The Worst Ways to Buy a Sacramento Home

Have you ever wondered what are the worst ways to buy a Sacramento home? I swear, there are times when I see flashes of 25 years ago watching buyers in Sacramento hunt for a home to buy. It makes me wonder why they waste the effort. I suppose part of it is due to the low inventory of homes for sale in Sacramento, and those slim pickings can make some buyers feel desperate. The other reason is probably due to the fact that some buyers think they know better than those of us in the industry, which means they probably don’t hold much respect for real estate agents, but some people are like that.

Every so often I will get a phone call from a buyer who starts out by explaining they are not interested in talking to me unless I am the listing agent. That’s code for they hope that by “offering me the opportunity” to work in dual agency (double-end the commission) that I’ll get them a better deal by sacrificing my integrity and ethics. Probably because that’s what they would do, but they don’t realize that I am not them.

Money is not my motivator.

They think that agents will do whatever is necessary to put a deal together because we’re all starving to death or maybe we’re just scumbags, I’m not sure. I refer these callers to my team members to show. But I don’t tell my sellers what I suspect these guys are up to unless I receive an offer, no sense in upsetting them. It does put me on notice, though. And that’s not a very good way to look for a home to buy in Sacramento.

Although maybe the #1 worst way to look for a home to buy is to drive around town calling on For Sale signs. I get a lot of those, and then buyers are ticked off when they find out the home is pending and demand to know why there are no pending signs on the For Sale sign. They don’t realize that all listings are available online these days. Hello, 2014. If they don’t look at an online feed from MLS, they’ll never know whether a listing is pending or not. About half the time the home is pending before the poor sign post company can even pound a post into the ground.

If you’re a buyer in Sacramento trying to buy a home, your best bet is to ask a buyer’s agent to work with you. You’ll get the best representation, the most attention and direct service, and you won’t be driving around calling listing agents to find out the home is already sold. ‘Course, in retrospect, the agents would have to answer their phone.