Is This Good or Bad Real Estate News?

Yes, inventory in Santa Clara County is slowly moving up, and may even hit 5000 before year end, but that isn't the whole picture of our housing market. While sales have slowed, the median price has continued to rise...up 9.3 percent from a year ago. This reflects what we're seeing in our offices. The mixture of homes sold has ticked upward as more high-end homes and fewer bargain foreclosures have changed hands. At least for now, foreclosure sales are down from over half of Bay Area resales to 26.7% currently. Many of these are still being picked up by all-cash investors, who now account for a quarter of these buyers.
Interestingly enough, we are seeing more movement of mid-priced homes as the market has slowed. The properties that are selling fastest in Sunnyvale and Cupertino are those priced between $650,000 and $850,000. Where buyers in the East Bay were rushing to take advantage of the tax credit before it expired, we didn't see as many of that group because of our higher housing prices.
So don't be too shaken by news reports that home sales are slowing. Our values are holding, and even increasing, and for local homeowners, that's good news to hear.

Getting Back to Normal

My interior house painting is finished, and Hak Kim and his crew from Painter Friend did a fabulous job...everything was taped and covered in plastic, and they were in and out in less than two days...and that included removing wallpaper from a bathroom and retexturing the walls. Now my challenge is to get everything back in place before the carpet cleaners come on Thursday. With the help of my long-time handyman, this chore is nearly finished, and I have stopped asking myself, "Why did I ever start this project in the first place?"
In the middle of all this confusion, I managed a week-long trip to my son who is assigned to our embassy in Ottawa, Canada, a beautiful, clean city. I've also kept up with our seasonally slowing real estate market, and managed to learn my way around my new Droid Incredible phone. Never a dull moment!

Doing Good While Doing Well

Last week, we cooked and served a full breakfast at our office of Coldwell Banker, followed by an auction. All proceeds (more than $8000) went to support Habitat for Humanity. We also heard the news that our Cupertino office has placed #1 again in the local CB area. It was fun working together for a good cause, and piles of waffles (and dirty dishes) were a change from piles of paperwork.
With the Labor Day weekend here, summer is finally drawing to a close and consumers and agents are returning home from the last of their summer vacations.
The real estate market continues to have its ups and downs, along with the economy, but the Bay Area market is faring better than most regions in the country. Also, our market is considerably stronger today than it was during the depths of the recession. We’ve come a long way over the past two or three years. The National Association of Realtors reported that the number of buyers who signed contracts to purchase homes rose 5.2 percent in July after hitting a record low in June. Sales nationally had fallen sharply in the months following the expiration of the government's home buyer tax credit in April, and economists were expecting that trend to continue for a third straight month.
Buyers are hiring agents, attending open houses and making offers. Homes are still selling. But it’s more important than ever for sellers to price their property appropriately for today’s market and make sure their home is in the best possible condition. If they do, buyers will come – sometimes with multiple offers.

Getting Ready for Painters...

...is almost as bad as moving.
I've been boxing up the contents of my bookcases, dressers and china cabinets. The house painters will move my furniture away from the walls, but only if I empty the shelves first. Because all the boxes will remain in place, I don't have the concerns about breakage that my clients have when they pack to move, but it's still a big job. I took the cowards way out, and told the painters that they didn't have to paint the closet interiors...another big job averted!
According to "The Move Advocate," creating a simpler and less chaotic lifestyle, even without the prospect of moving, can be rewarding but requires some discipline. There are general rules to help you decide how to edit your possessions...
1. If you haven’t used something in three months, box it up.
2. If you haven’t used something in a year, sell it or give it away!
Unless the items have significant financial or emotional value, it makes sense to sell or give them away.
I sorted through my old photos and paperwork during the last month, tossing duplicates and unimportant documents, and organizing others.
Yesterday, I made trips to the second hand book store and the Sunnyvale library to donate books, and today, I went to the Hope trailer with used electronics and appliances.
Don’t forget that any items donated to charity must be in “good or better” condition. This rule was put in place to keep people from claiming deductions for items that should have been thrown in the garbage
The center of most of my rooms looks like something out of a Barb Schwarz pre-staging video, but at least I won't be wielding a paintbrush or climbing on ladders!

Combining Short Sales and FHA Refi's?

All the recent news reports I've been reading warn of a new batch of repossessions coming. This is because less than half of the homeowners trying to refinance or arrange better terms under the government's so-called 'Making Home Affordable' program have given up...wrapped in rolls of red tape and frustrated by delays.
Now FHA has announced a Short Refinance Option to help Borrowers with negative equity.

In an effort to help responsible homeowners with negative equity...the 'Underwater Group'...HUD this week announced details on adjustments to the refinance program that it unveiled earlier this year. This new program will enable lenders to provide additional refinancing options to homeowners who owe more than their home is worth.
Starting in September, FHA will offer certain non-FHA borrowers who are current and in good standing on their existing mortgages and whose lenders agree to write off at least 10 percent of the unpaid principal balance of the first mortgage, a chance to qualify for a new FHA-insured mortgage. The FHA Short Refinance option is targeted to help borrowers who have underwater mortgages because their local markets saw major declines in home values.

On the surface, this sounds like a good idea, but the long list of requirements on both the lenders and the borrowers may create another paperwork morass that puts us no closer to the government's goal of a stable real estate market by 2012.

70, Today!

This really is a milestone. In about five minutes, I'll be 70 years old, and this month also completes 38 years in Real Estate sales for me. So much has happened...both in my life and in the real estate market since I came to Sunnyvale in 1967.
Some of the biggest changes have been in the technology we use in marketing homes. We went from checking out new homes on the market by driving to the local board of Realtors office and looking at a hand written list every week, then bi-weekly It was followed by "the book" with a single black and white picture of the house. Before electronic keysafes, we all accessed a keybox with identical keys. If an agent lost his or her key, the whole system had to be rekeyed.
Then came computers, printers with rows of holes on each side of the paper, and fax machines. No more driving to deliver each document that was needed for the sale or escrow...but as the ease of delivery has increased, the number of papers has increased proportionally.
Now a cell phone can pull up a series of color pictures of a house in seconds. We can lock out a lost or stolen key, and signatures are becoming electronic. No matter what changes come in the future, one thing will never change.
We will still need caring and professional Realtors to manage the legal and emotional sides of selling a home.
I can't wait to see what the next few years have in store, for the business...and for me!

When is it a Bedroom?

In the Realtor community, the definition of a bedroom was always: a room with a closet. My nearly 40 years of selling homes and using this meaning was recently corrected in an article by John Schneider, in his "All About Homes" column. Schneider is a licensed contractor, and he cited the Universal Building Code as saying that a bedroom is one used primarily for sleeping, and complying to several health and safety requirements. These include natural light and ventilation, an installed source of heat, electrical outlets, and a way to escape in case of fire or other emergency. Because of the potential for fire and the possible spread of gas fumes, there can be no door or window leading to the garage from a bedroom. (This is interesting, because there are local homes built by AHG that have this setup.)
There are other, more detailed requirements in the code, but nowhere in the list is the necessity for the bedroom to have a closet. We learn something every day!