The Housechick Blog

There are some people who absolutely do not want to live in an area with an HOA - a Homeowner’s Association.  While the intended effect of an HOA is to preserve property values, some folks feel restricted by the rules and regulations that go along with an HOA.

In the Tucson MLS, there’s a searchable field where I can find homes without a listed HOA fee.  While information there is deemed reliable but not guaranteed, you should always investigate to find out if no HOA really exists.

Also, many properties have deed restrictions.  Deed restrictions can limit the usage of a property, but are not a formal HOA.  When the property was originally built, or a subdivision originally created, the developer can record restrictions against the deed: hence the name, deed restrictions.

If you really want to know what you can or can’t do with a property, you’ve got to examine the deed and any restrictions that may be recorded against the property.  A common example of deed restrictions without an HOA would be something like not parking a boat in the front yard.

It’s a common misconception, that having no stated HOA means you can do anything you want with a property.  It just ain’t so.  You’ve got to check for deed restrictions.

The SAHBA Parade of Homes is coming!  It’s been 20 years since SAHBA has had a parade of homes. 

I’m told one home has a shower with a built in tanning system.  Can you imagine?  I’m not sure if that’s cool or just utterly ridiculous.  Or both.

Running February 2nd through the 17th, there are 7 homes in the parade.  Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, and kids 12 and under are free.  Hours are 10am-5pm.  I’m heading out there next Thursday to tour the homes with a friend.

The subdivision for the parade is Sonoran Preserve on the Bajada, which is over near Dove Mountain, in Marana, Arizona.  If you drive to Dove Mountain, you’ll see signs for parking, and then participants will be shuttled to the appropriate street.

The whole point of the parade is to showcase new home design, construction, and energy saving features from seven of SAHBA’s Certified Custom Builders Council.  Basically, to participate as a Certified Custom Builder, the contractors have to comply with building standards, with the SAHBA Code of Ethics, have at least 3 years of continuous building experience in the area, and can not have any unanswered or unresolved complaints either with SAHBA or the Registrar of Contractors.  These builders are also reviewed on a regular basis by the SAHBA Certification Review Committee.

Builders this year: Bauer Homes, Becklin Construction, Canatsey Building and Development, Casas Bonitas Development, JD Raney Construction, Lathrem Homebuilers, and Washburn Custom Builders.

SAHBA, by the way, is the Southern Arizona Home Builders Assocation, who is an advocate for planning and implementing public policies that promote housing opportunity and choice.  They also do the big home show every year - watch for it this April.

So the water heater went out at my rental property on Wednesday night.  It’s only a 3 year old unit.  As luck would have it, there’s some kind of class action suit against the manufacturers of that particular unit for installing defective thermocouples.  If your serial number begins with ‘FG’ you call this number and they send you out a new manifold assembly.

Yeah, a manifold assembly.  As in, what the heck is a manifold assembly?  I’ll take one, please, thank you.  And can you send that overnight delivery?

So we went over there to swap out the manifold assembly yesterday night.  Picking out tools to take over there was fun.  Do you think we need a screwdriver?  How many variety of wrenches should we take?  Certainly we won’t need a hammer, will we? 

Just ignore that tiny voice at the back of your head saying I probably shouldn’t be tampering with appliances that combine gas and flame on a regular basis.  It had to be done - my plumber flaked and I can’t leave my tenants without hot water for much longer.

Two hours later, we managed to swap out the old parts for the new.  Since I’m the one with the mad water heater lighting skills, I got to lay on the cold concrete and light the pilot.  And it flamed right up!  And then I release the red button and poof.  Flame go out. 

Hold button and clicky-clicky - woo-hoo, flame!

Release button: flame go out.

Repeat for 15 minutes. 

Spend 20 minutes readjusting all connections.

Spend an additional 10 minutes in clicky-flame-release-poof cycle.  Give up for the night.  Apologize profusely to tenants.

Today I’m advised that maybe the thermocouple isn’t *in* the pilot flame, maybe we can just push it into the flame.  Ah yes.  The thermocouple.  As in, which part is the thermocouple again?

At least we know which tools to take over this time.

So you just negotiated for some repairs on the house you are buying, and we managed to get the Seller to agree to recoat the roof.  You can’t wait to move into your new home in 2 weeks.

But hold on - that roofer?  He’s booked until next month. 

So now what?  No one wants to wait a month to close escrow on this thing, and even if you know what an escrow hold-back account is, your lender probably won’t allow it.

Luckily, we can solve this one. 

Since the Seller has agreed to pay for the roof, the invoice from the roofing company should be placed into escrow, and escrow will cut a check directly to the roofing company at closing.  And then you can hold on to that check for the roofer until they’ve completed the job.  Voila!

Couple warnings:

• One - don’t lose the check for the repair company.
• Two - the payment to the repair person should be recorded on the settlement statement.  No one is passing money around under the table.
• Three - this may not be advisable for major repairs.  You only get the amount of money specified on the invoice.  If the repair person finds more damage, or has to do extra work to complete the job, that can raise the price of the repairs.  You may have a huge fight on your hands to get any overage incurred paid by the Seller.

Okay.  I went back through and pulled new numbers because of the large number of sales that weren’t reported on time.  Good news is that average and median sales prices were largely unaffected when you break those numbers down by area.  The changes I found were all pretty insignificant in those metrics.  The biggest impact was on the months of inventory figures (also called absorption rate).  I’m not saying any miracles occurred in the market, but in some cases, the figure changed from 13 months of inventory to 10.  Still not good by any definition, but at least it is more accurate.

So let’s get on with this show.

Unit sales comes in at 743 units for December 2007 which is slightly fewer than in November.  Seasonally and historically, those two months are usually either very similar, or December is a tad higher than November.  We’ll be keeping a close eye on this figure in the coming months.

Average sales price citywide is at $272,228, as calculated last night.  Remember that I don’t consider outlying areas or manufactured/mobile homes in average and median calculations, as those aren’t areas and types that are in the market I service.  That’s not quite the lowest point this year, but close, coming off a high of $307k in June 2007.

The median weighs in at $224,900.  The median has been bouncing in this range for quite some time.

Citywide, we’re at 11.7 months of inventory.  There are individual areas of Tucson doing better and worse - the East seems to be doing the best here, at 8.8 months of inventory. 

Active listings were down a bit from November, coming in at 8708 units.  This is typical - fewer people want to list their home over the holidays.

As always, you can look at the performance of the individual areas of town by clicking on Tucson Market Stats at the top of the page, and then on any of the 9 major areas of town, which will appear underneath that Tucson Market Stats link once you click on it.

I’ve been tagged not once, but twice.  Usually, that’s a bad thing involving spray paint, but not so in this case.  It’s just the latest meme, making rounds online.  I’m fairly sure no one really cares to know this much about me, so we’ll follow this quickly with something more on topic.  Avert your eyes if you’re not interested.

This one is 7 things about me.  It took me a while to find 7 things about me that might be considered, you know, interesting.  But let’s begin.

1. If you haven’t read the ‘about me’ page, then you don’t know I’m a classically trained ballerina, although I didn’t have the facility to go pro.  In fact, most of my friends from ballet have or had professional careers with highly respected companies.  Training of that caliber means you spend between 20-30 hours a week, 6 days a week, at the studio during your teenage years. Which may have been a factor in #2.

2. I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol before my 21st birthday.  Honest.  Who had time for such trouble?

3. Another thing that staring into the ballet studio mirrors for 20-some years has taught me is that I’ve got one leg that’s longer than the other.  The femur on my left side is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 inch longer than the other.  If you told me to walk in a straight line and I did it with my eyes closed, I’d just walk in a big circle.  I’m a human compass. 

4. One of my biggest pet peeves is when my name is misspelled.  There’s two E’s in both names, people: kEllEy koEhlEr.  Ironically, my middle name is pronounced ‘lee’ but is spelled “Leigh.”

5. I’ve been known to tear down walls inside my house while hubby is at work and without prior warning.  Some folks call that ‘initiative’ or ’starting the remodeling project.’  Turns out, others just call it destroying the house.  Who knew? 

6. I don’t have my ears pierced.  In fact, I don’t wear any kind of jewelry, except occasionally my wedding ring.  I don’t understand the point of jewelry.  It makes no sense to me, I can’t imagine wanting all kinds of extra stuff hanging off me.

7. I’ve caught air in my car with a client riding shotgun going over a railroad track at night.  Honestly, he should’ve been wearing his seat belt regardless, but he snapped it on pretty quick once he landed in his seat again.  In my defense, it was a pitch black night, and there was no warning of the huge drop-off in the road on the opposite - and again, not visible at night - side of the railroad tracks.  On the other hand - the Infiniti FX?  Good shocks.

So there you go.  And now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

Except for this:

I’ve trained all my in-person friends to not send me chain email, little friend quizzes, or other survey-type things, because I do not, as a rule, answer any of that, or forward it on.  There is one friend who occasionally defies my exhaustive training, and sends me those things, but I like her anyway.  Because of that, I tag only one person.  Bobbi? 

There is an incredible moon out tonight.  It’s a late winter night and there is such a crisp clean cold in the air, you want to inhale deeply and let it touch your face and lungs.  The moon was huge and low and was just peeking through a hole in the black clouds, saying his first hello before heading across the night sky.

Stats are out for the Tucson Real Estate Market for December 2007 from the Tucson Association of Realtors MLS. 

But first:

Agents reporting sales later than allowed is this month’s complaint.  There’s a new threat on MLS of up to a $15,000 fine for those turning in status changes more than 48 hours late.  We’ll see if that has any effect or not.

Seeing that warning made me go back and look at the closed sales figures pulled today from MLS compared to what was reported.  In some cases, I found nearly 100 more sales, and in a month where there were only 700 sales or so, that’s pretty significant.  I’ve updated the citywide files, and will go back through each area and recalculate.  It may take a day or two, and I’ll give you a heads-up when I’m done.  That many more sales can impact average sales prices, months of inventory, medians, all kinds of data that I track and report here.  I think the new policy will be to calculate the past two months worth of information every time, so that we stay as accurate as possible.  Given that, consider this info for December to be “preliminary.”  (sigh.)

We’ll put the MLS reported figures in parenthesis, and the figures calculated with today’s data in bold.  You see why these reports irk me?  I like exactness.

• Average Sales Price Single Family Home: ($289,254) $284,839
• Median Sales Price Single Family Home: ($236,000) $230,000
• Average Sales Price Townhome: ($199,032) $202,121
• Median Sales Price Townhome: ($175,000) $175,000
• Average Sales Price Condo: ($143,281) $142,438
• Median Sales Price Condo: ($135,000) $130,000
• Number of Active Listings: 8708 listings
• Number of Sold Units: (682 units) 743 units
• Months of Inventory, or Absorption Rate: (12.8 months) 11.7 months

I’m going to hold off drawing any conclusions about what those numbers mean until I’ve finished updating the rest of the data.  My apologies, I knew the reported sales would be at least a bit off, but I never expected them to be off by 10%. 

In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves.  Here, I’ll give you a topic: The peanut is neither a pea, nor a nut.  Discuss.

Well, it’s winter in Tucson.  You can tell by all the styrofoam cups on the cactus tips.

What, you don’t have cups on your cactus?

The sytrofoam cups protect the delicate growing ends of the cactus, so that they don’t freeze during some of our colder Tucson winter nights.

I’ve worked with several home Sellers in Tucson that are moving up into different homes.  It can be a bit of a juggling act to coordinate a sale and a purchase of a new home.  Here’s what I usually recommend:

First, we get your existing home ready to sell, and put it on the market.  During this time, we’re not going to go look at homes, but I do want you to go talk to a lender and figure out how much you can buy or want to afford in your next home.

When we get an offer for your home, and successfully negotiate that contract, then we’re heading out to look at homes immediately.  In this market, we’ve got an excellent chance of getting your dream home under contract, contingent on your existing home closing escrow.

Some people want more time to find the right home, and don’t make those kinds of decisions well under pressure.  And that’s okay!  We can find you some short term housing for you to move into, and we can take all the time you need to find the next house.

The actual coordinating of the closing of both homes is where most of the trouble appears.  You want the funds from the sale of your existing home in order to close on the new home, but you usually don’t get to move into that new home until you own it.  There’s a problem of moving stuff - it just doesn’t happen magically and quickly! 

Usually, we’re either going to have to negotiate some kind of short term lease so you can stay in one home until the other closes, or move into the other one early.  The not-so-fun option is to find short term temporary housing in a third place if we can’t manage to get everyone coordinated. 

There’s several options and ways to handle selling your existing home in order to move up into a different one.  Take the time to have that conversation with your agent well in advance.