My office assistant pointed toward a basket filled with business cards and said, "Elizabeth, you better put your card in there." Being the suspicious type, I immediately wondered if some vendor was coming to speak at our office meeting. Maybe that person was planning to give away an engraved coffee cup or some other useless piece of marketing crap while compiling a direct mail list from those cards? No, thanks, I get enough junk mail and spam as it is.
I was assured it was a fun drawing, so I begrudgingly dropped my card in the basket. One of 2,000 business cards that I personally stamped last month with my DRE license number. California's new Department of Real Estate regulations, which went into effect on July 1, require every business card and first-point-of-public-contact material to contain an agent's license number.
I like my license number. I was one of the 600,000-some agents in California to get a license back in the 1970s. Today's license numbers are numbered in the millions, I believe. In fact, you can tell how new an agent is by his or her license number. If it doesn't start with a few zeros, it wasn't all that long ago that they received a real estate license in California.
Since I order boatloads of business cards at a time, I didn't want to throw them away, so I bought one of those custom rubber stamp thingies. It came with sheets of numbers and letters. Using this plastic tweezers, you can insert these characters into the bottom of the stamp and make your specialized message. Stamp, stamp, stamp, done.
Except the ink doesn't quickly dry. It smudges. I cleaned off my dining room table and carefully turned over each card in rows. Stamped, let them dry, collected them and set out more in rows. It was very time consuming. (In retrospect, I probably should have ordered new cards.) I also had to ask my husband to insert the little numbers into the bottom of the stamp because they have to read from right to left or be upside down -- I dunno, it actually made my brain hurt to think about it because my brain doesn't work in that manner. Hey! You try thinking upside down and backwards.
In any case, each business card has a special meaning to me now, especially after personally touching 2,000 of them more than once. I'm not going to give them away to just anybody, you know, or drop them into any old basket shoved in front of my nose.
But I'm glad I did because I won. What did I win? A free 30-day video to run on the front page of the Sacramento Bee real estate section. Now I have to decide which of my Sacramento short sale listings I should feature or whether I should just let people know that I am their Sacramento short sale agent.
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Elizabeth Weintraub is an author, home buying columnist for The New York Times-owned About.com, a Land Park resident, and a Land Park real estate agent who specializes in older, classic homes in Land Park, Curtis Park, Midtown and East Sacramento. Weintraub is also a Sacramento Short Sale agent who lists and successfully sells short sales throughout Sacramento. Call Elizabeth Weintraub at 916.233.6759. Put 35 years of real estate experience to work for you. DRE License # 00697006.
The Short Sale Savior,by Elizabeth Weintraub, available through bookstores everywhere and at Amazon.com.
Sacramento Short Sale Agent, Elizabeth Weintraub, has the answers to your Sacramento short sale questions.
Photo: Warholizer from Flickr
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