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How to Get Rid of Hard Water Stains in the Shower
Finding a way to get rid of hard water stains in the shower has for me been one of the great mysteries in life. Many of my home sellers say they prefer to replace the shower glass than to try to clean it. Since you can’t really just replace the glass and you generally need to replace the entire door and frame, it’s expensive. Time consuming, too. Not to mention a PITA.
Oh, they say green cleaning materials such as vinegar and water is a great solution, but you may as well drink it for all the good it does. Vinegar doesn’t easily dispose of stubborn hard water stains. However, I stumbled across a product that really works. My clients told me about it. I had referred Masters Window Cleaning service to the sellers and one of the guys on the crew said he could charge the sellers an extra $100 to get rid of hard water stains in the shower. Or, they could buy the product the professionals use.
Ha, they never told me that secret fix when they cleaned my windows in Land Park Sacramento. They made it sound like I was stuck with a few windows that had hard water stains. Little did I realize they had the secret fix all along. Yup, the pros say the best way to get rid of hard water stains in the shower is by using a product sold on Amazon: Driven Extreme Duty Glass Cleaner. It’s an acid gel, $19.95.
I had my doubts, but first tried it on the glass block in our master bath. There is no door in the shower. Just a staggered glass block wall that continually is hit with hard water on the inside. A good 10 years of build up in that shower. We use Lime-A-Way and CLR for the pebble floor to remove hard water stains, but the glass block and our windows has been a puzzle until now.
Wearing rubber gloves, of course, I applied a small amount of the gel on the glass block. Rubbed it with the rough side of a scrubby sponge. Rinsed and voila. Like they say in Panama: ¡Chuleta! I could see through the glass to the other side. Before using the secret fix to get rid of hard water stains in the shower, the glass blocks were cloudy and streaked. Worked like a charm! Some entrepreneur should hawk this stuff at an exhibit at the California State Fair or as seen on TV.
You can bet my Sacramento clients will now benefit from this tidbit I discovered. On to more happy home selling!
When You Have to Break Bad News in Sacramento Real Estate
Nobody likes to break bad news in Sacramento real estate. Nobody. Especially not the agents to their fiduciaries. However, real estate is a two-way street. One side can do everything right and the other side can still make a mistake. The side with the mistake might feel like it’s not their fault because it’s some other party to the transaction that screwed up. Doesn’t really matter anyway who is at fault. What matters is the resolution. How we handle the solution.
When we have to break bad news in Sacramento real estate, the best way to do it is in person, but that is not always possible. Short of a hologram — why can’t we send holograms already — that means talking on the phone. Even when you know the other side is likely to lose their cool. Explode, maybe, even.
Like yesterday, for example. Things were fairly quiet Friday morning. I had my annual eye exam scheduled in Midtown for late morning. No phone calls. Very few emails and text messages. Started out to be a good day. No sooner did I step foot into my optometrist’s office than my phone blew up. Email after email. 17 emails at once. I know how this looks.
Oh yes, another eye patient glued to her cellphone. This one won’t even look up or address us. She keeps staring at her emails. So rude.
Well, they don’t come right out and say it, but you can feel the vibe going on. I am not another rude patient. Heck no, I put my phone in my lap when it came time to look at the letters on the wall and read them off. After I figured out the cup they handed me was not for my ear and actually placed it over my left eye, I was doing pretty well. Because, you know, it takes time for them to type the data into the computer, time to get the drops to dilate my eyes and make them look like I just dropped acid.
Time I could use reading and answering emails. Because a file that was supposed to fund and record by noon wasn’t happening. Which meant the concurrent closing wasn’t happening, either. How can I finish an eye exam when this is going on?
I left without my contacts’ prescription, too. Darn.
Got into my car and found it halfway blocked by an enormous moving van. I’m wearing dark sunglasses behind my own polarized sunglasses, and everything is so dark I cannot see to maneuver. But somehow I made it out of my parking spot. Tried to drive to the entrance to the street on Alhambra, but more emails dinged. Plus, my music was playing (because you cannot turn it off in a newer Mercedes). The dealer said I can only turn down the sound. Or pause it, which it what I would have done if I could see my phone.
I should look into this further because that is a stupid design flaw, if it is true.
Well, it was time to break the bad news in Sacramento real estate. Could not put it off. The seller absolutely needed to know what had happened and what we could do about the situation. Do you email? Text? What? Nope, that’s the chicken, loser way out. Not a loser. A phone call is best. Except, because I could not see my phone due to the dark sunglasses and eye dilation, I poked at the screen. Missed the “call” button and ended up in FaceTime. Uh, oh.
I got to watch my seller’s eyes divert to the ceiling. Look down at the floor. Scrunch up the face. Eyes a blaze. That was painful. But it was the right thing to do. Comes with the territory. Fortunately, I don’t have to break bad news in Sacramento real estate very often. Hardly ever. Most of the time I am able to anticipate problems and stop them from happening. But not much you can do when the other side makes a mistake. It reflects on the listing agent even if the agent can’t anticipate or cause it. It’s why we make the big bucks. Because the buck stops here.
Should You Arm the Alarm When Home Selling?
Sellers want to arm the alarm. Always. Especially when they are putting a vacant house on the market. They want security. What they don’t always consider is the fact that they are not the people coming and going. Sellers might be very comfortable with where their alarm is located and they know how to easily disarm it. But agents do not. In fact, buyer’s agents, regardless of experience and dedication, often panic when presented with a security alarm.
Many agents are nervous enough trying to impress buyers with their showing abilities and neighborhood knowledge. Agents spend time looking for the lockbox, getting it open, trying not to lose the key. Jiggling that fussy door lock, open the door and BEEP BEEP BEEP. That familiar sound. OMG, where is the alarm code? Where is the alarm panel located? Will the alarm go off? Will police come?
I just got an email from my security alarm company for our house in Hawaii, and they are offering an upgrade to their service. Apparently, many customers were complaining that 10 seconds wasn’t enough to leave the house; they preferred 30 seconds. I dunno. You open the door and go out. How hard is that? But I always arm the alarm when I leave the island. Not so much while I am there. When you can hear your neighbor across the way clear her throat, those neighbors will hear an intruder.
But when a home is for sale, if the seller elects to arm the alarm, there is a strong chance an agent will set it off. Not on purpose, mind you. Agents are not as stupid as you might think. OK, not all of them. They just tend to panic at the sight of an alarm.
Once I leapt over a gate keeping the dogs at bay and put my life and limb on the line by climbing into their territory just to search for a security alarm. I, myself, have never set off an alarm. But that doesn’t mean other agents won’t. It can cost $100 or more for a false alarm.
I distance myself from this type of occurrence with my sellers. Of course, I explain this can happen, but I also am not responsible for the ability of other agents to disarm the security system. As long as they are fine with that unintended consequence and will relieve me from liability for false alarms, then, by all means, arm that alarm.
The Fifteen Second Rule for Getting Ready to Sell a Home
Although I will explain the 15-second rule for getting ready to sell a home, it’s something that agents who have sold thousands of homes can also do for you. You don’t have to do it for yourself. But let’s say you have hired an agent who has not sold thousands or even hundreds of homes. Then, you might want to try this exercise yourself. Because the number one thing I see many sellers do when getting ready to sell a home is they take on way more work than they should.
Sellers tend to want to fix things that have bugged them for as long as they have lived in the house. Or, they don’t want to fix things that should have bugged them but now they are used to it. So, it’s not a big deal anymore but needs to be. Point is they do the wrong things and not enough of the right things. Sellers often do updates they think a buyer would like if they were the buyer. Problem is they are not the buyer, they are the seller. And they can only think like a seller.
The 15-second rule for getting ready to sell a home should help sellers whose agents are not in a position to assist. It is simply this. Walk into a room, stand in the doorway and give yourself 15 seconds to assess the room. Whatever jumps out at you as odd or weird, well, that’s something you need to fix. If you don’t see it within 15 seconds, you probably do not need to fix it because the buyer won’t spot it, either.
What a seller should not do is get up close and personal with every item in the home. The only thing that sort of behavior accomplishes is to push you toward an obsessive compulsive disorder. All of a sudden, you can’t stand the way your baseboards are painted. Or, you fret about a cracked tile in a corner. Or, you decide at midnight to install a new fence around the house. Those little things are niceties but unnecessary.
Some of my clients I work with for several weeks or even months to help them with getting ready to sell a home. Not every home needs a lot of work but do be ready to spend a little bit and make a few little updates to make your home sale-worthy. Especially if you have neglected a certain repair you know deep in your heart you should have tackled. It’s amazing what we can overlook when living in a home.
Even sellers on a budget can make small fixes that will greatly enhance the ability to attract top dollar. Just make sure they are the right updates and repairs. If you’d like to know how much your home is worth, call your favorite Sacramento Realtor with more than 40 years in the business. Elizabeth Weintraub, at 916.233.6759.
Fixing Bay Area Offers Involves Finesse While Closing Sacramento Sales
Fixing Bay Area offers without offending the parties involved often means stepping back and putting your client’s needs first and foremost. There is no easy way to tell a Bay Area agent that so much stuff in the agent’s buyer’s offer is wrong. At first blush, I was tempted to quickly judge the parties as not being serious. They made demands that nobody asks for in our Sacramento seller’s market. The buyer asked the seller to pay for things no other seller pays for. In fact, it was about as one-sided as a buyer’s purchase offer that I would have written myself in 1978, but certainly not in today’s market.
To make matters worse, it wasn’t just a matter of fixing Bay Area offers, there were also 2 or 3 other offers on the table. After talking to the sellers, it was clear to me they would like to find a way to make the Bay Area offer work. After all, it was cash, so no appraisal. Getting an appraisal on this home would be difficult because there were really no comparable sales. The home was a white elephant. Overbuilt for the neighborhood.
After every open house, buyers would ooh and ahh over the upgrades and improvements. But after driving the area, they said no thank you. It was one of the nicest homes in the area. Plus, with cars parked up and down the street, basketball hoops blocking driveways, well, it didn’t present the neighborhood in its finest light. However, we knew that walking into the situation. The sellers were patient because they didn’t have to move until the end of October. They felt now would be a good time to sell over October, and they were right.
I decided to try to find a way to make the purchase offer work because that’s what my sellers desired. The buyer was doing a 1031 exchange, although the home would not be a rental. It would be occupied by family. Not even about to argue how it is not a 1031. Not our problem. So, I asked the buyer’s agent if the buyer would consider renting back to the sellers until the end of October. The buyer said yes and named an agreeable rental amount. This was a hugely important benefit to the sellers. Not moving twice.
OK, the dilemma was how to handle the fact the buyer refused to purchase the home in its AS IS condition. The way I saw it, we could argue over the black-and-white verbiage in the purchase contract which clearly states the home is sold AS IS. Or, we could find a way to make it work. The agent said the buyer expects all repairs from inspections to be completed. What? And we didn’t even have a home inspection yet. How could we agree to do all repairs when we don’t know what they are? That sounded like a recipe for disaster.
Well, what we could do is have the seller pay for a home inspection from a reputable home inspector. Not some fly-by-night idiot. There are idiots doing home inspections in Sacramento because they don’t need to be licensed. Anybody can pretend to be a home inspector. An teenage mouth-breather can be an inspector. So I drew a counter offer that included the seller paying for a home inspection, subject to successful negotiation of a Request for Repair. We agreed not to open escrow until the Request for Repair is executed, and if it can’t be, then the offer is void and canceled.
Seemed like a perfect solution. We signed all the counter offers and the purchase offer. A few days later, the buyer’s agent noticed we were holding an open house because our status was changed to Active With Release Clause. The agent accused us being dishonest and underhanded. What? The agent threatened if we did not cancel the open house, the buyer would cancel the offer. Then, the agent tried to cancel the offer.
However, the offer could not be canceled until the terms and conditions were met. We had a binding agreement.
But they do things differently in the Bay Area, and not every Bay Area agent sells a lot of real estate. Many sell only a few homes a year. So you really can’t hold it against the agents. Some agents just don’t know what they don’t know. All I really wanted to do was spare my sellers the anxiety and drama. Very difficult under the circumstances. I was fully prepared for the buyer to make more unreasonable demands, especially after receiving all of the inspections.
However, suddenly we received the Request for Repair from the buyer and it was not completely unreasonable. Very surprised and excited over this. In keeping with fixing Bay Area offers, I also rewrote the response to the Request for Repair to make it very specific. The Bay Area agent copied the numbers from the home inspection report but it was not easily understood and could be misinterpreted. The report did not identify how to make repairs, and it alluded to further inspections. After laying out each specific repair, we went into contract. We signed the Request for Repair, which also stipulated the buyer would immediately release all contingencies.
By being very clear from the beginning, we can often avoid misunderstandings later.
This is also the first escrow I’ve ever closed in which we entered escrow ready to close. I’ve closed thousands of sales over my 40-some years in real estate, not one like this. Twenty-day closing. No monkey business, no weirdness. Oh, and it sold over list price.
