bottom of many agent’s lists. Further, I understand that an agent can remove bad reviews from Realtor.com by not approving them, but I haven’t verified this. However, you can find my client’s testimonials at Sacramentorealtorreviews.com.
As for Realtor ethics violations being available to the public, I replied via email to Ken Harney’s request: The public viewing of dirty laundry is never gonna happen. I see the Washington Post changed my comment to “not going to happen.” But another newspaper did not. I think it lessens the impact to change what I said. It’s not meant to be assertive or in favor or against, just a fact.
Very clearly Realtors attempt to police themselves and, as such, sometimes they are wrong and sometimes they are right. A person was once pursued for an ethics violation when she excitedly wrote online that her business had exploded like 1,000 percent, it was so crazy. Do you think people are serious when they say something like that? Who do you think turns in so-called ethics violations of false advertising like this? Jealous agents, that’s who. These are NOT agents concerned about raising the bar.
Agents concerned about raising the bar are out there setting good examples.
On top of this, many years ago I got hauled into a ethics hearing that was so bogus, so contrived, so over-the-top idiotic, yet the abuse upon full disclosure failed to cease. Not even when an association lawyer who is now in management at the Board tried to stop it. The ethics committee jumped all over that claim and forced me to show up for a hearing that I should never have been called in for. Required to show my 1099 from the New York Times to prove I was also a paid freelancer. Brought my laptop to the hearing so I could visually explain how the internet works. They had no claim. Of course, I was found innocent.
But what a mess that should never have happened. That experience erased any feelings of good will toward the procedures. Such a dog-and-pony show. It most likely happened because some green-eyed agent noticed my content ranks high in Google for real estate-related material online. This individual evidently searched hard for something to report for a Realtor ethics violation because nobody goes to that extent on impulse. The person decided, in error, that the website, owned by the New York Times, had failed to disclose my Realtor status online. Which was untrue. Flat-out wrong.
Why aren’t they out there busting the agents who lie to your face? Doctor documents over a client’s signature? Insist there is no variable commission when there is? Tell buyers if they write an offer with the listing agent, they will make sure they get the property so they should drop their buyer’s agent? Submit earnest money deposits on transactions that are already deposited in another escrow? Independently make decisions for their clients? Squeeze buyer’s agents out of a listing on purpose? Tell a buyer a listing with a release clause is sold?
Those are a hideous bunch of infractors.
As long as Realtor Associations are in charge of ethics violations, there will always be drama. It’s like incest in some ways. And they will never publish that information to the public. They aren’t even that sure of it themselves.
Cannot Get Off the Plane Without a Buyer Cancellation
Welcome to the Sacramento fall real estate market and the increasing likelihood of a buyer cancellation. No sooner did my plane land in Sacramento last night than I received a buyer cancellation. Couldn’t even get off the aircraft without a buyer flaking. Buyers are dropping like flies lately, left and right. One listing I’ve put back on the market four times. Count ’em, four times. That’s just nuts. The seller can’t believe his eyes. And it’s almost never about the property itself as it is about the buyer’s insecurities, confusion and ultimate inability to perform.
Now, I don’t hear these sorts of stories from my team members. On the Elizabeth Weintraub Team, I take the listings and my team members work with our buyers. Every once in a while they might work with a buyer who freaks out over a repair and elects to cancel, but it’s not happening at the rapid pace for them as it is on my listing end. So, that makes me wonder if other buyer’s agents aren’t qualifying their buyers or providing adequate counseling.
Hate to admit that the art of real estate counseling as taught almost 50 years ago is truly a lost art among many agents in this day and age. Such a shame. Charles Chatham should be rolling over in his grave.
The buyer cancellation I dealt with last night was on a property that took the buyer almost two weeks to decide to buy. Who waits two weeks to figure out if they should make an offer? In a market of limited inventory, rising prices and increasing interest rates? Probably a buyer who is not all that committed to start with.
If we sold real estate in Sacramento like they do in the Bay Area, this stuff would not be happening. When a buyer makes an offer in the Bay Area, typically that buyer receives upfront disclosures and reports to review. They also don’t employ a ton of weasel clauses like we do.
While in Hawaii, I’d been corresponding with Ken Harney at the Washington Post, after he reached out to me. Mostly to talk about why the public can’t view ethics violations at NAR. But also about our squirrelly local real estate market, which reflects what is happening nationally. He calls the Bay Area its “own separate universe,” and he’s right.
We’ll see how things go this weekend. This week has been fairly quiet, and often the first Sunday after Labor Day is busy. Keeping a buyer in escrow is tricky at best. And the real bummer is the listing agent has absolutely zero control over a buyer cancellation. The listing agent doesn’t talk to the buyer, can’t advise the buyer, and needs to remain hands off. Which means the person responsible for the buyer is the buyer’s agent.
Some buyer’s agents don’t even have the decency to call listing agents to discuss. Nope, they just shoot over the buyer cancellation in an email and call it a day.
Wonder if Median Prices of Sacramento Homes Have Recovered from 2006?
Are you wondering whether median prices of Sacramento homes have recovered from 2006? If you’ve been watching the housing market in Sacramento for any period of time lately, you’re probably blown away by rising prices. You can’t spin around without finding limited inventory, multiple offers and getting priced out of the market. In fact, many buyers probably wonder just how high can prices go?
Are we back to where started in 2006, at the height of the real estate market? Does this mean the median prices of Sacramento homes have recovered from 2006 to 2018? We’re very close, but the fact is we are not there yet. You might think we’re out of the woods by all of the sales activity and pent-up demand for homes, but the statistics from Zillow tell a different story.
Of interest, there are four communities, upper-end, more affluent areas, which have moved past the median sales prices from 2006. Those areas are El Dorado Hills, Granite Bay, Folsom and the city of Davis. The bounce back rate for Davis is 115%, meaning median prices have surpassed 2006 by 15%.
The chart below shows the percentage of 2006 values that each neighborhood or city has reached in June of 2018. This data was extracted from the Sacramento Bee story and not verified as sourcing from Zillow.
If you’d like to know whether median prices of Sacramento homes have recovered from 2006 to 2018, the percentages below might astonish. As always, feel free to call your Sacramento Realtor, Elizabeth Weintraub, 916.233.6759, for more information.
City and Percentage of 2006 Median Prices to 2018
Florin 84%
Woodland 90%
Rio Linda 89%
South Lake Tahoe 93%
Auburn 93%
Galt 92%
Rancho Cordova 92%
Placerville 93%
Elk Grove 94%
Sacramento 93%
West Sacramento 96%
Citrus Heights 95%
Rosemont 95%
Carmichael 97%
Fair Oaks 97%
Roseville 97%
Rocklin 99%
Arden-Arcade 99%
Orangevale 99%
Lincoln 100%
Shingle Springs 100%
El Dorado Hills 101%
Granite Bay 101%
Folsom 105%
Davis 115%
