The Sacramento Real Estate Market in August 2015

There are no glasses on the table because this family finished their Jell-o shots in the kitchen.

The Sacramento real estate market in August tends to slow down a little bit in all of this end-of-summer heat and stays fairly quiet until the weekend after Labor Day. Part of the reason is it’s fairly hectic getting kids back in school in August, which seems almost sacrilegious to old geezer, watching your summer cut so short like that. The other is families tend to travel over Labor Day or attend family celebrations, and they’re generally not out looking at homes to buy.

Not even on their computers or phones, unless they’re a bored 19-year-old at a family reunion, oh, wait, that was me. And I didn’t have any stinkin’ computer or cellphone to waste time on. No sirree. I was forced to come up with other creative ideas, like how many bottles of beer could we stuff in the trunk of my ’65 Mustang before anybody noticed. Yeah, people might talk about Sacramento real estate in August while chomping on a brat and dribbling mustard on a shirt that won’t wash out the stain, but they are not looking at real estate and nobody, really, is holding any open houses.

The buyers who are out now looking at homes, though, seem to be driving their agents crazy. I say this because of the types of calls I’ve been receiving from buyer’s agents on my listings. The fact that they are calling this Sacramento Realtor generally means trouble. Because if the agent’s buyer likes the home and wants to make an offer, usually agents are writing the purchase offer and not calling the listing agent. They would call to say they are sending the offer or they have sent the offer but not just to chat.

Calling just to chat tends to mean one of three things. Either the agent doesn’t know how to write the purchase offer (which is not all that uncommon in this industry), or the buyer’s agent wants an edge in a multiple-offer situation (which is not happening on a large scale right now), or the buyer wants to lowball. If the buyer wants to offer considerably less, the buyer’s agent sometimes wants to discuss this and get a feeling of whether the offer will be rejected or if the listing agent will forever hold the act against them. There are listing agents who blame the buyer’s agent for sending goofy offers but I am not one of those.

I received a call from an agent yesterday while I was driving back to Sacramento from a weekend in Anderson, California. She was incredibly difficult to understand, but I made out the key words. She called on a home in Elk Grove, and when I figured out the address, I asked if she was calling because the buyer wants to know if he can offer $10,000 less than list price due to “all the work” the home needs, even though those inspection reports are attached to MLS and the home is already priced 50,000 under the comparable sales, because also we don’t have eyeballs and we have no idea how much work the home needs. The agent laughed hysterically. That was my answer.

My passenger asked how I could understand what the agent was saying during our conversation, because my phone was on speaker in the car, and it was garbled going down I-5 in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t make out half of what the agent said, but I did understand. It’s the time of year. Just wait until after Labor Day weekend. Normal lull to the Sacramento real estate market in August.