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The Issue of Getting Paid What You Are Worth To Work
As a Sacramento REALTOR who works on commission — and earns every dollar she makes — (I’d say pennies but pennies are useless unless rare; in fact all coins are useless because you can’t insert them into a casino slot machine anymore much less a parking meter), I am not astonished that a Seattle CEO slashed his million salary to $70,000 to give his workers a big fat raise to the same income. We need more people like this in the world. Yah?
We need the guys who will chain themselves to a tree, protest at nuclear power plants and actively support native American rights. We need the people who form committees to protect delicate and extraordinary nature such as the efforts to save Mono Lake and our national parks, and to try to save the sea lions and whales washed up on our California shores. We also need the people who will financially support those efforts. I figure I put in my time when I hitchhiked to Washington D.C. in 1969 to march against the war, among many other protest efforts over the years, so my involvement these days is mostly financial. But I can also write about inequities, and human rights is high on my list.
It seems to me that when people are paid a decent wage and earn what they are worth, they are happier, more productive and feel like supporting their employer, which can be pretty important to a soul-less corporate entity. You get honorable efforts for social commentary from some companies, like that goofy thing Starbucks tried to do with its coffee cup messages to discuss race relations, but not many will put their money where it leaves the coffer.
There are some things that are worth negotiating about, especially if you’re a person on a fixed income such as buying generic brands of cereal or tomato soup, maybe haggling over the price of a necklace at the jewelry store, but you might want to think twice when it’s a human being who is providing a service. There are people who won’t even leave a tip at a restaurant. Lots people do not get paid what they are worth.
People in service-related industries are sensitive to income. My former hairdresser, who moved away to Winters to have a baby with her wife, says she always leaves a $10 tip when she goes to a restaurant. Didn’t matter if the bill was only $30, she left a $10 tip. I do pretty much the same thing and always tip at least 20%. Heck, we gave the housekeeper a raise because she never asked for it and was worth more. I see what happens when people, like some of my short sale clients, take jobs they don’t want to take but have to take because they need to put groceries on the table. Their enthusiasm falls, self esteem suffers and their performance also tends to diminish. I see the cracked results when a contractor uses cheap cement and leaves footprints in a driveway because the homeowner squeezed him.
I guess my message today is we might to reconsider how we look at people who earn an income in a service-related industry, and stop trying to nickel and dime them to death. That is all.
Losing the Attitude Helps to Keep it Real in Sacramento Real Estate
Ya gotta lose the attitude to keep it real in Sacramento real estate.
A home seller from Lincoln mentioned yesterday that he has sold a handful of homes over the past couple of years and bought a home about a year ago, and he has never had such a smooth and easy transaction as he did selling a short sale through me. I called to congratulate him on closing his short sale. I sold the home almost immediately, it comped by the bank at the sales price, and we received a very fast approval, within about 10 days. He sounded almost astonished that he could say that his short sale was so much smoother than compared to a regular transaction. I guess you could say he was very pleased with my performance as his short sale agent.
I try to let buyer’s agents know when they call me that I am very experienced with Sacramento short sales, because that fact will tend to put their minds at ease and calm any fears their buyers might have about buying a short sale. Because after all, why would you buy a short sale if you could buy a home that was NOT a short sale — as a regular home would close much sooner. And there aren’t as many short sales nowadays as there were a few years ago. People need reassurance, and I get that.
The words I never utter, under any circumstances, are: don’t you know who I am? Because that sounds so pretentious, self-absorbed and sorta cocky. That’s something that Reese Witherspoon would say and did, evidently, when pulled over by the cops for speeding. That’s something a mortgage lender asked the other day when he whipped off an email: Do you know who the clients are? Doesn’t he? I guess it’s not Reese Witherspoon. I offered to let my transaction coordinator look it up for him. Even though his boss earlier that day had admitted they were no longer the mortgage brokers on that particular transaction. Criminy, guys, let it go. Try losing the attitude.
I say to people I have a dubious honor — because I don’t really know if it’s an honor, it wasn’t something I set out to achieve — but when I looked at the numbers, they were staring me in the face. The numbers from Trendgraphics reflect that I have sold more total short sales in a 7-county area than any other Realtor in Sacramento, a record that has continued to grow since 2006. That’s in addition to my regular real estate business in Sacramento.
Still, it was nice to hear from my home seller in Lincoln that I had exceeded his expectations. It doesn’t matter to me who my clients are — short sales or million-dollar owners — I treat each and every one of their files as though it is the one project I’m working on. It’s just the way I’m wired.
Why One Home in Land Park Sells and Another Home Does Not
A good way to start my blog today could be with a comparison reminiscent of that old TV show The Naked City, to talk about there being 10,000 stories about real estate sales in Land Park, Sacramento, but we don’t have enough inventory anywhere in town to make a statement like that. In fact, probably the last time the entire Sacramento County region saw 10,000 homes for sale on the market was 10 years ago. Are you ready for the astonishing news today?
Today, this very moment, in the entire county of Sacramento, we have only 2,280 single family homes for sale in our multiple listing service. But wait, there is more. Guess how many single family homes are in some sort of pending status? You know I have the answer. It’s 2,791 homes. We have more homes in pending status than we have homes for sale, which means we can’t repeat this scenario next month because there is not enough inventory at the moment to satisfy demand! The pending sale line has risen above the number of homes for sale. We have a real estate drought in Sacramento real estate. It’s not just the water shortage we’re worried about, although granted we could die without water. Real estate, not so much.
SACRAMENTO COUNTY REAL ESTATE MARKET SNAPSHOT
To put it into technical terms, we probably have about 3 weeks of inventory for sale. We could sell everything in the next 3 weeks. And this fact is driving the market completely insane. If your home is not in the best condition, or if it is located in a less than desirable location, it could take longer to sell, but a well located home in move-in condition should attract several offers. This is not a time to sit idly, tapping your fingers on the desk, wondering if it’s a good time to put your home on the market. You don’t have weeks or months to think about it because summer is coming. Summer sales slip and slide. It’s kinda like Jon Snow’s real estate slogan: Winter is coming, except there is no snow, blood or gore. Just heat and not much action.
Which brings me to the point in this week’s Game of Thrones season opener when Varys charged Tyrion Lannister with the character of compassion. Tyrion responded quixically: “Compassion? I strangled my lover with my bare hands; I shot my own father with a crossbow.” I vote this best scene in Season 5, Episode 1, Game of Thrones. Made me laugh out loud and scared the cat off my husband’s lap. I enjoy this type of entertainment sometimes to keep my mind off the wild world of Sacramento real estate or I’d be consumed by it all night.
I closed another home sale in Land Park last week that sold so fast and for more than list price which, a year ago, might have taken up to six months to sell. Of course, it helped that the sellers listened to my advice and made improvements to make the home ready for market. We priced it on the high end, yet sold with a 3% price bump and no hassles. In fact, we negotiated a few days rent-back for the sellers who were relocating out of state. I’d like to believe my marketing techniques, vast internet exposure and excellent photography helped make buyers fight like wild animals over it . . . but it might also be that I work as one of the top 3 Lyon Realtors, at the largest independently owned real estate brokerage in Sacramento that sells many listings in-house through our huge network.
There is another home in Land Park I drive by daily that sits forlorn with a small sign in the yard and no traffic, no buyers. It’s been on the market for months. The sellers changed agents twice. The photography is decent, but it’s not being marketed the way I would do it. I’d like to get my hands on that listing and put it into escrow, but I can’t solicit another agent’s listing, nor would I want to be that kind of agent. If you’re thinking about selling your home, give Elizabeth Weintraub a jingle at 916.233.6759. I answer my phone.
Why You Want to Work with the Elizabeth Weintraub Team
Josh Amolsch, Dianne Slutsky, Elizabeth Weintraub, Barbara Dow
If you’re a potential seller in the Sacramento valley who is ready to hire a Sacramento Realtor as your listing agent, you might want to consider an agent like me who is the team leader, for lack of a better term, of the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. I suppose we could have named ourselves like a garage rock band but it seems easier just to use my name because it has become its own brand of sorts. And besides, who has the time to sort through all of those goofy-ass names? We’re too busy selling real estate.
The reason you might want to hire a person like me is because I will represent you. See, people don’t think about fiduciary relationships, or even care much what they mean until you stop to ponder it. Why shouldn’t you have your own Realtor who works only for you and doesn’t work for the buyer? It just makes sense, right? Why should you purposely pay a large percentage of your home’s market value to a listing agent to work against your interests? Of course, dual agency can exist in just about any transaction if two agents who work for the same broker end up with their clients in a contract, but dual representation is slightly different, which is not our focus.
As a listing agent, I focus solely on the seller. I wear blinders on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. I’m not looking around at buyers who dangle double the commission in front of my face, and those guys know who they are. I’m working for the seller. My team members are working with buyers. They might be buyers for your home or they might be buyers for another home, but I focus on sellers. If the buyers are my former clients, I generally work alongside my team members to ensure the clients get the home they want, and I’m always available to my team members for consultations and brainstorming, should they need it. But they are extremely qualified and competent to start with, which is why I chose them. We watch out for each other and fill in when needed.
I love listing and selling homes. I excel at marketing, photography, home staging. I adore negotiations and finessing counter offers. Escorting buyers to look at homes, well, not so much. So I capitalize on my forte, on my strengths. All I do, just about every single day, is work on selling my listings. Tweaking, rearranging, networking.
It doesn’t cost anything extra to hire a Realtor who is a team leader of the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. Well all work for the same broker, like a small company within a larger company. I was first licensed in this business in the 1970s, and I have a background in title and am a former certified escrow officer. I almost went to law school, too, but then decided that career didn’t pay enough and would have interfered with my real estate business. There are only so many hours in the day, you know.
Some people think I’m sort of a doofus in the way I operate because I believe strongly in doing the very best job I can. They say: just take the job, sign that listing, and get on with it. But we all need to cling to something in this business, and I choose personal integrity. Doofus as that may sound to some, it probably doesn’t sound that way to you. You can call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. Even after all these years, I still answer my phone.
How to Rely on Creative Problem Solving for Sacramento Real Estate
Realtors rely daily on creative problem solving abilities.
Creative problem solving can’t really be taught in schools or silly seminars, you’ve either got the ability or you don’t. If you have the ability, it can be developed and refined, but if you don’t have the ability to employ creative problem solving, then your next best bet is to align yourself with somebody who does. It’s especially helpful to have this ability when you’re selling Sacramento real estate, because no two situations are ever identical.
If I were to try to teach another agent, though, how to hone in on creative problem solving, I would begin with exercises. You know, set up a fictional situation and then ask for solutions, see how many different types of approaches the agent can come up with. First, one identifies the players: their strengths and weaknesses; next the final outcome desired. What is left over in the middle is how you do it. It’s called critical thinking. It’s like those diagrams with lines and arrows predicting outcomes: if you do A and B then proceed to C, unless you do B without A, then go to E.
I realize this sounds overly simplistic to many but many complicated things appear simple when they are broken down into separate components and analyzed. I’ll give you an example. Say a seller has moved out of state and a buyer’s agent goes over to check on the house and make sure it is ready for an appraisal. Perhaps she discovers the key won’t open the door. That’s a common scenario with keys and it happens a lot. One thing I always do when given a set of keys is lock the door, insert the key into the lock and turn to make sure the key works. Then I place the keys into the lockbox. So, when an agent calls to say the key doesn’t work, I can pretty much figure the odds are it is operator error.
Unless it is not. When construction crews have been into the home to make repairs after squatters broke in and vandalized the place, though, the odds of operator error go way down. I left the buyer’s agent a voice mail message and suggested she give it the old college try, but if the keys don’t work, then she has my permission to call a locksmith and change the locks. I called the seller and asked if the keys had been changed. Not to the seller’s knowledge. But the seller was perfectly OK with changing the locks, anything to get the transaction closed.
The agent called back and left me a voice mail saying she did not own the home and did not feel comfortable changing the locks. She wondered if the seller had other keys. This is where creative problem solving comes in. I called the agent, got her in person this time, and relayed the conversation I had had with the seller. It went something like this: I told the seller that the buyer’s agent is one of those agents who needs to follow all the rules and will not change the locks, so you might have to drive a couple hundred miles to change the locks yourself . . . when the buyer’s agent cut me off and said she would gladly change the locks. Could I recommend a locksmith? You betcha.
See, nobody wants to be accused of always following the rules. Nobody wants to be a pansy. There is getting the job done and there is following the rules. Sometimes you’ve got to focus on getting the job done. If you need a creative Sacramento REALTOR who solves problems daily, you can call me anytime, Elizabeth Weintraub, at 916.233.6759. I answer my phone.
