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The Magical Touch in Sacramento Real Estate
I realize this might sound a little touchy-feelie, but if you want to acquire the magical touch in Sacramento real estate, you’ve got to let things be and not give them so much negative energy. It seems like I am constantly taking my client’s temperature. Resting my hand on their foreheads to see if they feel hot or cold and then trying to make things OK. Because selling or buying real estate can be very stressful.
If my clients begin to feel stressed, I encourage them to call me. I welcome their frustrations. They can tell me exactly how they feel, and I will extract the anxiety and release it. I don’t absorb it because that would turn me into a lunatic. I think that’s part of what makes a Sacramento agent a really good real estate agent, when an agent can go out of her way to help to alleviate her client’s fears and dissolve the pain. Suffering is bad enough without suffering at will.
There is enough suffering in the world without people purposely creating more unhappiness for themselves. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t always get what you want, and sometimes you don’t even get what you need. But if you try to let go and focus on positive outcomes, things have a way of working themselves out.
I’ve seen the results of this first hand. Some new problem will crop up and immediately the people involved tend to think the worst. They create the most horrible image and play that image like a movie over and over in their heads to reinforce just how awful it really could become. But the thing is none of that might happen at all. Given the choice of believing things will work out and taking steps to make it happen or freaking out and condemning everything in your path, which will give you the result you deserve? Both of them, I guess.
So, the question is what do you deserve? I believe you deserve the magical touch in Sacramento real estate. That’s what we do.
This Agent is Accepting New Home Listings in Sacramento
It’s been a stressful couple of months in Sacramento real estate lately as this listing agent has been focused on winning challenge after challenge. It can take a slight toll. In the middle of all of this action, it’s important to pause and assess the housing market to best advise my clients. This is when I often head for a massage. It’s nice to feel a human touch on my skin. To unwind and relax. I visited Images Salon on Riverside next to Vic’s Ice Cream in Land Park yesterday and was delighted. Ten times better than the place not to have a massage in Land Park.
I’ve got 12 escrows pending to close before my birthday this month, and once I realized how many were already sold, it’s made me more excited to work even harder to sell the remaining few I have and to gather more listings. I have a small number of homes in various stages of prep and, after a manicure, pedicure and haircut, these will be available for sale, but I am also accepting new home listings in Sacramento to sell over the summer. Moreover, believe it or not, I am working on the Sacramento fall real estate market.
It’s always a cycle in real estate, and it’s a balancing act to make sure my home listing inventory is not more than I can personally handle. For example, a few years ago, I had 70 listings and that was about the maximum this agent can comfortably handle, but today that number of home listings is small enough to count on two hands. That’s because inventory has been dramatically reduced in Sacramento. Plus, it’s rare to tackle a short sale anymore; those days are gone. Compared to a few years ago, I feel almost like I am on vacation, if it were not for the constant challenges of pending escrows. Any agent can flip a home into escrow but getting it closed is where the true professionals shine. To better explain cycles, let’s look at the housing market numbers in Sacramento:
Studying the Trendgraphix chart above and searching MLS, one can really notice the cyclic trends. For example, at the moment, the number of residential home listings for sale in Sacramento per the MLS are 3,253. The number of pending sales, which include a handful of pending short sales, are 2,908. That means we’re still running out of homes to sell. It’s a drought, although not as severe as our water drought.
The first thing I notice in the May Trendgraphix report above is the column for May looks very similar to the column for October of 2013. But what is different about it is two-fold. First, the pending sales in October were quickly moving down as fewer homes were selling. However, the pending sales in May are continuing to move up, a trend that began in January and shows no signs of slowing! Closed sales fell off slightly in May, probably due to the flakes and unqualified buyers, but I predict that June closed sales will correct. Second, our pending sales exceed those closed. It’s been that way all year.
You don’t see the smaller details, but as a busy Sacramento real estate agent, I can tell you that our inventory over the past year and half has doubled. We moved from 1 month of homes for sale to a little over 2 months, but that it still not enough home listings to sell. Our days on market has increased to 31, meaning buyers are taking longer to make the right choice. Home buyers are also hitting prices harder as homes are selling on average at 98% of list price. A buyer might say that sellers are 2% overly optimistic, but as a listing agent I know it’s the other way around.
If you’re looking to hire the best Sacramento real estate agent you can find, your best bet is to call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I’m presently accepting new listings. Will your home be sold by Elizabeth Weintraub next month? There’s one way to find out.
Chart: Trendgraphix
Working with People You Like in Real Estate
Real estate is one of the few professions in the world in which one can pretty much choose to work with people you like and ignore the ones you don’t. People who don’t work in the real industry and view it only from the outside have a completely different viewpoint of what’s going on and how it works — but that’s true for just about any industry. It always looks simpler and easier when you’re not the one doing the work. Clients try to be helpful and offer suggestions which, to them, may seem like wonderful ideas but are often unrelated to the real estate market at hand. Maybe they got these ideas from a book, somewhere online, or from a family member who sold a home 20 years ago, and it can be hard for these types of clients to let go and let a professional do her job.
There’s not a real estate agent working hard in Sacramento right now who doesn’t know exactly what I’m talking about.
Even when we lay out the principles of real estate in an ABC format, people still have their own ideas about what a real estate agent should do and how they want their property sold. It’s OK because they wouldn’t be human if they didn’t have preconceived notions. It’s tough for us agents to explain because we don’t want to come right out and say to a seller, for example, that the seller is wrong. Nobody wants to be wrong. But sellers can be less right than they may have a right to be.
It’s a delicate balance. To inform, educate, bring about an agreement, a mutual understanding, a mutual agreement and to overcome stubbornness that might be staring us in the face, but it’s all part of the job of a Sacramento real estate agent.
There are times in the real estate business when you can’t come to an agreement. There might be no compromise. A client could be working within the realm of a distorted reality. So, what do you do when that happens? Some agents will take the listing anyway and figure they can ignore the yelling and screaming later. Other agents will walk away and decide to work with only clients who are more reasonable.
I try to keep it simple. If I like the person, even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on every single aspect, I might still work with them. I don’t have to agree with their premise to do a job for them. If I don’t like them, there is nothing they could say to make me want to work with them. Not enough money in the world could make me do it. Money is not a motivator to me. I don’t sell out for money; I don’t compromise who I am.
There are agents who say they would have no clients whatsoever if they worked only with people they liked. I guess I’ve been more fortunate.
Assholes, Steve Jobs and the Smiley Face Mac
Because I don’t preplan my Sacramento real estate blogs and write fresh every morning, yesterday was the first day in almost a decade that I did not write a blog, and you know what –no kickback about it, no consequences and nobody cared. That shows how significant my words in a daily blog are — nobody gives a crap. This real estate agent could have dropped dead, and someday will, and the first clue will be no blog that day.
The problem began when I slept in and therefore overslept. Then my phone started ringing at 7:30 AM and did not stop all day. I recharged it twice. I’m up late most nights reading Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson. It’s such an enthralling book and not because Jobs was an asshole. I deal with enough of those types in real estate, and Jobs was a level above those guys because he’s also had charisma on top of being a genius. He got kicked out and rose again, like a Phoenix. Most real assholes I run into through my business are assholes to the core, simple guys, but Jobs seemed more complex. Like his asshole-ness was so completely integrated into his personality that it was more easily forgiven.
But I’m not reading the book because I’m fascinated by Steve Jobs; I’m reading it because I have been an Apple customer for more than 25 years, and it’s like reading my own history.
Ah, with fond memories I recall the Macintosh, the PowerMac, and the G3. Some of them are sitting in my garage. I can’t bear to destroy or wipe the hard drives, so I can’t give them away. The will probably sit in my garage until they rust. They are relics already. They will never turn into an antique. Even now I smile thinking about the days of a smiley Mac face and how that image appearing on my computer monitor meant everything was all right with the world. No frowny faces. Plus, one can always depend on a Mac. You can’t say that about Windows.
Between house renovations and in the midst of my real estate endeavors in the 1990s, I worked on the side for a few years as a communications director at a nonprofit in Minnesota for the second largest industry in Minnesota: printing. I outfitted that nonprofit with Macs. Networked the computers myself. Signed up all of the employees for AOL. Even when the president who is now long dead subscribed to DSL (to track internet activity, among other reasons), I still kept a modem under my desk and used it with muted sound for personal activities.
Today, I own iPads, an iPod, iShuffle, iPhone, a desktop Power Mac, a PowerBook with state-of-the-hard drive drive, and I’m an iTunes customer. Do you know that Apple does not make its own product to transfer music between all of your devices and one has to pay a third-party vendor for that service? This is what happens when Steve Job dies.
Where Not to Go for a Massage in Land Park
One of the best ways for this agent to deal with a million and one little crises in Sacramento real estate is to head for the nearest spa for a Swedish massage. It’s been about a year since I’ve been over to the spa on 6th Street at Southside Park, but it’s been on my mind recently. The reason is a seller of a home near Southside Park met with me at my real estate office in Midtown last week to talk about selling a family home on U Street. That home is right around the corner from a certain bed and breakfast spa, but when I mentioned the Spa, he did not realize it was there, although it’s been in business at that location for years.
This Spa at Southside Park — the name of which is not relevant– is close to my home in Land Park, and I consider myself a regular client, even though it’s been a while since I made an appointment. I called on Friday and left a message. When nobody called back, I called again and left another message. Around noon on Saturday, I called a third time and this time a live person answered the phone. She promised to check on an appointment and call me back in 10 minutes. I waited an hour and called her again.
The employee at the Spa said she had left a voice mail. What number did she call? Turns out she had written down my number incorrectly and left a voice mail on somebody else’s phone. And she had called not in 10 minutes as promised but 30 minutes later, she confessed. See, this is the thing — you don’t tell a person you will call them back in 10 minutes and then not do it. Plus, you make sure you have called the right number.
Gah.
All the more reason to have a massage. These people can be irritating. But, wait, it gets better. Then the owner called me an hour before my appointment. She said her employee forgot to obtain my credit card number to verify the appointment. My appointment was in one hour, for crying out loud. I find it odd that you need to pressure me for my credit card number to assure that I will show up, even though I am a regular client, I complained. She glossed over that comment and demanded my credit card number.
In retrospect, I should have refused and hung up the phone. I considered it. But then I would not have received a massage.
Which, as it turned out, would not have been a big loss. It was unlike any Swedish massage I’ve ever had. Lots of stroking over and over. Not much pressure, even though I requested more pressure. A Swedish massage is a little bit like a pancake: you bake one side, flip it and do the other. When I turned over, I received a lot of stroking down each side of my neck and then there were hands on my head, squeezing here and there. I was pronounced done.
Where did they find this guy? Did they yank him out behind the counter at Mak’s gas station?
I asked if this Spa was under new ownership. Yes, it is.
There is a massage place over on 19th Street in Midtown. It’s a bit further to drive and not as convenient but I imagine they’re doing a bang-up business there. I can see why. There is also a spa on Riverside in Land Park, which is even closer to my home, that I should check out. Because this former client won’t be going back to that place at Southside Park.
