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Do Sacramento REALTORS get a Sick Day?
This Sacramento Realtor has been very fortunate over the past 10 years to not have had a sick day. I can’t remember the last time I felt so horrible. Usually, I work through any kind of illness, and I probably will do so today as well because, let’s face it, just because my head is hanging over the toilet doesn’t mean I can’t send a text message or an email. I got my old-person’s flu shot this winter, too, but, apparently it was not a safeguard this time. This year’s flu shots are only about 25% effective, I hear.
Without going into graphic detail, because nobody needs to hear about my projectile vomiting except perhaps 5-year-olds — and I wish I had some of those around me right now so I could entertain them with my vivid descriptions. Suffice to say it entailed three rooms. The worst was probably when I was down on my hands and knees in our new marble bath scrubbing the grout with Tilex. No, no, not the grout.
I slept for more than 12 hours. Not before I called a couple of new clients. I am listing a home in Land Park shortly, and probably another in Arden. Other people might say what is wrong with her, calling clients from her sick bed, but the thing is I could not sleep if I did not take care of business first.
Today, I will take it easy and work from my home office. There is no appointment in the world that can’t wait until tomorrow.
Replacing Drain Waste Pipes Under the House in Land Park
Our home was built in 1948, and we live in an older community of homes in Land Park, Sacramento, the neighborhood of the famous Orangeburg sewer lines. Why in the world anybody would ever have thought it was a good idea to use tarpaper for a sewer line is beyond me. It was after the wars and a few years before I was born; at a time I imagine the country was under economic recovery and reeling from the then-pressing Korean War, but still. People, where were your heads? When we bought our home, the previous owners gave us photographs of the sewer line replacement in 2000. It was done by Trenchless, and it wasn’t a trenchless sewer line. It was a whole new sewer line.
On top of this, during our subsequent kitchen and bath remodels, we replaced our horizontal water pipes with copper. It never occurred to us that we could have problems with the cast iron drain waste pipes under our house. My husband was certain our washing machine line was plugged because a few weeks ago the water from our washer backed up into our kitchen sink. Then our shower began backing up. My husband poured Drano down the shower drain, which worked, but that is the lowest drain in the house, and should easily drain. Moreover, nobody should ever really use Drano. It is not a safe product for your drains.
Something was not right.
Being a Sacramento Realtor, I realize the value of sewer inspections, and we routinely advise our buyers to request plumbing inspections of varying sorts. I am familiar with sewer line inspections, too, and called Trenchless to come over. They’ve always done a good job for my clients, although they no longer provide the service as a pre-inspection for real estate agents. They’re right down the street on Broadway, and Max enjoys a pretty good reputation among my peers. He looked at my photos and identified the sewer clean-out. Good thing I had saved the photos. Hooray for Polaroid.
My husband did not really understand why I was so gung ho on doing a sewer inspection, but now I am very glad that we did. First, we discovered the doofus guy who poured the cement for our driveway covered up our sewer clean-out. He installed a cap over the sewer clean-out but he missed it by about a foot. Now we have to chop up part of our concrete work to dig out the old clean-out. Thanks, doofus cement dude. Thanks for walking around in the wet cement, too, and leaving your big fat ugly footprints, you moron.
We are also replacing 40 feet of the corroded and rusted cast-iron drain waste pipes under the house up to where it meets the new sewer line. I had a closing yesterday for a short sale home in Elk Grove, but that commission check is going to Trenchless, so it’s not like I made any money yesterday. I worked on the sale of that short sale since last April. Poof. Gone. Such is the life of a Sacramento Realtor.
The Fixer Home in Citrus Heights That Sold AS IS
This is a story of a real estate closing that could happen to just about any seller in Citrus Heights, or anywhere in the Sacramento Valley for that matter, and how a first-time home buyer found her dream home. Sometimes, sellers find it difficult to believe that their Sacramento REALTOR is really looking out for them and trying to do what is best. In those instances, sellers tend to form their own thoughts about how they intend to sell a home, a strategy that can backfire.
A client contacted me in 2013 to inquire about selling another investment home, this time a home in Citrus Heights. I had previously sold a home for this couple in Roseville. They were very happy with me. I met with the tenants in Citrus Heights and prepared an agent visual inspection. My advice was to evict the tenants. The home was not presentable.
Sometimes, you can easily sell a home with tenants in it and sometimes you lose too much on the sale if you leave the tenants in the property. An experienced Sacramento REALTOR can spot the “trouble sales” a mile away and properly advise. In fact, I have one at the moment that I’ve been trying to sell for almost a year and the tenant is very uncooperative yet the seller won’t throw her out, so we had to wait. Because of the challenges, that particular seller is losing approximately $15,000 on the sale due to the tenant. Penny wise, pound foolish. Laugh, if you want, there are reasons behind these expressions.
My Citrus Heights seller, being a nice guy, decided to wait another year and then ask the tenants to move. At that point, he decided not to sell the property outright but to gift the property to a worthy charity and take the tax write-off, as long as the non-profit agreed to hire this Sacramento REALTOR to sell it. The head of the charity once sold real estate in another part of California. Usually I love working with real estate professionals, even if they are no longer in the business, but there is also a downside to it because people are the sum of their own reality. What works in Orange County doesn’t necessarily work in Sacramento, and our real estate market is very different. Plus, when years go by, things tend to change, so what was true 20 years ago is not true today.
We sold almost immediately to a first-time home buyer who was obtaining a conventional loan. As part of this buyer’s due diligence, she obtained a pest report, which reflected about $4,000 worth of work. Even though the home was sold AS IS, the buyer asked the seller to complete the pest work. The seller adamantly refused. The non-profit felt it could sell for cash in this market at top of market, a strategy that falls pretty flat in this market. Investors expect a profit margin and won’t pay top dollar. We reached a standstill, and the home went back on the market. Finally, the seller lowered the price but not enough to attract an investor who would pay cash.
We sold to a buyer who was obtaining an FHA loan and who agreed to pay for the pest work herself. Now, the problem with FHA is the 90-day flipping rule, which means title cannot transfer within that period. Our escrow was delayed by several months. The lender had its own issues and caused more delays as well. Ultimately, the home closed but the non-profit lost about $10,000 during this time period in order to save the initial $4,000 for the pest report — to sell AS IS.
The moral is sometimes it’s better to bend a little bit with a bird in hand. Sacramento REALTORS, the busy ones, spend a lot of time analyzing markets and movement. It’s professional advice a client can rely on.
How to Find a Sacramento REALTOR on the Internet
How to Find the Best Sacramento Realtor
The internet has finally become ubiquitous. When you think about it, it only took about 25 years, — which to me, of course, seems like yesterday because at my age I have little concept of the passing of time. All the signs are there. First, you had Al Gore raising a ruckus, followed by people like my dentist who, same age as me, hauls in a clerical worker to “pull up the Google” and search for an image to find types of teeth. Then there is About.com, which recently notified all of its Experts, including this Home Buying and Selling Expert, of a corporate decision to eliminate our email addresses, because they are unnecessary.
Just about everybody has an online presence today who needs it in one form or another. Although, there are people who avoid social media on purpose because it’s a time suck and wouldn’t dream of maintaining a website or blog for any reason. For example, I use Facebook when I’m bored, which isn’t very often, but I don’t devalue those who are addicted. Everybody has their own thing. In my spare time, I like to blog and write articles. Facebook, not so much.
When I think back to my first online experience, in 1991, stuff is absolutely more colorful and fast as lightning today, but it’s still just a transfer of information. Now we have instant access to anything we want to know. We don’t have to look it up in an encyclopedia when we have Siri and Google, just like we don’t have to stop at a pay phone to make a call. Why, you can be out to dinner with your partner and notice an unusual object or hear a song or simply think of an obscure question, and bam, you can use your phone to get an answer. Immediately. Because you can’t wait until after dinner.
If the real estate curious want to find a Sacramento REALTOR like me online, all they have to do is search on Google. In fact, many searches for Elizabeth Weintraub point to my website when people just type my name into a Google search bar. Even if they misspell my name, it will still direct them to me and provide a way to contact this agent, either by phone or email. So I don’t really have to publish an actual email address anywhere. Not on About.com, not on my website, and not in my blog. There is always an envelope to click that will send me an email.
The good thing is having no email at About.com now means my spam will be dramatically cut. With the internet, one almost doesn’t need an email. Landlines are vanishing and almost everybody has a cell to accept text. I don’t care how my clients find me, just as long as the search to find a Sacramento REALTOR ends on my website so I can showcase my successful 40 years of expertise in real estate.
Sellers Who Bare Souls Before Hiring a Sacramento Realtor to List Their Home
Do not disclose secrets until you hire a Sacramento REALTOR.
Home sellers say the darnedest things when they are talking to a Sacramento REALTOR about selling that home. There are times I might even stop them, but those are the occasions when I know that I will be their listing agent. In other cold-call situations, I might let them continue to babble. The reason I might stop them is because they will say something that I may file away in the back of my mind, when I don’t need to know it. Something like: my bottom line price is XYZ. It could be; it could not (which is a whole ‘nother blog). In any case, I have no business obtaining that knowledge.
My real estate business — one of the reasons I work as a premium agent and not a discount agent — is built on a passionate bedrock of commitment to obtain a full-price or higher offer for the seller. To do what is absolutely best for the client. What is best for the client is that I not possess any inkling of a bottom-line price. I don’t need to know. It’s not my business to know how little the seller might take. I maintain a fierce loyalty to my clients.
However, if I am not the listing agent, then all bets are off. I have no fiduciary to the home seller. Sometimes, I will meet with a seller whose goofy idea is to flatter by proclaiming that they have placed me on the top of their list for hiring a Sacramento REALTOR, but then say they want me to discount my standard commission or perform some other task that is outside the realm of reality. Or, maybe they’re just trying to confirm a price range because they’ve already decided to hire their sister-in-law, and are seeking free advice, I dunno. But the point is if they are not hiring that Sacramento REALTOR in a fiduciary capacity to represent them as a listing agent, I think they forget that we real estate agents work with buyers as well.
They might forget that they already disclosed their bottom line price, all of their fears and other important information, which buyer’s agents will use to their advantage. They might say: the pool needs work so we expect to pay a big credit to the buyer for that. Or, buyers can repaint those red and pink walls and we’ll give them money. They often don’t realize that buyers don’t want to paint and, if they must, they will deduct many thousands of dollars from the sales price. It’s not two $25 cans of paint in a buyer’s mind, which it is to the seller. It’s tough to understand sellers who want top dollar and refuse to neutralize god-awful colors. It’s one thing if you live in a culture like Mexico or Miami. Quite another in Sacramento suburbia. But if I am not the listing agent, I’m not there to give tips, drawn on my 40 years of experience in the business; I reserve pertinent advice for my own clients.
The main thing is home sellers should not share personal information or facts that can affect the sale of their home while talking to a listing agent who is not their agent. Because that listing agent might also be a buyer’s agent with a buyer underfoot who will now use all of that information to her advantage. It’s not unethical. That agent enjoys a fiduciary relationship with her buyer. Different priorities. And that buyer’s agent might be a shrewd negotiator, especially after the sellers have moved out of state, expecting escrow to close.
Sellers don’t often think of things that can come back to bite.
