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This is the Market for Hard to Sell Sacramento Homes
Selling hard to sell Sacramento homes is a speciality for Elizabeth Weintraub, Sacramento Realtor.
Disappointed or frustrated home sellers who couldn’t sell last year or those who foresee particular challenges with home selling, should realize that this Sacramento real estate market is the perfect time to list those hard to sell Sacramento homes. Because home buyers will look past defects and, due to limited number of homes for sale, might be forced to bid on your house simply because they can’t buy anything else. If you couldn’t sell that home previously, now is your time, providing you hire the right Sacramento Realtor.
Now you might wonder, why would a Sacramento Realtor willingly advertise that she is ready, willing and able to tackle the difficult homes? Why wouldn’t she want to work only on luxury homes in Sacramento or the prettiest of all listings? Perhaps she likes to work on them all. Each home presents its own unique challenges, regardless of how simple the seller might think the home is to sell. Often the question is not whether it will sell but whether it will close and close without drama. And that can happen as well with hard to sell Sacramento homes.
I noticed a for sale sign went up on a home in Land Park recently, which I had showed about 5 years ago. Nobody wanted to buy the home then because it had laminate flooring over hardwood, the character was stripped out and it backed up to a wall. It also featured a weird layout, seemed to have been designed by a bachelor with way too much time on his hands. It was not really a family home in the sense that we think of those types of homes. When I saw the sign go up, I predicted it would finally sell. It closed last week.
This is not the only challenged home. There are many hard to sell Sacramento homes in Land Park and surrounding areas that deserve to be on the market right now. Before the big push comes, if it ever comes this spring, and the way things are going, it might not. We have such incredibly low inventory, a spattering of 1,752 are for sale in Sacramento County, and a whopping 2,879 homes are pending. This means we have more buyers than we have homes for sale.
Buyers who will be willing to install their own flooring, especially if your carpeting is worn and tired. Buyers who will paint those kitchen cabinets or replace them. Buyers who gladly will take a 2-year roof certification with repairs than demand a brand new roof. Buyers who just want a roof over their, four walls and a place to call home, even if it’s not perfect. I can sell those hard to sell Sacramento homes for top dollar.
If you’re ready to put the past behind you and capitalize on today’s market, call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I have the expertise and knowledge to move that fixer home.
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.
Another Sacramento Home Has Closed Escrow
Want to read about a Sacramento home that closed escrow without a hitch? It’s not often in this Sacramento real estate market that I am afforded the opportunity to gush about what a smooth transaction we just closed because in squirrelly times like the present, the real estate business is typically anything but smooth. The escrow that just closed, with the exception of the document delay on Wells Fargo’s end, presented no problems at all. It was a miracle, in retrospect. I will probably close more than 100 homes again this year and, when I can count smooth closings on one hand, I consider myself and those around me fortunate.
No agent is an island in this business. I might be a rock but I am not an island. I need my team members, escrow officer, transaction coordinator, lenders, title company, appraisers, office assistants and, most important, the agent on the other side to successfully close.
The trick is to not burden the client with every little hiccup in a transaction. That’s one of the reasons home sellers and buyers hire a Sacramento real estate agent — it’s to be a buffer. This doesn’t mean we don’t disclose what’s going on, but there are some behind-the-scenes situations that don’t affect the parties and the parties might be better off not hearing about it, until it closes, if ever. There is no reason on god’s green earth to make other people miserable if they can be spared.
That’s why Powers that Be created real estate agents. We are the ones who often bear the brunt of the transaction. We take the punches so our clients don’t have to.
The agent I worked with on this last transaction was wonderful. She worked tirelessly to meet the demands of the escrow, and I would eagerly work with her again in a heartbeat. Many agents are fabulous in this business and will do whatever it takes to close. In the beginning, though, her buyer was a little bit wary and not as optimistic as his agent.
The home that sold was newer, built in 2010, so we weren’t overly worried about defects or problems, although every single home on the face of the planet will have some kind of defect. There are no perfect homes out there. But because so many escrows lately have developed problems midway through after buyers discover a small defect and suddenly wanted to renegotiate or lower the price, the seller, on advice from a legal friend, elected to be upfront about what she expected. Cut off that behavior at the pass.
In the counter offer, she explained the Sacramento home was sold in its AS IS condition. Yes, that verbiage is in the contract, but few pay attention to it. She simply asked the buyer to agree not to request repairs nor try to renegotiate, regardless of what a home inspection may reveal. The buyer was worried that he could not cancel, but after he thought about it he realized that was not really a valid concern. The seller wanted assurance of some sort that when she removed her home from the market, the buyer would not continue to negotiate.
She wanted the AS IS clause to mean AS IS. Not maybe. There are buyers in Sacramento who have no intention of closing on the sales price they offer. They know it when they write the offer. These types of buyers plan to further reduce the price after the home has been removed from the market for a few weeks. That’s a sneaky way to do business.
Some buyers don’t know when the negotiations have ended. Some negotiations, on the the other hand, never end. But this one did. It stopped at the counter offer. The buyers agreed and the escrow closed, as they say in Shakespeare, without further ado, sigh no more.
48 Hours of Sacramento Real Estate
If selling massive numbers of homes in Sacramento was so danged easy, let me tell you, hundreds of real estate agents would be selling homes like there’s no tomorrow, and we all know, that for most agents, that’s not happening. It’s as though every single transaction lately has had a bunch of little snags that need to be poked with a toothpick and slipped back into place. And that’s assuming that buyers can even get into contract in the first place.
Part of the problem is people don’t read, they don’t listen to each other and everybody is in such a rush that they don’t take time to figure out how to make something work. You can’t get upset with them or irritated because people are who they are, and you can’t change them. You can only change your own view.
Way back in the old days, like 40 years ago when was a title searcher, just to keep the title officers giggling at First American Title, I would slip stick figure drawings of a guy hanging by a noose on an affidavit of death document. Things aren’t that different today now that I am a real estate agent and sell homes in Sacramento.
I’ll give you a few “real world” examples from the past few days. See, this is the thing about real life in real estate, it’s so real that a reality show could never be made about it. It’s so real that people might think this agent made up stuff just to be funny, but I don’t have to make stuff up because it’s the godawful truth.
- An agent sent me an offer and included a note saying she knew I had mentioned that my name needed to go on page 8; however, she had put another agent’s name in that spot and now there was no room for my name.
- I asked an agent if her buyer could afford a higher sales price if the short sale bank demanded it because the offer was low, and the agent said no, but the seller should help the American home buyer.
- When I asked a tenant if I could shoot photos of her home with furniture in place, she said sure, the movers were coming on Wednesday, so could I come over on Thursday.
- Sellers needed to transfer utilities in their name after the tenant moved to allow a final walkthrough for the buyer, and they agreed to do so as long as they could charge the buyer for it.
- First time homebuyers asked if they could buy a home with no money, no reserves, no way to borrow any money and the home needed to be a foreclosure because their sister bought 27 homes without any money.
It takes a special kind of personality to sell Sacramento real estate. If I let all of this get to me, I would not be doing a competent job nor taking care of my clients, and that’s not how I operate. Besides, it wouldn’t be a regular week in real estate without a little craziness.
Selling Homes in Sacramento is Like Herding Cats
Working in real estate and selling homes in Sacramento is somewhat like herding cats. Just for the record, I don’t run a cat ranch or anything, but there are 3 cats who live in my home in Land Park, so I know a little something about herding cats. Cats will do whatever they want to do. They are somewhat predictable, but there are times a cat will completely freak you out, and the Sacramento real estate market is a good comparison. Just when you think that cat is headed for the litter box, it will abruptly stop and throw up on your feet.
I always look for trends because, as a Sacramento real estate agent, it helps me to properly advise clients. You know, just because buyers were wild and crazy last spring doesn’t mean that activity carries through to August. August is typically a slowing down month. A time for families to finish vacation plans, shop for back-to-school clothes, and prepare homes for winter which, in Sacramento, means closing the garage door.
I’m looking forward to the Sacramento Autumn Home Selling Market. It’s generally spectacular every year, and it shouldn’t be any different for 2013. About a week after Labor Day, the flood gates will open. That’s my prediction. But getting into escrow and closing are two distinct things. Any monkey can get into escrow. Closing is another story.
There are signs of increased listing activity right now. Sellers are calling and asking about selling homes in Sacramento. From just yesterday, I have 3 new listings in Elk Grove on the horizon, a home in Roseville will hit the market today, and I’m meeting with another seller in Citrus Heights this weekend.
Buyers, on the other hand, are a bit slower to submit offers now. They are spending more time thinking about it. Not every transaction that every agent has in escrow will close. I’m seeing more fallouts from buyers with cold feet, buyers who can’t qualify, buyers who probably should not have been trying to buy a home in the first place. There are also buyers who can’t understand that a rising market means if they’re buying a short sale, that price might be higher after waiting a few months.
What we need are incentives like my cat Pia’s freeze-dried chicken treats that we can throw in front of these guys. We need to continually check in with our buyers and make sure they’re still on board and headed for closing. Remove obstacles from their path. Keep the positive vibe going. Because I tell ya, it’s not easy herding cats when you’re selling homes in Sacramento.
