Home Buying / Selling

Have you ever stopped to consider the type of listing agreement your agent is asking you to sign?

Odds are you have not. In fact, odds are nobody has explained the various types of listing agreements to you. That's because when most agents hand a seller a listing agreement to sign, it is an exclusive right-to-sell agreement. But there are other kinds of agreements you could sign, which carry varying degrees of complexity.

A seller in Sacramento signed an Exclusive Right-to-Sell listing agreement with his agent. After a few months on the market, a neighbor who wanted to buy the home emerged. Turned out this neighbor had been engaged for years in on-again-off-again negotiations with the seller. But the neighbor was not excluded from the listing agreement.

Arguments could be made that if the neighbor was serious, the neighbor could have made an offer to purchase the home long before it was listed. But the fact remained, the seller owed a commission to the listing agent when the neighbor finally made an offer during the listing agreement term . . . read more about listing agreements.

More Articles by Elizabeth Weintraub:

• 10 Reasons to Hire an Agent
  
• How to Choose a Listing Agent
  
• Full-Service Agents

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

Purchase offers gain strength, in part, from your type of financing, which means your type of mortgage can be an advantage in an offer or a disadvantage.

Whether perceptions are true about certain types of loans doesn't come into play. The problem is often perceptions govern the hierachy of loan types in a purchase offer. Some types of mortgage loans are far more desirable to a seller than others. This means an offer presented with certain types of mortgages has an edge in offer negotiations and, if more than one offer is being considered, the type of mortgage could be the reason why one offer would beat out another.

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• How to Get a Condo Loan
  
• Top 3 Loan Approval Mistakes
  
• Is it OK to Make Multiple Purchase Offers?

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

Sometimes, trying to avoid the worst day to buy a home is simply impossible.

Home buyers don't set out, as an ordinary rule, to buy a home on the worst day. Much of the time it's bad luck that lands them in that predicament. If buyers could pick the best day, it would be when nobody else is closing on a home, and that's not the worst day, by any stretch.

For some reason, and maybe it's just my bad timing, I manage to buy homes in the fall, either when it's snowing or raining cats and dogs. This means when I'm moving, I'm typically soaked to the bone by the elements. As I slosh through rain puddles, you might hear me mutter that this is the worst day to buy a home, but that's just me grumbling.

What would be worse is if I never closed at all . . . read more about Worst Day to Buy a Home.

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• Before Buying Your First Home
  
• The Best Day to Buy a Home
  
• Location, Location, Location

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

It won't go away. Jingle mail is a lingering phenomena in the United States, which is a direct result of the foreclosure crisis.

Some home owners, terrified of pending foreclosure, decide to mail their house keys to the lender and move out. They call it "jingle mail" because the keys make a jingle-bell sound when picking up the key-stuffed envelope. The term has become a euphemism for walking away from your home. I imagine most buyers would tape the keys to a card -- providing they possess a bit of common sense -- so the keys don't really jingle.

Here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself. How do you know that the lender will actually receive the keys or even wants the keys? And why would an owner move out while the home is in foreclosure? Typically, owners can stay in the home, payment free, until the lender evicts them. Eviction happens after the foreclosure is final and could take anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the way foreclosures are handled in your state . . . read more about Jingle Mail.

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• How Foreclosures Work
  
• Three Stages of Foreclosure
  
• Ways to Stop Foreclosure

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

Buying a home in a seller's market is a lot tougher than buying a home in a buyer's market. It might seem to many home buyers across the country that the market has turned on a dime. One day they are reading about falling prices and a depressed real estate market, the next, multiple offers.

What happened and why is not as important if you are a home buyer trying to buy a home. How you will compete in a seller's market with all of those other buyers is a much higher concern. Because if you can't compete, you might not buy a home. Read more about buying a home in a seller's market.

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

It's not true that Fed cuts reduce mortgage rates, regardless of how many times you hear it, says my personal expert, mortgage broker Dan Tharp.

According to Mr. Tharp, when the Federal Reserve Bank announces a big reduction in rates, say, 50 basis points or more, that action can actually cause 30-year-fixed rates to initially go up. That's because mortgage rates aren't tied to T-bills, like many people erroneously believe.

Trying to predict which way mortgage rates will move, though, is a little bit like throwing darts at a moving target board. The lenders I work with often tell me that rates can fluctuate wildly throughout the day. Rates can be up in the morning, drop over lunch and go back up within a course of a few hours.

Agents and lenders advise buyers to lock a loan rate when rates appear attractive. But the thing in the back of every buyer's mind is what if rates go down? That's a big consideration. But what if rates go up? What could cause rates to go up? Many real estate professionals, including some loan reps, do not fully comprehend how mortgage rates are determined and how Fed cuts affect mortgage rates. There's a myth perpetrated within the industry that rates always go down following a Fed cut . . . read more about Fed Cuts Affect on Mortgage Rates.

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• How to Stop Trigger Leads
  
• Places to Get a Mortgage
  
• The Best Time to Lock a Loan

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

When dinosaurs roamed Earth in 1974, I got my start in the real estate industry. I took a job typing title policies for First American Title. The typewriter, believe it or not, did not self-correct.

I was young and attended college part-time. I hadn't quite decided on a career at that point, but I also typed incredibly fast, more than 120 WPM. The reason I could type so fast was because I had two typing classes in high school. Because I had moved around so much my senior year, my transcripts were in pieces. Half of them were lost. The school did not know that I had already taken Typing 101 in ninth grade, so I repeated the class in grade 12.

Taking typing twice meant I was forced to unlearn all the bad habits I had acquired and to put new habits into place. Plus, it was really hard pretending I did not know how to type in class.

As a result, I replaced my bad habits with my new learning curve. My typing speed jumped from 30 to 120 WPM. Of course, I hated typing, and I hated typing as a job. It wasn't long, maybe a few months, before I asked to be promoted. I became a title searcher. From there, it was a hop, skip and a jump into escrow and then real estate brokerage.

I will always remember First American Title and how it gave me my jump start into becoming a real estate broker. There is a rich history at First American; it's been around for more than 100 years . . . read more about First American Title.

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

Spring is in full bloom in Sacramento, which makes May a perfect time to tour homes of East Sacramento and admire the delightful, whimsical spring gardens.

It amazes me that many people think the capital of California is Los Angeles. Even in my adopted state of 35 million residents, some of them, if asked to quickly name the capital, draw a blank. And half of those who do realize that the capital is Sacramento don't know where it is. Just for the record, Sacramento is located approximately 90 minutes north and east from San Francisco.

Sacramento is in the Central Valley, tucked at the confluence of the largest river in the state, the Sacramento River, with its tributary, the American River.

Located just south of the American River and east of Midtown is a delightful community known as East Sacramento. It's within walking distance of downtown. Many of the homes were built in the 1920s and 1930s, and are filled with Old World vintage details such as curved archways, stained and leaded glass windows, and richly appointed woodwork.

The photograph shown here is of the East Sacramento home where Ronald Reagan lived while he was Governor of California. It's hard to believe that the Reagans paid only $1,200 a month to rent it in 1967, especially when it last sold in 2000 for $1,765,000 . . . view a photo gallery of East Sacramento Homes.

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

In a market like we are in today, it's not unusual for home buyers to find themselves in situations where the seller of the home they want receives two offers on the house. Sometimes, more than two offers.

Home buyers find that confusing. Take Susan and David, for example (I have changed their names to maintain their privacy). They are very particular about the home they want to buy: it must be located near homes that show pride of ownership and in a specific area. We found the perfect home for them, but the listing was expired by 2 days. It had been on the market for more than a year.

I tracked down the listing agent and submitted an offer. We were doing the Snoopy dance, feeling certain they would get this home. A few hours later, the listing agent called to say she had received another offer, and now there were two offers on the house.

Is this a conspiracy, the buyers asked? How can this happen? . . . read more about Two Offers on a House.

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

When home values fall, a home owner might start to think about whether it makes sense to walk away from a home.

The scenario goes something like this: It's 2005. Dick and Jane have not saved any money for a down payment, but because market conditions are hot, and all their friends are using 100% financing, they decide to make the leap into home ownership. They find the perfect home to buy for $300,000. The back yard might be a sea of sand, but that's OK, they can get by without landscaping for a while.

Several years ago by. Dick and Jane still haven't put in a lawn. So, they go to the bank to get a home equity loan to help pay for the landscaping. The bank appraises their home and declines the loan because the home is now worth $200,000. Well, that's no surprise, says, Jane, after all, bank-owned signs are popping up like dandelions in their neighbor's yards.

To heck with owning a home, Dick and Jane say. Let's give the this worthless piece of crap to the bank. They figure: What's the worst that can happen? Plenty . . . read more about Walk Away From a Home.

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}