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Valley Fever in Dogs

April 30, 2009

This is my brown boy Floyd.  He’s been a proud member of the Housechick family since 2000 when we adopted him from FAIR, the Foundation for Animals In Risk.

A couple of years ago, he was diagnosed with Valley Fever – fairly common in dogs, at least in my experience.  We didn’t catch it until his infection level was crazy high – Floyd never shows any of the typical symptoms, so we only find out when things get really bad.

Last time, he was on medication for nearly two years.  Which is painful, as the pills are expensive.  Floyd loves it all, of course, as he gets a spoonful of "crunchy" treat twice a day for two years.

And here we are again.  I took him in for vaccines and figured we might as well do the blood work for a Valley Fever test, since it’d been a while – and my past experience with my pets tells me that it can recur.

And it’s back.  And of course he’s showing no symptoms.  But the level is so high that they did a chest x-ray to make sure he was okay.  And he will be.  Here’s hoping it won’t be 2 years of pills again.

Valley Fever is technically a fungal infection: Coccidioidomycosis.  It lives in the soil and usually infects both pets and people by breathing it in.  Many will become infected and only have mild symptoms, if any.  Others will develop more severe infections and require treatment.

Symptoms in pets include coughing, loss of appetite and weight, skin lesions, and lameness.  In bad cases, it can kill them.  I’ve yet to own a pet in Tucson that didn’t need Valley Fever treatment.  Keep an eye out, pet owners.  Non-natives haven’t always heard about this infection, but it is pretty common in Tucson.

Where’s the Floorplan?

April 22, 2009

Question from the audience: why do listings for existing homes show tons of details, maps, pictures, virtual tours, fact sheets about every possible detail – but not floorplans?

My Answer:

I do floorplans occasionally – they’d be linked along with the rest of the virtual media.  I know in some other parts of the country, it is customary to have room measurements along with the listing – in Tucson, we don’t do that, we don’t have fields in our MLS for room descriptions or measurements.

But beyond that – I have floorplans drawn when I suspect the assessor square footage is incorrect, usually in older homes.  When I represent a Seller, I want the house to be as big as possible.  If having a floorplan drawn finds 1100 square feet instead of the assessor-listed 900 square feet, then we can price that house much differently.

In the luxury Tucson market, floorplans tend to be a typical item used in marketing.  I suppose the logic is that when you sell a high-end home, there’s a larger marketing budget – but floorplans are in the $0.10 – $0.15/square foot range, so we’re not talking thousands of dollars anyway.

Personally, when I represent home sellers, I know that more often than not, people buy on emotion.  Someone who swears they’ll never buy a home without a split bedroom plan will drop that requirement if they walk into a house with the right "feel," the right view, the right light, the right everything else.  So I want people inside the house – sensing, feeling, reacting – not discarding that listing sight-unseen because the floorplan doesn’t look exactly right.

It’s the same reason I’m not a huge fan of virtual tours.  Though if I ever find home video that does an awesome job of getting people to be curious about the house, I’ll adopt that strategy immediately.

I get 25 photos, and I’ll use up as many of those slots as possible to show the house from a multitude of angles and rooms.  But the point of marketing a home for sale is to entice people to come look at the thing, in person.  Floorplans are one of those things that I think can turn people away before they look.  I’ve seen too many buyers forgive a floorplan when everything else is right.

And I know that may not be an incredibly popular answer, in this age of information-freedom where we want all our answers up front.  But it’s honest.  When I represent a seller, my job is to get real live people into that house.  And despite what we often tell ourselves, emotional reactions are a HUGE influence on our buying decisions. 

Tucson Life – The Week In Photos

April 17, 2009

Lots of estate sales this week. Spring’s on the way too, with blooms everywhere and a freshly groomed pup.

Impact Fees on New Construction Homes in Tucson

April 16, 2009

Interesting article about impact fees in the Tucson area this week on local Tucson architect’s blog, In Place Architecture.

Impact fees are what local municipalities charge in order to help offset the additional public services costs of new development.  For example, anytime you build a new house and connect it to the City of Tucson’s sewer, then that costs money to the city down the line, both for the infrastructure to carry waste to a facility, and then again at the waste-water facility to handle the additional load.

SAHBA released a report about those impact fees in the various governments around Tucson, saying they have an average of $25,534 for a typical 2000 sq ft new construction home at a median price of $237,470.

More information on impact fees in Tucson on the city’s site, with a calculator to help estimate those fees.  An interesting place to explore if you’re trying to budget the cost of new development in Tucson.

Mixing Roof Types

April 6, 2009

Had a discussion about roof types the other day with one of my clients.  There are some newer home communities where the builder would offer two different elevations for the same model: one with a pitched tile roof and one with a flat roof, so you often see those mixed within a community.

Now, tile roofs and flat roofs have very different lifespans and need very different maintenance.  The tile roof you need to have checked every couple of years for cracked or shifting tiles, or for cracks in the mortar at the peak.  Tile roofs can last decades with only very minor maintenance and attention.

Flat roofs, on the other hand, you should probably be checking those annually for cracking and blistering and ponding.  Depending on the type, a flat roof may need spot sealing along the seams and protrusions yearly, and a re-coat for some kinds of roofs every 3-5 years.  Usually, this kind of roof maintenance is fairly inexpensive, at least compared to something like major work on a tile roof.

What happens often is that the main house is a tile roof, but the garage and patio roofs are flat, so you’ve got two different maintenance types and schedules.  A lot of home owners with tile roofs don’t think about their flat patio roofs until they start to leak.  It’s perfectly fine to have mixed roof types on a single house, just make sure you’re maintaining each on the proper schedule.

Comparing the Short Sale and Foreclosure Markets

April 3, 2009

Fun with numbers –

# Short Sale Homes on the Market today: 1820

# Short Sale Homes Sold in March: 143

That’s a 12.7 month supply of short sales in Tucson.  Which means about 1 of every 13 short sales actually sell.

 

# Foreclosed Homes in the Market today: 1614

# Foreclosed Homes Sold in March: 417

That’s a 3.9 month supply of foreclosed homes.  Meaning roughly 1 of every 4 bank-owned homes are selling.  That’s a pretty fast rate.

 

In comparison, there are 7676 homes on the market today, and so far, there’s been 691 sales recorded for March.  Which is an 11 month supply of homes, overall.  If you’re trying to sell a home in this market, your competition is those foreclosures – that market is moving while the rest is still slow.  And if you’re trying to buy, well, you’ve got a lot to pick from.  But if you’re wanting that huge bargain foreclosure home, know you might have some competition.  Depending on pricing, of course.

 

Note – since our MLS doesn’t have a field to identify short sales and foreclosures, they’re usually disclosed in either the agent or public comments.  I’m searching on common phrases to identify these properties and pull these numbers.  It’s not a perfect method – let’s call these numbers approximate.

Buying Short Sales and Foreclosed Homes in Tucson

April 1, 2009

Been discussing this quite a bit recently with my home buyers.  Two very different situations if you’re trying to buy short sales and foreclosed houses in Tucson.

A foreclosed home – also called bank owned or an REO property – is one where the lender has completed the foreclosure process and now has taken it back and owns the home.  Banks usually list them with agents, who in turn offer them on the local Tucson MLS where you can see and purchase them.

In this situation, the bank really doesn’t have any knowledge about the house, so they refuse to make any disclosures and sell it as-is, more often than not.  The listing agent doesn’t have any information about the house either, other than what they can tell by looking and checking public record.

When you’re buying a foreclosed home, it is important to inspect very carefully.  There’s no one making disclosures, sometimes you have to turn on the utilities yourself at your own expense, and sometimes the condition is less than ideal.

However, these foreclosed homes are often sold at a discount, so if the condition isn’t terrible, you can often pick them up at good prices.  Also, the lender is usually highly motivated to sell the thing, so when you’re buying a bank-owned home, typically the bank will respond in a timely manner.  Timely meaning days, or a week, not months.

I’ve got a special site that lists foreclosed and bank owned homes for sale in Tucson over at TucsonBankOwnedHomes.com.  Click on the map to see a list of bank owned homes for sale in that part of Tucson.

Short sales, on the other hand, are very different.  "Short sale" means the lender comes up short at the sale – there’s not enough money made to pay off the loans.  It does NOT mean they sell quickly.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

In short sales, a real person still owns the house, not a bank.  As a buyer of a short sale, you negotiate with the seller using a special addendum, and then the seller goes back and negotiates with his lender(s) to see if they’ll take less than they’re owed.  This process could take – quite literally – months.  And there’s no guarantee that the seller and the bank will reach an agreement, or that the bank won’t just foreclose on the house anyway.  And if you’re dealing with more than one lender at a time, it all just gets messier.

However, if you’ve got plenty of time and plenty of patience, you may want to consider buying a short sale home.  These are usually as-is sales – the seller walks away from the deal without making a penny, so they’re not motivated to make any repairs.  They can take months to complete, during which time, you sit and wait for the seller and the bank(s) to reach an agreement – a process on which you have very little insight as the buyer.  Typically, the condition is a little better than in a foreclosed home.  The seller may still be living in the property, so they probably haven’t trashed it in anger.

These homes usually sell at a discount as well, though not typically as steep of a discount as a foreclosed home.  Just be aware that you might be dealing with a reticent distressed homeowner, that the lenders will have no regard for timelines, and that you’ll need lots and lots of patience.

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