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What You Need to Know About the Sacramento Housing Market
Sacramento housing market report, square-foot prices over 15 months, 12/31/16.
We can talk about low inventory until the cows come home in Sacramento, but the biggest news in the Sacramento housing market report is that prices are slowly creeping up. You can clearly see this reflected in the average price per square foot above. What you don’t see is January 2017 average price per square foot, which is $203. Why is this relevant?
It’s important because we rarely see a price jump in January, usually it is the opposite, and January starts off a little bit slower. Our inventory is relatively the same in December as it was a year ago in December, standing at 1.1 months of inventory. This low inventory is so low if you were trying to dance the limbo under that bar, you would fall flat on the floor and likely break your back.
It’s a seller’s market in Sacramento real estate, in full fury.
This means if you are a seller, put your home on the market. Do not shuffle your feet. Get that lovely home into MLS as soon as you possibly can and start showings. Every new listing, even the ugly homes, is like tossing bird seed to starving pigeons in the park. Buyers come running from every direction to feast on table scraps. Elbowing each other.
We are seeing multiple offers on almost every listing as well. It’s not as crazy as it was at the bottom of the market, like in 2011, where we could receive 20 or 30 multiple offers on a single listing. I’m seeing more like 2 to 4 offers per listing. That seems much more manageable. If it’s a fixer property, the number of multiple offers tend to be higher.
But what difference does it really make how many offers a seller receives? As long as there are two offers, a seller can negotiate with the Seller Multiple Counter Offer, which has been known to bump up the price. Everybody wants what somebody else wants. And hey, bottom line, we only need one committed, strong and qualified buyer anyway. While it’s nice to tell your friends how many buyers fought over your house, it’s much better to say you got top dollar and no hassles.
If that’s your objective, call a top producer Sacramento Realtor with more than 40 years in the business. Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
Why a Desktop Scanner Replaces a Fax Machine
A desktop scanner replaces a fax machine now, our cat, Tessa, is partly to blame.
Little did I know that today a desktop scanner replaces a fax machine. It was not readily apparent to me. My entire home operation for selling Sacramento real estate was set up to be self sufficient many years ago; when a device malfunctions, I tend to simply replace it. I’ve only had 2 fax machines in Sacramento, one that I took out into my back yard and literally beat to death with a hammer, a Panasonic fax machine. And my Brother 4100e. That happened 10 years ago!
I figured something must be wrong when I looked on the OfficeDepot website and noticed that my Brother 4100e was still a top seller, after all of this time. How could that be? Something was not right. A similar fax machine, one grade higher, cost twice as much and the main difference was it held another 20 pages in its document feeder. This seemed crazy.
OK, maybe OfficeDepot just did not sell enough fax machines anymore. I clicked on a few other websites and nobody carries much in the way of fax machines. That was a telling sign, a red flag. We have fax machines at my office. Heavy duty fax machines. My husband asked what I use a fax machine for. Well, mostly to fax listing documents to myself so I can forward them to others. That is a scanning function.
I already have a ScanSnap portable scanner that I bought years ago when short sales were hot. I could take that baby to seller’s homes and scan all of their tax returns, sensitive personal documents, directly to my computer. But since short sales pretty much dried up in 2012, I haven’t used my portable scanner. Fugitsu also makes a desktop scanner. A desktop scanner replaces a fax machine, and I never realized it.
Fortunately, I have several eFax services at my disposal, one of which is free. Why have I been paying AT&T $40 a month for a fax machine? The things we put up with when we’re a busy Sacramento Realtor. For starters, the document feed roller tends to stick and sometimes I have to stand there and manually feed each of my 30-some pages into the fax machine by hand. Not to mention, our cat, Tessa, long ago batted off and destroyed the document feeder guide plate.
The copy function isn’t working correctly because I need a new cartridge, and since I’ve never replaced the drum, that could explain why copies have a big long black line streaming down the front. To buy a new drum and new cartridge would cost more than to replace the fax machine. It makes sense to me that a desktop scanner replaces a fax machine.
Ah, the old days of those 1980’s thermal paper fax machines and how we could not live without them. It meant we didn’t need to drive our client’s houses, we could fax documents to their offices and later to their homes. How high tech. Now, we can’t live with a fax machine at all, not even a laser fax machine. Outdated, and of no use.
Buyers Who Want to Get Out of a Home Purchase Contract
The time to think about how to get out of a home purchase contract is at signing.
While I am not an advocate for trying to get out of a home purchase contract, I sure seem to attract a lot of buyers who are working with some other agent and want to cancel their transaction. The conversations usually begin innocently enough, and they don’t always tell me they are in the middle of a sale transaction right off the bat. I generally have to ask pointed questions to extract that information.
They aren’t trying to take advantage of my knowledge when they call, either. Most of these buyers are very upfront about wanting to hire me. The only problem is they are a day late and a dollar short, as the saying goes. They should have hired me from the beginning but for whatever reason, did not. So it’s often on the tail end of transactions that they think about calling me for help, especially when they want to get out of a home purchase contract.
The problem with this scenario is I can’t really advise them. For the obvious reason being that I am not their Sacramento Realtor. They already have a Realtor working for them, and it is against the Code of Ethics for any other Realtor to interfere in an existing transaction. When I explain this, the argument is often: Oh, but I’m not asking you to interfere. I’m just asking . . . which amounts to interfering.
The unhappy buyers probably hope they are sweetening the discussion by promising to work with me. That’s like promising to marry a person when you’re still married to somebody else. Ain’t gonna happen until you get divorced. And a buyer, once in contract, cannot divorce her agent to marry another. She can ask the agent’s broker to assign a different agent from the brokerage to her file, but she’s gotta dance with the brokerage who brung her to the party.
Further, after all of the buyer contingencies are removed, if you want to get out of the purchase contract, you’ll have to give up your earnest money deposit. Not to mention, the seller might demand liquidated damages. Messy, icky situation. On top of which, Realtors are not lawyers and cannot provide legal advice.
I try to show empathy for those stuck in these types of situations. I understand how frustrating it can be to feel like you do not want to buy the house you have committed to purchase in addition to wanting to fire your agent. It’s like a double whammy. There is a place and time to fire an agent, not when you’re ready to close escrow, though.
Funny thing, though. A woman I spoke to about this very situation last year called me recently and now wants to sell that house. She was astonished I recalled our conversation, since I talk to so many people. I don’t recall much of her conversation, honestly, but I do recall her pain, her agony. That won’t happen this time around.
How Mary Tyler Moore Influenced This Minneapolis Girl
Bronze statue of Mary Tyler Moore at Minneapolis Nicollet Mall.
The corner of 7th and Nicollet in Minneapolis will never be the same again, and it’s not just because Mary Tyler Moore died on Wednesday. That iconic corner, yes, where Mary Tyler Moore tossed her hat into the air during the opening credits of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Dayton’s Department store was on that corner, kitty corner to Donaldson’s, spittin’ distance from Woolworth’s, and across from the Forum Cafeteria, the latter a delightful art deco lunch place where you could choose either macaroni and cheese or a dish of Jell-O for 10 cents.
Last I heard the historic building that housed Dayton’s and all the various other incarnations of department stores is closing. They already moved the statue of Mary Tyler Moore, erected in 2002 at a cost of $150,000, from 7th and Nicollet to two blocks down. What’s the point in that? That wasn’t where Mary tossed her hat.
I grew up with Mary Tyler Moore in many ways. It hit me hard to hear she had died two days ago. She was only 80. Listen to me, only 80, like 80 isn’t old. But it’s not when you’re the person who is almost 65 and hoping to reach at least 100. She was an inspiration to this Minneapolis girl. When the Mary Tyler Moore Show first aired on TV, supposedly filmed in Minneapolis, I was 18 and graduating high school. I went out to get my first real job, because waitressing at the Tick Tock Diner on 7th and Hennepin to pay the rent through high school didn’t really count as my first job.
I’d had my own apartment since my senior year in high school, but I didn’t truly feel independent until I finished school, was released from probation (another story another time) and got my first “real” job in 1970. I did not attend my graduation. Like Bruce Springsteen, an outsider who fought the establishment, I, too, considered myself a rebel, a nonconformist, and I vehemently refused to go to graduation. In fact, I did not even know for certain if I graduated. Not until I showed up at South High School, the last graduating class from that location on Cedar, and watched the office clerk dig through the pile of diplomas, teasing, “I don’t know if it’s here.”
Mary Tyler Moore portrayed a single woman working at TV station in Minneapolis. I was a single woman working at the Grain Exchange Building on the 4th floor for Checkerboard Grain, a division of Ralston Purina. My job was not as glamorous as Mary Tyler Moore’s, but we were in the same boat. Suffered the same inequities. Dealt with chauvinism and sexism as a fact of life.
When Ralston Purina executives came to visit, they always quizzed me about Mary Tyler Moore. Where she lived in Kenwood, which was crazy because she could not afford to live in that mansion or that neighborhood; where she walked around Lake of the Isles, and if we could reserve the Mary Tyler Moore table at Basil’s Restaurant in the IDS Tower overlooking the Crystal Court.
The thing about the Mary Tyler Moore Show was Mary’s character could always make you laugh. No matter what kind of situation life threw at her, she held her head high and found something amusing about it to diffuse the intensity. If she could do it, I could do it. Even though I knew the show wasn’t real, it was a lot more real than, say, watching Dick Van Dyke tumble over a chair week after week.
All of the characters seemed like real people, even bumbling Ted who later became president of the United States.
Mary inspired me to make something out of my life, and I figured out that I did not have to die a slow death at a desk on the fourth floor of the Grain Exchange Building, smoking cigarettes and breaking fingernails on a Remington nor get oogled walking across the floor of the Exchange to pick up mail. After a couple years, I moved to Colorado, then on to California, and finally attended college for several years before eventually moving into the field of real estate. Here I am today, a top producing Sacramento Realtor.
All of the influences in your life tend to make you who you are today. Mary Tyler Moore was that kind of woman for me. She did not compromise who she was, she was genuine and what you saw was what you got. Mary Tyler Moore, Dec. 29th, 1936 to Jan. 25th, 2017.
What Selling Real Estate in the 1970s Was Like
Selling real estate in the 1970s bears little resemblance to today.
Selling real estate in the 1970s was as different as Red vs Blue states today. Many years ago, on a faraway planet known as Orange County, California, I once primarily represented investors and created the craziest home buying concepts that were almost always accepted without question. Looking back, I possess fond memories of this time, when many agents were considered pioneers, innovators, although, in some cases, crooks; and because of the latter, I’m glad the 1970s are history.
A real estate agent could do just about anything she could conceive in real estate. For me, personally, I’m capable of conceiving a lot. I suffer from imagination overload. There were few laws in the 1970s, except for usury and Fair Housing, which governed agent activity.
I’ll share some of these unusual 1970s concepts and practices with you, in hopes that you will realize how far we have come today in real estate, and not that you want to do any of this yourself. The first thing was my buyers never signed a purchase contract. Buyers were not involved. They signed an assignment of contract from me. I wrote all of the purchase contracts in my name or assignee. I decided the best way to purchase the property and when the offer was accepted by the seller, I presented it for consideration to the investor.
We didn’t have a fax machine. Copiers, the size of small cars, utilized huge drums. We dialed black rotary phones and called sellers from the newspaper. MLS consisted of a large book published once a month, with small weekly updates.
Just about all of the financing was creative, mostly subject to, with a few lease option sales, land contracts and wrap-arounds. I sold second trust deeds after creating the paper from thin air, pocketing a 20% to 30% discount and using the instruments as down payments on property I didn’t always assign away. Some of the homes I kept for myself. We also picked up loan proceeds by writing it into the contract, until lenders included verbiage to stop it.
When selling real estate in the 1970s, in the purchase contract, the buyer obtained a loan of $100,000, delivered $96,000 to the seller, and the difference, if any, of loan proceeds above $90,000 was paid to the buyer’s brokerage. This was on top of the real estate commission. All parties would agree to this. Blows my mind. Against the law today.
Today, an assignment of contract is unusual, and if I spot a buyer trying to wholesale a property like that, I’ll advise the seller not to take the offer. It’s generally not in the seller’s best interest. Besides, double escrowing or picking up a property through an assignment is rare in a seller’s market, but it doesn’t stop seminar gurus from teaching this old / new practice to the young impressionables and special little snowflakes.
I never inspected properties when selling real estate in the 1970s. This was before The Easton vs. Strassburger 1984 decision that held agents and real estate brokers have a duty to conduct a reasonable inspection. My transactions were fast and furious, we typically closed in a week. Cash flow ruled, but if you couldn’t get cash flow, negative cash flow was OK with 7% down and straight notes for equity. My entire practice was based on my ability to negotiate and to negotiate well.
The 1986 Tax Reform Act put a halt to a lot of investing (no more tax write-offs for negative income), and the 1991 downturn in the market pushed a lot of investors out of the marketplace. Years go by. Things change. Markets evolve.
Every so often I receive an offer like one of those from 40 years ago, and of course I send it to the seller. But I also explain in detail what it is. In fact, we received one of those types of offers a few days ago, trying to lowball 80 cents on the dollar in a seller’s market and wholesale it out, OOffda. I think this means seminar groups are in town.
I’m probably one of the very few Sacramento Realtors who survived selling real estate in the 1970s and the creative financing fiasco that time period entailed. Let’s just say we’re much better off today. If you’re looking for a top producer in Sacramento to sell your home, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759.
