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Selling Sacramento Homes From Our Vacation House in Hawaii
Fresh flowers invigorate Sacramento Realtor to sell Sacramento homes from our vacation house in Hawaii
My husband was not really surprised when I proposed buying our vacation house in Hawaii last year, but it wasn’t really on the radar for me, so I was a bit astonished that we actually did it. I spend so much time focusing on Sacramento real estate that I don’t spend a lot of time day-dreaming about the future, like most other normal people. But when the opportunity presents itself, I do tend to yank open that door without hesitating.
To me it seemed simple. I could sell real estate in Sacramento during the month of December from Sacramento, just like any other day in my life. Or, I could sell Sacramento homes from our vacation house in Hawaii. Given the choice between the two, well, you know which one I picked. That’s because I don’t want to wait for retirement (whatever that is) to pretend that I live in Hawaii. I’d rather do it right now.
Since my specialty is representing sellers and selling my listings, it’s a lot easier to do that from a remote location long distance than it is to, say, haul buyers around. Working from our vacation house in Hawaii only works because apart from shaking the seller’s hand, there is really no reason to have to meet in person. I have a laptop, iPad, cellphone, internet service and a wonderful support team. Wired and connected.
In fact, I listed a home in Sacramento that had been listed by another agent without success and sold it almost immediately, it’s closing next week from Hawaii. I never met the seller. Not only have I never met the seller, I never talked to the seller by phone. That’s because my foreign sellers don’t really speak English very well. They can write English, so we communicate via text and email. How about that?
I listed another home in Elk Grove on December 22 and sold it with 5 offers on December 23rd. Not only did I sell it, but the seller received about $15,000 more than his last unsuccessful agent had it listed at. Who buys a home the day before Christmas Eve? Lots of buyers; the Sacramento market is on fire. I sold that home from our vacation house in Hawaii. It’s even easier to sell homes in Sacramento from Hawaii in some ways because I have no distractions at the house.
Although I did stop at the grocery store today to replenish supplies and bought flowers pictured on this page. The flowers are a gift to myself. For a job well done. Today I sent out 3 comparative market analysis estimates and should be picking up a listing this week, another next week and one is for April. I love selling Sacramento homes from our vacation house in Hawaii. This was a good idea!
How Fast Can Realtors List Houses for Sale in Sacramento?
The timeframes for listing houses for sale in Sacramento vary among Realtors.
You would be amazed at how fast Realtors can list houses for sale in Sacramento. Well, maybe not all Sacramento Realtors, but this agent is organized. If you call me in the morning, I can research the comparable sales for your home, draw the paperwork, run over to complete my visual inspection and shoot professional photographs, and your home can be in MLS by late afternoon. It’s not the way I prefer to list houses for sale in Sacramento, but sometimes sellers need an emergency listing. I accommodate.
Chuckle as you may, but emergency listings happen more often than most people probably think. Some pop up out of the blue. I may never have spoken to the seller before the day she calls. She might need an appointment in a few hours. Or, I might be working with a seller for months and months before he is ready to go on the market but when that moment arrives, it needs to be right now. No problem.
I don’t always have the luxury of time. Ordinarily, it may take me several hours to prepare a comparative market analysis, depending on where the home is located and other factors such as condition, upgrades, market temperature, demand and positioning. If I have my druthers, I often hire a third-party photographer with more time and better equipment to deliver HD photographs. That appointment alone can take several days to obtain. Then, there’s also the preparation time to tweak and deliver the photos to my email. The average time involved in listing houses for sale in Sacramento is generally a week.
But if you need your house on the market immediately, I can do that, too. In fact, I talked with a seller last night about listing her home in Roseville. Laid out how the process works, how long it will take to sell, and let her know I can still score a four-color online and inprint Sac Bee ad in our Open House Extravaganza for this coming weekend. We could be on the market by Thursday night. Set an appointment for 4 PM today to prepare an inspection, attach a lockbox, sign paperwork. This seller should be in escrow at least by December 20th, by my calculations.
Just as I was beginning to implement my organizational chart, the seller emailed to say they were not selling the house after all. Well, that’s OK; when she changes her mind tomorrow, next year or 10 years from now, she knows where to find me. Elizabeth Weintraub is not going anywhere. If you need an emergency Realtor for listing houses for sale in Sacramento, just call 916.233.6759.
Working With Real Estate Investors Buying in Sacramento
Real estate investors buying in Sacramento love our home prices.
Who doesn’t love working with real estate investors buying in Sacramento? In what agents call our “thinventory” market, which is still limited despite an uptick of listings, real estate investors are buying homes that first-time homebuyers pass by. Sometimes this means working with agents from the Bay Area who represent Bay Area investors. For some, English is a second language, and things can get lost in translation, if you’re not overly careful, like I am.
Plus, it’s not unusual to run into misunderstandings over verbiage. Say a buyer agrees to purchase a home in its AS IS condition and then changes his mind, for whatever reason, and now wants a credit against the sales price. Or, maybe his agent did not remind him what AS IS means. Or, maybe he never intended to purchase the home AS IS to start with and simply wanted to beat out every other buyer — what we call deception and they claim is strategy. Or, maybe his definition of AS IS varies from our definition. Hard to say.
It is not uncommon, in that scenario, for an agent from out-of-area to try to make demands that are not agreed to in the purchase contract. Some agents operate under very different rules than the rest of us; although we are all governed by California real estate law. They also might not understand that disclosures are provided within the first 7 days of the California Residential Purchase Agreement and not in advance as is the practice in, say, San Jose, for instance.
It can mean it’s more work for the Sacramento Realtor, but that’s OK. Further, I should probably point out that I’ve worked with plenty of agents from the Bay Area who are smart, savvy and fun.
Still, we love those Silicon Valley and Bay Area investors. Those are real estate investors in Sacramento who have cash, not just hard-money loans, and are willing to go the extra yard or two it sometimes take to buy a home in Sacramento. Many homes in Oak Park or North Sacramento, areas with lower median sales prices than the average, for example, are owned by Bay Area investors. The prices of some of those homes are about the same as a covered parking spot in San Francisco.
I can see why real estate investors buying in Sacramento are attracted to our wide variety of homes for sale. In fact, we just closed a sale in Natomas, a fixer home that needed a lot of updating. We received a premium price for that home, too. If you’re thinking about listing a home that you’re unsure will sell, call Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate at 916.233.6759, and it’s possible we’ll sell it to real estate investors buying in Sacramento.
If You Think Selling a Home in Sacramento is Scary
Selling a home in Sacramento does not have to be a scary event.
Selling a home in Sacramento is not as scary as it seems if a seller hires the right Sacramento Realtor. Yet for many people, selling a home is a frightening experience: like an asteroid hurtling toward the earth with no place for you to hide or, worse, bumping into an old boyfriend at the grocery store with your hair wrapped in bleaching foil because, darn it, you forgot to pick up coffee. A Realtor with a bit of sensitivity, compassion and experience should be able to guide sellers through putting their home on the market. Alleviate some of that anxiety.
For some people, it’s not knowing where they are moving when selling a home. It’s hard to focus on the sale when there is no destination on the horizon. They imagine themselves homeless, sleeping in the car, while some other fool is living the good life and jumping into their swimming pool. Slamming their soft-closing kitchen drawers. Leaving their sticky fingerprints all over those stainless appliance finishes.
I have talked to sellers who have told me after interviewing a bunch of other Realtors that not a single agent had asked them where they were moving. Like the agents didn’t care or were too focused on just getting that listing.
When you’re selling a home in Sacramento, you want your Realtor to grab the big picture and to anticipate things that could go wrong and stop those horrible events from happening. Only an agent with adequate experience can do that. Sure, you might want to hire your sister-in-law who happens to have a real estate license — because one in 35 people in California most likely do have a real estate license — but what you give up to achieve complete trust you lose in specific performance, which reduces bottom-line profit and adds to anxiety levels. Good intent but bad idea.
This is why so many people who are selling a home in Sacramento want to list with Elizabeth Weintraub at Lyon Real Estate. They know I will do everything in my power to reduce anxiety and provide professional guidance to achieve my sellers’ goals. Your goals are my goals. Every listing plan is customized. If you think selling a home in Sacramento is scary, you haven’t met this Realtor.
Dim Sum at New Canton and a Major Homebuying Mistake in Sacramento
Sacramento homebuyers face as many choices as dim sum at New Canton.
Sundays are usually busy days for Sacramento real estate and dim sum at New Canton. It’s a struggle to find time for an after-breakfast nap, even on a rainy day, when prized packages of savory gems of dim sum await just down the road from Land Park and my cell phone keeps ringing. I realize lots of agents just let calls go through to voice mail, but I answer to save myself the hassle of having to call back. It’s opportunity ringing. However, many of the phone calls I’ve been receiving lately are from Sacramento home buyers who do not understand how real estate works. They think they do, but they do not.
When presented with a situation like that, I have several choices. One of course is to tell them the listing they are calling about is already pending and hang up, but that’s a waste of an excellent opportunity to share. The first homebuying mistake many home buyers make is thinking that because they see a home without a pending sign on top of the sign post that the home is available. About half of the time, by the time the sign post goes into the ground, we’ve already got offers from buyers. Many agents do not bother anymore with pending signs. The second homebuying mistake many home buyers make is presuming that because they see a home in Trulia or Zillow, or any of the other popular online websites that feature homes for sale in Sacramento, that the home is available. Much of the time that home is either not for sale, maybe has never been for sale or is pending / sold.
The third homebuying mistake is calling the listing agent and presuming that listing agent is eager to work with the buyer. A home buyer told me yesterday that the only reason he was calling me, even though he had his own agent, a personal friend he has known for years who, by the way, is retired from real estate and no longer active, is because, wait for it . . .
listing agents have twice the incentive
Sorry, no, listing agents don’t have twice the incentive. The implications are insulting. We are not sleazes. Top Sacramento listing agents do twice the business because they list and sell twice as many homes. Not because they hope to “double-end a deal.” If you could somehow find a listing agent solely focused on double-ending, why would you ever desire to hire an unethical person like that? Taking a home buyer who doesn’t know quite as much as he thinks he does and pairing him with a sleaze bag is a recipe for disaster on both ends. Maybe those kind deserve the muck, but you, YOU, dear home buyer on my cellphone, you deserve much better.
I won’t work directly with a home buyer, and I list and sell so many homes in Sacramento that I rank among the top 10 agents in 7 counties, and guess what? I don’t want to directly represent you. My seller would prefer that you work with a buyer’s agent as well. Here, I have several buyer’s agents I can refer you to who will gladly show you homes and negotiate a purchase offer on your behalf. No cost to you. Many of the top listing agents in Sacramento work this way. The response then is, wait for it . . .
Uh, I wanna do it on my own.
If you do it on your own, you will miss many of the homes for sale that fit your criteria and parameters. This is not your mother’s real estate market from 10 years ago. You can’t drive around a neighborhood and wait for a sign to be pounded into the ground. You can’t wait for a home to show up on a website. You need a direct feed of MLS listings directly from MLS that is instantly delivered to your email inbox the minute that home hits the Sacramento real estate market. And you can’t get that information on your own. You need a dedicated agent working with you to find homes that are not yet for sale as well. So, give me your name and phone number, and I’ll get a top-notch buyer’s agent to find your dream home and close it for you.
Or, you can keep driving in circles and calling listing agents who don’t answer the phone about homes that are sold. Your choice.
Then I slide into my chair at New Canton and begin to point at dim sum dishes I desire from the steaming carts rolling by. My husband orders oolong tea. I dig around on my plate to grab a delectable shrimp fun with my chopsticks, my husband asks for jellyfish and beef shins. As I survey the New Canton dim sum delights laid out before me on the table, I wonder why Sacramento home buyers limit their choices. It’s because they don’t know any better. They think they are doing the right thing but they are not working in the Sacramento real estate business, and they just don’t understand. Times have changed.
If you need an excellent buyer’s agent, call the exceptional Barbara Dow at 916.761.7398 or the amazing Josh Amolsch at 916.224.2756. Both on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. Or, call that guy who is retired, out of touch, likely to screw up. Here, try a sesame ball.
