Category: Real Estate (page 166 of 266)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

No, wait. Appearances to the contrary, that is not the Church of Darth Vader. It’s the brand new Tempe Center for the Arts — a concert venue, because Phoenix can never have enough empty concert venues.

It’s built near a working freight railroad line.

It’s built in the glide path of Skyharbor Airport.

It’s built in the flood plain of the Salt River.

Who says taxpayers are dupes?

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in the Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Appraisal, inspection could swing the balance toward sellers

It’s not fun to be a home seller right now. We’ve talked about why your home must be priced right, prepared right and presented right in order to sell. But — guess what? — even that might not be enough.

There are subdivisions where twenty or more essentially identical houses are for sale. There may be at most one buyer for all of those homes in any given month. Still worse, that buyer’s loan might not hold up all the way through the closing process.

The good news is that the belt-tightening the mortgage industry has been going through may be loosening up by a notch or two. There will be no more reckless loans to unqualified borrowers, but buyers with good income, good credit and good debt ratios are qualifying for very aggressive interest rates. And jumbo loan borrowers are being welcomed more warmly than they were a week or two ago.

But the problem remains: There can be so much inventory that buyers are literally paralyzed. On the one hand, they want to see everything before making a choice. On the other, they rightly fear that prices might be even lower a few months from now.

What should you do as a seller? Whatever it takes.

Here are a couple of ideas:

First, have the house appraised, price the home below that appraisal and leave the appraisal report out where buyers can see it.

Second, have the home professionally inspected. Do all of the repairs in the inspection report, then have the inspector back to confirm your work. When everything is ship-shape, leave that report out where buyers can see it.

You can’t control lenders or interest rates. You can’t control the price of homes into the future. What you can do is take away every buyer objection over which you have control.

Nothing matters more than price, so if you won’t price your home to the current market, you needn’t bother with anything else. Your house will not sell. But if you’re committed to doing whatever it takes, these ideas could swing Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tipped again by Poor and Stupid, novelist Orson Scott Card discovers everything that’s wrong with one-size-fits-all municipal zoning laws:

I’m not urging that the government mandate any more absurd mileage requirements for cars, or ration gasoline, or any other absurd proposals. Hybrids are great, for the things they’re great for. But even hybrids still burn gas, and if we could drive less, then hybrids would save even more gasoline.

In fact, all that I want government to do, locally and at higher levels, is to stop with the regulations that force us to use cars for everything, and replace them with regulations that permit us to walk or bike.

Right now, in most locations zoning laws force developers to create neighborhoods with houses of about the same size and cost, on roughly the same size lot, while forbidding any retail within walking distance.

Meanwhile, those same laws generally forbid the construction of new neighborhoods that mix income levels, house sizes, and densities.

(In Greensboro, we do have mixed-use zones that permit some aspects of a walking neighborhood, but it is only used in specific new developments, not for regions of the city large enough to make a difference. Most of the city is still zoned in the old way.)

It’s as if government looked at the beloved old neighborhoods that people drive through with yearning and nostalgia, and banned them.

The result is that the poor are shunted off into isolated islands, where crime thrives, employment is remote, and the poor have to own cars just to get a job. Meanwhile, most people can’t walk or bike to any useful destination, because the law has forbidden retail or office buildings anywhere near where people live.

I have no problem with allowing people to continue to live in pedestrian-hostile neighborhoods, if they want to. I just want the law to allow the construction and adaptation of low-car-use neighborhoods.

That means allowing low-parking retail to be built close to new and existing residential neighborhoods, like the old-fashioned “Main Street” town, where a commercial strip leads immediately to residential side streets.

In a town the size of Greensboro, this doesn’t mean one downtown that Read more