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Expecting the Unexpected is Easier Said Than Done in Hawaii
The mongoose is an invasive species in Hawaii.
Expecting the unexpected is something I try to avoid due to careful planning and organization of my life, but you can’t really live well this way. One pretty much needs to expect the unexpected in order to prepare for it. In the case of my Sacramento real estate practice, for example, this ability, predicting future problems and avoiding them, is very handy for my clients. It is also rather rare for me to get freaked out over something, especially when I’ve witnessed so many oddities in life. Still, there are things that freak me out.
Weird things that make me laugh at my reaction to them. For example, yesterday an internet lead followed up with me and called. She apologized profusely for taking so long to return my phone call. She rambled on and on about how she had picked me exclusively to represent her because I’ve been in the business since 1974. She was impressed by my online reviews. She really wanted to meet with me to discuss selling a home in Orangevale. I was her agent.
From what I recall, her property turned out to be a mobile home unsecured to a permanent foundation, so, not real property. Second, she stated in her email the structures on the property were old, dilapidated yet she believed the acreage was worth at least $800,000. Except I could not find any documentation to support this theory. She wanted to meet with me on Monday. When I disclosed Monday is not possible because I am in Hawaii, she did not ask when I would return. I expressed my confusion over her estimate of value, explaining the comps show her property is worth $250K or so. She cut me off and hung up.
I was not expecting the unexpected to happen. Although it was for the best, I tell myself. But the thing is even delusional people can be educated. I have patience. I will take time to explain the reality of Sacramento real estate to people because I realize they don’t really know what I know. I find when people understand the facts, often their opinion is altered. My job is not to avoid ignorance, it’s to transform it.
Within minutes of this phone call, I suddenly noticed a squirrel on our patio. Right by the sliding door, looking at me. This was unexpected. It was even stranger because my brain shifted, and I realized this was not a squirrel. It was a mongoose, an invasive species to Hawaii. I have never seen a mongoose that up close and personal, and certainly not in my yard. I was not expecting the unexpected.
Although, I don’t know why. Another example: I hired a housecleaning service to come in and tidy up things before we arrived at our house in Hawaii. Dust. Vacuum. Clear out any geckos. I do not want to find another dead baby gecko, like I did just before I left in June. It was rolled up on its back with its little gecko legs in the air and had been hiding under the toaster. Those baby geckos are so small they can slide under closed doors. When they don’t find food, they die.
Then, I removed a clock from our wall to relocate it to a different spot. I had bought a hand-painted scroll from Bali to hang over the bronze buddha resting on a stand because the clock in that spot seemed unnatural. What? Inside the back of the clock was a baby gecko. I managed to drop the clock without breaking it, and called my husband, official gecko remover. Shared my technique of quickly covering the gecko with an empty yogurt carton, only because I had already broken a glass doing that, and then slowly sliding a wok spatula under the carton and carting all outside. Problem solved.
I picked up the clock again and examined the back of it to assess whether I had broken any part of it. Holy shit. Another gecko! Another baby gecko! This time the clock flew across the living room and onto the ceramic floor, while the baby gecko flew in the opposite direction of our bedroom. My husband tried to stomp on it but it slid under a bamboo transition piece. You never know what you will see or where you will see it in Hawaii. You’ve gotta expect the unexpected at all times.
College Glen Home Sold in 3 Days $10,000 Over List Price
This College Glen home on Cliffwood closed escrow at $335K.
When these wonderful sellers were referred to me to sell the husband’s family College Glen home, I was truly overjoyed to meet them. Sometimes, a Sacramento Realtor simply connects with her clients. It’s an amazing feeling. People who don’t express or welcome emotions probably don’t do well in real estate. I can tell when I meet people whether there is a spark, and I can also feel the energy when I enter a home. When both are present, whammo, remarkable things can happen. Further, these types of sellers make me want to be a better agent.
The sellers had appointments with other agents but after meeting with me, I think they canceled those appointments. The husband’s wife literally hired me on the spot. She said, handing me the successor trustee documents: I want you to handle this. See, they could tell. I would do whatever I could to make their transaction a smooth and pleasant experience, on top of netting them the most money they could possibly ever expect to achieve. That’s my job.
Son of the deceased help to build this wall at the home in College Glen.
There had also been a death in the College Glen home, to which I was equally sensitive. Especially since the husband had also grown up in this home. It was truly a treasured residence. My job, as I saw it, was to maximize profit potential and find the right buyer. Lots of people proclaim to be the “right buyer” but so often it’s just a smoke screen. We wanted to choose the buyers who would purchase the home AS IS, not demand repairs nor expect renegotiations later, all of that hocus-pocus employed by some buyers in Sacramento real estate.
The seller told me he expected the home to sell around $282,000. But all of the comparable sales, exemplified by our seller’s market frenzy, pointed to a price of at least $325,000. He seemed a bit astounded, but I showed him the statistics, explained my thinking, my strategy, they unanimously trusted me to do this.
After our open house Sunday, we received multiple offers. One offer was higher, but like I pointed out to the sellers, if they really preferred the first set of buyers — the buyers who submitted an offer on Friday and agreed to wait out the open house — the sellers could always counter the first set of buyers to match the highest offer. That’s exactly what happened and how this College Glen home came to sell at $10,000 over list price, at $335K. We closed 18 days later. No fuss, no muss. No drama. Just a smooth closing. And this is how Sacramento real estate is supposed to happen. It’s why experience matters.
Wildhawk Neighborhood Home Features 5 Bedrooms Near Wildhawk Golf Course
9956 Phoenician Way is located in a Wildhawk neighborhood called Wildhawk West Village.
The Wildhawk neighborhood is one of Sacramento’s best kept secrets. It is located between Calvine and Gerber and West of Vineyard. Homes are built in the early 2000s to present, but the high demand homes are those with 5 bedrooms and plenty of square footage. Many families move to the Wildhawk neighborhood for the Elk Grove schools. Nearby, there is Arnold Adreani Elementary School on Wildhawk West Drive but also Katherine L. Albiani Middle School on Bradshaw in Elk Grove and Pleasant Grove High School on Bond in Elk Grove.
The residential communities in Wildhawk are conforming and in close proximity to the Wildhawk Golf Course. The Wildhawk Golf Course features 18 holes and an onsite restaurant, plus golf lessons. Getting to this development is half the fun because it’s a pleasant drive by horse pastures and rolling countryside. It’s closer to downtown than many parts of Elk Grove. You don’t have half the hustle and bustle of Elk Grove in Wildhawk. It’s seems to be more quiet.
Entrance showcases a second floor-bridge and clerestory windows.
Due to limited inventory in Sacramento, there are not very many homes for sale in the Wildhawk neighborhood, and nothing really like this 5 bedroom, 4 bath home. When you enter the home, the first thing you notice, apart from the soaring ceilings with clerestory windows, is the beautiful bridge on the second floor. It features white railings, carried into the color of the railings on the stairs. The bridge offers views of the formal living room and the family room on the other side. You can view the bridge from both sides of the home.
A highly desirable feature of this home in the Wildhawk neighborhood is the fact there are two master suites. You’ll find a master suite on the first floor with its own bath, and a second bedroom, with a first-floor guest bath. Upstairs, is another master suite and two more bedrooms and another guest bath. The square footage, according to the Sacramento County Assessor, is 2,628 square feet. The home is enormously big, meticulously maintained, with earth tone colors.
Kitchen features dining space, an island and black appliances.
Apart from the formal living room and dining area, around the south side is the family room and kitchen and more dining space. There is an island in the kitchen, gleaming white glossy tile and black appliances, including a gas cooktop and double ovens. The whole south side of this home has a view of the pretty back yard. Other floor plans like this included a 3-car garage instead of a 5th bedroom on the first floor, but this plan is more family friendly. There is even a spot for a trampoline in the yard.
Come to our open house on Sunday from 2:00 to 4:00 PM and see for yourself with you’ll love living the Wildhawk neighborhood. Check out the virtual tour, which you can play over and over to your heart’s content. 9956 Phoenician Way, Sacramento, CA 95829, is offered exclusively by Elizabeth Weintraub and Lyon Real Estate at $495K.
Do You Need Sacramento Window Cleaning Services?
Why not treat yourself to a professional Sacramento window cleaning?
When I told my husband we needed Sacramento window cleaning services, he pooh-poohed the idea. But that’s primarily because he doesn’t like people he doesn’t know, otherwise known as contractors, crawling around our property. He resists change. A little cobwebs in the screens never hurt anybody, in his motto. Except the spiders and other critters living in our screens were pretty much taking over the territory. When was the last time we washed the windows, I wondered. Probably not for at least 10 years.
Sacramento window cleaning is a necessity every single year. Our summers are long, dusty and hot. We don’t really get rain. I also discovered that spraying our windows with the garden hose is the wrong thing to do, according to the window cleaners we hired. They said all that does is put hard water on our windows, which causes hard water spots. They also claim rain, mixing with stuff in the gutters and dirt, can cause hard water stains. As do sprinklers that let water hit the windows.
I studied a bunch of websites and service providers. Finally, I settled on Masters Window Cleaners. The company has almost 200 reviews on Angies List, and they provide instant quotes on their website. Not only do they clean the exterior windows, but they clean the interior glass, remove and scrub the screens, plus they clean out grub in the tracks. They came over to our house in Land Park early last Wednesday and texted to let me know they were on their way.
The guys were working away at Sacramento window cleaning for almost 5 hours. But then we have about 400 square feet of glass in our home. The most astonishing thing happened after they finished and left. Every time I walked into a room, I felt like something was amiss. There was too much light. No cobwebs in the windows. No spots on the windows. In fact, it was so bright that I forgot we have windows in the house. It was as though the outdoors was inside the house; like, no barrier. Yup, a double take in every room, I continued to be astonished all day.
Which just tells me that our windows were really filthy. I ask my sellers to clean their windows, but I’ve never hired anybody myself. If you need Sacramento window cleaning, because God knows housekeepers don’t do windows these days, I recommend Masters Window Cleaners. They charged us about $300 to clean almost 50 window panes. If you’re thinking that’s a lot, consider it was 2 men over 5 hours. Not to mention, I didn’t have to do it and could instead focus on what I do best, selling Sacramento real estate.
Why Selling Sacramento Homes to Neighbors Can Be More Difficult
Selling Sacramento homes to neighbors can sometimes mean lower values.
The longer I’m in the real estate business in this town, the more I see why selling Sacramento homes to neighbors can be difficult. For starters, let’s say the neighbors already own a home. They want to sell and buy a bigger home in the same neighborhood. Of course, when their home goes on the market, it’s worth a lot of money, so much money that even Trump would have a hard time describing how much money that home is worth, and if he isn’t the worst liar in the world I don’t know who is. I got a big kick out of Jack Ohman’s editorial cartoon yesterday: excuse me, I have to take this call from Winston Churchill, heh, heh.
I’ve been so busy selling homes that I haven’t paid attention to the value of our own house. Like the shoe cobbler’s kids going barefoot. A lender appraised our home in Land Park yesterday for more than double its original sales price. My immediate reaction was we need to dump this house and move out of the state. Which is what we did the last time this happened, now that I think about it. The problem is there are not very many places we can go to in California that will allow me to continue selling Sacramento homes. So I think we’ve gotta stay put.
It got me to wondering, though, how many people would buy back their homes at today’s values? Would you, if your home suddenly doubled in value? Would you buy your neighbor’s house if it were similar? See, I’m finding that selling Sacramento homes to neighbors is a lot more difficult because they live in the neighborhood. They are too close to the way things used to be or the way they think things are. It’s a commonality that prevents some neighbors from seeing value.
Almost every time that I receive a lowball offer from some potential buyer, it’s a neighbor. Somebody who doesn’t see the value in the home. And then invariably we sell to a buyer from another neighborhood, possibly a buyer who wants to move up into an area they perceive to be better. All those reasons that make a certain neighborhood more valuable than another, like, say, conforming homes, better school districts, pride of ownership, desirable location, those things are readily recognizable by a buyer from outside of the immediate vicinity but not necessarily afforded a lot of credence by those who live there.
Perception often lies in the eye of the beholder, yet even if you’re Donald Trump, it doesn’t alter facts. It’s a challenge selling Sacramento homes in this market because of low inventory, as readily available comparable sales might not be present over the past 3 months. To determine value, you’ve got to rely on principles of substitution, and not every agent knows how to compute those values. They are trained to look in a half mile radius and if they can’t find a comp, they give up.
I recall a sale in Davis for about $1.5 million a while back, and all the agents I spoke to in Davis said it could not be done and the value was not there. When I sold that house at list price, they wanted to know if it was a neighbor who bought it because no such neighbor would do such a thing. Yet, it sold for cash. To a buyer who recognized the value. A buyer from the vicinity but not directly in that neighborhood. I saw the same thing happen with a couple of luxury sales in Riverlake, too. It’s like some close-knit communities seem too close.
Just throwing it out there for consideration. Just because a neighbor can’t recognize value doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
