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The Best Colors to Paint the Interior of Your Sacramento Home
Are you wondering about the best colors to paint the interior of a house in 2018? You’ve come to the right place. Sellers choose colors that are comforting, supportive of their life style and reflective of who they are as an individual. When a Sacramento listing agent marches into the living room to announce that the seller’s choice of color will cost them hard equity when selling, sellers might not agree. And, it’s OK if they don’t agree. Perfectly fine. Nobody is forcing them to make repairs to enhance their value. If a buyer writes a lower offer because of the paint colors, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
Sellers, due to their emotional attachment to the home, don’t always see things as clearly as a Sacramento Realtor. Still, the best we can do is inform, educate, and let the sellers make the choice that best fits for them. We can’t make that decision for them.
Probably the worst color to paint any room in the house is a brilliant white. It tends to kill the space. Especially if other colors are missing in the room. The result can be bland, dead, non-exciting. Reminds me of the people in white on the HBO series, The Leftovers. My team member, exclusive buyer’s agent Amy McMullan, says: “You can paint walls gray, throw up subway tile next to a hardwood floor and you can sell that all day long to Sacramento buyers.” We know because we’re out there in the trenches.
When my parents were raising their children, they had specific ideas of colors for each room. My parents’ best colors to paint the interior were 1950’s pastel. Pink for the bath, living room was green, kitchen yellow and bedrooms brown, blue or rose. Then, the 1960s and 1970s fell into place and everything was more vibrant. Orange became wildly popular. Over the years, white faded in and out until it finally vanished about 20 years ago. Taupe or light brown, coffee and cream dominated after our horrible hunter green and mauve stage of the early 1990s.
Today, gray or greige (a grayish beige) are the colors of choice. However, light tan is still popular. If you like, you can read an article by Zillow boasting how 7 colors made certain houses fetch higher sales prices. Be aware that much of the data is more general, not local to Sacramento. When you’re wondering about the best colors to paint the interior of your house, it should be a decision based on what local buyers want. Ask your Sacramento Realtor.
When Buyer’s Agents Make Promises They Cannot Keep
What do Sacramento listing agents call it when buyer’s agents make promises they cannot keep? I know some people would call it lying. But with the way the world is going today, with all the crazy crap like truth is not truth and fake news accusations when the news is factual, it can make a person nuts. We want to believe our fellow agents, but sometimes, you just can’t.
I hate to say that, but you get good and bad in any profession. There are people whose word you can trust, take to the bank, and others who say whatever they have to say to accomplish a directive with little regard for the truth. No wonder agents have such a bad reputation. They have a bad reputation in part because they deserve it.
Now, when I had buyer’s agents make promises they cannot keep in the past, it was usually over a short sale. In retrospect, I was a lot more hard-nosed then than I am now. A buyer’s agent could weave a love story about how her buyers are madly in love with this house. Could not see buying any other property. They will gladly wait for the bank’s approval. When none of that crap they spewed forth was true. It was wishful thinking.
It is rare when one of my team members needs to cancel an escrow. They are educated, trained and skilled in real estate. If one of their buyers decides to cancel, it’s generally for an excellent reason. Every so often, though, the buyer is just not committed. However, I’ve never known any of my team members to be dishonest. Ever. And we discuss how to break the news to the listing agent without burning bridges.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve seem to have noticed a large number of buyer’s agents make promises they cannot keep. You would hope an agent’s word meant something. That there was honor. But that’s just my wishful thinking.
How to Attract Listings in Sacramento By Going to Hawaii
Some of my clients know first-hand that I might pay a bit more attention to my listings in Sacramento when I am in Hawaii. That might sound counter-productive to some of you who would do the complete opposite if given a chance. But going to our house in Hawaii is like arriving at my source of personal power. I dive right into the Aloha. It’s not like I must go to the ocean to swim or drive the coastline. Because I’m perfectly content on my lanai, working on my computer against a panoramic backdrop of the ocean off in the distance.
Especially when I am the only person at the house. I don’t even have a cat or a neighborhood cat to distract me, although I won’t discount the geckos, lizards and occasional mongoose. It’s a quiet environment that lets me focus on my listings, alone in the warm Kona breezes blowing across the lanai.
No wonder I am so at peace and happy in Hawaii.
Of course, all I have to do to attract more listings in Sacramento is to print out that boarding pass. Like magic. Bam. The phone starts to ring. I managed to squeeze in one last listing appointment yesterday before I left. When you read this, I will be 30,000 feet in the air, enjoying breakfast over the Pacific. Two and a half movies later, I’m in Honolulu changing planes to Big Island.
I also just picked up another listing in Sacramento yesterday when a buyer flaked out. We had to put the home back on the market, but we’ve also got a group of interested buyers who did not act fast enough. The buyer’s agent said the buyer decided after going into escrow that he cannot afford to buy a home, or his loan was too much, hard to say. Cold feet. So many buyers develop cold feet, it seems.
It’s entirely possible that before I come back home to Sacramento that I’ll take more listings in Sacramento. With technology — internet and cell — that’s all I need to sell homes in Sacramento. The new listing on this page is a view from the street in Laguna West, which is in Elk Grove, a suburb of Sacramento. I love to sell homes in this neighborhood; it’s one of my favorites.
These sellers have a list of things to do before going on the market, but they could be ready in a couple of weeks. This will probably be priced in the lower to mid-700s, if you’re interested. You can call me at 916.233.6759, but please note the time difference in Hawaii is 3 hours earlier than Sacramento. Mahalo!
Where are the Property Lines for Homes in Sacramento?
A buyer’s agent asked this Sacramento Realtor the million-dollar question yesterday. She wanted to know where are the property lines for a home in Sacramento. Yes, just go ahead and ask your seller, the agent requested. Well, I will advise the seller not to answer that kind of question. Even if he thinks he knows the answer to where are the property lines, he should not discuss it. Because he could be wrong. Little puts a person more at risk than being absolutely certain where the property lines are located.
Besides, there are tools available and better ways to answer where are the property lines. In the early 1970s, I worked for a few years as a title searcher at First American Title. That meant I was responsible for piecing together a chain of title from the U.S. Patent forward. Some of that information was already updated on punch cards, but we didn’t have computers. If we didn’t have a punch card, then it meant a trip to the county courthouse. Which involved Grantor and Grantee books. Manual entries from pens dipped into an ink well.
Anybody can draw out property lines from property descriptions. It’s not rocket science. Simply use a protractor and a ruler. It helps to read this piece about legal descriptions, which I also wrote.
To answer the agent’s question about where are the property lines in Sacramento, I emailed her the preliminary title report. In the prelim is the metes and bounds description. The thing to remember is there is always a POB, the point of beginning. You begin at the POB and end at the POB. If you can follow directions, you can do it.
Another solution is to walk the property itself and look for a “pin” which is a marker in the ground at the corners. A pin is more likely to be discovered for a much older home than a newer property.
An easy solution for those who really do not care one way or the other about an extra foot here or there is to ask your neighbor. Just agree on a property line. Bear in mind that there is no guarantee with this solution that the neighbor won’t sell to an individual who disagrees with your agreed-upon assessment.
The very best way to settle where are the property lines for homes in Sacramento is to hire a surveyor. That expense can set a person back $500 to $1,000 or more. Which is why nobody really knows where the property lines are located.
July 2018 Sacramento Housing Report Suggests Stability
There are subtle changes in the July 2018 Sacramento housing report from Trendgraphix this month. It re-enforces what I see from my professional practice. Since May, I have noticed a slight change in Sacramento real estate. A bit of cooling from the extreme frenzy, and I’ve discovered there are some strategies that no longer work very well, so I’ve been shifting my approaches accordingly.
In looking through the statistics, what jumps out at me is the big uptick in inventory. However, pending sale numbers are surpassing closed sales for last month, which means August should be a good month for closed sales. Also, although the inventory is up, the new listings are down. Yet the average price per square foot is the highest it has been over the past 15 months, coming in at $237. Our median price is about the same in the July 2018 Sacramento housing report.
Basically, our closed sales are down 4.1% over this time last year. Our inventory is up by 22.1%. When inventory goes up and sales go down, we should see a little bit of cooling in the market. It will be interesting to note when we move into our spring market next year if this trend continues. However, the real number I see is the median sales price which has been fairly stable over the past 3 months, moving from $359K to $360K and back to $359K.
Below are the supporting statistics for the July 2018 Sacramento housing report.
charts: Trendgraphix, used with permission from Lyon Real Estate.
