North Phoenix Agent Blog

FINALLY. I get it. I had the V8 moment. Now I understand why every blogger Realtor I know is tweeting. 

Life happens between blog posts. Use Twitter to send & receive interesting little snippets of daily life as it happens to people you know. You can follow me at @northphxagent

This video by CommonCraft, posted by Daniel Rothamel over at The Real Estate Zebra explains it all.

A good first impression is worth thousands of dollars in the home selling business. Most potential buyers will make up their mind about your house in the first 10 to 15 seconds. Maximize that microburst of time by completing the following:

• Well trimmed lawn, or weed-free rockscape
• Clutter-free look
• Freshly painted door and trim
• Sparkling clean windows and lighting fixtures
• Brand new, cushy doormat
• Dust-free entry
• Consider adding a little color

A little color near the front entry draws the eye in from the street to the door. Where the eye goes, the buyer follows. Try potted flowering plants, painted shutters, or even raised flowerbeds or rockbeds. Of course, you must  consider your home’s style when adding these accents. Shutters on a Santa Fe style adobe home look ridiculous, but they’re perfect on the red brick homes built in the downtown areas in the 40’s and 50’s. With flowers and flowering plants, reds and yellows are beautiful for photographs, while any color works for in-person viewing. Ask your Realtor or a certified home stager for more advice here.

Don’t skimp on the doormat. A good thick doormat makes folks pause for an instant or two. That instant allows the potential buyer to think about how much nicer your doormat is than theirs. Sounds silly, no? But you’ve already got the potential buyer thinking your doormat is a step up so they’re likely to assume your house is really nice too. Never forget that home buyers may be shopping for 2000 square feet with 4 beds and 2 or 3 baths, but they’re also shopping for a lifestyle makeover.

Finally, don’t forget to dust your front door area. The Arizona climate kicks up a lot of dust (and pollen this time of year). Your front door is probably covered in a fine coat of dust which you probably don’t even notice. After all, how many of us actually use our front door?  That’s for company, we use the garage or carport entry for day to day. Well when your home is for sale, company’s coming! Grab a microfiber cloth and give the door a quick once-over every couple of days. Wipe the dust from the windows, the door (especially if your door has raised panels or other detailing), and the threshold. Sweep the concrete at your entry while you’re out there.

Next in this series - Behind The Curtain

Just back from the monthly “Urban Tour”. Arranged by Realtor Helen Prier of Urban Living Properties and sponsored by Jeannie Bolger of Wells Fargo Home Loans and Rich Ghali of Guaranty Title, the tour meets the 4th Thursday of each month to tour downtown Phoenix condos.

We saw some really cool stuff this month. My personal fave remains the Executive Towers but Portland Place is mighty impressive. You can search downtown Phoenix condos here.

Rates spiked up just a bit yesterday and are settling back down today. Tomorrow’s rates will hopefully bring us back to the high 5’s territory.

6.00% — Conforming, 30 year fixed
5.80% — Conforming, 5/1 ARM
8.50% — Jumbo 30 year fixed
8.25% — Jumbo 5/1 ARM

You can reach Kristi Collins of Coldwell Banker Home Loans at 602-750-8594. CB Home Loans guarantees you’ll close on time. If CBHL causes your late closing, they’ll discount your rate by 1/4% for the life of the loan.

The NPR radio show Marketplace reported this morning that home sales jumped 2.09% in February. Analysts had expected another month of slumping sales volumes; it would have been the 7th in a row. At the same time the number of homes sold increased, the prices for those homes decreased. NPR surmises this is probably a function of more home sellers getting realistic and dropping their asking price.

There’s so much data in our local MLS that I can’t crunch enough numbers to support the above theory. I rely on Realtor John Wake for most of my stats; he’s a whiz at that number crunching.

I keep my eye on the anecdotal data. My favorite title officers say that January & February were booming months for closings. My favorite in-house lender Kristi Collins of Coldwell Banker Home Loans (602-750-8594) agrees. Me too. I was swamped from Novembver through the end of February.

It’s quiet now. I think it’s the calm before the storm. In a good way, of course. I think that late spring and summer will be the workhorse months in metro Phoenix. We’ll burn through inventory, get rid of the homes in the MLS that shouldn’t be there, and sell some great homes at realistic prices to investors and first time buyers. 

Rates are still historically low. I locked a buyer at 5.81% for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage on Friday last week. Rates bounced up again to 6.125% this morning. But compared to the 17% and 18% that was common in the early 1980’s that a bargain.

The sellers left on the market these days are anxious to get sold. They’ll agree to pay closing costs, help first timers gather a down payment. We’re even hearing talk of sellers helping to buy down mortgage rates.

Calm before the storm or beginning of the end? Time will tell.

Since sliced bread? Well, I don’t know if I’d go quite that far. But Jott.com is pretty awesome if you’re a person on the go. And who isn’t these days? From their website, “Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments.”

I use it while I’m driving to send myself reminders of To Do’s. I call Jott’s toll free number, speak my reminder into the phone, and bam! Jott sends me an email of the reminder. Since my email comes to my crackberry phone, that might seem silly. But I ignore the email on the crackberry and when I get back to the office desktop, there’s my reminder waiting for me.  This is all waaaaay safer with speed dial and a headset than the old pen and notebook I used to use.

You can also set up Jott to send tweets to Twitter, posts to your blog, or even emails and texts to others. Their motto kinda says it all:  Life is busy. Talk to Jott. Get Simple Back™.

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Federal Fair Housing law prohibits discrimination in housing because of:

• Race or Color
• National Origin (the country in which one was born)
• Religion
• Sex
• Familial Status (whether one has children or not, whether married or not)
• Handicap/Disability

Some states include additional groups, such as “sexual orientation”. You can check your state’s protected classes here.

The most common question I hear from buyers is “Is this a good neighborhood?”

What they’re really asking about of course, is either the crime rate or the type of people living in the area. Fair Housing law prevents me, your Realtor from telling you about the neighbors if that conversation might stray into discussing one of the protected classes. Most Realtors just don’t discuss the topic at all, for fear of violating Fair Housing law. It’s rumored that the FHA sends testers out to work with Realtors, secretly checking for violations of the law. True? I don’t know but I don’t want to find out.

Besides, my idea of “nice” or “good” neighbors might vary wildly from yours. Some people find the idea of living near folks of another race, religion or sexual orientation is a big problem. Others don’t care. My best advice to buyers in this scenario is to drive through and walk through the neighborhood yourself, at different times of the day, to see what you see. Talk to your potential new neighbors. Realtors can’t ask or answer questions about the protected classes but buyers can, and should. You’d be surprised what neighbors will tell you!

As for crime, I can and will point you towards websites that list crime statistics, usually by ZIP code. I usually beg off answering the ‘crime’ question, because one person’s ’safe neighborhood’ is another person’s ‘fringe neighborhood’ is another person’s ‘hood.’

Housing not covered by the Federal Fair Housing law

• Single family housing not sold through a broker
• Owner-occupied housing of no more than 4 units (you own a duplex & rent the other side)
• Housing operated by private clubs which limit membership (co-op’s)

The first bullet above applies to For Sale By Owner homes. Selling it yourself? Discriminate all you want. I’m kidding of course, but the government can’t interfere if you want to sell your home yourself but intend to refuse to sell it to someone who practices the B’hai faith or was born in Australia.

The second & third bullet points don’t apply much in metro Phoenix. But there are duplexes and fourplexes in our Valley, and even a few co-op’s down in South Scottsdale. No one can force you to rent ther other side of your duplex to a family with 17 kids if you abhor children. Similarly, the co-op board reviews applicants who want to purchase a unit, and they make their own rules about who can move in.

For more information, see the Federal Fair Housing booklet and information about updates to Fair Housing law. Think you’ve been discriminated against in housing? The National Fair Housing Advocate Online can help. Note that all these resources apply to housing you buy. For help with rental situations, see the Arizona Residential Landlord Tenant Act.

A Federal appeals court ruled on March 14, 2008 that “the soapbox isn’t liable for what the speaker has said.”

That gem stems from a lawsuit filed in February 2006 by a group of Chicago-area attorneys, accusing Craigslist of violating federal housing laws by publishing housing ads that attempted to exclude potential buyers/tenants because of their race, gender, or religion. The District Court judge ruled that Craiglist serves as an intermediary party and not a publisher and is therefore not liable for what individual posters said in their ads.

It’s like the difference between the glossy Homes for Sale magazines and your local grocery store’s bulletin board. Each probably has classified ads touting area homes sale. But the glossy publication employs a staff who are responsible (among many other things) for making sure that federal Fair Housing rules aren’t violated in the ad text. But the grocery store is just providing a bulletin. Individual homeowners can post any discriminatory ad up there they want to (one prays they don’t!) and no one can hold the grocer liable.

Why It Matters - This actually could have been a watershed moment in American legal history. If Craigslist had been held liable for the content of their users’ ads, it could have conceivably shut down the site and changed the world of online social networking. Craig and those other sites like Flickr, MySpace and Facebook presumably employ some staff, but the amount of staff needed to screen every ad, post, comment and photo would be immense. One imagines a lot more jobs suddenly being outsourced to India. <snerk>

In my opinion, it seemed unlikely that Craigslist would be held liable for the content of it’s posts. Even the casual online visitor (I hope) knows that bulletin board, auction & social networking websites don’t screen your posts. But a whole bunch of attorneys felt the case had merit, so what do I know? Apparently, they felt that bulletin boards in cyberspace were just different enough from pen-and-ink bulletin boards to warrant a legal once-over.

Housing discrimination is terrible and folks shouldn’t do it, but holding Craig responsible for the stoopid things regular folks sometimes say seems to take things a bit far.

The principal and interest payment on a $250,000 loan has dropped by $88.99 per month since September 28th on the 30 yr fixed. Rates took a serious dip this week. If you’re still thinking about buying, this might be just the news you need to hear!

30 Year Fixed:    5.8%

5/1 ARM:            5.9%

Courtesy of the Queen of Clean, Linda Cobb, here are some natural & effective ways to deal with Arizona’s persistent dust/dirt.

To clean today’s trendy dark dark wood furniture, use a damp cloth (use plain tap water and wring the cloth out until it’s just damp) to wash it. Then immediately buff the furniture dry with a lint-free cloth such as chamois or bar towels.

Don’t use retail furniture polish on your wood furniture - it usually contains silicone which is actually drying. Here in the deserty dry of metro Phoenix, our furniture suffers from dry air enough with us helping it along with silicone. Instead, use a mixture of:
**About 1 cup mineral oil
**About 2 teaspoons lemon extract
Mix these together and store in a well-labeled glass jar.

Used fabric softener sheets work exceptionally well for cleaning glass.

The Fed cut its federal funds rate again today, down to 2.25%. The Fed Funds rate is the overnight rate banks charge each other for borrowing money. The Fed Funds rate has been chopped a full 3% since September 2007. MSNBC has a nice chart showing that the current 2.25% rate is the lowest since the end of 2004.

The dollar rebounded on the news, but some industry watchers were disappointed they didn’t get a full 1% cut. The Dow also had a good day, rising 3.5% on the Fed’s news, the largest one-day gain since July 2002.

What does it mean for mortgage rates? That’s hard to tell. Generally, Fed rate cuts don’t immediately impact mortgage rates. I heard from a very knowledgable mortgage lender (Andrew Schmidt of Nations Home Lending) yesterday that mortgage rates generally track with the stock market’s Dow Jones, S&P 500 and other big indices. When stocks go down, mortgage rates go down. There was some complicated logic in there about traders selling stocks and buying bonds, thus pushing up the yield on the bonds, and thus decreasing the average 30year mortgage rate.

It’s important to keep in mind that the overall real estate market is slower to move than the stock market. If stocks are a speed boat zipping up one day and down the next, then the national (and even local) real estate market is more like a huge ocean liner. It takes time to reverse course and start out in a new direction. (BTW, the speed boat/luxury liner analogy isn’t my invention. Sadly, I can’t remember where I heard it in order to credit the creator.)

Suffice it to say that I mostly understand the inner working of Wall Street, but I rely on a bunch of top notch mortgage lenders for my daily fix on what mortgage rates are doing and why.  You should too, if you’re in the market to buy or sell. See my list of preferred lenders here: recommended-lenders.doc

I’m a near-total techno nerd (in the bad way) and can’t figure out how to put a chart right into my blog post without it going all visually wonky.

So here’s a PDF of the most recent stats, up through the end of February.
pdf-of-monthly-sales-inventory-numbers-for-blog.pdf
Catchy file name, no? <Snerk>

The summary? We’ve got a heckuva long way to go to ‘normal’, but at least the numbers are still moving incrementally in the right direction.

One very interesting item on the chart — the number of pending properties jumped all the way to 10% of our current inventory. Could this mean the traditional spring buyer bump has begun?!?

Sales are historically higher in the spring and summer months, as parents look each other in the eye over the dinner table (or over late night drinks) and say to each other, “Honey we should move to get the kids in a better school district before next fall.” If that process has begun, Gawd bless them. Parents striving for a better education for their little monsters just might be the salvation of our market. Or at least the beginning of the snowball. Or dustball, given we’re in the desert.

‘Course, it could also be that 10% of our inventory is pending but many of those will fall out of escrow. That would be BAD. Or it could be that first time buyers are getting the message that now is one of the best times in their young lives to buy real estate. That would be GOOD. Or it could be that cash-poor buyers of all stripes are getting the message that Zero Down financing is still available through various programs like AmeriDream and Nehemiah Corp, and most buyers can still buy with only 3% down via FHA programs. Those too would be GOOD.

Only one way to know. Wait and see what end of March numbers look like.

Today is the birthday of Vita Sackville-West, best remembered as a writer (The Edwardians) and as one of Virginia Woolf’s several lovers. But she was also an avid gardener. Sackville-West is largely responsible for getting the English upper classes outside, working in their gardens beginning in the 1930’s. At a time when most considered gardening a masculine occupation best left to servants, Sackville-West brought gardening into the mainstream through her weekly column for The London Observer. She wrote about the joys she found digging in the garden and the satisfaction of arranging her own flowers at her beloved country home, Sissinghurst.

In Vita’s honor, I present a list of desert gardening resources for the Valley’s many transplanted humans, relocated to the desert Southwest from a “somewhere else” that invariably has more rainfall. For all of us struggling to figure out how to grow anything but rocks in a climate bursting with 100+ degree temperatures and less than 7 inches of rainfall annually, I invite you to click and grow.

Of course the mac daddy of all desert gardening books is The Sunset Western Gardening Book. First published in 1972 by the same folks who produce Sunset magazine, this has been the bible for desert gardeners since publication. I believe my good ole’ Dad still has a copy, proudly purchased when we first moved to the Valley in 1978. Dad bought a 4 bedroom, 2 bath family rambler on about a 1/2 acre of land in Squaw Peak and felt compelled to make that land produce something. Anything. (My link is to the original 1972 cover art. There are newer editions but the old cover is kitschy cool so I linked to it.)

Desert Botanical Gardens is a wonderful resource for desert gardening, both online and in person. They offer online photos & tips, adult education classes, and tours of their beautiful grounds. With our recent spring rains, the DBG is breathtakingly beautiful. Visit!

(photo credit to MaggieAZ of stock.xchng)

About.com has a monthly calendar of tips and to do’s for desert gardening.

The Sierra Vista Garden Club website seems to be kept up to date with tips, events, recipes, links, and a super list of nontoxic household items useful in gardening such as tea, ammonia, baby shampoo & beer. Sierra Vista is a good deal south of the metro Phoenix region (just southeast of Tucson) so take note that their climate might be slightly different than our urban heat island affected climes. The SV Garden Club has a link to the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. You can zoom in on a region, but its a little hard to tell if Phoeix is in Zone 8b or 9a.

The Tucson Gardener has a fabulous list of desert gardening books. No links, but you could print and take to your local library.

Finally, for those who’d like to enjoy the desert beauty without attempting to garden on their own, try the Desert Foothills Land Trust and their 13th Annual Sonoran Symphony. Get out and view the desert’s beauty while being serenaded by a full symphony.

InmanNews.com ran a good little snippet on this morning’s news bulletin about draining your water heater. Since I don’t want to just re-post their article here (pesky copyright laws!) I did a couple Google searches. Links below. Draining your water heater from time to time will increase the life of the heater, and ensure you have more hot water for your daily needs.

DIY Network - Drain Your Water Heater - seems like a fairly thorough article; great pictures of each step

The Natural Handyman - chatty & entertaining, but don’t make this the only article you read before atttempting at home

Lowes - fairly short but with excellent illustrations

HGTV - amusing pics of having a professional plumber do the job. Being a total girl, this is the option I choose. I don’t do home maintenance; I exercise my check writing skills.

If you have a HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit), you should think twice and call your lender before planning to use it. Most major banks have been freezing HELOCs lately, due to the price declines so many local market are experiencing.

From InmanNews.com, this is a partial list of the banks already known to be freezing customers’ HELOCs:

Bank of America - HELOC Freeze
Countrywide - HELOC Freeze
Chase - HELOC Freeze
CitiGroup - HELOC Freeze under review
National City - HELOC Freeze
Suntrust - HELOC Freeze
USAA Federal Savings - HELOC Feeeze
Washington Mutual - HELOC Freeze

Don’t use your HELOC again without seriously looking at the SOLD prices in your neighborhood, and considering whether you have any money left to spend. If you’re really concerned about the current market value of your home, call me (or any qualified Realtor you trust) for a comparative market analysis of your area.

An important point to remember is that most of us do NOT need to be worried about declining prices at all! If you like your home, plan to stay in it for 5 years or more, and can afford the payments, then you can ignore this headline and every other gloomy real estate media story. Love your home and rest assured that home prices will rebound by the time you want to sell.

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Things That Do Not Influence Your Asking Price

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