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Good News is Often on the Tail End of Bad News
White blonde hair is not the same thing as silver hair
There is really no such thing as horribly bad news in the life of a Sacramento Realtor. Although, I could point to the 7 hours I spent at a Land Park hair salon yesterday, trying to process my hair into silver, and it’s still only a white blonde. At one point my hairdresser was ready to boot me out the door with golden blonde locks but instead I canceled my manicure and pedicure next door on Riverside to try one more go around. I made an appointment for silver hair, not golden blonde.
The worst thing is I’ll show up to claim our VIP tickets at the Basilica of Saint Mary’s Block Party this Saturday in Minneapolis with white blonde hair. Probably go visit my brother who is dying from lung cancer and not talking to anybody until now. Eventually, I’ll return to my hairdresser and give it another go for silver. Or, Mother Nature will do it for me in enough time.
Then I received an offer for a troublesome property that the agent did not show and could not verify if the buyer can even qualify. Plus, another sale blew up because the buyers freaked out and, since I am not their buyer’s agent, I can’t try to calm those irrational fears. It’s their ultimate loss.
When a sale blows up, I try to break the news to the sellers as gently as possible, especially if we are not able to talk by phone about it. The last thing a seller needs to see in her email is the subject line that the buyer canceled. The cancellation of a purchase contract can be jarring and disturbing news, delivered unexpectedly. I approach it along the lines of the cat is the roof and can’t come down. Like yesterday I emailed the seller that the Buyer Has Problems. Because they do. Their problem is they aren’t closing because it never occurred to them that buying a 100-year home could present a few a minor issues.
Bad news for them. Good news on the tail end of bad news for some other lucky buyers, though.
The other good news is I am relisting another home that the seller canceled last year and now wants to sell again. She was very apologetic for doubting certain aspects of this transaction; I understand confusion like that and tend to forgive. It’s a nice home in a good community, and should not present any unusual difficulties to sell. All of this just goes to show that when a door closes, a couple more open up. There is no good reason to let any bad news in Sacramento real estate create a negative or adverse situation.
Agents Must be Qualified to Work on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team
Josh Amolsch, Dianne Slutsky, Elizabeth Weintraub, Barbara Dow
You can’t make up this stuff. Yesterday morning at 7:33, midstream reading the Sacramento Bee and chewing a piece of gluten-free whole-grain toast, I noticed my cell phone vibrate on the kitchen table. Local caller. I picked it up. The caller asked if it was too early to call. Now, you’d think she would have considered that fact before entering my phone number . . . I responded: obviously not since I answered. I can be a smart aleck sometimes. She wanted to know if I am a top producer Sacramento Realtor like she read on my website, sounding as though she wondered if I misrepresented myself.
Just what one wants to hear early in the morning. Are you an honest person? I asked who she was and what she wanted, which seemed to somewhat bristle her. She repeated her question. Why, why does this 7:33 AM caller want to know how much money I make, and why is she interrupting my breakfast?
Turns out she wanted to know if I would consider putting together a team of agents and whether I would hire her if she got her real estate license. You’d think the first thing she would have done was peruse my website to determine that the Elizabeth Weintraub Team already exists, and she could have looked over my closed listings to realize that I am indeed a top producer Sacramento Realtor, but not everybody has the patience nor the where-with-all to successfully navigate online.
Eyeing my carton of non-fat Greek yogurt, although not with the same intensity and drooly attention as our cat, Pica, I moved quickly to end the call by saying I don’t hire new agents. You’ve got to have experience and be fully qualified to work on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. Oh, says, the caller, the conversation was over then. Thank goodness. Except it wasn’t.
She went on to flatly state there is a bubble next summer and wondered if I was aware. She heard it on the radio. What is this? Jehovah’s Witnesses on my doorstep at 7:30? We still have thousands of homeowners underwater in Sacramento. Very few homes for sale. I suggested that maybe this is not the best time for her to be entering the real estate industry if she truly believes a bubble is about to burst. She followed that up by insisting she was a very intelligent woman who has a mortgage lender’s license, and had once sold her own home which, in her mind, makes her fully qualified to work to work on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team.
No, no, shoot me now. And then it got worse.
You don’t need a Realtor to sell a home, she insisted. Well, why didn’t she tell me THAT in the first place because I had no idea my services were completely useless. It’s so easy, she continued, all you have to do is call a title company. What? Even experienced agents are struggling to close transactions in today’s market — the world of Sacramento real estate is extremely complicated — and here is this nitwit who wants to enter a profession she truly believes is unnecessary?
I considered referring her to my office manager but then I might have to see her face in my office, and she would be disruptive to others around us, give more undeserving Realtors a bad name, and decided against it. Just wished her well and pitied the next agent she undoubtedly will disturb.
How Are These Sacramento Real Estate Things Still a Thing?
My experience of working with agents over the past 40 years shows that you can’t change a narcissistic real estate agent, no matter how much that agent might desire to change, if the agent is clueless. It’s generally cluelessness that causes a self-centered agent to say silly things. After all, agents are not immune to ignorance in any greater numbers than any other person in the world. It’s the bell curve distribution. You’ve got bad doctors, bad politicians, bad school teachers, bad law enforcement officials, and bad real estate agents, along with the good.
Some agent implied recently that she felt the REALTOR Code of Ethics is an over dramatization of the industry and appeared as though she preferred to pick and choose which Articles to adhere to and ignore the rest. Because this agent must operate in a vacuum, dancing alone to tunes in her head that only she can hear. Or, perhaps she is not a REALTOR because only REALTORS must adapt the REALTOR Code of Ethics. You can’t change agents like that. They don’t want education. How is it that some agents are not a REALTOR? How is that still a thing?
Earlier this week another agent said she was not submitting an offer for her buyers on a short sale listing because we would make her promise to stop writing offers for that buyer. Duh. It’s a good thing we avoided getting tangled up with that disaster, but how is this type of ignorance still a thing? After 10 years of Sacramento short sales, how are real estate agents still under the goofy impression that it’s a worthwhile endeavor to write a bunch of offers for a buyer when a buyer can purchase only one home? It’s a waste of time for everybody involved, including the buyer’s agent. And it’s considered against the law.
Let’s see, Ms. Shit for Brains . . . you want to write an offer on an Elk Grove short sale but you don’t want to commit to waiting for short sale approval? You want us to accept your buyer’s offer, remove the home from the market, submit the entire short sale package to the bank, advise you weekly on our activities, negotiate the short sale, resubmit endless financials and, after 8 to 12 weeks, while the foreclosure doomsday clock is still ticking for our sellers, finally produce a short sale approval letter only for your buyer to announce that she has purchased a different home?
You want to waste the time of all of these dedicated people: the Sacramento listing agent, her team members, transaction coordinator, escrow officer, title officer, the buyer’s lender and the sellers’ entire extended family on the off-chance that maybe your buyer will elect to perform at the 11th hour? What are you thinking? Where is your head? How is this still a thing?
Granted, some agents list short sales that they should not be listing because they did not qualify the sellers for the short sale or it’s priced inappropriately or they are using a third-party vendor for negotiation, but that’s not the case with this Sacramento Realtor. I have closed more short sales since 2006 than any other agent in a 7-county area. My short sales close. That’s because we choose to go into escrow with strong buyers who are committed to closing, and because it’s doubtful you will find a more qualified Realtor in Sacramento to negotiate your short sale.
But, seriously, after all these years, how is this attitude toward short sales still a thing?
Persistence is a Mantra for Elk Grove Realtor
Confidence and persistence go hand in hand. While there are those who will certainly disagree, I happen to believe that persistence is a good thing, especially when it applies to Sacramento real estate. How important is it to be a person who finds a way to get things done and who doesn’t let adversity spit in her face? That’s what I ask. I’m one of those people who will do just about whatever it takes to accomplish my goal or the objectives of my clients. You will never hear me say something can’t happen if I can figure out a way to make it happen, and it’s within my power, then that thing will happen.
I preface my blog today with that statement because it will help to explain how I almost became the newspaper headline: Elk Grove Realtor Found Dead Speared to Gate. I had just closed escrow on another home in Elk Grove and had given the buyer’s agent a couple of days to get the keys out of the lockbox before I drove over to Stonelake. I paused on the front porch when I discovered a contractor’s lockbox attached to the fence. How convenient, I must have switched out the lockboxes at some point, which I often do. I tried several times to enter the code but it would not open. Hmmm. The reason it will not open has got to be that it is not my contractor’s box. Therefore, logic dictated that my own Bluetooth iBox was most likely in the back yard on the gas meter. Except, I was denied physical access by an electronic gate, which was closed and would not budge. Dilemma.
This was the pivotal point at which another Elk Grove Realtor would have shrugged her shoulders and elected to come back at some other time when the occupants were home. But not this crazy person. Oh, no, I was not leaving without my lockbox.
First, I am not completely insane nor illogical. I texted the buyer’s agent and asked if he had the code for the contractor’s box. Sure enough. My heart pounded with glee. I opened the contractor’s box. Uh, oh, the key was not there. Empty. Rats. OK, I am not tall enough nor strong enough to hoist my body over the iron gate with spikes. I’m in my 60s for crying out loud. But if I had a ladder or some big guy to assist, I could do it at the low point because an electronic box attached to the house could serve as a stepping point to the ground.
I texted the seller. He directed me to a relative’s house but she was not home. Anybody else? Oh, yes, there was Lisa, who lived a few doors down. I knocked on her door. “Hi, I am Elizabeth Weintraub, your neighbor’s Realtor,” pointing toward the house with the for sale sign still in the yard, “and I’d like to borrow your ladder so I can climb over his gate to get my lockbox.” Surprisingly, she gave me her ladder. Well, she first called the seller to verify because I probably looked like a crazy person.
I stood in Lisa’s front yard while she made the call behind closed doors. All of a sudden, a tiny hummingbird flew up to me and hovered within 6 inches of my face. I wondered if I resembled a flower because why would anybody be standing still in the front yard if she wasn’t a botanical of some sort? Hummingbirds generate a lot of noise up close, in case you’re wondering. A school of hummingbirds would be almost deafening. This was a female hummingbird. Suddenly the neighbor came around the corner and thrust the ladder into my hands. Eureka.
Trying not to break off any branches of a shrub, I positioned the ladder at the low end of the gate, and carefully squeezed my body around the corner, trying not to let my foot slip. One slip and I’d be gored by a spike. One tiny misstep, major injury, if not death. I considered the headline: Elk Grove Realtor found dead speared to gate. Nothing horrible happened. I grabbed the lockbox, and hauled the ladder back to the neighbor. Her parting words to me were she was sorry she had to make the call because “you totally look like a Realtor.” No makeup, jeans, a t-shirt, wild curly hair and Chanel flip-flops. Yeah, right. Perhaps it was my Italian roadster parked next to the sign.
Glancing down at my cellphone, I spotted an email from the president’s office at Quicken Loans. Quicken had located an appraiser who could go out to Anatolia yesterday to complete an appraisal, after every other appraiser in Sacramento was booked and at least a week out, and we were up against contingency deadlines. This is how persistence pays off. I do what it takes to get the job done, and that persistence is why my sellers are happy to pay my commission.
The photo on this page is of my sister, Margie, but the ladder photo was shot yesterday at the home in Elk Grove. Photos by Elizabeth Weintraub.
Losing a Wrapped Radiator Earring in Downtown Sacramento
The thing about actively selling Sacramento real estate all day long and being engaged, on-call, on my toes, alert and ready for any crap that is thrown in my direction is the fact that I don’t have a lot of time to spend on any of my obsessions, like trying to find a replacement for the wrapped-radiator earring I lost downtown. Yesterday was extremely windy. I parked in front of the Memorial Auditorium, hacked that portal in Ingress, captured it, while I fumbled for quarters to feed the meter in the midst of super strong gusts that blew down 15th Street. My hair probably resembled an octopus, curls flying in all directions.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in de Vere’s Pub with my husband for lunch — which has pretty decent grub btw — that I noticed my wrapped-radiator earring was missing from my left ear. You’d think that my Bluetooth device, which I wear on that ear as well, would have hooked the earring or prevented it from flying away, but that’s what I get for not sticking the little plastic doohickeys on the backs of my earlobes for security. 100% my fault.
Wrapped-Radiator Earring by McKenna Hallet
The artist who created those earrings resides in Maui, and she doesn’t sell to the public. I met McKenna Hallett at the Four Seasons last summer when my friend and team member Barbara Dow grabbed a much needed getaway vacation. She makes low-impact jewelry, things made from stuff she finds around the island, and she doesn’t use electricity or precious resources other than a treadle-driven sewing machine or her own muscle power. Her mission statement seems to be: Wearable art made without burning fossil fuels from stuff I find.
As I stuffed quarters into the parking meter, my phone rang, which froze my Ingress screen. The caller was a bank negotiator advising that the bank decided to send a person from the investment team to personally tour one of my listings of homes in Elk Grove and assess the damage. Even though we had delivered photographs and a contractor’s bid. They want to figure out whether they’ll make more money from an REO or from a short sale. I hate to say in this case I’m guessing they’ll choose REO because the occupants make it difficult to show.
There are many portals on 15th Street, and they change from Enlightened to Resistance and from Resistance to Enlightened faster than a Sacramento Realtor can deploy resonators. My cell rang again, and this time it was Roof Doctors to say they cannot provide a roof certification on a pending escrow. I didn’t need to capture the Taco Truck portal anyway. I’ll deal with this disappointing news.
But I sure wish I could have found my missing wrapped radiator earring. Walking back to my car, I realized that it could have flown into the bushes or been stepped on, flung into the street and, even if I spotted it, I probably would not recognize it, since I had a good 5-block area where it could have vanished. The best thing to do is just replace it. Short of flying back to Maui, I tracked down the artist and she gave me an outlet that sells McKenna Hallet’s stuff. Of course, I have to call them, and all of my other business gets in the way of that because I only work on personal matters after my real estate activities finds a break. Some days, that’s never. C’est la vie.
