Archives (page 12 of 17)

February 16, 2009

Prices for Phoenix-area real estate are very low, but are they low enough to justify a run on the market?

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Prices for Phoenix-area real estate are very low, but are they low enough to justify a run on the market?

Looking for some rock-solid investment advice? Buy low. Sell high.

That seems obvious enough — except it often turns out to be the opposite of what people do. There are legions of people in the Phoenix market who bought high and are having to sell low.

The trouble is, it’s hard to know which is which until after the fact. Many people bought homes during the boom at what seemed to be high prices, only to sell them a year later for even higher prices.

That was a very fun game to play — until the music stopped and left you without a chair. Many putative experts — I was one of them — thought the boom would go on even longer than it did.

But what about now? Prices are very low, but are they low enough to justify a run on the market?

The technical answer is yes. Phoenix-area home prices are nicely aligned with incomes, and premium rental homes are comfortably cash-flow-positive from the first tenant.

The market’s response is no. So far, there hasn’t been a fire-sale mentality in the marketplace to go along with the fire-sale prices. I’m working with several investors who are picking up multiple properties, often for cash, but there is nothing like the activity we saw in 2004 or 2005.

But all that could change very soon. The Fed continues to hold interest rates very low, and there is talk of forcing the rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage down to 4%. And the so-far-unadopted stimulus plan includes a $8,000 tax credit for first-time home-buyers.

Lenders will find a way to turn that tax-credit into a short-term loan. And $8,000 is a 10% down-payment on an $80,000 home. Putting 3.5% down on an FHA loan, $8,000 is enough to get an $225,000 property.

If owner-occupant buyers soak up all the excess resale inventory, that should cause prices to stabilize or even start to rise. If, instead, new-home builders use the tax credit to build even more homes in our already-overbuilt market, the bottom will be but a distant dream.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

February 11, 2009

Fannie Mae changes the rules for investor loans: No more than four rental homes? Nope — you’re not done until you get to ten

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Bloomberg:

Fannie Mae, the mortgage-finance company under U.S. government control, will no longer bar real-estate investors from qualifying for its loans if they already own four properties as it seeks to spur housing demand.

The company will expand its limit for investor and second- home loans to as many as 10 properties per borrower, according to a Feb. 6 notice to lenders on Washington-based Fannie’s Web site.

“Bona-fide, experienced investors bringing significant equity to the table will play a key role in the housing recovery,” Brian Faith, a Fannie Mae spokesman, said today in an e-mailed statement.

You still have to qualify, of course. You need good income, good credit, good ratios — and a goodly amount of risk tolerance. But if you have the means to buy two rental homes for cash, you could well have enough in down-payment money to buy eight or ten with leverage.

The implication? Finding cash-flow-positive rentals is easy in the Phoenix area right now. When our markets turn, your appreciation could really add up fast.

February 8, 2009

Are you planning on making expensive changes to your home? Make sure they’ll make sense to future buyers

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Are you planning on making expensive changes to your home? Make sure they’ll make sense to future buyers

I was in a house once where the sellers had spent $20,000 remodeling the kitchen. Black Corian countertops with lime green trim. A black sink with gold-plated fixtures. Black and green marble flooring. And all of it was set off by dramatic spot-lighting, blinding where it hit, gloomy everywhere else.

That kitchen was gauche by Las Vegas casino standards, but the owners could not understand why their house wasn’t selling.

If you’re going to spend money improving your home, be sure your work results in real improvements.

Updating kitchens and bathrooms can be a good idea, but make sure your design decisions fall somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. A bathroom pleasing to a king — or to a gangster — might suit your tastes, but it could make your home hard to sell.

Adding a second story to a ranch home is usually a pretty terrible idea. Like them or not, ranch homes are what they are, and if you violate the low, sleek lines of your home, you may end up with something that looks like the neighborhood goiter.

If you decide to convert that patio into living space, do it in a way that makes architectural sense. A huge family room leading, through the removed double-doorway to yet another huge family room won’t make sense to future buyers. And whether you call it an Arizona room, a Florida room or a Lanai, if it’s not ducted to the main HVAC system and insulated to the same rating as the rest of the home, appraisers will not count it as livable space.

Likewise, a converted garage can be a great way to get a overgrown teenager to move out, but it’s not really a bedroom. The garage is probably worth more as a garage, on resale.

Here’s a useful question: “Would this make sense to me if I were buying this house?” If the answer to that question is not an obvious yes, don’t make the change. No matter what you might want, if your house doesn’t make sense to buyers, it won’t sell.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

February 6, 2009

Downtown living for less: Renaissance Park puts you within easy walking distance of everything downtown without leaving you broke

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

There are a lot of cool places to live in Downtown Phoenix, but few that fall within the financial reach of mere mortals. Renaissance Park, a condo community on 7th Street just north of Washington is the exception.

Check it out:

View Larger Map

You’re seconds from the Diamondbacks and the Suns, right across the street from the Science Museum, and you’re just a skip away from the Herberger Theater, Symphony Hall and Arizona Center. Plus which, you’re new home is right on the brand new Phoenix Light Rail line. You can’t get any more downtown than this for less than half-a-million bucks.

Even so, you’re not sacrificing luxury. Renaissance Park is a sweet place to live, with shady, verdant grounds:

Refreshing pools and spas:

And all the comforts of home:

The unit you’re seeing here, #142, is being offered by Elite Desert Realty for $185,900. There are several others for sale, also at very aggressive prices. The language of real estate is photography, so see more of Renaissance Park by clicking this link.

And if you’re dying to live downtown but didn’t think you could afford it, give us a call at 602-740-7531 and we’ll take a closer look at Renaissance Park and some other Downtown living options you may not have considered.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

February 1, 2009

Remodeling your home — if you do it right — can add to your enjoyment now and to your resale value later

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Remodeling your home — if you do it right — can add to your enjoyment now and to your resale value later

Removing interior walls and low ceilings can make your house feel more open — and more modern. Combined with other improvements — kitchen and bathroom remodeling and energy-efficient windows — opening up your floorplan can add substantially to your enjoyment of your home now, and to its resale value later.

Simply opening the kitchen up to the living and family rooms can make a huge difference. Modern homes are built around the “greatroom” concept, where the kitchen leads to an island which in turn leads to the entertainment space. Whether people are cooking, hanging out or watching television, family and guests are all together, rather than being isolated into separate spaces by function.

A common upgrade people will make to older homes is converting the carport into a garage. This is not a difficult change to make, but there are safety considerations: The door leading from the garage to the house should be fire-rated and self-closing to keep exhaust fumes out of the home.

People also try to convert carports to livable space, often to the home’s detriment. When you step down off the slab, you are stepping out of the house. If you want to convert a carport — or an existing garage or a patio — to livable space, you should start by pouring new slab to the same level as the rest of the home. This is not just a cosmetic issue. You need a better footing for the extra weight the slab will have to bear.

But that’s just the beginning. The walls will need to be built to the same insulation factor as the other exterior walls of the home. And the roof will need reinforcement — and insulation.

It’s not uncommon to see homes that have doubled in square footage by means of converting outdoor spaces to indoor spaces, sometimes with one vast converted patio leading to another. But if these additions are not built to the same standards as the rest of the home — and if they are not ducted to the central heating and air conditioning systems — appraisers will not evaluate them as livable space.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate

January 26, 2009

Looking to make changes in an older production home? Within limits, you can do just about anything you want

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Looking to make changes in an older production home? Within limits, you can do just about anything you want

We talked last week about how production homes are put together in the Phoenix area. Here’s why it matters:

Within limits, you can do just about anything you want to do within your home.

What limits? Whether it is block-construction or wood-frame, the exterior walls of your home are the load-bearing walls. Without expert advice — which includes plans and permits — you should not remove or adapt exterior walls.

You will almost always have a shear wall running through the center of the home, parallel with the peak of the roof. The shear wall prevents lateral motion on the roof. It should only be adapted with the advice of a structural engineer.

Water, sewage and sometimes gas lines are contained within wet walls, and these should only be altered with expert advice.

What’s left? Interior walls. These consist of wood framing covered by drywall. Power lines will run along at about 18 inches above the floor, and cable and telephone lines may have been dropped in from overhead.

That’s it. An interior wall is a drywall curtain dropped in to separate one room from another. Working with appropriate care, you can move or remove interior walls at will.

This can be a big help in older homes. Floorplans from the fifties and sixties can seem byzantine and dark to modern eyes. By blowing open the rooms, you can open up the sight lines and improve the fenestration.

Older homes also lack anything that we might think of as a master suite. The master bedroom will be small, with a small three-quarter bath. You may have to work around wet walls and the shear wall, but it is often relatively simple to combine two bedrooms into a mater suite: Master bedroom, a more-expansive Master Bathroom, a walk-in closet, even a sitting room.

Here’s one more that can be common in older homes: The ducting, especially in hallways, will result in very low ceiling heights. This can all be ripped out and thrown overhead into the truss, resulting in a much more open feel to the home.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

January 20, 2009

Rental homes in greater Phoenix are so cash-flow positive they even leap the Fannie/Freddie hurdle

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

I had an investor put Phoenix rental homes to the FannieMae/FredddieMac test — cash-flow positive with one hand tied behind your back — and our properties passed with flying colors.

Rental homes in metropolitan Phoenix are so cheap, by now, that many investors are simply paying cash to buy them. But suppose you need to qualify for a loan?

Fannie and Freddie will want a 25% down-payment, which is not a bad idea in any case. But the loan underwriter will probably also want documentation that the home will still be cash-flow positive even at 75% of the prevailing market rent.

And guess what? Phoenix qualifies with flying colors.

Just to demonstrate this fact, I looked at seven homes in Coldwater Springs, a golf-course community in suburban Avondale, AZ. This is a premium subdivision, both for rental homes and for resale homes.

Click through to the web site I built for these homes. Nothing is concealed and everything is revealed. These homes are lender-owned, and each of them needs work, but none of them needs much. Figure from $1,000 to $5,000 to bring them into turn-key condition. Another benefit to visiting that site is that you will see the kind of work-product I deliver to out-of-town investors.

A rental property in Coldwater Springs should rent for $950 to $1150, depending on the size of the home. And the community is so avidly sought by homeowners, a former rental should sell at a premium price to owner-occupants on the way out.

You can click here for a cost break-down on a typical Coldwater Springs rental. No smoke and mirrors, no blue-sky assumptions, just the straight dope.

And take note: These homes represent the high end of Phoenix-area lender-owned homes. You can spend a lot less than this for homes in other neighborhoods. They’ll rent for less, but their overall financial performance could be as good or even better.

This is a perfect storm for rental home investors in greater Phoenix: Premium homes going for fire-sale prices at historic low interest rates. I represented tenants for two years and investors since then. I understand what tenants like and what they hate. I can help you find premium rentals that will stay rented to premium tenants and will command premium prices on resale.

But no opportunity is perfect. It may be quite a while before the Phoenix real estate market recovers. But these homes should easily self-amortize while you wait for positive appreciation to resume. Email me or pick up the phone and dial 602-740-7531 to discuss how to proceed. (Outside of Arizona? Dial 1-800-508-5430.)

I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I can handle as much of the process as you need by remote-control. I have relationships with everyone from property managers to handymen, and my investors have been very successful at keeping their properties rented. I’d love to talk about how I can help you achieve similar results.

January 19, 2009

A pocket history of production home-building in the Phoenix-area

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

A pocket history of production home-building in the Phoenix-area

Production building of homes in the Valley of the Sun began in 1938. Before then, homes were one-off affairs, each one built like a tailored suit. If you tour these old homes, you can see builders playing with the techniques that would lead to production building.

The big breakthrough was the concrete slab foundation. Older homes in the Phoenix area are constructed on built-up foundations, just like homes back east. But because Phoenix doesn’t suffer hard freezes in the Winter, it was possible to pour a slab, then build the house atop it.

The benefit? If you could grade the land to a level plane, you could use the same plans over and over again. Starting in 1938, production homes — you might call them subdivision or tract homes — began to spring up all over the Valley.

Two-bedrooms, one-bath at 900 square feet was a common footprint. The move-up model was three-bedrooms, one-bath at 1,100 square feet. An evaporative cooler on the roof and a wall heater in the hallway between the living room and the bedrooms. The walls were plaster at first, but this soon gave way to drywall.

These building techniques were perfected just in time. The end of World War Two was the beginning of the huge and on-going growth surge in the Valley, and production builders could not put up tract homes fast enough.

There was a mason’s strike in Phoenix in the mid-seventies, with the result that builders switched from block-construction to wood-framing.

“Stick” houses were even cheaper to build, and wood-frame roof trusses made possible the kind of soaring vaulting and unimpeded sight-lines we expect in modern homes. Generally speaking, the interior walls in a production home can be moved or removed at will.

People can be hypercritical of the sameness of production home construction, but it was of a piece with twentieth-century mass manufacturing. Because builders learned how to contain costs and build efficiently, it was suddenly possible for ordinary people to be able to buy brand-new homes.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

January 11, 2009

Doing the right kinds of repairs and remodeling to your home is the key to maintaining its resale value

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Doing the right kinds of repairs and remodeling to your home is the key to maintaining its resale value

Cleaning, painting and doing small repairs around the house are just about unlimited virtues for homeowners.

They’re a matter of necessity for people who hope to sell their homes. Only the best-prepared homes are selling at premium prices right now, with the rest going at or near the lender-owned price.

But even if you’re not selling, staying on top of the little things promotes your enjoyment of the home, and it helps to sustain its resale value. At a minimum, regular maintenance will help you catch small problems before the become big, expensive problems.

But if doing little jobs matters a lot, what about doing big jobs? Should you redo the kitchen and bathrooms while the market is low? Should you convert the carport into a garage and the patio into a family room? Should you add on a brand new master suite?

The definitive answer to all these questions is: Maybe.

Remember that the Phoenix real estate market may be down for years to come. It’s possible you won’t see a return on your investment for quite a while.

On the other hand, if you know you’re going to be in the home for the next five years, and if a new kitchen will substantially improve your enjoyment of the home, it might be worth doing.

Labor can be very cheap right now, and money is easy to obtain if you have equity in your home. But you have to resist the urge to over-improve for your neighborhood. Brazilian Blue Marble is gorgeous, but it probably won’t be worth more than Corian or Formica countertops on resale.

Serious additions are a bigger question. If you know you’re going to be in the home for five years, you’re probably okay. If the addition makes sense — if you live in a neighborhood of two bedroom homes, adding a master suite makes great sense — then go ahead.

Build with permits and follow the building codes, though. The worst thing you can do is spend money and time on supposed improvements that actually reduce the resale value of the home.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

January 3, 2009

If selling is not a viable option, you need to fall in love with your house all over again

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

If selling is not a viable option, you need to fall in love with your house all over again

The foreclosure market dominates the news, but it remains that good old-fashioned American homeowners occupy the overwhelming majority of Phoenix-area homes. That’s the good news.

And here’s some even better news: If you have significant equity in your home, you can probably refinance right now, reducing your monthly payment.

But here’s the bad news: Unless you absolutely have to, you probably won’t be moving for at least five years.

Don’t believe the number you see on that refi appraisal. At most, your house is worth the same amount as a comparable lender-owned home, plus the net cost to bring that home up to the livability of yours.

Swallow hard. You may have read in the paper that Americans lost $2 trillion in real estate equity in 2008. That’s a specious number. Money is the stuff you can fold up and spend. The equity in your home is unrealized money. You weren’t rich when your home was worth a lot, and you’re not poor now that it isn’t.

But what you are is stuck, practically speaking.

You don’t want to sell your house for what it can bring right now. If you do, you will lose money. But, refi or not, you’re making your payments.

If your home really was purely an investment, like a stock, it might be wise to dump it, take your lumps and move on.

But your home is not only where your heart is, it is very probably where most if not all of your savings are. You need to wait for the market to turn so you can sell at a profit.

So what should you do?

My advice: Paint.

Patch that stucco and paint it. Caulk the wood at the eaves and the trim and paint it. Clean out the house one room at a time and patch and paint the walls, repairing and painting the molding.

You’re stuck in your house for the next five years. It’s time to fall in love with it all over again. When there’s nothing you can do to improve the real estate market — paint.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

December 28, 2008

“U.S adults” may not want foreclosed homes, but homebuyers sure do

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

“U.S adults” may not want foreclosed homes, but homebuyers sure do

Did you see in the news where only 47% of U.S. adults would consider buying a foreclosed home?

An amazing number, isn’t it? What does it mean?

Almost nothing, of course. The real estate market in Phoenix, along with many, many other cities, is dominated by foreclosed homes right now. They are virtually all that is selling.

So how could so many homes be selling if so many people are averse to buying them?

This is a nice lesson in the uselessness of public opinion polls. “U.S. adults” are not homebuyers. Homebuyers are homebuyers. Asking U.S. adults how they feel about sushi or blackberry wine will tell you nothing about their sales, either.

What the survey does tell us is that the news has gotten out about the sometimes difficult process of buying a foreclosed home — especially a short sale — and about the often dismal condition of those homes.

And yet, foreclosed homes are selling and virtually nothing else is.

Why?

Because they’re cheap, that’s why. Even in the nicest neighborhoods, a lender-owned home will sell at a discount of 50% to 80%, compared to owner-occupied homes. In not-as-nice communities in the West Valley, you can pick up a stucco-and-tile 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1,500 square foot home with a two-car garage for $50,000.

As I write this, there are 120 homes like that, all built 1995 and later, listed for $75,000 or less.

Let the price rise to $100,000 and there are 690 available right now.

Last month, 191 of those homes sold for $100,000 or less. That’s an implied absorption rate of 3.61 months, arguably a seller’s market.

So on the one hand an undifferentiated population of U.S. adults, who may or may not be in the market to buy a home, has a generally negative opinion of foreclosed homes.

And on the other hand there is a land-office business in foreclosed homes.

We will see many years’ worth of foreclosures in our market. How we feel about that in the abstract makes no difference.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

December 20, 2008

Workable real estate deals may require even more creativity

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Workable real estate deals may require even more creativity

I do a lot of work with buy-and-hold rental home investors, more and more of whom are able to come into Phoenix with all-cash offers. Poor me, I know.

But: I’ve been spending a lot of my time, lately, thinking about “triangle-trade” strategies — old-style funding mechanisms that we were happy to forget all about when money was easy.

So picture a buy-and-hold investor with 100% equity who wants the best deal he can get when he sells his former rental home. Why not do a lease-purchase instead of a straight sale? The investor can help his buyers accumulate a down-payment, perhaps working with them to improve their credit score at the same time. The investor gets a higher purchase price, the buyers get a lower monthly payment, everybody wins.

Or how about selling with a contract-for-deed? There are a lot of people out there with great incomes but lousy credit — more every day. If an investor — or ordinary homeowner — is willing to take on the risk of a carrying back a note, the home can sell now, rather than languishing on the market.

Or if the seller isn’t able to carry the whole mortgage, how about carrying back a second loan? If the seller has the equity, and if that will swing the balance with the buyer’s lender, it can make sense.

San Diego Realtor Don Reedy has come up with his own blast from the past: Parents help their kids get into homes by co-signing on the loan and helping with the payments, then share in the equity on resale.

Single people or single parents or childless couples could do the same sort of thing with a larger home: Go in on the home together as tenants-in-common, using their combined income to qualify for the loan, then paying the mortgage and sharing in the equity on a pro-rated basis.

Buyers are not in short supply, nor are homes available for sale. Creativity could make all the difference, going forward, in putting workable deals together.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, investment, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

December 13, 2008

For some, the most financially-astute course of action may be to fake their way to foreclosure

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

For some, the most financially-astute course of action may be to fake their way to foreclosure

Looking for some good news in the Phoenix residential real estate market? So is everyone else.

New foreclosures are down, as are new foreclosure filings. Lenders are working with homeowners to help them stay in their homes, just in time for Christmas. That’s good news right?

Maybe. It turns out that, of the folks who negotiated loan workouts in the first quarter of 2008, 60% are back in default on their loans.

It gets worse. The typical newer stucco and tile West Valley tract home lost 7.41% of its value. In November. Year-over-year, that house is down 35.46%. Compared to its high in December of 2005, that property is down 48%.

Now there is a silver lining. If you bought your home in 2003 or before, and if you have resisted the impulse to refinance it, you’re probably still ahead of the game, at least by a little bit. And with interest rates at historic lows, this might be the time, finally, to refinance to lower payment.

And investors and first-time homebuyers could not have things better: The selection of available homes is still very broad, prices are below replacement costs, and interest rates are deliciously low.

Better news — for people who don’t own homes: Prices could go a lot lower, and interest rates could drop even more.

But what, then, is the implication for loan workouts? Until home prices stabilize and start to rise again, a loan workout against substantial negative equity might not make the best financial sense.

As we talked about last week, the hit on your credit rating from a foreclosure is a terrible thing. But it’s plausible to me that you could recover from that faster than your home will once again be worth what you’re paying for it.

And that’s the worst news of all: We have mismanaged our economy so dreadfully that, for many people, the most financially-astute course of action they can take is to pretend to be deadbeats, to fake their way to foreclosure. It worked on Wall Street and it can work on Mockingbird Lane, too.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

December 6, 2008

Seriously, who’s a better risk for a mortgage than someone who has already lost a home to foreclosure?

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

Seriously, who’s a better risk for a mortgage than someone who has already lost a home to foreclosure?

We talked last week about credit flexibility among merchants as they try to find ways around the banking crunch. The flip side of the same coin is how the credit marketplace will react, going forward, to home foreclosures.

You’ve heard all your life that a foreclosure is second only to a bankruptcy in the way it will ruin your credit. This is still true, but “ruin” may turn out to be an adjustable calamity.

Here’s why: A lot of people are going through foreclosure. Ninety percent or more of homeowners are unaffected by the wave of bank repossessions, but that still leaves millions of people who are going to have a foreclosure on their credit for the next seven years.

What’s going to happen to those folks when they go to the furniture store or the jewelry store or the car dealership? They might end up paying a higher interest rate, but they’re still going to get financing.

I have been advising my investor clients for months to ignore recent foreclosures on credit reports. Past performance on every other sort of credit account matters a lot. But if landlords refuse to rent to folks who have lost their homes, they will be turning away half or more of the tenant population.

My take is that, right now, a recent foreclosure is like hospital debt: If everyone else was getting paid before, during and after the financial catastrophe, you just have to look past the elephant in the room.

And here’s the funny part: I am sure this will apply to home loans in due course, also. If mortgage money remains freely available, lenders will find a way to overlook recent foreclosures in order to underwrite new home loans.

We can hope that, this time, interest rates will reflect the true risk lenders are taking on. But this country runs on credit. Just because a borrower recently defaulted on a six-figure debt, that’s no reason to withhold the unlimited boon that is homeownership.

In America, we can sell ourselves on anything — provided we don’t have to pay for it today.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

December 2, 2008

Four ways to experience the F.Q. Story Home Tour this weekend

by Greg Swann

Sun City Real Estate Broker

Here are four great ways you can take in the holiday goodness of the F.Q. Story Historic District Home Tour this weekend:

Get thee hence. The tour is on Lynwood Street this year and runs Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.
Tour our past F.Q. Story listings. We’ve listed a number of stunning historic homes in Story in the past. Here are a few of them:
Tour the F.Q. Story Historic District house-by-house. We love these homes. We have photos of hundreds of F.Q. Story homes. You can wander through the neighborhood from home, taking a peek at everything.
Join us at Open House. We don’t have a home listed in Story right now — our listings are selling in 43 days, on average, in 2008. But we have an amazing home for sale just a few blocks east, at 56 West Willetta Street. The home is a 1926 Craftsman, roomy and comfortable, with a heated pool and spa. Even better, you’re just a short walk from the new light rail line, which opens at the end of the month. If you’re coming down to Story for the tour, be sure to drop in and see us. We’ll be there from 11 am to 5 pm.

View Larger Map
Join us at 56 West Willetta Street, Phoenix, AZ 85003
Sunday, December 7th, 2008, 11 am to 5 pm

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate