…but don’t let’s lose sight of the important things: The Main Event of The World Series of Poker starts today.
Category: General (page 18 of 23)
Zillow.com cannot tell the truth about home values, so it is releasing an Application Programmer Interface to spread its misinformation far and wide.
Who do they hope to enlist with their API? Working Realtors, the people who know best that Zillow.com’s property evaluations are necessarily and unavoidably false.
Could the strategy work? Hide and watch.
Here’s a better question: Could this be the fifth column of a triumphalist Web 2.0, where obvious falsehoods are so widely propagated as to be accepted as truth?
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
You don’t have to be completely impervious to facts to write for the Arizona Republic, but it helps:
To counteract slow equity build-up, borrowers might want to couple a 40-year term with a biweekly payment schedule, which results in the equivalent of one extra monthly mortgage payment yearly. A biweekly schedule can cut a 40-year term to about 29 years, Rogers said, allowing for faster equity increases and less interest paid over time.
Or you could just move every three to five years, like everyone else.
Update: Another ninny:
But the loan comes with a big asterisk. Non-conforming loans — essentially those for more than $417,000 on single-family homes this year — are amortized over 40 years but must be paid off with a balloon payment at the end of 30 years.
Not only are not going to move for 40 years, you’re not even going to refinance for the first 30 years.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
. . . except when it isn’t.
We had a terrific storm in North Central Phoenix last night. This house — listed for sale, alas, but not by us — lost a very old tree.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
Money is the gift that keeps on giving in the Valley of the Sun:
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
This morning’s Arizona Republic has a little featurette on a housing bubble weblog in Gilbert. It’s called the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog, but I think would it be more sonorous if it were to be named the “Housing Doom Housing Bubble Housing Blog” or even the “Housing Doom Housing Bubble Housing Blog Housing.” After all, soon enough there will be no housing, according to the BubbleHeads. That notwithstanding, the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog insists that, “The housing bubble is getting ready to burst.” That sounds like an ascription of purpose to me, and I’m left wondering why the housing bubble doesn’t take itself down to the Doc-in-the-Box to have itself lanced. I mean, who wants bubble pus all over the carpet?
For what it’s worth, the Housing Doom Housing Bubble Blog is not as amazingly daft as some other BubbleBlogs. But so close to home… And in Gilbert no less, perennially the fastest growing small city in America… Think about it: How do you go about seeing faces in clouds in a place where there are no clouds?
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
From the Republic:
Your first haboob. Light rail in other cities. Where to see good art.
These topics are regularly hashed out on a collective blog focused solely on the Valley. The site, Phoenix Metroblogging, turned 1 year old Wednesday. And to celebrate, the Weblog has been counting down 30 things to love about Phoenix.
And yes, haboob is on the list, with loving the transient nature of residents as No. 1.
Metroblogging is one of several hyperlocal, city-specific Web sites in 49 cities around the world. The site generates a daily feed of headlines from its members, so one could read postings from Dubai to Houston to Tokyo. Content isn’t filtered or edited.
In Phoenix, the blog draws together different perspectives from throughout the Valley.
Phoenix Metroblogging has that Alt-Phx kind of pomo vibe that can wear thin the further you get from the Melrose Curve. Indecipherable? Precisely! Even so, enGoogled, “the top 30 things I love about Phoenix” is fun reading.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, blogging, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
Arizona State University, a tax-payer funded institution whose apparent purpose is to salvage poorly-thought-out commercial real estate investments, races to the rescue of another white elephant:
Arizona State University has struck a multiyear deal with downtown Phoenix’s only shopping mall and plans to use it as a temporary student union for its new college campus.
The university will lease about 4,000 square feet of space at the Arizona Center – an outdoor restaurant, retail and office complex at Third and Van Buren streets – and hopes to make it available to students for meetings and social gatherings by September.
The student union space will be directly above the AMC Theatres on the mall’s northern end.
The terms of the deal are still being finalized, but both ASU and the shopping center stand to benefit from the arrangement.
University officials, who have just weeks to go before the new Phoenix campus opens, are feverishly looking for ways to boost the student-life appeal of the downtown area. The Arizona Center has long been underutilized as a shopping destination. Partnering with the university could mean a substantial boost in the center’s foot traffic.
Alas, unless you’re wired with City Hall, they probably won’t take your house off your hands…
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate
The model is a general guide, not a strict equation, and shows Phoenix’s fringe cities have the potential to become regional destinations.
Well, duh!
The quote is from the Arizona Republic’s latest mash note about the beauty, glory and power of central planning.
If you don’t like their plan, don’t worry. After 160 years and 160 million corpses, they have learned precisely nothing, so they’re going to ram it down your throat like it or don’t.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
Not all of the calls I get in response to my Republic columns are irksome. I like the calls I get from real people, rather than Realtors or brokers. Very few of them are viable, in-the-market, potential clients, but that’s not why I write the column. On the other hand, a brief telephone call is not the best way for a person to wrap his mind around a new idea.
As an example, the first call I had yesterday was about the “Who pays whom” article. He was a very sweet man, but he insisted I must be wrong, because the seller of his home had paid his closing costs.
I explained to him that I write deals that way all the time, that I prefer to do things that way no matter what the buyer’s financial circumstances, because, for now at least, retaining your own cash is usually more profitable that the interest-cost of the additional borrowed funds.
But — emphasize that — but: It doesn’t matter. You’re paying your own closing costs either way. If you pay them in cash, you can watch the money come out of your checking account. But if “the seller pays the closing costs” all you’re doing is exchanging one price discount for another. Your money stays in your checking account because you are paying more for the home and financing the closing costs.
“But, but, but–,” he sputtered.
“I know. This is hard. If the seller hadn’t paid your closing costs, would the purchase price have been the same?”
“Hell, no!”
“So you took a three percent discount in closing costs instead of shaving three percent off the price.”
“That sounds about right.”
“So you borrowed three percent more than you would have done, if you had paid the closing costs out-of-pocket.”
Silence — the threshold of rhetorical surrender.
“So who paid the closing costs?”
“…When you put it that way…”
“Who paid for everything?”
“I’ll be damned if you ain’t got me convinced…”
If only my Realtor and broker callers were this reasonable…
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
The second in my series of articles devised to tick off real estate brokers appeared in the Arizona Republic today. (Here is a more permanent link to a longer version of the article.) Torquing the brokers is not really my intent, just a secondary consequence. Next week we get to Ardell DellaLoggia’s issues, which may just spark a riot at the Arizona Association of Realtors.
Here’s today’s article in full:
The conventional wisdom in real estate is that the seller pays the sales commission to both the listing agent and the buyer’s agent. Is that really the way things work? To find out, follow the money.
Imagine a closing conference. Normally, we don’t have these in Arizona. Buyers sign their documents at one time, sellers at another. Neither party need ever set foot in Arizona, for that matter.
But for the sake of discussion, picture a settlement conference. Let’s invite everyone who has a seat at the table, so to speak, so we can see who pays whom.
At the head of the table is the escrow officer, who will be getting paid escrow fees and title insurance premiums.
Next comes the County Recorder, who will receive a recordation fee. At the next seat is the County Assessor, who will receive property tax payments. Then comes the insurance underwriter, who will get the hazard insurance premium.
The seller will get a big pile of money, some of which will be passed along to the seller’s mortgage lender.
The two Realtors will both get paid, of course.
The buyer’s lender arrived at the table with a big satchel of cash, but the lender will be taking some of it back in the form of loan origination fees and pre-paid interest. Moreover, the money the lender brought is really the buyer’s money. It was lent on the surety of the home and the buyer’s income and credit.
In fact, everyone seated at that closing table is going to be pocketing money — with one exception.
That one exception is the buyer, who pays for everything else, either out of pocket or on credit. The seller doesn’t pay the Realtor commissions — or anything else. Read more
I was wrong. The Republic did cover the increase in apartment rents corresponding to a drop in vacancy rates. And only two days later than the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
If you don’t live in Arizona, or even if you do, it may help to put a little background on the Town of Buckeye, until lately a proud if tiny outpost in the midst of the wide Sonoran Desert west of Phoenix. Buckeye was the point in the car trip when thoughtful and experienced fathers would shout out, “Heads up, kids. This is your last chance to use the potty before we get to California.” This was not literally true, but Buckeye was at the frontier of a land where public facilities of any kind could be hours apart.
That’s all changing, of course. They discovered a huge aquifer under Buckeye, and now it’s on track to be the fourth, third, or even second most-populous city in Arizona — and possibly the largest in land area. From the Arizona Republic:
Buckeye is a place where the best breakfast in town is right on Main Street, where a man still feels comfortable leaving his car running as he jets inside a corner store.
It’s a place where you tell someone to meet you at “the Sonic” because there’s only one.
Signs, though, hint things soon will be sharply different for a town that could someday be as large as Phoenix. The acres of empty land are filling up with plats for homes that will make up more than 30 master-planned communities like Verrado. Town Council meetings provide standing room only and are filled with developers holding poster boards with more plans for Buckeye’s future. The numbers say the town could have 1 million people by 2025, up from about 25,000 now.
And most of those 25,000 people are new arrivals. The town’s population was 8,000 in 2000. Folks in other parts of the country have no way of getting their minds around that much growth, that fast. This is one of the signal triumphs of the Phoenix metropolitan area, sixty years of expertise at managing — and surviving — extreme growth.
At 230 square miles now, Buckeye already is larger than Tucson, Mesa and Seattle. Even one of the town’s planned communities, Douglas Ranch, is 55 square miles, larger than Tempe.
The proposed annexation would put Buckeye closer to its planning area of 600-plus square miles and further away from its past as a sleepy, rural community.
“Most people don’t have any idea how big Buckeye is,” said Bob Bushfield, its community development director. “If we continue to annex all the property around, we will be every bit as big as Phoenix.”
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
From the Business Journal of Phoenix:
Arizona ranks well in terms of economic growth and potential, according to a study released Tuesday.
A new report by a research group called Federal Funds Information for States ranks Arizona first among states in terms of economic momentum.
The FFIS study found Arizona with strong growth in terms of jobs, personal income and population. Nevada ranked second, Louisiana last.
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate
Last Winter I represented a couple who bought a home from a pair of ancients who had lived in their house for over 30 years. During their long tenure, they never ran across a memento that they didn’t want to keep. So although we gave them a long escrow, by the last 5 days they hadn’t made a dent in emptying their nest. The seller’s agent, Dan Peacock, a fine Realtor whose license is currently with Homesmart, worked some magic and the house was empty at close, and at the time that’s all I cared about.
But, have you ever found yourself in this situation: surrounded by mountains of stuff, so much that you no longer have any idea of what you have, so much that it’s crowding you out of enjoying your home? And so much that you’re overwhelmed at the thought of how to go about getting rid of it? I was there earlier this year when I sold the family home, which I had bought from my parents eight years earlier. The home was full of memories. Memories of my youngest sister going to Senita Elementary then learning to drive and cruising MetroCenter then going to prom at Moon Valley. Her wedding gown was still hanging in the laundry room and her children’s kindergarten projects for Grandma and Grandpa were still tacked to walls and taped to cupboards. On top of those were my own memories. Memories of my life in the house during the last years of my late husband’s life: Decorating ideas we had cut out from Phoenix Home & Garden and Architectural Digest. Pretty stones we had collected along the shores of Southern California. And more recent memories with Greg and Cameron: Dried flowers from my wedding bouquet. Michael Jordan and Star Wars posters in Cameron’s bedroom. Memories that will last a lifetime, but stuff that was consuming my thoughts and my time. We had moved from that house over a year before, but still all that stuff was there, and we had sold the house.
There was a solution. Yesterday sellsius° real estate blog mentioned it Read more