In Rugged California Housing Market, Tactics Adjust

In a rugged home sales market, a number of spins are arising as agents and sellers try to adjust to keep the business of sales going.

At least one Stockton, Calif., homeowner is turning to sale by owner in an attempt to get the price low enough to attract a buyer.

Another is offering to finance any buyer’s California mortgage.

Realty agents also are looking for better business possibilities.

A new Stockton agency is looking for customers by becoming brokers in short sales - sales in which lenders agree to take less than is owed on a house, because they decide it actually will be less costly and time-consuming than going through the motions of foreclosure.

And one longtime agent decided to specialize in foreclosures, which account for an increasing share of the California home loan action these days.

Donna Kniess and her friend have their three-bedroom, two-bath Clarks Fork Circle home in Spanos Park West for sale at $389,000 - and for-sale-by-owner fliers specifically note to agents:

“I am not interested in having my home listed with an agent. This allows me to offer a better price to the buyer.”

Thus far, the only response has been a deluge of printed information or phone calls from agents who want to list the house, Kniess said.

Kniess and her friend own another home in Merced and aren’t financially pressed to sell the Stockton house, she said.

“It’s a shot,” she said. “You never know.”

Kniess said she thinks that even in this slow market, there are buyers out there. A house across the street recently sold. And her house, initially listed eight months ago at $425,000 and then lowered to $414,000, did garner two offers - one at $410,000 for the house and all furnishings.

Kniess said she wasn’t offended by that offer and should have accepted it in retrospect. She and her friend also turned down another offer, sans furniture, at $395,000.

They turned down both offers at the urging of their real estate agent, who urged counteroffers to get sales price up but instead ended up offending the would-be buyers enough that they went away.

Part of the blame for the sales downturn goes to the growing credit crunch from the backlash from the collapse of questionable loans - especially bad credit home loans - made when the market was sizzling.

Just down the street from Kniess’ house is a four-bedroom, two-bath home with prominent signage touting that the seller - “a local California mortgage loan fund” - will carry any buyer’s loan at an annual interest rate of 6.5 percent with low or no down payment required.

This is given that the buyer has a credit score of 700 plus.

Continue reading in the Stockton Record …