Elizabeth Weintraub • Sacramento Short Sale Agent • Land Park

Let me say something in defense of the "good old days." It used to be that you could drive to a store, buy a big ticket item, drive around to the loading dock, stick that item into your trunk and drive home with the trunk open. Those days are gone.

Especially in a city like Sacramento. Many retail stores stock only display merchandise and you can't actually take something home. I suppose that's a practice to keep overhead down, expenses to a minimum. If you want to buy a chair, for example, you pretty much need to be living in San Francisco and not Sacramento.

The last time I bought a piece of furniture from a retail store, they sold it to me out of a catalog because they didn't have on display or in inventory an item I wanted. I got in my car and drove over there for that? I could have bought the same thing online and had it shipped for less.

The personal touch seems to be missing from retail transactions. It's even more prevalent in real estate. Buyers today can sign a purchase offer online and transmit electronic funds without having to shake hands with a buyer's agent. Sellers can accept an offer without ever leaving the casino, too, or wherever they hang out. You can't look the guy in the eye anymore.

With the Equator system becoming more readily accessible among short sale banks, I no longer receive emails from negotiators. All communication is handled through the clunky Equator system. It doesn't work so well with Firefox, either. For example, I can't pick and choose to whom I send a message. If I hold down the control key while I select names, it will select only in blocks. So, what the hey, I send to everybody in a row.

I received so many offers on my Sacramento short sales yesterday I lost count. Seriously. Is it a full moon? The offers arrived in waves. With the exception of one or two agents, none of those agents called or emailed in advance. They didn't ask how to submit the offer, whether the home was available or how many offers I had.

Many were signed digitally and most were incomplete or unacceptable. I'm not saying those two go together exclusively hand-in-hand but it could be. I give agents a choice. They can either fix the pages with mistakes and resend them, or we can send them a counter offer. Of course, I point out that if the seller needs to sign a counter offer, the seller might consider changing the sales price. Agents tend to send the revisions.

One agent complained. The agent could not believe I was being "so picky about a short sale." Excuse me? A short sale is not a second-class transaction. I am a Sacramento short sale agent, and closing short sales is what I do. That's my job. I'm not that anal that I make buyer's agents dot every I and cross every T. Sometimes, I let things slide if the intent is there. I pick my battles, and I know on which hill I will be prepared to die.

Agents should at least take a little extra care and time to prepare an offer a seller can accept. They owe that to their buyer. You know, send a preapproval letter that meets or exceeds the offered sales price. Don't send an offer for $200,000 and a preapproval letter for $150,000. Make sure the earnest money deposit is dated sometime in this century. If you don't know which fees a short sale bank will authorize, call and ask.

And please send the offer to the agent designated in MLS. My listings all say to email the offer to me. They spell out my email address so the agent doesn't have to look it up. But at least 50% of the offers for my sellers are sent elsewhere. This is a sorry state of affairs.

I know why REO agents don't call back. The top REO producers handle three times to four times the volume I do, and my workload is insane enough as it is. But I still care about the personal touch. I still answer my phone. And I am sentimental about the good old days. That will never change.

Or a way to get purchase offers on any listing, really. Want to know how? All an agent has to do is tell everybody she knows that she is going out of town for the weekend. That will do the trick. Of course, what would also do the trick is to not go out of town at all, and maybe just tell people that. Because I swear, the moment I left town and went to Seattle, I received no less than 7 offers on 7 listings.

Thank goodness I have my BlackBerry, including wireless Internet for my laptop in my room. It's a bit of a hassle, but I have been able to get those offers accepted and returned to the buyer's agents. All except for two because those sellers seem to have suddenly acquired other objectives in my brief absence.

But I can say this, it's about 55 in Seattle right now, and it's supposed to climb to 105 in Sacramento today.

When reviewing real estate transactions, I often search for common denominators because they tell the story about why people do the things that they do, and they give me a hint of trends. Maybe it's just my analytical or curious nature that makes me probe. For example, I never write a purchase contract without searching for information first and have a hard time understanding why real estate agents would not, but most don't.

Buying a home is not like buying a loaf of bread. One doesn't look at the price tag and say, "Holy crap, I can remember when bread was 25 cents; four bucks is highway robbery, but here you go." When I write offers, I look at the DOM, I pull up the agent's history -- a starving agent speaks volumes to seller motivation -- I Google the sellers and check the mortgage balance, property history, surrounding comparable sales, among a dozen other factors.

That's because I believe information is a powerful tool to use in offer negotiation. I want to know who all the players are and how they got into the game. It gives my buyers an edge. Because I work with home buyers and sellers, I rely on my experience, examining each situation from all angles and standing in another's shoes.

When I represent the seller, for example, it pains me to have to call an agent and say, "I'm sorry you wasted all that time writing an offer and faxing it to me without calling me first." Nobody should ever write an offer without talking to the listing agent, but especially not when the listing clearly states offers have already been received. You don't offer less than list price, and then ask for the seller to pay your closing costs in a multiple offer situation. That's the definition of insanity.

I received five offers on a Sacramento listing last week. The first four were over list price, with the highest and best coming in at 15% over list price with a buyer who is putting down 20% in cash. The fifth offer was FHA, 3% less than list, asked for 3% closing costs and was written by a mortgage broker-slash-agent. Why would a buyer ask her mortgage broker to represent her? Isn't that sort of like asking your housekeeper to clean your teeth?

As agents, we can talk to sellers about pricing the house right until we are blue in the face, but ultimately, the price a seller selects is the seller's decision to make, not ours. There are a ton of reasons why agents take overpriced listings, but the bottom line is the price rests with the seller, and in the end, we do our best to try to get that seller his or her price.

Every Monday I send out property updates to sellers. Those reports include the number of hits obtained through a variety of web sites; I comment on the market and include year-to-date clicks on the virtual tour, among other data. I believe sellers should be informed, even if they don't care, and some do not. However, none of that changes the fact that listing agents do not control how much a buyer offers on a home.

I had been working on selling a home for the past 14 months. We received an offer 10 months ago for, let's say, $350,000. I was ecstatic. The seller did not share my enthusiasm and against all logic rejected the offer.  Most agents would have canceled the listing at that point, but I felt a duty to march forward.

Of course, I had pointed out to the seller that often the first offer is the best offer, but he refused to listen to reason. That home eventually sold almost a year later at, let's say, $280,000, and the seller was forced to bring in cash to bridge the gap between the sales price and the loans. A short sale would have been too painful for the seller. But this was painful. It was painful for the seller, and it was painful for me watch the seller beat his head into the ground.

In fact, in our present marketplace, I'm not seeing any subsequent offers at more than the first offer price. The last time I received a second offer for more than the first offer was in 2003. In declining markets, some sellers are lucky to receive an offer at all. All offers should be seriously considered and negotiated because there might not be a second offer, even for less money.

So, what's been your experience? Is the first offer always the best?

Photo: Big Stock Photo