Sacramento Real Estate Blog

Several months back I published a link to a Sacramento Zip Code map that another webmaster had published.  It was amazing how many people clicked through to the blog post with that link, so clearly lots of folks are interested in finding out where one zip code begins and another ends.  I guess snail mail is still popular.

Ever since, every so often I’d think to myself that I wanted a better zip code map if I could lay my hands on one.  Better in this case meant something resizable, clickable, that sort of thing — the kind of thing someone publishing web pages containing real estate in certain zip codes or another would consider “better”.

Also, better meant I’d be able to use it without spending a lot of money and / or violating someone else’s copyright, which I had a feeling the guy I was linking to was doing.

Well, it turns out that everything I found was either worse, very expensive, or also subject to copyright.

As I was looking into how to get Googlemaps to do such a trick, I came across Matt Cutts’ Fun With Zip Codes article, which has little enough to do with Googlemaps (except by way of showing you what you might need to know once you’ve looked up the appropriate Googlemaps API, which is GPolygon).  But the article does show you to have fun with zip codes (as promised), if by fun you mean using an open source plotting tool and US census data to draw the picture above.

Well, yes, that’s fun, assuming one can make James Joyce roll over in his grave at the same time.

The other day I mentioned that I had begun work on some new software to enable me to display more listings in many different ways — by city, price, subdivision, or what have you.  When complete, this software will unify and supplant the three or four different scripts and exports I run to provide the Sacramento duplex, new homes, and condo listings on this site, and the Granite Bay subdivision listings on that site.

This project is progressing fairly well, somewhat better than expected in fact, so I should have something to show for it in a week or less.  I say it’s going better than expected partly because PHP makes coding to mysql easier than expected.  I always knew PHP was a cakewalk, but it’s even more of a joy to work in a full LAMP environment.

It’s also going better than expected because I have a tendency to announce and begin projects that don’t get finished.  This one’s looking like it won’t fall into that category.

I guess I’m not the only one whoever did this sort of thing, because there’s a tee shirt for that, too.

I should probably become a ThinkGeek affiliate if I’m going to keep this up.  Until I do, I should have this disclosure:

If you click on one of these ThinkGeek links, I make a 0% commission.

I’ve published some comparative real estate data for the following Sacramento Counties:  Sacramento, Amador, El Dorado, and Placer.

It’s pretty dry stuff, even for me, but you might enjoy it if you know without looking it up what the shirt at right is about.

If you do know what the shirt at right is about without looking it up, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this as well, and you’ll realize that this shirt is actually real estate related.

Word of honor:  I will work on being less obtuse.

Due in part to the high volume of business we’re generating — and with a view to generating even more — Elite Properties is looking to grow our organization by hiring a few more of the best real estate agents in the business.  We offer a congenial, small-company environment.  We prefer to spend our money on great people rather than offices, so we’re able to offer competitive compensation ratios at all levels of experience.  We primarily hire agents with one or more years of experience, but would consider a strong newcomer as well depending on the person.  We only hire agents with the highest ethical standards, who believe in providing an excellent level of care to their clients.  (There’s a pretty good description of how we do business on the home page here — so if that sounds like how you like to work we would love to talk to you).

We especially want to talk to you if you are:

• An average to excellent producer either on the listing side or selling side, or both, who is primarily interested in working with clients in Sacramento and/or Placer County.
• A salesperson who enjoys writing.  We’d also would be very interested in talking to experienced prose writers (commercial, creative, technical, etc.) who would like an opportunity to learn a real estate sales career in which their writing talent can be fully utilized.  Please note that this is a 100% commission opportunity that can be pursued either part or full time by the right candidate.
• Highly motivated to succeed in the Internet marketplace, and wanting to work with a recognized leader in this area who can fully support your efforts.

For a confidential interview, please contact John Lockwood directly at (530) 672-9160.

Being the egocentric narcissist I am, I don’t usually do testimonials to other bloggers. But look: there was this guy, Athol Kay, who’d occasionally pop by and comment on a post of mine. So I finally broke down and decided (in between glances at the mirror): gee whiz, great wonderful egocentric narcissist that I am, I can afford to take a slight vacation from this one-party orgy of self-admiration to read someone else besides me.

So I clicked on the handy backlink that Wordpress provided, and lo and behold, I became an Athol Kay fan. I mean, look at this Bad MLS Photo of the Day, for example, or any of the other ones. This is hilarious stuff. And look at these cute kids. No but seriously, this is all very engaging stuff.

I wish I could find out how to steal the Bad MLS Photo of the Day idea without looking like I stole it. Perhaps I could post it in French or something, and disguise myself under the pseudonym, Andre LaPlume. (Hey, it worked for Oscar Madison).

So anyway, I was poking around on this great Connecticut blog, and I thought I’d write about it, because I’d become a fan.

I thought this was important, because I remember how happy I was when I found out that after blogging ever since the Civil War, I had finally acquired a fan.

Back in the Civil war, we used to blog with telegraphs and muskets, if you must know. We were too busy fighting Johnnie Reb back in those days to give much thought to having fans.

So you should read Athol Kay if you move to Connecticut, folks. Or better yet, read me after you move to Sacramento from Connecticut. (I moved to California from Connecticut, as it happens, but we stopped in Santa Cruz and Cupertino before making it up here). But that’s beside the point. The point is, we totally have better weather.

Plus: we get to say “totally”.

Having several agents doing a great job with our clients is giving me the opportunity to do a few more rounds of working on our various web sites.  We still have yet to convert a few of the less popular ones to the “Elite Propeties” brand, for example.  Once you start to get over seven hundred or so indexed pages, you end up with a “maintenance problem”, but that’s a good problem to have because its pretty hard not to have some reach at that scale.

Of course, one can always do more, which is why we’re going to be putting together some new software to allow us to publish more listings, more often, in more different and creative ways than we can now.  The main benefit of this for our clients is that our sellers will be able to have their home listed not only in the MLS and on our featured properties page, but also in a very targeted way on a page that’s likely to appeal specifically to buyers of that type of home.  Many of the pages on our sites have always been a sort of hybrid between our IDX provider and information we customize for you from the MLS, so in a way this is nothing new.  However, we think this will drastically improve the frequency with which we publish this information as well as the variety of what we’ll be able to do.

We’ll have more to say on this once we start rolling it out, which should be some time in the next couple of weeks.

I am very pleased to announce that our Amador County office hired a terrific new agent this week, Jaime Pubebla.  Jaime comes to us from a real estate firm in Jackson, and I believe she’ll be a crucial player in getting our Amador County office on the map.  Oh wait, it’s already on the map.  Well, you know what I mean — the top of the map — or the charts, or something.

Welcome, Jaime!  It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Come to think of it, if Bridget keeps up the good work, we may end up so huge that we end on this map. 

We’re probably not frightening enough, however.  We’re all pretty friendly.

Real Estate is the best of jobs, and real estate is the worst of jobs.  The potential earnings are outstanding, and the potential earnings are dreadful.  You don’t sit in a cubicle all day long, but you do sit in the front seat of a car.

At least you get a big window, and the view changes a lot.

One of the downsides of the business is that sometimes we fall victim to other peoples’ opinions of us.  (Actually I suppose that’s a downside of being a social animal in general).  In my online colleagues, especially, I often see a sort of Stockholm syndrome at work.  I don’t mean to suggest that our clients or the general public are always and forever beating us up.  I’ve been fortunate that the overwhelming majority of my clients have been fabulous to work for.  Howerver, I do think that we have to jump through more hoops to earn our clients’ trust than some other business people might.

Here are some of the signs that you may be suffering from real estate Stockholm Syndrome:

• You begin to wonder if you should have been selling houses to all those people during the boom when prices were so high, even though that was the price at the time, and your buyers were not ambiguous at all about wanting to buy them.
• You spend time and devote space on your web site or blog to discussing businesses or people who — one way or another — are trying to take food out of your mouth, as though the public would be better served by your poverty than by your success.
• You think having leads is a bad thing.
• You take a dim view of one or more accepted and legal industry practices for making money, such as paying referral fees to other Realtors®.
• You believe it’s better to be transparent than substantial.
• You’re more focused on the possible mistakes you can make in your promotion efforts than in the natural freedom of expression that is one of the great things about being in a sales profession.
• Picture in the upper right hand corner.  Can’t go anywhere without a picture in the upper right hand corner.  (Read: “I can’t possibly have anything interesting enough to say, so I need illustrations.”)

Here is what I take to be the core etiological process of real estate Stockholm syndrome:

• Someone expected you to be crooked, based on your sales role.
• With that expectation in mind, they treated you differently than if they trusted you.
• You internalized that, and started to behave like a dog avoiding a beating.

By the way, the online form of this is just the tip of the iceberg.  There’s a full article’s worth of the way we do this offline as well.  Here’s a preview:  as a profession, we routinely work either without any assurance of getting paid, and when we do have a contract, we treat it as unenforceable.

May I help you?

Here is are various flavors of cure you might try, depending on your mood:

• Get in touch with your Buddha nature.  (Possible Christian translation:  God don’t make no junk).
• Repeat after Stuart Smalley:  “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.”
• Be more like me, the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Get over it.
• Three pillows and a down comforter.
• Ignore advice.  I recommend you start with mine and work your way up.

As you know, disclaimers and other fine print usually appear at the bottom of the page, but in this case we should state it at the outset: This article includes forward looking statements based on projections of past market data. The accuracy of the data is not guaranteed, and the projections are likely to vary from the real future.

Hey, this is like an ad for stocks. But it isn’t.

It’s a real estate ad. On a real estate web site. Go figure!

In response to an optimistic post of mine that showed that in the 19 months since the peak of the market boom, we’ve only lost the appreciation from the final four months of the boom, a reader was somewhat dissatisfied with the darkness of the shadow of gloom this cast, and asked me to project the depreciation out five years. Well, that’s fair enough, but to give the boom it’s due I begin at the time the Sacramento Bee suggested was a period of 103% appreciation in five years, and project forward ten years from there. The results are over on the right (click to enlarge).

Now let me say it again: we don’t have any data past today, so the real shape of the curve from then on is unknown, and even before then it’s artificially flattened somewhat, but it’s based on what we consider good data. Interested parties should run their own projections.

So let’s look at what we have, even if it’s all just hypothetical. According to data from the Sacramento Bee for appreciation, and from my own research for recent deprecation, the projection at right yields a 45.837% appreciation over 10 years (granted that’s unrealistically precise, but that’s the number). So let’s say you bought a 100,000 house in April, 2000, when interest was at a bad old 8.30% (Source: HSH), and you put 20% down. That means you financed 80,000 at 8.30%. According to our chart, your investment was worth $145,837 ten years later when you decided to sell it and invest in a bubble blog.

Let’s see how you made out. OK, you put $20,000 down at the beginning, and let’s say you paid 2.5% closing costs on $100,000, so that adds $2,500 more for a $22,500 initial investment. Over the course of ten years you also spent $72,414.31 in principle and interest, so you’ve spent a total of $94,914.31 over ten years. When you’re done you sell this property for the full $145,837. After paying off your loan balance of 70,606.05, and 7.5% in closing costs, you net $64,293.18. So let’s subtract out our 94,914.31. Oh rats, we’re about $30,621 in the hole at this point. What a lousy investment real estate is! This really stinks. That’s why I want a bubble blog.

But wait a minute, this house wasn’t sitting vacant during these ten years, you were living in it. So if you didn’t have this house, you’d be paying, oh, I don’t know, $700 a month in rent. Over ten years, that works out to $84,000. Now let’s subtract out our $30,621 that we are in the hole. OK, here’s our net: $53,389.

Now here’s what just happened:

• You got a lousy initial rate of 8.3%.
• Your house has just declined in value for five straight years in a row.
  
• You haven’t paid anyone rent for the last ten years, and yet you still had a place to live.
• You’re $53,379 ahead of what you paid in.
• You have $64,293 in cash in your pocket. One might say you won the $64,000 question, and the question was: “Can I go look at some houses?”

OK, on the plus side we missed the income tax write off on the interest, and on the minus side we didn’t factor in property tax and insurance and maintenance. Call those two omissions a wash. We’re guessing on the rate of decline anyway, so there’s no point in being fastidious about the exact dollar amount.

Now, will prices go down from where they are now? Probably. Is the interest rate today more than two points less than what they are in this example? Definitely.

If I made a mistake on the math, I’m sure someone will call me on it. Meantime, if you’re running a bubble blog or otherwise channeling the ghost of Nostradamus, that’s terrific. I’m happy for you. However, if you want to enjoy the benefits of home ownership, our number, as always, is (877) 735-5657.

There’s a colorful adage I strongly believe in that serves nicely as a topic for this article.  It’s this:  there’s a bolt to fit every nut.  To me, the beautiful thing about developing a company is that I no longer feel the need to be a sort of “universal nut”, because I can get other nuts to work with me.

Alright, come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t the greatest adage to start with.

Let me back track.  Early on in my real estate career, before I began to know what groove I fell into and what I’d end up good at, I felt I had to be great at everything.  I was a kind of Jack of all Trades, because Jack didn’t know which trade would bring in the escrows that — at that time — were few and far between.  So I did things at the time that I wouldn’t dream of doing now.  I hadn’t yet learned what I now take to be a sort of formula for success in this business:  Don’t do everything, but instead, find out what you do well and keep doing it, and be congenial as heck to the folks who are good at something else.

For my first example, I’m going to let you in on a secret:  You shouldn’t hire me as a listing agent.  I don’t mean you shouldn’t hire my company to list your home.  On the contrary.  I have two simply outstanding listing agents on my staff.  I have seen them spend hours and hours and hours working on getting their listings sold — advertising, holding open houses, etc., etc.  If you call me to list your home and you get me on the phone, guess who’s going to get the listing?  It won’t be me.  (Well, by way of full disclosure, it will be me indirectly because I’m the broker, which means I get part of the dollars but 100% of the buck, which by law stop here.)

If you want your home listed by an outstanding listing agent, you shouldn’t hire me, but you definitely should still hire my company.  I recommend you pick up the phone and call either Bridget Felmley-Gay at (530) 306-9111 or Vicki Babcock at (530) 409-1100.  Then start packing.

If you’re an investor, I’m pretty good at that myself, but my real superstar is Susan Norris, and she’s at (916) 849-6421.  Susan is an investor herself, and she loves finding investors homes that will make them money.  Susan’s also the Queen of the Duplex.   (We should get her some kind of blue and gold robe for that).

There are other things I’m not the superstar of, and that’s fine.  Take land, for instance.  I’ve done land, and I’m actually pretty good at it, but it’s not my first choice.  So if you call about land, I’d try one of the handful of agents on my team who really love land — or I might even make a referral outside the company.

Wait a minute.  I think that’s called customer service.   Well hey, good for me.  My job is not to be a superstar of everything, but to find someone who is and have them on my team for you, so when you call, you always get the person who’s outstandingly well suited to the job.

Then again, there are some things I am the superstar of.  I could work with first time buyers all day long and twice on Wednesday.   Also, I love helping people from out of the area to get a sense of the market, prices and schools and so forth in the different neighborhoods, so if you’re not sure if you’re moving yet and you want to kick some ideas around, call me direct at (530) 672-9160.  As for Internet Marketing, that’s my real Superman category.  Get my a blue shirt with an S on it and I’m good to go.  And like all the agents on my team, I’m very good at working with buyers on general residential sales, though once you get past about $600,000 or so and more into the luxury category I have agents who are somewhat stronger in that area than I am.

Fortunately for me, I don’t think the Peter Principle has kicked in yet, so I consider myself quite good at the thing I am:  the broker of record.  I love looking and staying current on real estate law and procedures so our agents — and more importantly, our clients — will be safe and protected from problems and litigation.  I’m a detail guy, a former computer programmer.  You know, a nerd.   I think nerds make good brokers, because we’re used to sitting in cubicles and sifting through details.

Another person who’s outstanding in that area is Becky Nagel, our transaction coordinator.  Becky is one of the best file reviewers around, so I always give her first dibs on the files before I look them over.  (I’m no fool, letting Becky do it first usually means I end up having nothing to do!)  By the way, if you’re an agent in California who needs someone excellent in this category, Becky’s an independent contractor and I’m not yet keeping her busy enough, so let me know if you want me to introduce you.  But you better call me before Elite Properties gets big enough to hire her, because when that happens I’m going to try to hire her directly and you’re going to find someone not so good.

So anyway, that’s what I think we’re good at, and who’s good at what.  I don’t know that I addressed finding the agent that’s right for you — there are all sorts of articles about what questions you’re supposed to ask you’re real estate agent.  As you can guess by now, I recommend that you add to those lists the following:  “What things are you really good at in real estate?”  If your Realtor doesn’t know or answers “everything”, chances are he or she is new.  If they say “X” and you need a “Y”, then ask for a recommendation about who a good “Y” is.

I got your transparency right here here, Alice.  On the moon!

Hey, these offline tools really do make things easier.

Bear with me, but I thought that title would allow me to let the interested robots know that no, I really haven’t abdicated my core topic, while at the same time setting the stage for me just hacking around on yet another blog authoring tool, Microsoft’s LiveWriter (Beta).

So far I like it better than Blogjet, though we’ve got the same no default category thing going on.  (I suspect Wordpress doesn’t expose that). 

On the plus side:  Image handling is easy and intuitive — which Athol mentioned recently as a core feature of Blogjet.  I would like to see something besides Margins / Inherit from Web Log, but what the heck — my marginless images give me more Web 1.0 cred.

Still on the plus side, single character mouse select!  (I use that once every seven years, of course, but there it is).  File Menu where the File menu should be, so Alt F is File and Alt-O is Format, the way God intended.

Surprised the heck out of me on the plus side:  a Firefox “Blog This” Button.  Looks like Microsoft is starting to get it.

Best feature of all is that (so far at least), this tool can be had for the same cost as Wordpress, so get it while it’s free!

Well, I installed the trial version of BlogJet, and here I am kind of playing with it.  Cronin made me.  The license once I’m done playing with it costs $40.00, but I’m not sure I get it.  Blogjet is a tool for authoring blog posts.  Oh wait a minute — isn’t my blog software, Wordpress, a tool for authoring blog posts?

Also, I don’t like it when I can find one or two bugs in the first half hour of using a piece of software.

Blogjet folks, in case you’re Googling yourself:

• The error message returned when you enter an incorrect URL for xmlrpc.php is pretty cryptic for anyone but a developer.  How about adding:  “Possible cause:  you entered the wrong URL [you idiot].”
• Undo should work on titles as well as the body text.  What’s up with that?

In fact, that’s a good way to rate software, it occurs to me.  Half-hour software is software where it takes a half hour to find your first bug.  Two minute software is really poor quality.  Six month software is very robust.  Twenty-year software is suitable for Mars missions.  The first bug in this case was in the configuration process.  Ouch.

It’s nice to have a spell checker, I suppose.  But I have one of those already on Visual Slickedit, and if God had wanted us to spend forty bucks to blog, He wouldn’t have given us cut and paste.  Visual Slickedit is six month software, in case you’re wondering.

Real men emulate Brief.

But back to Blogjet.  Ever hear of CUA, guys?  The last menu item on the left should be File, so that when I do Alt-F, I get File and not Format.  And while typing that, hey presto, found another bug:  you can’t highlight an individual character with the mouse, at least not obviously.

That stuff should work, for forty bucks.  Five-minute software should cost $9.95 at most.

But I can understand the appeal of the tool for the Web 2.0 crowd.  You can easily do tricks that will ensure that the rest of the Web 2.0 hive recognizes you as one of their own worker bees and doesn’t sting you out of the nest.

The natural world offers such rich metaphorical opportunities.

You can post Youtube video easily, so it would appear.  Don’t be a grouchy old don’t bee.  Be a Web 2.0 do-bee.  Or a 2–bee, for short.

Or in my case, with apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, not 2–bee.

If I were a 2–bee, I’d care about Youtube and Flickr.  As a realty 2–bee, I’d also have to care about Trulia and Zillow and Redfin.  Not only don’t I care about them, I don’t care that I don’t care.  I have second order indifference.

Having run out of venom, like most bloggers I considered that a sign that it was time to hit the “Publish” button.  In the course of that I was going to say, “Keep your fingers crossed”.  Then I noticed that my default category wasn’t a default any more.  Tools / preferences was no help.  So go ahead and uncross your fingers and relax — there are plenty of bugs for everyone.

I attended a seminar put on by the folks at Strategic Credit Coach on Friday. Their seminar was a lot better than their web site (http://www.strategiccreditcoach.com), on which I don’t have permission to access /.No, and I shouldn’t need permission to access /. That’s what index.html is for. Or whatever else is specified in httpd.conf. Trust me on this one.

The seminar was a mixed bag. On the one hand, there was a lot of good information about the importance of good credit, and how to go about improving one’s credit score. It gave me a strong desire to check out, begin monitoring, and improving my own credit scores, and to think about how I might help clients in a similar situation. However, it left me somewhat skeptical about the credit coaching business. On the negative side, the biggest thing that caught my eyes were the fees involved, which are probably reasonable given the level of coaching and effort provided, but still problematic, I thought. For six months of credit coaching and repair efforts, this company charges $995 for an individual, or $1495 for an individual with spouse. The first thing I thought of when I saw that was than anyone with a real need for the program probably didn’t have that kind of money. In retrospect I wish I’d ask them when they charge those fees, in light of the fact that they’re not supposed to do it up front. (See Title IV of the Consumer Credit Protection Act regarding Credit Repair Organizations).

I would urge anyone who’s looking to improve their credit to make this FTC article “Credit Repair: Self Help May Be Best” your first stop. I know in my case, my financial situation always tends to improve markedly whenever I pay enough attention to it. In looking over the wealth of other materials on other web sites (and even a few articles on this one), I feel a separate article on Credit Improvement Resources beginning to gel. Stay tuned.

Today I picked up a Sacramento Bee and as I was going through it, a headline on the front page of the Metro section caught my eye: “Fraud suspect pleaded poverty: Con Man accused of money schemes after his bankruptcy filing”. Reading through the article, I learned of a con man who was recently arrested, and had earlier a prison term for a mail fraud case that netted him over $400,000.

Reading the name of the accused, I was struck by a feeling of deja vu, remembering a potential buyer I had previewed property for one time. This “buyer” had called me inquiring into both million dollar plus homes and large residential acreage for creating subdivisions.

As I worked with him over the next several days, a number of things weren’t quite adding up. First, this alleged multi-multi-millionaire was renting a $430,000 house from his sister. Secondly, he told me he would be buying the properties in question through his corporations, and when I asked him the names of these companies, the Secretary of State’s could not confirm any corporations under these names. (Later, the story changed to, “Oh, I haven’t set them up, yet.”) Finally, he told me a story about how he was unhappy with his last real estate agent who had insisted that he get prequalified, and how he was private about his finances and didn’t want to prove his ability to close until he’d identified a property, for fear of letting the seller know how rich he was.

In light of all I was discovering and what wasn’t ringing true about him, I finally made the decision not to work with him, and told him so.

So as I said, today when I read the Bee article, I thought the name reminded me of the prospect I’d fired several months ago. Sure enough, when I went home to check my client records, it turned out that the name of the captured con man and the name of my “prospect” were one and the same (including the middle name).

A good friend of mine told me once that con men have trouble with people who are honest, because honest people will ask the con man (either silently or out loud): “OK, well if this deal is so great, why don’t you take it?” In my case, what started me feeling suspicious was the idea that someone with tens of millions of dollars to spend would have to rely on a Realtor® he found on the Internet to find properties. It seemed pretty obvious to me that such a person would already have relationships in place with folks in my business, and a staff to work on such things. The other items that didn’t ring true all seemed to reinforce this idea as we went along. Whether that means I’m basically honest as my friend suggested or just basically suspicious, I don’t know.

In any event, the best defense against con artists that I know of are the following principles:

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. When you hear something thats’ too good to be true, the hair on the back of your neck should be standing up already. If it isn’t, rely on the second principle.
• Never, ever, pay money up front for something that sounds too good to be true, until you’ve researched the living daylights out of the person you’re giving money to.
• When in doubt, consult with friends, colleagues, and others that you can trust — people you knew before you met the person offering you that deal of a lifetime.
• If you still have doubts, you’re probably best to err on the side of walking away.

I had the pleasure of attending a great class on short sales and foreclosures yesterday, presented by Jeff Yonamine of Foreclosure Resources that was hosted by the good folks at Finacial Title. I’m still digesting a lot of the good information we received, but meantime here are some tidbits:

• The number of foreclosures in the US increased 68% in November 2006 from November 2005.
• Jeff expects prices to continue to decline for the next few years, given the historical long term pattern of real estate prices (approximately fifteen years from peak to peak, or from trough to trough, if you prefer).
• Mortages are most likely to default in the Bay Area counties of Marin, San Francisco, and Santa Clara, and less likely to defaut in the Greater Sacramento area and other “low priced” areas of California (yes, I know saying “low priced” and California in the same sentence is oxymoronic, but at least I’m no longer vanilla moronic).
• If you’re an investor looking to buy a foreclosure property, the California Association of Realtors® was good enough to include a new form that allows us to work with you to help you locate a property. (We still can’t represent you as an agent on the transaction, however). By the way, if you’re looking to buy a foreclosure to live in, that’s no problem — we can represent you on such a purchase just as we always could. (Actually the class was a bit unclear — possibly incorrect — on the latter point, so I’m taking my stand from my reading of the California Equity Purchaser Law, but I should probably run it by the California Association of Realtors® legal hotline folks to make sure the law hasn’t changed. I love calling them, which is the definition of a real estate geek, besides wearing lockbox key pocket protectors.)
• For those of you who’ve been through a short sale and experienced all the fun we have with these, Jeff presented the case for feeling a little less spiteful toward the lender rep, noting that in some cases he’s seen one person with a case load of up to 350 active short sales going at the same time.

A call for help is going out in greater Sacramento for a Cameron Park baby who is in need of a bone marrow transplant to save his life. 

Trevor Austin Kott (a 6-month old Cameron Park baby) has been battling congenital acute myeloid leukemia or AML since his birth last October. This rare disease affects blood cells in the bone marrow. He is undergoing a fifth round of chemotherapy in his fight to beat a deadly disease.

Trevor is critically ill and needs a marrow transplant to survive. His life depends on finding a match immediately. Doctors say he has about 6-8 weeks to live unless a match can be found. So far  there hasn’t been a match.

BloodSource is coordinating a number of bone marrow match drives over the next few weeks. Trevor’s family hopes that one of these drives will find the one match to save him. A list of days and times for the bone marrow drives to benefit Trevor can be found at this link: http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=26100

There will be a drive in Cameron Park on Saturday, April 14 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Blue Oak School, 2391 Merrychase Drive. 

Potential bone marrow donors must be between the ages of 18 and 60, and in general good health. The test only requires a swab from the inside of your cheek with a Q-tip. The test costs $52 and is tax deductible. The fee goes to the National Marrow Donor Program. The program maintains a registry of bone marrow donors which doctors use to find possible donors for other patients.

The following links have more information on the plight of this infant.
http://www.news10.net/video/player_news10.aspx?sid=26100&aid=37806
http://www.news10.net/video/player_news10.aspx?sid=26347&aid=38037
http://home.comcast.net/~trevorkottinformation/Help_Trevor.rtf and http://www.trevorkott.com/index.html

Like Sacramento County, Placer County’s residential real estate has decreased in value over the last 12 months, but the adjustment has been moderate compared to earlier gains. The average price of the 332 homes that sold in March was $514,647, down 7.1% from last year’s average of $553,816. The median price dropped 8.5%, from 447,000 in March of 2006 to $436,500 in March of 2007. However, since this year’s home was slightly smaller on average than last year’s, the average sold price per square foot dropped less dramatically, down 4.9% from March to March. This year-to-year decrease is actually less than we noted earlier for Sacramento County, but we’d need to do more work to say for sure if this trend has been true since the peak of the market.

Inventory of Placer County residential real estate is moderately into the buyer’s market range of the spectrum, at 8.15 months. The expired to sold ratio for last month was 58.4%, up only slightly from last year’s 40.2%. Days on market are up from last March’s average of 56, to 66 days on average this March.

At the risk of quoting Bill O’Reilly, there’s a kind of a culture war going on between folks like me in the Real Estate Business (and presumably, homeowners who are concerned about the value of their investment), and the bubble bloggers, who’s premise is that the end of the world as we know it is happening / has happened / will happen / will never stop happening — something like that.

Lately it’s struck me that the sort of price depreciation I’ve seen since the peak of the market (in July or August of 2005, depending on what indicator you use) has been rather gradual compared to the double-digit appreciation of the previous five years. So I set out to understand how much ground the average Sacramento County homeowner has lost in the nineteen months since July of 2005. Specifically, I wanted to know when prices were last at the “low” they are now. I expected the answer to be some time in 2004 or 2003.

Even I was surprised at how little the prices have changed in the horrible awful we’re-all-going-to-die period of the disaster-horror-story be-very-affraid time since the death-star-bubble burst.

The answer is this: In 19 months, the average sold price per square foot has gone down 10.2%. That works out to be a rate of decline of 6.4% per year.

So, 10.2% over 19 months is a bubble bursting?

Well, let’s see how the stock market compares. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Crash of 1987:

The Crash was the greatest single-day loss that Wall Street had ever suffered in continuous trading up to that point. Between the start of trading on October 14th to the close on October 19, the DJIA lost 760 points, a decline of over 30 percent.

OK, granted, that was the result of five really bad hair days on Wall Street (if you count the weekend). Compared to that, the “mini bad hair day” of a 3.3% drop on February 27, 2007, was really no big deal. So a no big deal loss on the stock market is 3.3% per day, while the catastrophe of the real estate bubble bursting in Sacramento has worked out so far to a decline of 6.4% per year.

So I’m more than unimpressed by the bubblers. I used to be simply unimpressed — now I’m impressively unimpressed!

OK, so much for the rate of decline. Here’s a surprising word or two about the magnitude of the decline: the total losses in the past nineteen months since July 2005 have only wiped the gains made in the previous four months, from April to July of 2005.

Check out the chart below to see where today’s prices intersect the gaining prices of early 2005.

It’s the “end of the world as we know it”, and I feel fine.

Wow, these signs are really easy to make.

Today I released myself from my pen (the driver’s seat of a Honda Accord — and you thought your cubicle was cramped), and I’m having a free range Friday.

Apropos nothing: I think when I’m slaughtered being free range will make me more succulent.

All the custom blogs would have a picture of some sort of cow at this point in the upper right hand corner. And they’re all made out of Wordpress Ticky-Tacky and they all look just the same.

Apologies to Malvina Reynold, who was a communist and who wrote the little boxes song. It’s OK to apologize to communists these days, because the telescreen informs me we’re at perpetual war with the terrorists now, not the communists.

It’s important to stay current.

Woops, I let a little politics slip. Anything is likely to happen on a free range Friday.

There should be music.

Yahoo Music Unlimited is THE killer app of the Internet. Anyone who tells you different is a terrorist. You’re with me or you’re against me. No, but seriously, if you have a few bucks and are looking for a good time, don’t call that number in the stall, boys, get yourself a Yahoo Music Unlimited account.

It’s high time I got a Free Range Friday. I was getting a serious case of real estate brain.  Be that as it may, one could read this Free Range Rhapsody and conclude that I haven’t yet thoroughly recovered from it.

CC&Rs. Loan to value. HOA. Run the comps, the comps, the comps.

Ironically, my real estate brain was preventing me from writing about real estate, which is what this blog is supposed to be about when it’s not gone feral.

“What happened to that poor broker, Malva?”

“He done gone feral!”

Papa was a rollin’ stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home. And when he died, all he left us was a loan. (With negative amortization, that bast$%d!).

By popular demand: it’s coffee time.

Finally, four days into the month, I’ve make it past the devil-may-care tomfoolery of my award winning April Fools humor, and I’m on my way to posting those words that are loved by thrill seekers everywhere — market statistics. Yes, chart fans, it’s time to put on your glazed expression for this month’s Sacramento County market update.

Prices are down. Unit volume is down. The expired to sold ratio is up. Days on market are up.

But, as always, let’s flesh it out a little more.

Based on data from the Sacramento Metrolist MLS, the average home sold in Sacramento County in March of 2007 for $379,016, down 5.0% from March of 2007. Since buyers took advantage of the price savings to select homes that were slightly larger, sold price per square foot dropped more rapidly, 7.7%, from $247.89 last March on average to $230.26 this year on average.   The median sale price drop split the difference, as it were, at 6.8%.  This year’s median price was $340,000 compared to last year’s median of $365,000.  The expired to sold ratio went up from 44.8% last March, to 68.8% this March.

Inventory is in “buyer’s market” territory, but not alarmingly so, at 7.7 months.

One of these days I really have to get some meat into the charts for Sacramento County, as I’ve done elsewhere for Amador County. Simply tallying up the numbers month to month is getting less and less helpful, I suspect, since the more interesting question is something like when prices were last at this point, and how the average rate of decline over the last twenty months or so compares to the average rate of growth for the sixty months prior to that.

Man, man, your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea
I am the eyes of Nostradamus, all your ways are known to me.

– Al Stewart

In keeping with the rich tradition of boldly making market predictions on this blog, I thought I’d make some predictions for the Kazakhstan New Year (April 1-March 31).

A Tom of the West will lose his gold
Find it quickly bought but dearly sold
Fortune’s equity dashed to mental hope
Forged in fire, the dead’s red pope.

A queen of midland takes a stand in awe
Unashamed, the scent of hellhounds paw
The silver diamond loses its appeal
Sinew, blood, and bond on glinting steel.

On the rain a skein of thread is spun
The new prince of the fire is just begun
Approaches he the border of the mist
Now it’s April Fools, you get the gist.

Recent research conducted by historians at UC Berkeley has shed light on the origin and etymology of Sacramento, providing critical historical proof of a theory that until now had been held by only a few intrepdid revisionists in a tiny minority of the academic community (i.e., crackpots).  Documents in the Universidad del Espagnol de St. Juan de Borquia (known in the Roman texts as St. John of the Bogus) have proven that early conquistadors in search of the fountain of youth, and sailing from Spain, had heard rumors of a holy herb that would create such a fountain. This herb, a native shrub of California, the “mentos”, was said to produce the fountain of youth in combination with certain beverages. It was considered sacred to the Native Americans of the Central Valley, and there was an apocryphal tradition that the absence of the active substance in mentos caused certain forms of mental illness (hence “de-mentia”).

The herb was found in quantity in the on the slopes between dry dirt-pits of the Central Valley and the Heights of Del Paso, and so the Spanish missionaries and traders ventured to the valley in search of the holy mentos (or “Sacra-mento”, as it was known in Spanish). Its fountain producing properties were proven by Don Julio de Boulevard, the first Marquis de Coca Cola, as early as 1569. Don Julio later settled in the northern part of the area near what would later be known as Elkhorn Blvd.

No original paintings from the period have survived. Here is an artist’s rendition of what the Spanish church later came to call the “revelation of Don Julio”:

We’ve updated our lists that we refresh periodically for the following popular property categories:

• Condos for Sale in Sacramento County
• New Homes in Placer, El Dorado and Sacramento Counties
• Sacramento County Duplexes

Enjoy!