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Sacramento Sellers Who Sell a Home Twice
Words a Sacramento home seller never wants to hear — and no, it’s not anything like we need to catch the Chihuahuas, but runs close — are: the buyer needs to cancel escrow. Especially at the last minute, when contingencies have been removed and everybody expects the loan to close. Part of the shock is the seller has already in her mind mentally closed escrow. She’s generally moved on and is just waiting for the check.
It’s jarring news to find out the buyer can’t close. It means a seller must sell a home twice. And why can’t the buyer close? Because the buyer can’t get the stinkin’ loan. The first thing sellers question when this happens is what about the preapproval letter? They believed the lender who said the buyer was qualified to buy a home, and I don’t blame sellers for feeling misled. Mortgage lenders don’t guarantee preapproval letters. But there’s more to it than that.
Sometimes, you don’t know that one of the parties has a lien filed against that person until the preliminary title report discloses a judgment. If there are two people buying the home, the lender generally removes one of those persons from title and proceeds with the remaining individual, providing the remaining individual has enough income to qualify.
Which reminds me, a teacher yesterday in Redding wrote and asked what piece of advice I would give first-time home buyers today. That piece of advice is: don’t buy a home for which you must rely on two incomes to meet the mortgage payment — because people split up, get divorced, become sick, die or lose jobs. Things don’t always stay the way they are.
That’s good advice for anybody to follow. But the really important thing I tell sellers is if the buyer does not qualify at the end and needs to cancel the escrow it could actually be a good thing! When I say this they look at me like I’m dense, this goofy, overly optimistic agent. However, it could mean that the seller will put her home back on the market and sell it for more money, perhaps even to a buyer with cash.
That’s exactly how it generally works out, too. It can be a good thing if the buyer cancels. And because I’ve closed over the years hundreds of short sales in Sacramento, this Sacramento real estate agent has unparalleled experience in selling a home twice.
Selling Sacramento Real Estate Without Internet
While this Sacramento real estate agent was on vacation in Alaska with limited Internet access, two real estate transactions blew up at closing — which is a rarity but seems to be more common lately. These would have blown up even if I was in Sacramento. Pending sales blowing up appears to be due to a mix of buyer remorse, uncertainty and severe underwriting guidelines. Fortunately, I was able to put both of these homes back into escrow almost immediately and at better terms, even from thousands of miles away.
I also sold another home in Elk Grove while I was cruising the Inside Passage. We had just left Skagway that evening and headed back to Juneau, a long stretch without Internet. I had anticipated this difficulty before I left, which is why my team members and assistant were on alert, jumping in to help answer questions and monitor listing activity. On top of that, I had set up my iPad as a Hotspot so if we did find cellphone coverage, I could receive wireless coverage through my laptop computer.
The only problem with the iPad is I should have named my iPad something other than Elizabeth Weintraub’s iPad. Like, maybe, Breaking Bad. Although we had only 35 travelers onboard the Alaskan Dream, many of them asked about it because it showed up in their wireless connections as a connectivity port. It kind of made me feel like the only rock pigeon dangling a slice of bread from my mouth, surrounded by starving, pecking pigeons.
My Hotspot only worked though if I was near a cellphone tower. As a backup, I also left my cellphone plugged in and turned to silent. That’s because I use two different cellphone carriers, so whichever was strongest would pick up the signal.
Sure enough, around 1 AM, while I was sound asleep, we cruised into Juneau to get diesel before continuing on to Glacier Bay. See, this is how I sell Sacramento real estate in my sleep. My husband set the alarm on his cellphone to wake me up. Eureka. Internet. I quickly uploaded the offer I had received to DocuSign, cc’d my assistant to send the executed offer on to the buyer’s agent, and crawled back into bed. Of course, it was hard going back to sleep with my brain on fire.
A Sacramento Agent is Not Always Sitting Behind Her Desk
The last few days have been so weird in Sacramento real estate. I’ve got sellers saying they don’t know if they should accept an offer, even though most of their two-dozen offers are more than list price, and I’ve got buyers on other transactions saying they don’t know if they want to close. Why, it’s enough to want to make a Sacramento agent want to write an article about an Affidavit of Death. OK, I couldn’t help it, but I hope you like that link. 🙂
It would be easier if the next time I decide to plan in advance for months and months a vacation somewhere wild if I would just move the date up just one day early. Then, everybody would think I was leaving on, say, a Monday, instead of a Tuesday, which would give me one whole extra day to take care of last-minute problems that have a way of being very last-minute, up to the point of when I’m boarding the freakin’ plane.
It’s enough to give a normal Sacramento agent a heart attack. But no heart attacks for me. When I go, it will be something much more horrendous. I was lounging about at the doctor’s office yesterday in my underwear, waiting for almost 40 minutes on the examining table before the doctor popped her head in the door. We just have to do a little biopsy, she says. Nurse, oh, nurse, where is my razor blade? I can’t do a a biopsy without a razor blade. Flipping her gloved fingertips in the air. Twirling. Waiting.
Conditions aren’t always quite so comforting while I’m lying on my back and trying to answer emails on my cellphone. Doctor sticking a numbing needle in my stomach. Ouch. Slicing off pieces of skin with razor-sharp, um, razors (who knew?). What is astounding to me is when clients sometimes say my emails are too short. They have no idea what this Sacramento agent is actually doing while I’m attempting to respond quickly to their concerns. People who know me are groaning. People who don’t are wondering what I’m talking about.
No matter what, I still try to give first-class service to my clients. I have systems in place, team members from the Elizabeth Weintraub Team who will jump in to help, and even then, I have a really hard time going on vacation. I don’t want anybody to think I have abandoned them, because I haven’t. Not really. Not ever, if I can help it.
F-Bombs and Sacramento Real Estate Agents
An agent from Davis called yesterday and dropped F-bombs left and right. Said she had moved here from southern California. She wasn’t upset or anything, it’s just the way she apparently talks to other people. People she doesn’t know. People she’s not even mad at. She seemed angry with the world and complained a lot about how we sell real estate differently in Sacramento than agents do in southern California.
I’m not so sure about that. I used to sell real estate in Newport Beach in Orange County several decades ago. Escrow is handled a little bit differently from north to south in California, but agents are still pretty much the same. In southern California, escrow instructions are signed right away after an offer is accepted, and the escrow officer is on top of the file from day one. In northern California, most of the documents are signed at closing.
As a veteran Sacramento real estate agent, I’ve been selling real estate in Sacramento for so long that I’ve grown very accustomed to the way we handle our processing in northern California. It seems to be a bit more civilized and makes more sense. Why go to all of that work when the file might not close, seems to be the premise in Sacramento.
Because after an offer is accepted, the appraisal still needs to be completed, the buyer has to conduct a home inspection — during which problems could arise, nothing that requires F-bombs — not to mention, a buyer might not make it out of underwriting. It just seems to make sense that most of the paperwork is consummated after the borrower has lifted the contingencies and the loan is ready to fund.
But regardless of my opinion about whether selling real estate in northern California is easier than in southern California, I don’t believe agents should swear at each other. Sheesh. It was ##$^@ this and *&%$# that. Plenty of F-Bombs. I wanted to ask that agent what pool hall she had rolled out of that morning, but I figured why irritate her further.
Timing the Sacramento Real Estate Market
A seller in Elk Grove just pocketed an additional $75,000, due to timing the Sacramento real estate market. It’s not that I recommend trying to time the market, because it’s almost impossible to do. But you can get lucky. It’s a roll of the dice. Just look at Donald Trump — oh, my poor eyes — because he doesn’t always accurately predict much of anything.
We put this home in Elk Grove on the market in the spring of 2012. I sell an awful lot of homes in this particular part of Elk Grove. This home is located in the highly desirable area of the Machado Dairy subdivision over by Bruceville and Bilby, close to Machado Dairy Park. Buyers like this neighborhood for the schools; the homes are somewhat newer with mature trees. It’s bordered by farm land, which makes you feel like you’re out in the country with all of this open space.
There are so many upgrades in this home. People wonder why a home next door with the same square footage sells for so much less, and it’s upgrades. Ask a short sale seller about upgrades. They will tell you about the cost of every single upgrade down to the penny. But this home was not a short sale, it was a regular equity sale. When we came on the market, many of the homes around it were short sales but even so, we sold at the highest price possible — at a price that barely squeaked through an appraisal because there were no comps in that immediate neighborhood.
The buyer could not close. She could not close because she could not get her tax returns verified because she filed her taxes late. The government was running behind. When the buyer’s escrow extension expired, the sellers canceled the transaction and decided to wait. That was a smart move.
Now, a year later, because the market had gone up, I wrote to the sellers to suggest that they sell their home in Elk Grove at this time. Still, there were almost no comparable sales to justify her sales price, but we sold at the top of the market. The sellers made an additional $75,000 by timing the sale.
