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Are You a Buyer Who Wants to See Homes Outside Your Price Range?
Is it smart to look at homes outside your price range? At first blush, sometimes buyers think, oh, what can it hurt? Maybe the homes are overpriced and the owners will eventually lower the price to my price range? Or, maybe the seller is severally distressed and needs an immediate sale so she will take less.
Looking at homes outside your price range is likely to do one of three things. All three of them can be damaging.
1) You may find yourself falling in love with a home that is so far out of your price range you’ll do practically anything, liquidate any asset, to possess it. When emotions run away with you, that’s how people often end up in financial trouble.
2) You could fall into a great pit of depression. Quite logically, you may ascertain this is not a property you can afford, maybe not ever, and that makes you sad. It’s the opposite reaction you expected. There is little joy in drooling over a commodity you cannot afford as all it does it elevate your expectations to a level you might never achieve. And that’s a terribly negative place to be.
3) You could lose out on an opportunity that is well within your price range because you are spending too much time looking at homes outside your price range. When that window of opportunity opens, you’re already behind closed doors elsewhere. And that’s a shame.
It truly makes more logical sense to look at homes within a range you can afford to buy. Let’s say you are preapproved for $525,000 and want to buy a modest home in the leafy Sacramento neighborhood, Land Park. The first thing I would tell you is look somewhere else or raise your price point. Many of the homes for sale in that price range are near noise, some other detriment or incredibly small.
You could instead look at Southside Park, which is a perfectly nice neighborhood in the same ZIP code as Land Park but it is not Land Park. It is more urban, like Midtown. I would also encourage you to check out 2214 Davini Lane near Southside Park. It is a tri-level built in 2007, which features all the bells and whistles. For sale at $489,000.
By focusing on your price range and not looking outside your price range, you’ll have a better chance of buying a home you love for the long run. It’s a lot of work to go through buying a home. Why repeat the experience due to a mistake? You can get it right the first time around by talking about your price ranges with your agent and making sure your parameters for a property search are returning results you can live with.
Have You Checked Out the New Macbook Air?
Never thought this Sacramento Realtor would be purchasing a new MacBook Air, but stranger things have happened. I bought my MacBook Pro 3 years ago and figured it would last a while. Problem is while I have 16 GB to handle all the specific software I use to sell real estate in Sacramento, the hard drive on that MacBook Pro is only 256 GB.
Back in the day, way before MacBook Air, a hard drive with that configuration would be plenty. In fact, I come from the days of 40 pound portable computers with 20 GB hard drives. Not anymore. Especially not with Dropbox and iCloud, which I’ve successfully divvied up between my Mac Mini desktop and my laptop. But now I am down to less than 10% of storage on my laptop, and that is a bad thing, which will only worsen. No external hard drive would solve that dilemma.
The amazing thing about my MacBook Pro versus the MacBook Air is the MacBook Air can run for 12 to 13 hours on its battery. My MacBook Pro lasts 3 hours, if I am really lucky. The resolution is far superior, and it weighs only 2.75 pounds. Since my MacBook Pro was a clean install and not a migration, I can easily migrate data to my MacBook Pro.
Not to mention, I can get a 1.5 TB drive, which is what I ordered. But the really super duper amazing thing is Apple.com is giving me an $1,100 credit for my MacBook Pro. Which means my husband doesn’t have to haul it off to recycling. And I get a $2,500 machine for about $1,400.
I would have never before considered a MacBook Air for my use in my Sacramento real estate business. But Apple makes this product irresistible.
How Often Do You Check Your Email?
How often do you check your email in today’s high tech world? Almost everybody sends a text message, even longer book-length text messages. However, I still work primarily email-based. When sending files or attachments to my clients, I need email. I could share documents via any assortment of online storage options, but my clients would struggle, and I like to keep things simple and easy for them.
For example, vendors routinely send me links to Google, but my email is not Google based. I use Google for as little as possible, primarily because its do no evil premise is a joke today. I prefer to pay directly for services I can rely on and control.
Far as the norm for checking your email, I’d guess, based on responses I receive, that most people do it a couple times a day. If they don’t have a smartphone, they need to use an actual computer or an iPad. In fact, speaking of iPads, I just got rid of AT&T because I don’t use cell service anymore. It’s a waste of money to pay for it.
Yesterday morning I received an email from a fellow who said he and his wife have decided to buy a condo in Midtown Sacramento and wanted to know if I could help them. Absolutely. I love working with clients who contact us directly and are ready to act because I know they’ll be in escrow within hours if not a few days.
We responded immediately, and our buyer’s agent extraordinaire Josh Amolsch contacted the buyers. They responded to say, oh, they already bought a condo last year and the email had been stuck in their email outbox since October.
I’m thinking, is 4 months a reasonable time not to check your email? My email downloads to my computer every 2 minutes. But as a Sacramento Realtor, I’m a bit of an extreme. Out of curiosity, I looked up the condo in the tax rolls. Actually, they ultimately ended up buying that condo last February, 11 months ago. That’s a long time not to check email or notice there was an email in the outbox. If you’re connected, emails should automatically release.
Now this makes me wonder how many people even use a desktop computer anymore. Everybody has laptops. Are desktop computers going away? And look at that phone in the top photo. Have you seen anything that honkin’ big lately? Does anybody but my husband use a landline?
Are You Ready for MLS Enhancements?
It is nice to see that a person or persons are thinking over at MLS because they are calling their mandated updates — decided without input from the membership — MLS enhancements. In some ways, though, the changes are enhancements. Are you ready? Because all listings supposedly converted two days ago. I only know this because I spotted a warning that other features might not work correctly because of the updates, um . . . enhancements.
One of the best changes are the increase of allotted letters and spaces in the marketing comments and confidential remarks in MLS. We were bound by 500 characters for so long. Not anymore. Now, with the new MLS enhancements, we can enjoy 1,000 characters for marketing and an increase from 300 to 1,300 characters for confidential remarks. We can yak away!
Although I figure the added stress will definitely backfire for some agents. Those are the agents who struggle to describe a property. And let’s face it, some properties are so boiler-plate, they have difficulty. Those are the agents, I’m afraid, who do not know how to write about a brick in the wall. Which of course I can do. They can’t even write about the wall, much less the perimeter of the property on which the wall resides.
Further, our allotment of photographs has leapfrogged from 36 to 99 photos. Personally, I’m having a hard time imagining a listing that would require 99 photos to adequately tell the story. There are only so many angles in which to shoot a bedroom. I suppose we could look under the bed. Or in the closets. Maybe inside the medicine cabinet?
And speaking of photos, MLS contacted me a few days ago to say one of my photographs was not in compliance. The way that sort of thing happens is some agent, and it is a listing agent, reports the violation to MLS, and then MLS follows up. My listing photo was not in violation. It was shot from the property. With a zoom lens, but still it was shot from the property, which is a MLS rule. MLS removed it anyway, even though it was in compliance, and frankly is not worth the energy to argue over such trivial shit. But what a pissant.
But back to the MLS enhancements. Some of the changes pertain to legal liability such as adding a field for surveillance equipment. I imagine it’s to let buyer’s agent know they should watch what they say and do within view of the surveillance equipment. So, that’s gonna put a stop to discussing the merits of the property in front of the Ring doorbell or opening the refrigerator to swipe a Coke. Oh, who am I kidding, agents would have to read MLS.
Some of the other MLS enhancements include re-naming a sold property now as closed. Not sure the reason for that. And many of the statuses have changed. Personally, I’ve always liked active release clause as a strategy, but now that is gone in favor of contingent show.
One of the clauses is likely to draw the ire of sellers, though. I’m not sure they thought this one through, but one of the MLS enhancements is to include the now required status of Notice of Default. To me, that is an invasion of the seller’s personal financial situation that is really not anybody’s business. Now, buyers will know if a seller has fallen behind on her mortgage payments.
It used to be we could enter a listing that was in default into MLS as a regular listing. As long as we could close escrow prior to the sale date, the parties do not need to know upfront that the seller is experiencing financial difficulties. I do not see a logical reason to make this a listing status because it will hurt the seller. It eliminates any negotiating power the seller could hold.
Besides, as a matter of disclosure, once an offer has been accepted and we are in escrow, the preliminary title report will show the Notice of Default. Further, the Notice of Default is also noted on the Realist, which any buyer’s agent can access to analyze. Publicizing the seller’s personal financial situation to a buyer means the seller will lose equity. Once a buyer knows the seller is hurting, buyers will attack. Just does not seem fair to sellers, and I hope MetroList reconsiders.
When pigs fly, I’m afraid. Or enough lawsuits are filed.
December 2018 Report Sacramento Housing Market
The December 2018 Sacramento Housing Market is not pretty from a seller’s point of view, but from a buyer’s point of view, it is beautiful. This is not to say that sellers should not be selling because if a seller owns a gorgeous home in a fantastic location, it will quickly sell. The others, not so much unless they are priced accordingly, and that is a struggle.
Because you don’t work in the Sacramento real estate business for as long as I have without knowing that almost every seller thinks they have a gorgeous home in a fantastic location. So that means I have my job cut out for me in 2019, because it will be a lot tougher for us Sacramento listing agents.
For this Sacramento listing agent, I am not concerned. I can weather any kind of market because I’ve been in real estate for over 40 years.
Also, I forgot to mention this earlier, but my Elizabeth Weintraub Team placed in the top 3 agents at Lyon Real Estate for the month of December. What makes this particular feat of worthy note is three-fold.
- About $2.5 million of sales rolled into January and did not even close in December!
- I spent the entire month of December in Hawaii, still working!
- And the company has close to 1,000 agents so to place in the top 3 is an honor. How do you like those pineapples?
Which means you absolutely cannot say the December 2018 Sacramento Housing Market is faring poorly. It’s doing just fine for some of us. However, inventory is up almost 30% over last year at this time. The number of homes sold in December of 2018 as compared to December of 2017 is down by more than 26%. And pending sales for December over a year ago have fallen by 11%.
What the December 2018 Sacramento Housing Report should signify to sellers and buyers is the market has transitioned to a buyer’s market. Twice the inventory offers twice the choices for buyers. Further, the second take away is if you are thinking about selling, try to make your home conform to what buyers want. Buyers will not overlook defects or dated houses, even if you think they will because you would. They won’t. And third, hire the best damn listing agent you can find. This is definitely not a time to consider discount agents with little experience.
