Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Last night I went to meet one of my company’s agents, Jamie, to help her with an offer she was working on for a buyer at a new home subdivision, Pavilions Condos.

It was an unusual Friday evening of work.  I happened to be in Sacramento enjoying a few hours off, so it was easy to go meet Jamie at this subdivision, which is in one of the most desirable parts of Sacramento’s beautiful Arden / Arcade district (95825).

I got to try out the new Tomtom One to get there.  The Tomtom (in case your TV is off and you’ve missed their commercials), is a GPS navigation system.  I’ll be reviewing it on the Sacramento Map Project blog in a few days.  So I punched in the address to where I was going, without recourse to a map, or for that matter, really knowing where I was starting out.

Nice.

So there we were, Jamie and me, and Jamie’s very congenial and likable new clients, along with the also congenial Luke Greene, the broker representing the builder.  I was going to look at the comparable sales for our clients, and wasn’t really finding any good ones (as suspected), since this was a new home subdivision and many of the homes were being sold outside the MLS.  Luke suggested that Kristin would be the one who really knew more about the comps, and went to get Kristin. 

Enter Kristin, a comely brunette, if she’ll pardon the expression (which I hope she will, since she’s an attorney and if she doesn’t pardon it I’m in a heap of litigation).  So Kristin and I talk about what comps she has and when we can get more information about them from the title company and so forth, which of course isn’t going to be last night because title companies keep bankers’ hours.

So I end up giving Kristin my business card so she’ll have my email to send me more information, so I can pass it on to our clients and so on, and imagine my surprise when Kristin says:

“John Lockwood — do you write a real estate blog?  I read that all the time and it’s in my favorites.”

WHAT?

Someone reads this thing?

I’m told by Luke and Jamie, who had a better view of my face, that at this point my expression got kind of bug-eyed, and my face turned red.

Imagine my surprise:  I have a fan.

So for the rest of the night there I was kind of on cloud nine, in my I-didn’t-know-I-was-meeting-clients khaki shorts, because not only do I get to help Jamie write an offer for some delightful clients, which would have been wonderful enough all by itself, and not only did I find the place pretty automatically with the help of satellites in outer space, but now, lo and behold, I have a fan.

Heck:  how well could the rest of the evening go?  Well, we got through the offer process quite well, making sure we put in a contingency period for the comps and the rest of the buyers’ inspections, and while Luke went to copy the paperwork, we all got to meet Brian and Diana Moore, who assist the new owners at the Pavilions.  Brian’s the customer service manager, and Diana is marketing director and runs the Design Center, which is where you go to pick out your add-ons and accessories for your great new condo.  It turns out we got there on party-for-the-residents night (thank you, Diana), so there was cheese and bread and shrimp-on-a-stick, and everyone couldn’t have been nicer and more congenial if you’d picked them out of a book full of nice and congenial people.

Eventually Luke came back with the paperwork, so we bade the clients good-bye so they could get on their way back to the bay area, and eventually Jamie left to pick up poor Bridget, who’s outside a gym in Rancho Cordova freezing (this is a bit of a long story, isn’t it?), so there I am eating cheese and bread and shrimp-on-a-stick with Brian and Diana and Kristin and Luke, and eventually it dawns on me that if I don’t leave, these congenial people, including Kristin (who I’ve now been calling “my fan” for the last hour or so) are going to have to be there all night.

I figured it out, though.

So I guess what I learned in addition to the fact that I have a fan is that if you want a gorgeous luxury condo in a beautiful part of Arden Arcade where you can walk to Borders and a host of upscale stores, and you want to make sure the agent you’re working with and the folks who’ll take care of you when you spend your builder incentives (oh yes, we love builder incentives) are all nice and congenial:  I know where to recommend.  I hope you’ll let me take you, but either way, I hope you go.