How Many Listings Should a Sacramento Realtor Carry?

The number of listings might have little bearing on a Sacramento Realtor’s ability to service.

A question that really has no bearing on reality but I get asked it often enough all the same is: Elizabeth, how many listings do you have? For starters, I suspect people want to use the answer as a quantifier. If you have one or two listings, you look like a loser in some people’s eyes. If you have 200 listings, you could look like a person who doesn’t have time to brush her teeth much less pay attention to her clients, and that assumption could be way off base, too.

What makes a difference, though, is in what position are those Sacramento listings? By that I mean are they pending, pending short lender approval (which is different than a pending sale), active contingent, pending bring back-up, active release clause, an active short sale or simply an active listing? I generally carry about 25 listings at any given time, but the active listings, the homes that take up most of my time, might only range from 3 to 5. I typically sell my active listings pretty quickly because I do things right. The short sale listings require a lot more time on the market because today’s buyers tend to pass those by.

A few years back, like 2010 or 2011, I carried on average about 75 listings in various states of status. Talk about stress. I am conscientious, though. When I worked on that amount of inventory, I was often out of bed by 4 or 5 AM and hard at work. I do what it takes, and that’s what it took to keep my sanity and my sellers happy with my performance. Now, that my inventory has fallen by about two-thirds as the number of homes for sale overall in the Sacramento Valley have slipped, things are fairly normal and quiet for me. It’s almost like being on vacation.

I realize for another Sacramento Realtor, 25 listings might seem like a horrendous number, but for me, it’s just business as usual. I can sleep in until 7 AM now. That’s a luxury. There is no question what my focus is for the day. I don’t spend much time on looking for business because business comes to me. I’m very fortunate that way. Many other real estate agents spend at least half of their time prospecting for clients, but I don’t. Some choose to work only part-time. I work full-time. My time is focused 100% on my clients and my listings.

Keeping track of 25 files and maneuvering moving targets is easy for an organized person to do. Besides, many decades ago, like in the 1970s, I was a certified escrow officer, and I used to work on a caseload of 60 to 80 files at a time. If you think handling a real estate file as an agent is time consuming, try being an escrow officer. Escrow is where I developed my organizational skills, and that ability has served me well as a top producer Sacramento Realtor. I try to treat each of my clients as though they are my ONLY client, because if I don’t, that’s exactly what would happen.

I am never too busy for a client. Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. I answer my cell.