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Expert House Hunting Tips Serve Sacramento Home Buyers
Elizabeth Weintraub’s house hunting tips leave no stone unturned.
Below are a few house hunting tips that I developed for use when working with Sacramento home buyers, but they can apply to most home searching efforts in California and probably outside of the state as well. The first tip is to know what the buyer would like to buy and needs to buy. Likes and needs are two different things but if we can accomplish both, then buyers have found the perfect home.
Little is worse than managing an irritated buyer, I imagine, who might say something like: the house is a total disaster — because the agent showed her relocation buyer the wrong home. Yet, that seems to happen on a regular basis around Sacramento. It is as common as a summer day in Sacramento topping 100 degrees; I often receive feedback on my listings from agents that indicate the agent should never have showed that home to that particular buyer.
Some of the reasons agents show homes that do not fit their buyer’s requirements are:
- The agent does not know the neighborhood and therefore does not know what to expect from certain price points. For example, if an agent spots a 3,000 square foot home in Midtown that is, oh, let’s say priced at $525,000, that’s because the home is a fixer.
- The agent does not read the marketing comments in MLS nor the confidential agent remarks in the listing, which typically set forth expectations and provide a wealth of information.
- The agent does not understand the buyer’s wants and needs.
- There is nothing else available in the buyer’s price range. Otherwise, how does that explain an agent, say, showing a 600-square-foot home to parents with many children? Yet, that happens. And the feedback is, no surprise, oh sorry, the home is not big enough.
- The agent doesn’t have enough experience to know how to offer variables and solutions to help a buyer expand her horizons and / or parameters.
My house hunting tips are to thoroughly investigate available properties. Before showing, the professional buyer’s agents know almost everything we can possibly discover about that home. We know, for example, how long the listing agent has been in business and how many homes she typically sells, and at what percentage from list price. We know how long the seller has owned the home and the approximate unpaid mortgage balance. We know how many days on market it took to sell the home the last time it was on the market, which signifies appeal.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg; we study the photographs to look for defects and, if possible, we preview. A home buyer’s time is valuable and top agents know that maximizing showing times is paramount. One of my best house hunting tips is for the buyer’s agent to call the Sacramento listing agent. Yes, phone to ear. Call. Old fashioned stuff that still works.
And let’s not forget our party girlfriend: Google.
If one can find the seller on Facebook, often an agent can read all about his plans to sell and hopes for a new home or whether he has been transferred out of state, getting divorced or, say, borrowing to meet the demands of a bail bond. It’s amazing what people disclose through social media. If you need a professional buyer’s agent, call the Elizabeth Weintraub Team at 916.233.6759.
The Sacramento Real Estate Agent Who Shows 3 Homes
Not every home that comes on the market these days is a highly desirable home in a hot location. Some of them are ordinary homes in Sacramento, owned by sellers with a little bit of equity who might need every scrap of equity they can squeeze out. Every once in a while, one of these sellers might be close to short sale status but would be willing to pay a couple of dollars just to close the transaction. These homes seem to be overlooked by buyers or possibly used by real estate agents as “the home not to buy.”
Back in the old days, and quite possibly even today as I type, real estate agents used to show 3 homes:
- A home the buyer cannot afford
- A perfect home that meets the buyers’ needs
- A home so horrible nobody would ever want to live in it
And they would show the 3 homes in the above order. Because when the Sacramento home buyer falls in love with the first home, it can be heart-breaking to realize that it’s just a dream, and the buyer can’t really afford to buy that home. It’s similar to the concept that HGTV uses on House Hunters, except 2 of those homes are often not for sale. After the buyer’s heart is broken, it’s on to tour the home that’s perfect.
The buyer can’t believe her good luck. Everything is exactly the way she thought it would be. The living room is in the front, she walks through the formal dining — past the two rooms she will never ever use in her lifetime — and into the kitchen with the Wolf 6-burner stove — a stove she will never turn on, but wow, it looks magnificent. Which reminds, did you hear that Burger King is now delivering to select areas in Sacramento? Yes, it is true.
While the buyer is salivating over the perfect home, the agent takes her to the home nobody would ever live in. Maybe it’s nestled next to the train tracks, or under the freeway, or across the street from a graveyard, by a school, or maybe the home is just a mess inside, with torn-up carpeting, Corian counters and half-chewed cabinet doors in the kitchen. Most buyers do not want to buy a fixer these days and, if they do, they will discount heavily for repairs that they have no idea how to undertake or what the repairs will actually cost.
So, then the buyer goes to the agent’s office and triumphantly declares she will buy house number two.
Sometimes, though, your number just comes up. Sometimes, in this limited inventory marketplace, we run out of the homes that are too expensive and the homes that fit a buyer’s every requirement. Sometimes, all that is left are the unique homes with a defect. Did your agent show 3 homes? Think about it.
And that’s when we’ll get three offers in one day on the same house.
