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The Comparison Between Sacramento Real Estate and Pastries
Sacramento real estate is bit like pastries.
Selling Sacramento real estate is a little bit like selling pastries. Everybody always wants the cherry beignet or creme brûlée, and they walk right on by the original glazed creme doughnuts or cinnamon rolls. Sell out of the chocolate-sprinkled pastries, and people go wild and keep calling, wanting to know when you’ll get more chocolate sprinkles. Or, maybe it bothers me more than I let on that Doughbot has closed its doors over on 10th Street and W.
The thing is once a home goes into escrow, it seems everybody wants it even if for months nobody wanted it before. Bam, pending sale and buyer’s agents start calling to see if the seller won’t at least allow one more showing, puhlease. They want to know how the sale is moving. If we don’t have a release of contingencies on file, we don’t really know for certain how the sale is moving.
The truth is I can’t predict whether a buyer will close escrow on a Sacramento real estate transaction. I can call the loan officer to ask if the buyers have actually filled out a loan application and submitted tax returns, and that’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t assure anybody that the buyer will close. Buyers have a way of freaking out lately, maybe more so than usual. Sacramento real estate has been a bit squirrelly over the summer.
It’s almost like I want to ask the buyer’s agent, are you certain your buyer wants to buy a home in Sacramento? Because a signed purchase offer for that piece of Sacramento real estate is NOT that assurance. It should be, but it’s not. Further, I would like to shelter my seller from any disappointment these types of situations can generate. But we can’t protect them from buyers who will change their minds.
Their agents aren’t likely to ask if they are certain. Their agents are more likely to say sign here and here,?and thanks for the earnest money check. Not because they’re ruthless or whatever, it’s because they often wrongly assume that because a buyer signs a purchase offer that the buyer really wants to buy the house. So, I don’t know how solid an offer is and there is no way I can accurately or honestly tell a buyer’s agent if it’s worth pursuing a pending sale.
If the buyer doesn’t want the chocolate eclair but prefers the creme brûlée, then by all means, put a backup offer on the creme brûlée but that chocolate eclair, I tell you, is mighty tasty. I encourage you to call Elizabeth Weintraub for all of your Sacramento real estate needs.
If You Aren’t Ready to Buy a Home in Sacramento
Don’t be afraid to tell a real estate agent why you are calling.
When a person calls a Sacramento real estate agent about buying a home, there are basically two things that agent wants to hear. Either the person is ready to buy a home in Sacramento or the person is not ready to buy a home. Either one is OK. We are not answering a phone solely to make a sale and push a buyer into making a decision that perhaps a buyer is not yet ready to make. But it’s helpful for us to know what the buyer hopes to accomplish by talking with us.
We are not standing behind a desk at an office, monitoring a candy dish for those who walk in. Most of the time, when a buyer calls a real estate agent, we are busy selling real estate. We are with a client showing homes, writing purchase contracts, shooting photographs, driving out the W X Freeway on our way to a listing appointment. We could also be walking the dog, comparing cold cuts at Taylor’s Market or picking up our car from Midtown Autoworks after an oil change.
We don’t work retail. We work from our cellphones.
I’m one of those agents who tries to answer her phone, which seems to blow away many callers. I have to admit that, yes, they have reached a real live person, which astonishes them. If a buyer wants to buy a home in Sacramento, I am ready to help. But if it’s so surprising that an agent would answer her phone, when buyers do reach voice mail and leave a message, why don’t these same buyers answer their phones or return the calls agents leave for them?
Probably because they are not yet ready to buy. Many are “just looking.” Just looking seems to be a phrase for describing curiosity. Technology makes it easy to contact a Sacramento real estate agent. If a buyer is simply curious about a sales price or some other aspect of a home she has just driven by, it’s OK to say so when calling. Just say: I am not ready to buy a home in Sacramento.
She can also search the web from her Smartphone and get the answer just like she finds out which is the top downloaded song from iTunes and the present weight of Kardashian’s beehive butt.
Because so many callers forget or are afraid to mention that they are not really buyers, this becomes the reason many agents don’t answer their cellphones and send all unknown calls to voicemail. But I can’t help myself, when my phone rings, I tend to answer it.
