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Typing With One Hand After Rotator Cuff Surgery
This morning is the day I go in to the hospital for rotator cuff surgery, which is an outpatient deal and my doctor has done thousands of these operations, so no need to fret. I’m not fretting, why should you? I also have no idea what it actually entails because I purposely did not do much research on the particulars. Know why? Because some things we are simply better off not knowing until the crisis passes. I don’t need to obsess over the intricate details.
What it means is I get to be a one-armed bandit for a while. My arm will be in a sling, and in order to heal properly, I can’t type. Doctor says I can’t use my left hand fingers. ?I do have voice recognition software, but I probably won’t use Dragon. I spent hours talking into the microphone so it would recognize my voice and the way I say things, and it still has difficulties.
For my personal situation, my laptop computer is a better choice. It’s an Apple product and the voice recognition is built into it. All I have to do is put my cursor where it belongs and start yakking. Easy enough.
I’ve practiced using my right hand for everything in preparation for my rotator cuff surgery, and the only real difficulty I have encountered is putting on mascara. Super hard to do with one hand. It’s not like I can ask my husband to do it because he’ll poke out my eye.
But it will be back to business as usual on Tuesday. No downtime for this Sacramento Realtor. I’m just not the kind of agent who can lie low and do nothing. But I can manage it for one day.
Prioritize to Just Sell Homes in Sacramento
Some people find it very difficult, almost impossible in some cases, to prioritize. Now that I am in my 60s, I’d like to believe that I have a pretty good handle on prioritization, especially for my Sacramento real estate business. There are days when I’ve got a ton of information coming at me from all directions: emails from buyer’s agents asking questions about listings, voice mails from a person who called at the same time I was on the phone, media desiring interviews, potential sellers, sellers whose homes are listed but not yet sold, sellers in escrow, buyers who want to purchase homes in Sacramento, and this doesn’t count my support team or escrow much less the time-waster sales guys.
What does one do first in any given day? Chase the new business, handle the existing business, process purchase offers, negotiate counters, suppress those Request for Repairs, what? I look to sell homes in Sacramento. This Sacramento REALTOR handles her existing business always foremost. It’s simple for me that way. Existing clients get priority.
Sometimes I’ll answer the phone and a person will introduce himself, state his company affiliation and before he gets another word out of his mouth, I find myself explaining that I am on the Do Not Call list and please honor it and don’t continue to call me. Then I hang up before he get can slip another word in edgewise. I’m lucky that reporters don’t sound like salespeople on the phone. Nope, salespeople are far too chipper and perky. They shouldn’t be calling me anyway, and if I needed a particular product, I’m not buying it over the phone or from an email or from some dude standing on my front steps because nothing good has ever come from that for anybody in the world.
I know some Sacramento REALTORS who wish that a few of their listings would go away. Especially if the days on market begin to linger, and they face more exhaustion trying to sell the home. This REALTOR, on the other hand, always figure if I went to the trouble to obtain the listing, then I need to focus on my objective to sell homes in Sacramento. Why go out and look for another listing to sell when I have an existing listing right under my very nose waiting for me to sell it? All I need to do is try a different approach if my existing plan doesn’t work.
That listing is already there. Just sell it. Hey, yeah, that should be my new motto: Just Sell It. So, that’s my focus and prioritization regardless of how long it takes. Because it’s not up to me how long it takes to just sell homes in Sacramento. It can be the market conditions or seller pricing or a bazillion other forces out of my control. Right now is a good time to be on the market, though, because we’ve passed Winterfell and are moving into a new year; bring on the dragons.
What Does a Sacramento REALTOR Do With a Lowball Offer?
Probably one of the worst things a Sacramento REALTOR can do is make a judgment call on an offer, even about a lowball offer, when presenting an offer to a seller. That’s because the listing agent is not the seller, and we don’t ever really know what a seller will do. To presume we do is sorta stupid. The one exception to this, though, is when the transaction is listed as a short sale, and the bank has already authorized a sales price, which is probably not subject to negotiations and conforms to a formula, like FHA Short Sales.
There are agents in the Bay Area, for example, who often send lowball offers without any warning or notice. Most of the lowball offers I receive like this are faxed to my office, even though all of my listings contain explicit directions on how to submit an offer, and faxing the offer to the office is not one of those options. They are often missing crucial elements of the offer, especially when it’s a short sale. I try to overlook those mistakes because I realize when buyer’s agents are crazy-busy throwing offers at the wall to see what sticks, they don’t always have the time nor the patience to thoroughly read each MLS listing.
It’s possible these same agents could also be the type to double-end their own transactions as the principal buyer. Yowza. They probably think they are clever, living life at its fullest and not on the edge. I try not to be judgmental about them, and I just pass along their offers.
When I send these offers that don’t stand in chance in hell of acceptance to the seller, it is a waste of time for everybody, but I am required by law to do it. If a buyer’s agent sent me an offer written on a roll of toilet paper, I’d have to send it, and many of these lowballs would be better off scribbled on a roll of toilet paper than handwritten and faxed. But I also apologize to the seller for a) sending them a worthless offer that the agent should have known better than to send, and b) wasting my seller’s time. I explain that I am legally required to send the lowball offer but they are not required to respond and, in fact, they should ignore it.
It’s somewhat more disturbing when lowball offers arrive on pending listings. I’m not sure what the thought process is, maybe that the deal will blow up and the seller will be so despondent or desperate that she will grab any offer that floats through email. But the fact is if a transaction should blow up, I simply sell it again, generally at a higher price. I just closed a few days ago on a waterfront home in Elk Grove, which I sold 4 times. The final sale was the highest ever, and such a good offer that we rescinded a counter about to be accepted, grabbed the new offer and ran with it all the way to the closing table.
This is what Sacramento real estate is about.
I received 3 offers recently on two preapproved short sales, varying between $50,000 and $100,000 LESS than the approved and pending price. That was unusual. Enough so that I called the out-of-area agent to ask why was he creating all of this unnecessary work for me, and bothering the seller with these silly-ass offers that are obviously going nowhere. I considered not calling him but due to the volume of business I do, I had a sneaky feeling if I didn’t nip this in the bud, it would continue on my other listings. My time is valuable.
The agent’s response was he has to do what the client tells him to do, just like I would do. No, see, the difference is I don’t work with idiots.
Do You Really Want a Self-Service World?
Watching Downton Abbey the other night made me yearn for the days when the wealthy relied on respected employees: a person to comb out your hair, help you dress, brush cat hair shoulders, polish your shoes. Not that I had ever experienced any of those things as a kid but it doesn’t mean I would not appreciate the benefits of such service; I mean, one less thing to think about, right? Especially in a day and age like the present when self service is increasingly ubiquitous.
I recall when gas stations switched to self service. Supposedly in exchange for a cheaper price on gasoline, you had the choice of getting out of your vehicle in the middle of a snowstorm, freezing your tush off opening the gas tank, inserting the gas nozzle, and huddling under the canopy to fill your car. You were the window washer and tire pressure attendant, too, which meant those things just never got done. Now, we pay premium gas prices and there is still no gas station attendant.
Don’t you miss the days of going to the train station window to buy a ticket? Nowadays, you can rent a car from a robot computer at the airport. You can buy almost any transportation ticket from a computerized machine: airline, bus, train, light rail. In fact, when I flew on Hawaiian Airlines January 1 to Molokai to after arriving in Honolulu from the Sydney Airport, I was told to check my own bag. Just go over to that machine and do it, the security guard pointed.
Wha? How am I to stuff my bag inside a machine? It didn’t make sense. I had never seen such a thing before. Rather than try to tackle it and mess up, which I surely would do, I had the good sense to tell the security guard that I don’t know how to do it. He grabbed an attendant and asked the attendant to do the self service for me. It involved inserting your ticket and punching buttons to receive a baggage tag, then attaching the tag to your luggage and transporting said luggage to the luggage conveyor belt yourself. For this self service Hawaiian Airlines charges $15.00, too.
The days of check-out clerks at many stores are almost gone. How many people actually speak to a bank teller anymore when the ATM is right there? I like talking to people, asking questions, gathering information and the personal attention is part of what makes the personal transaction a pleasure. When you eliminate people from the equation, what does that make all of us apart from a collection of zeros and ones? Completely removed from reality.
This is why real estate will always be a profession that needs real estate agents and a Sacramento REALTOR for guidance. If there is a market for self service, it is small. There are people who might view a home as no different than a loaf of bread on a grocery store shelf, yet the legal aspects of real estate are complicated, the negotiations require experience and people will never outgrow the need for a professional who knows more than they do.
A Sacramento REALTOR with experience is a value-added component of your real estate transaction.
Do You Know WOT WOT?
Pool at Hotel Molokai
An expression used in Molokai is wot wot; it’s a slang phrase for being informed about something and knowing what to do. Like knowing which end is up. I tried to explain it to my husband but his brain could not wrap around it. He kept asking about a punch line. There is no punch line. It’s kinda like telling somebody that they should know “what is what” after they’ve been in the business for a few years. The thing about wot wot is not everybody knows. When you come to a Sacramento REALTOR for advice, though, that agent should know wot wot.
That knowledge of wot wot is what keeps your transaction running smoothly and without a lot of complications. That’s not to say we can always anticipate exactly what an underwriter might come up with that could cause a problem in a file, which is where most of the woes in real estate today seem to originate.
Hotel Molokai Hawaii
We had an underwriter disclose yesterday that because a home was transferred into the name of a nonprofit organization as a charitable contribution prior to the end of the year that now that file is being treated like a flip, even though it is not a flip. Flip transactions require an additional appraisal.
In another transaction, the buyer, unknown to any of us except to his mortgage lender-slash-buyer’s agent, is on title to another property. By all rights, he probably should NOT have received a preapproval letter because that mortgage would have showed up on his credit report, and somebody, like his loan officer, probably should have questioned it. In this particular instance, the original borrower, who apparently could not qualify first go-around, is now trying to qualify for a refinance to remove the co-borrower.
There is no way the listing agent in this transaction would have known any of this information or could have determined it at time of offer acceptance. But it would have made a difference in the how the negotiations were handled had this bit of information been received by the agent.
So, while your Sacramento REALTOR may very well know wot wot, we don’t have a crystal ball to predict all the things that can delay a closing. But we move closer to it every day.
