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Brilliant Real Estate Ideas for Sacramento Realtors
Often your best real estate ideas can come to you in a dream.
Some of my best real estate ideas come to me when I’m sleeping. They pop into my dreams. Which means some of my very best ideas are probably lurking in my subconscious. It beats having your best ideas come to you when you’re, oh, say, like Dudley Moore in that 1981 movie Arthur. His best ideas came to him when he was drunk. Probably because he was rarely sober. If you’ve never seen Arthur, you’re in for a treat.
A few nights ago I had a dream that I was holding an open house for that adorable family on Showtime’s Shameless. They live in this two-story wreck in south Chicago. I gathered the kids around me and assigned each one of them a room. When visitors came through the open house, the job of each kid was to stand in their appointed room and talk about the benefits of that room.
We rehearsed. Like a broken record, over and over. That’s a brilliant real estate tip, yes? Who better to sell a home than the people who actually live in it? Sell the benefits, not the features. The sun comes up in the morning through that window, so I don’t need an alarm clock.
Last night, though, I dreamed up a new wallpaper. You know how wallpaper has gone out of fashion? Well, I’ve got news for you, it’s coming back. Only edgier and with a bit more bite. My new wallpaper idea is to take the sections of your city’s free entertainment newspaper — the part with all the bands — neatly trim the edges, apply wallpaper paste and slap it up there. How cool is that? That real estate idea is worth millions.
Of course, with wallpaper, the pattern repeats. The unique thing about this phenomenal idea is the pattern does not repeat until maybe you get to last week’s paper or the week before that. But the pattern doesn’t have to repeat. You can write your own rules. And it’s free. Doesn’t cost ya a penny.
Back when I was a kid in my 40’s, I used to swipe posters from the halls of local venues and hang them on my living room wall. Now, I wish I had saved those posters because those fun days are gone; I can’t make myself stay up that late anymore. But this is the next best thing. Every kid in America will be clamoring for this rock-band wallpaper. I”m just joking, you know, about the real estate ideas.
While Elizabeth is in Cuba, we revisit older blogs published elsewhere.
Refrigerator Water Dispensers That Fail
Why does GE Profile put a water dispenser inside the refrigerator?
Today, I’d like to share with you two enormous annoyances: Agents who promise to send offers and do not, and GE Profile refrigerators with an interior water dispenser.
Until agents are holding a signed offer in their grubby little paws, agents should probably refrain from sending out emails or making phone calls to say they are sending over a purchase offer. Oh, I know that agents can get even more excited than their clients. They get caught up in their almost-there transactions. They get giddy. And then they share that giddiness. I know they want me to be as excited as they are, so I try, but the fact is I don’t feel as giddy as they do.
Because I know the truth. Maybe they’ll send an offer on that Sacramento home, maybe they won’t. Until I have received the offer, I don’t pass on this information to my sellers. Why? Why get their hopes up only to dash them? If every agent wrote an offer when promised, I’d have island guys rubbing my feet with palm oil as I sleep on the beach.
Speaking of sleeping, I woke up last night at 1:00 AM. My water bottle was not next to my bed. Probably because my husband put it in the dishwasher. I was way too sleepy to dig through the dishwasher looking for it. Instead, I got up, grabbed a glass from the kitchen cabinet and opened the door to the refrigerator.
Sure, GE Profile refrigerators seduce you with their clever marketing, low-energy ratings and pretty curved design. But my refrigerator has the water dispenser inside and not outside. To make matters worse, the button is covered, so, if you have long fingernails, it’s difficult to depress. I shoved my glass under it, maneuvered the door behind my back and pressed the button with my nail. I removed the glass, and the water continued to flow. The stinkin’ button was jammed.
I know now that if I need a large receptacle or pan in a hurry, it can’t be done. I hope an asteroid never hits my roof during a heavy Sacramento rainstorm. I had to dig through the cabinet to find a pan. This was after trying to fix the jammed button as the kitchen flooded. Water flowed all over my Marmoleum floor, which can’t get soaked. Well, not everybody in the Weintraub household gets to sleep. A bit of screaming his name brought my husband running. I don’t know what he did but he fixed it.
But I’m betting this won’t be the last time he leaves my water bottle in the dishwasher. And it won’t be the last time an agent promises she is sending me an offer and does not. Doesn’t matter; I am tough. After all, I’m a Sacramento Realtor.
While Elizabeth is in Cuba, we visit older blogs published elsewhere.
Kicking Those Last Few December Closings into 2015
December closings are often tricky around the holidays.
My December focus, along with packing for our trip to Cuba and closing on our Hawaii house, is basically getting my last December closings sewed up in 2015. I’ve got 6 listings right now that I had initially hoped might close this month, but two have already rolled into January, which is OK. TRID regulations affect a few things but mostly it’s the same as always: last-minute issues popping up that the loan officers should have taken care of at inception and did not. When you’re a Sacramento listing agent like me, these loan problems are out of my control because I represent the seller, not the buyer.
There are some things I can handle with great efficiency, however. For example, yesterday a buyer’s lender required an addendum specifying a small change. I immediately whipped out the document in ZipForms, uploaded it to DocuSign, called my seller and while I had her on the phone walked her through signing the document and then emailed it to the buyer’s agent. I texted the buyer’s agent to let her know we needed the document signed and, in fewer than 15 minutes, the loan processor held the executed document in her grubby little paws.
That means one file will most likely close right away in my December closings, followed by another, leaving two escrows yet to close. The odds of closing over the remaining 7 business days are high enough on the remaining two that I imagine they will close this year, but it’s still nail-biting time. To close, you’ve got to have people on the job who care if it closes, who make it their personal project to close, and finding those kind of people in this day and age of people hating their shit jobs is really difficult.
It makes me think back to when I was an escrow officer in the 1970s. The reason I stood out among the sea of escrow officers is because I invested my time into closing, especially December closings. I studied each file, dotted each I and crossed every T, and often ended up going above and beyond what was expected me of me at that time to close. So many workers meander through workdays; they punch a clock, do a job and go to lunch, and they don’t care whether the work is finished or how many lives their performance affects. It’s just a paycheck.
Some Sacramento Realtors believe if they can flip a transaction into escrow, everybody else will force it to close. It works that way for some agents but that kind of cavalier attitude has never quite settled in with me. If I can interfere, find a way to make it close sooner for the parties involved, that’s what I do. The last few days of this month are often brain aneurysm avoidance days, but I certainly hope to bring my last few December closings in on time.
Assessing an Accurate Picture to Manage Expectations
Elizabeth Weintraub and niece Laura Burgard at Al Vente in Minneapolis
My sister Margie says I have an aura about me, a presence, she says, that makes people want to do nice things for me. If it is true, and I am not certain that it is, I wouldn’t know it, I suppose, because it’s awfully nice, I have to admit, to have things go your own way most of the time. It could also be because I am completely grateful when nice things happen out of the blue, seemingly for no reason. But I also know that I can’t force good things to happen.
My niece Laura says people instinctively realize when they meet me that they should go out of their way to make certain I am happy. She thinks I have a magic touch. I’m not sure where she gets that impression. Although, at dinner last night, at this lovely French restaurant, Café Levain, near 48th and Chicago in south Minneapolis, our server, noticing we had finished our bottle of Rothschild white bordeaux dashed breathlessly to our table, carting a mostly empty bottle of the same wine, “Look what I found in the kitchen!” She poured a bit into our glasses.
See, I’ve never had that happen before. But my niece doesn’t know that. We all have our views of the world. And it’s our views that shape our expectations and help me, especially in my real estate business, to help manage expectations of my clients. In order to do that, though, you’ve got to accurately assess the picture. You can’t pick an isolated circumstance and figure that is the norm.
Experience is what gives me an edge. I can often accurately predict a future happening based on the present circumstances because I’ve been through so much a million times. When a person hires me to be his or her Sacramento Realtor, they are also gaining my experience. It’s a unique experience, unlike anybody’s. But I rely on it and my clients can too. I manage expectations well.
Buying a New Car in Sacramento is Like Burning in Hell
Bill, one of the closers at Thompson’s Toyota in Placerville, amuses himself.
Buying a new car should be fun and exciting, but my experience yesterday at Thompson’s Toyota in Placerville was like that scene in Breaking Bad where bad guys stranded a woman in the hot desert sun for days after tying her feet and hands to stakes pounded into the desert floor. Like burning in hell, as Catholics imagine. We were at the dealership, held pretty much against our will, for 5 hours. Five horrible hours, cramped in an uncomfortable chair, watching other victims, none of whom smiling, shaking hands, shaking heads and following salesmen around like little puppy dogs. It was a hideous experience I hope never to duplicate, but the truth is I suspect all of the car dealers in Sacramento are like this. They’ve perfected the work-the-customer system and it’s dialed in.
Perhaps my difficulty stems from the expectation that buying a new car should be fun and exciting. If I could just do away with that expectation, like my husband has, I would probably have been happier. Often, it’s simply easier to adjust your own attitude to the situation at hand than to try to change the inevitable. And it’s not that I’m picking on Thompson’s Toyota, it’s just where we happened to be yesterday. We probably could have been at any dealership in Sacramento. My husband’s Prius is almost 10 years old, and he wanted to buy the last model of 2015 because they are changing the model next year.
His philosophy is never buy a first-year model because they haven’t worked out all the inherent problems yet. So that was one of our very first stumbling blocks at the dealership. He had called their internet sales guy, some innocent kid who has been working there a week, and by mistake the kid had directed us to a 2016 Prius, which was not the car my husband wanted. That right there ate up a good 2 hours of our time while a sales guy called other dealers to find a 2015 model that wasn’t seafoam green or a demo. My husband also brought a Consumer Report’s guarantee price for the car. Not every car dealer in Sacramento will honor Consumer Report’s guaranteed pricing, which was another reason we drove from Land Park to Placerville.
When it’s my husband’s car we’re buying, he is welcome to buy it any which he wants. He doesn’t thrive on confrontation and negotiations like this Sacramento Realtor. And that’s OK.
I was able to extract myself from some of the discussions because, during part of our camp-out at Thompson’s, I had to deal with a negotiation for my sellers in Carmichael, followed by a call from a mom who wants to look at homes in East Sacramento to be closer to her work. That meant I could pace in the corners of the dealership with my cell plastered to my head while I stared at the long black insects, which had crawled into the tile edges and attached themselves to the wall. I tried to poke one these hard-shelled critters with the toe of my shoe but it didn’t budge, and I was afraid to squish it. The dealership experience might irritate me, but I am no bug killer.
That wormy thing attached to the wall was the highlight of my experience at the dealership.
The fact the dealer insisted on running a credit report on me compounded the annoyance. Dude asked for my monthly income, and I reluctantly told him. He then tried to divide that number by 12, LOL, which tells me they don’t listen. The Mercedes dealership had asked for that, too, when I ordered my new Mercedes GLA SUV last month, but I declined and they honored it. Not so at Thompson’s Toyota. We paid cash, so a credit check was really unnecessary. Then, once we got into the torture chamber itself — the finance manager’s room to sign paperwork — everything was running along smoothly until the finance manager insisted that I sign the arbitration clause. If he hadn’t insisted that initialing an arbitration clause was required by the state of California, I wouldn’t have been so argumentative but I cannot believe the state of California requires a consumer to waive her legal rights to due process of the law.
I still don’t. But it was fast approaching the dinner hour, pitch black outside, our poor diabetic cat was overdue for his insulin, and the clock had ticked past the 5-hour point that we were at Thompson’s Toyota. There’s gotta be a better way for consumers who are interested in buying a new car in Sacramento to have a better time of it.
