Author: Greg Swann (page 175 of 209)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If you list, you last,” runs the Realtor’s mantra. This is true to a degree: It assumes you will last long enough to get a listing and for that listing to sell. It’s no accident that most agents start out working with buyers. It’s harder work — from the traditional point of view — but buyers will be more forgiving of a lack of experience, and working with buyers can require a smaller up-front, out-of-pocket investment.

In any case, I didn’t list very much in my early years as a Realtor. I crashed and burned on an early listing, and I didn’t race back to the wreckage until I had learned a lot more about what I wanted to do. Even on that listing, we were doing a lot of radically-innovative things, but I had made the classic new agent’s mistake: I was drawing huge traffic to a home that was over-priced.

After that bad first experience, I listed when I couldn’t avoid it: For pre-existing clients. Listing, lock-box, sign, flyer — but also price, preparation and presentation. We weren’t gun-shy, but we wanted to perfect the idea of our kind of listing before we rolled it out in any major way.

As it happens, we hit our stride as listers just as the Phoenix real estate market oscillated to an absurd frenzy. We did a lot more work last Summer than we actually needed to do: Web sites, open houses, neighborhood canvassing, etc. — when all we actually needed to do was go down to the Safeway and whisper that we had a house for sale.

But we got really good results really quickly, and we learned a lot about the things we do now — when selling any house, even a perfect house at a perfect price, is a major undertaking.

This is from our seller’s web page:

Take a look at this web site.

This is the site we built for a house we recently listed in the F.Q. Story historic district of Phoenix. It happens that the home was owned by one our favorite clients, but that’s beside the point: This is the work Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Phoenix-area real estate market’s three-month experiment with stasis came to an abrupt end in October: Although sales levels were normal, as compared with October 2003, the most-recent October before the real estate boom, both asking and selling prices dropped precipitously among the homes tracked in the October 2006 edition of the BloodhoundRealty.com Market-Basket of Homes.

Average prices for Market Basket homes in October were down 4.07%, compared to September, a difference of $10,327. Year-over-year, prices are down 7.97%, and down 9.88% from the December 2005 high. Prices in October were strongly affected by deep discounting by new home builders. Even so, two-year appreciation on an average Market Basket home is 38.21%. Three-year appreciation is 63.15%.

A total of 162 sales were recorded, down from September’s total of 183. Market-Basket homes spent an average of 103 days on market, 3 days more than in September. For comparison purposes, 149 Market Basket homes sold in October of 2003, the last relatively normal year, in an average of 54 days.

As has been the case in recent months, many Market-Basket homes are selling at or above list price. A few deeply-discounted properties pulled down the average – most notably deeply discounted builder’s spec homes. Average discounting netted out to 1.96%, down from 2.03% in September.

Inventories of available Market Basket homes continue their decline. There are now 1,229 homes available for sale in the Market-Basket, where there were 1,337 in September, 1,406 in August and 1,506 in July. With sales of 162 homes, the implied absorption rate is 7.58 months, up from 7.31 months in September, but down significantly from almost 10 months in July. A six-month absorption rate is considered normal. The number of homes listed as “Sale Pending” is 191, up from 165 in September.

Based on the idea of the Consumer Price Index market-basket of goods and services, the Market-Basket of Homes uses average sales prices for a small subset of all Valley home sales to get a clearer idea of what is happening in the middle of the bell curve. The alternative method, striking a median among all closed transactions, introduces too many extraneous Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reflecting upon today’s Arizona Republic column, here is a story I’ve been sitting on all week:

Work is under way to build a bridge on Cotton Lane and expand the road from Maricopa County 85 to Estrella Parkway.

The project will produce a half-mile, six-lane bridge over the Gila River complete with bike lanes and sidewalks.

The Maricopa County Department of Transportation has partnered with Goodyear and developers to coordinate and pay for the $59 million project.

With Estrella Mountain Ranch and the planned King Ranch communities expanding or sprouting, the project becomes necessary to serve the area’s new residents, said Bill Hahn, a project manager with the county transportation department.

A six-lane bridge…

Lose the sidewalks and bike path and it could be converted to an eight-lane bridge…

This is not the emptiest land in Arizona, but it is close — for now. The trouble is, Estrella Mountain Ranch is maybe five percent built, with plans for 30,000 more homes. There are other huge projects planned for the immediate area, and The Sprawl Machine is going to start growing northward from Casa Grande and Gila Bend, as well.

I think this enormous bridge is de facto stake-driving for the unplanned, unannounced, unwhispered-about extension of the SR-303 Freeway south to the Interstate 8 Freeway.

I don’t even think it’s a horrible idea, stipulating that they’re going to build the Freeway anyway. Better to build the bridge right, even by sleight-of-hand, than to have to replace it later.

But: It’s sleazy to build a Freeway bridge without telling the tax-payers that they just signed up to build the whole Freeway.

And: The tax-payers shouldn’t build the damn Freeway in the first place…

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

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my column in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link). Presumably, there’s nothing here to annoy Realtors or brokers, so I can have a Friday free of vitriolic anonymous phone calls. We’re back to money again next week, though, so my relief will be short-lived.

 
Government needs to stay out to stop sprawl

It seems reasonable to suppose that someday, the Sun Valley Parkway will be called the Loop 404 freeway.

By then, Loop 303 might stretch south all the way to Interstate 8 and east all the way to Fountain Hills, and from there all the way south to Apache Junction and Coolidge.

Already, people are talking about turning Northern Avenue into a freeway connecting Loop 101 and Loop 303.

All of this is simply the inexorable logic of the “Sprawl Machine” in action.

How does the Sprawl Machine work?

First, developers put up houses on remote farmland, where the land is cheap. There are no roads, schools, libraries, fire stations, etc., but the developers know that the new residents will clamor for those things as soon as they move in.

Politicians, scared to death of negative opinion, build all these missing amenities, adding value to all the remaining unbuilt homes and undeveloped land.

The politicians finally get wise and impose “impact fees,” taxes assessed in advance to pay for the amenities that will be built as the new homes rise.

The developers argue that this makes the homes less affordable, which is true. The politicians argue that the new residents are bearing the costs of the new burdens they occasion, which is also at least somewhat true.

But here are two more true statements that you will seldom hear uttered aloud:

In our current mixed economy, if the politicians said, “Sorry, folks, you moved where you shouldn’t have,” eventually developers would stop trying to build in places where municipalities don’t provide services.

In a truly free market, developers would build all the amenities we’re talking about (and then some) at a particular project, or they wouldn’t build the project at all.

The current mess is occasioned by government intrusion into real estate.

On the one hand, developers build where they shouldn’t. On the other, Read more