top producer in sacramento
Why October is a Good Month for the Sacramento Housing Market
At first I had intended to show you a graph of the Sacramento housing market but the real information to be gleaned is not contained in the graph of the housing market in Sacramento, it’s actually in the numbers. Simply put, we do not have enough inventory, not enough homes for sale in Sacramento to satisfy demand. I noticed this in my own real estate business because all of my listings are selling. At any given time, I generally carry a couple dozen listings of one type or another, and at one point in 2011 my inventory was up to 75 listings or so. I’m selling them all now within about 30 days.
I checked the stats on other top producers, and their inventory is reduced, too. For the last 12 months in Sacramento, Elizabeth Weintraub ranks as the #7 agent in the area. If you’ve ever thought about putting your home on the market in Sacramento, now is the time to do it. Are you worried that you might not find another home to buy? No problem, you can sell your home contingent on finding another home, and most buyers will wait for you. This is the market to move up in. We’ve got a big group of entry-level home buyers itching to get into a home.
Interest rates are still low and not expected to rise until maybe December. If you wait to buy when everybody else under the sun is buying, you’ll have too much competition for the home you want to buy. Warren Buffet is the guy credited with saying that you should buy when nobody else is buying and sell when nobody else is selling. Our Sacramento housing market is a perfect example of that wisdom.
Look at the statistics in the UPPER RIGHT. Sales have fallen 75% the first week of this month as compared to the first week of last month. Our pending sales are down for the same time period by 35%. This is an excellent time to sell your home in Sacramento. You have the best of all worlds. The median sales price has remained pretty much steady at $290,000 for the past 4 or 5 months. That hasn’t happened in years. I can’t remember the last time that happened. I also can’t remember the last time my inventory of listings dropped below 10 homes for sale.
We’re not gonna see a big uptick in pricing next spring. If you want to sell a home, right now you should be on the market. We have fewer than 2 months of inventory.
Call your top producer Sacramento Realtor today, Elizabeth Weintraub, at 916.233.6759.
Sacramento housing market statistics, Trendgraphix.
The Unique Difference an Experienced Sacramento Listing Agent Makes
From many home sellers’ point of view, they really don’t know what a Sacramento listing agent does to sell a home because all they see is the peripheral stuff. When the home first goes on the market, they see the for sale sign in the yard, maybe open house activity on Sunday, strange business cards showing up on the kitchen counter, ripe for drawing mustaches on. After an offer is accepted, there is an escrow, disclosure paperwork, an appraiser, and some guy who doesn’t wear booties and tracks mud everywhere traipsing through tearing the house apart. Maybe a pest inspector who might cause you to run screaming into the yard with a baseball bat: hey, moron, stop poking holes in my house!
The sellers might even believe they are doing all of the work because they have to pack up the house and move. Their Sacramento listing agent is not in the dining room helping them to roll crystal stemware in bubble wrap. They don’t see what is really happening, but if their transaction closes smoothly, it’s most likely due to the efforts of their listing agent.
My clients generally know exactly what I do as their listing agent because I tell them as we go along. I try to keep them informed of my activities. There are some Sacramento listing agents, for example, who won’t tell a seller that an offer is about arrive for fear that the seller will build expectations and be disappointed if the buyer later changes her mind. I try to put myself in the sellers’ shoes, and I would want to know this information. It doesn’t mean I email a seller with the good news that an offer is in the works, but I let them know it’s a possibility and why it might not happen.
My sellers know I’m on their side and say it the way it is. Which is why I actually told a seller yesterday that I am sorry to see their home sell. OK, I was half kidding. They laughed because they understood. I’ve been working on it for a long time and have become intimately familiar with the property, am used to checking on the stats daily in my MLS reports, drumming up feedback from buyer’s agents’ showings, taking photos out of order to tweak and rearranging the order, lining up open houses, moving up the ranking on other websites by publishing more data, blogging about the home and its features, checking the comparable sales and new listings every week and working other angles to sell the home, relentlessly searching for untapped strategies.
Now the home has left my active inventory and moved into pending status. I’ve already anticipated all the ways things can go wrong in underwriting, the possible challenges of inspections and handled them in advance. Smoothed out almost every possible wrinkle because that’s what 40 years of real estate experience from this Sacramento listing agent buys my clients. I take the hell out of the transaction for them. Of course, they don’t realize this when they choose me to be their Sacramento listing agent, and they might never know what hell could happen because it generally doesn’t.
My continual goal is to find a way to convey this to a seller who is on the fence about whom to choose as a Sacramento listing agent. I am fiercely dedicated 100% to my clients. It shows in the work I do and the delighted reviews I receive. There is a difference among Realtors.