The Junkmail Deluge
September 30, 2008
One of my recent first time home buyers called me the other day, asking about the mounds of refinance, home equity lines of credit, and credit card offers piling up in her mailbox, whether they were important or not.
Usually - not important.
In Pima County, home sales are public record, which means that companies can take a feed of those records, see that you just bought a house, for how much, and send you a bunch of junkmail, offering you loans or refinances and whatnot. By and large, you can ignore this stuff.
However - it’s worth at least a quick look to make sure that the mail is really junk and not your existing lender telling you that they’ve sold your loan to some other company. Many times, the company you make your monthly mortgage payment to changes fairly quickly after you buy a home, so you need to watch for a letter from your existing company, and a letter from the new loan servicing company with your payment coupons.
Because you don’t want to be digging through 3 days of trash to find that payment coupon you ripped into pieces without even opening the envelope, so that you can tape it all back together and mail in your mortgage payment to the new loan servicing company when you realize your loan has been transferred. Not that I’d know from experience or anything.
Housing Bail Out Shot Down
September 29, 2008
In case you weren’t glued to the various news sources, the housing "bail-out" bill was shot down by the House today. Lots of finger-pointing, wild speculation, and general insanity afoot.
Arizona House Representative Raul Grijalva issued a statement on his no vote
I’ll update this post with links reactions and predictions, just as soon as some dust settles and I can find a few cohesive, well-argued stories. Anyone else want to contribute an opinion or story of value, comments are open, below.
Continental Ranch - How Home Values have Changed
September 24, 2008
Had a little fun with some numbers and graphs today. Two things to show you.
First, this is a graph of average price per square foot for Continental Ranch from the start of 2004 through today, sold single family homes only:
You can see the Continental Ranch market peaked sort of late 2005, early 2006. And that the spread of this data, the range in selling price per square foot, has grown wider over time as well. Some of those home owners are back to 2004 values, but not all.
One other thing I think this illustrates well - I’m asked near daily if we’ve reached the bottom of the market. But if you look at the period roughly between 9/2005 and 3/2006, there’s a 6 month spread of data where values don’t really go up or down. In this case, it signaled the start of values declining in Continental Ranch, but we didn’t see that numerically until 6 months later. I can’t call an official ‘bottom’ until prices start trending in the opposite direction, which may be half a year after the start of the change. Do I think we’re close? Probably, but there are some major events coming up soon that could change that answer depending on the outcome. The best you can do is to make decisions based on the information available today, and with an eye to how long you plan to own that home.
One more chart. I do love graphs.
This is a chart of the ratio of sale price to original list price since early 2004. Lots of home buyers want to know how much to offer. As we can see here in Continental Ranch, some homes are priced well, and sell at or near 100% of listed price, and others, well, others sell far below their original list price. And many more are selling far below list price than were a couple years ago. Is this a sign of Sellers pricing their homes unrealistically? Or agents not in touch with the market and overpricing? Or both?
Take the Memories, but Don’t Leave the Paint
September 19, 2008
In honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, I bring you this undersea adventure room.
And yes, the ceiling is painted in the water motif too.
I’m sure the child who lived in this room adored the dolphin and all the custom paint. But when it came time to sell, the owners were too emotionally attached to the paint job to repaint the walls with something more neutral.
And this house sat on the market for a long time, slowly coming down in price. And the owners moved away. And they got to take all their lovely memories of this room with them - and still didn’t repaint it, even though they’d already left the house behind.
And the house sat on the market longer. Because it wasn’t just one room painted in an, ah, unusual manner. It was the whole house. And finally, someone picked it up on the cheap, and turned it into a nice place.
Memories, you get to take with you. Your paint job - not so much. Holding onto this paint job cost the owners tens of thousands of dollars.
Park(ing) Day in Tucson - Sept 19
September 18, 2008
Tomorrow, there’s a rather cool and funky event happening in Tucson. It’s called Park(ing) Day. This is a once-per-year global event to promote the need for more parks and open spaces in urban areas.
During Park(ing) Day, volunteers take over a public parking spot and turn it into a park.
There’s a map of Tucson Park(ing) Day "parks" here. Most are in the Downtown, 4th Avenue, University area.
If you look at that map of Tucson parks, you’ll notice that the free downtown redLine shuttle goes to most of them. Here’s the redLine Schedule, should you want to explore the Park(ing) Day parks in Tucson with a bit less walking and a bit more free public transportation!
h/t to @tucson_cowgirl for the heads-up!
Photo via Flickr courtesy of stewf
Housechick Just Got Fancier!
September 17, 2008
If you’re not in your feedreader, you’ll have noticed that things look a bit different around here now. Just look at that nice wide reading column, the complete navigation at the top, all kinds of new stuff here.
Market stats have moved off into their own blog, you can click on Statistics at the top of the page to see all of those. The promised new charts for sale and list price distribution are now there for your chart interpretation pleasure.
The Tucson MLS Search is up in that top navigation as well, under "Search Tucson MLS," now in a wider format for easier home perusal.
I can’t wait to show you what I have up my sleeve for the Neighborhood part - but it’s not ready yet, so you’ll just have to check back more often.
Still a couple of areas to flesh out, some places to prettify and whatnot. Please help me out - if you find a broken link, something just terribly wrong or confusing, send me an email and let me know (see the fancy "contact" link at the top of the page? Or you can just click on my name up there….).
Exciting changes afoot at Casa Housechick.com. Keep an eye out, there’s more fun to come.
WHOOPS: you can comment from the main list of posts, but not the individual posts. We’re also missing navigation forward and back from within the post itself. Noted and working on it. 
What’s Negotiable on a Good Faith Estimate?
September 15, 2008
A beautiful question I found in the list of keywords that people searched on and found my site for today:
What is negotiable on a Good Faith Estimate?
First - what’s a good faith estimate? It’s an estimate of costs that your lender prepares so that you can better anticipate closing costs and more easily compare loans. A ‘GFE’, we we call it, details out lender costs, estimated title and escrow costs, recording costs, and whatnot.
So when your lender presents you with this good faith estimate, what parts are negotiable?
Well - lots of it. At least, the parts that your lender has control over. Your lender isn’t in charge of the title and escrow and recording costs, they’re just providing those estimates to you more or less as a courtesy. So your lender can’t do much for you with those.
But what they can negotiate are their own fees and rates. Tom Vanderwell of Straight Talk About Mortgages has this to say:
When you are shopping for a mortgage lender, you need to look at the entire package, fees and rate. If you find two lenders who are at the same rate, but one has $200 more in fees, that’s when you have to either decide to go with the other one or negotiate it down to match the fees.
Just remember - when you get a home loan, you’re paying your lender to perform a service for you. And it matters whether that person has expertise or not - if they can get the money to escrow on time, if they can help you select the right loan based on your needs, if they can reduce your stress during the entire process. Those things have value too.
La Cholla Airpark - Horses and Hangars
September 12, 2008
I was researching some horse property in Tucson today for a client - if you want a good sized lot, close to town, with horse facilities, you keep coming back to La Cholla Airpark.
La Cholla Airpark is unique among Tucson’s luxury home communities - namely because it has a private airstrip and because horses are allowed. Several homes have both horse facilities and hangars.
A typical lot in La Cholla Airpark is about 7 acres, and there are roughly 100 homes in the subdivision. Given the large lot size, the homes are private and usually have fabulous views of either the Tortolita Mountains, the Catalina Mountains, or of sunset and city lights.
What I find amazing is that La Cholla Airpark is nestled up against the Tortolita Mountains, right on the outskirtrs of Oro Valley, so you have amenities of a much more rural area, but are still very close to town. You can fly home, taxi over to your private estate, park your plane on your property, go for a ride on your horse, and the closest light night pint of ice cream or nice meal out is only 10 minutes away.
As of today, homes range from $799,000 to $6,400,000, which is quite a spread. More typically, homes sell in La Cholla Airpark between $1-3 million, with more expensive homes having larger lots, larger homes, more amenities, and the lower end tend to be the older, smaller homes, on average lots.
Occasionally, bare lots come on the market as well. Today, there are two La Cholla Airpark lots for sale, both at $650,000 for roughly 7 acre parcels.
You can see all homes for sale in La Cholla Airpark here, and the lots for sale here.
Preliminary Home Inspections and Research
September 11, 2008
I have a client considering a home that doesn’t have any covered parking. Nice house, but the owners had a big living room built instead of a carport. They claim that a garage or carport could be built over to one side of the house, but there’s really no guarantee of that.
So if not being able to build covered parking is a deal-breaker, then how much do we investigate before deciding whether or not to make an offer?
We can look up the zoning and setback requirements, get deed restrictions and a current copy of the HOA restrictions. But without a survey, we can’t measure distance from the house to the property line to see if a structure can be fit into the space.
So do you pay for the survey before you make an offer, or do you try to get one done in a limited inspection period? Or make the whole deal contingent on an acceptable survey? Will the owners even allow you to conduct preliminary inspections and surveys before going under contract? What if you spend all this money researching and then you and the Seller can’t agree on price or terms?
And on the other side of this deal, if the owner is claiming covered parking can be built, shouldn’t they really have already done this kind of research and footwork?
Every decision when you buy a home is a trade-off. Same goes for sellers.
If the owners had already done their research before they made the covered parking claim, they might have had an offer from us by now. As it is, why should we go through all that trouble, when there are hundreds of other homes on the market that are just about as good?
Tucson Real Estate Market Statistics - August 2008
September 9, 2008
The overview, as Kelley sees it:
or Download Tucson Market Stats for August 2008 here (MP3)
You can also read the written overview, on that Tucson Market Stats link at the top of the page. Or, you can subscribe to my Tucson Market Reports podcast here, just FYI.
The Quick Numbers:
- Single Family Home Average Sales Price: $270,889
- Single Family Home Median Sales Price: $207,000
- Single Family Home Units Sold: 701
- Single Family Home Months of Inventory: 8.9
- Townhouse Average Sales Price: $159,904
- Townhouse Median Sales Price: $159,900
- Townhouse Units Sold: 55
- Townhouse Months of Inventory: 11.0
- Condo Average Sales Price: $131,687
- Condo Median Sales Price: $134,950
- Condo Units Sold: 50
- Condo Months of Inventory: 9.4
- Citywide Average Sales Price: $246,084
- Citywide Median Sales Price: $189,375
- Citywide Units Sold: 806
- Citywide Months of Inventory: 9.1
Remember to check out the individual areas in the link at the top of the page. Click on Tucson Market Stats, and you’ll see the 9 areas of Tucson as links underneath.
Data gathered from the Tucson MLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Figures quoted here include only single family homes, townhomes, and condos in the 9 areas that make up the Greater Tucson Area: NW, N, NE, W, C, E, SW, S, and SE.
tags: market reports, market statistics, tucson, tucson real estate
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