Sacramento Real Estate Blog

The home I co-listed with Vicki Agregado on 4032 Birchgrove Way in Rosemont closed escrow last week while I was on vacation.

Hooray!

This listing took longer than we expected to sell, and we faced extensive competition from foreclosures, short sales, and other distressed properties selling in the neighborhood.

This is true in spite of the fact that along the way the list price of this home was what we considered reasonable — toward the end the winning combination was a deeply discounted list price and an above market commission.

Over the weekend I spent some time surfing for the heck of it, and I think I have some fairly credible results, including:

• This kaleidescope, and this other kaleidescope.  And for that matter, the whole web site underneath both of them, which probably has more fun stuff you can check out and get back to me on.
• How to be a great salesperson.
• What sort of stuff was happening on the day you were born.  Find out.
• Can you tell the inventor of a programming language from a serial killer?  It’s tougher than you think.
• And for those of you who absolutely know you’re underpaid and want to make it up on your boss’s computer, be sure to visit the original Star Wars Lightsaber Simulator.

How I spent my summer vacation has nothing to do with real estate.

I didn’t look at houses or pick up a real estate magazine.  I almost looked for a house magazine for Orange County at one point, but I was too tired.

Here’s Helen enjoying Pluto.

This year I bought an Amtrak California rail pass, which was definitely a mixed bag.  Trains are great fun, if they’re on time and if there’s a seat — less fun if, as is often the case, they’re not or there isn’t.

Helen and I took the Amtrak from Sacramento down to Monterey, where we visited the Monterey Bay aquarium. 

Next morning we were up early and on the train to Los Angeles, where our first outing was spent at the La Brea Tar Pits, looking at skeletons and recreations of critters who met unfortunate ends stuck in the tar.

Our second day in LA, we went to our favorite vacation spot in California, Universal Studios, where we went on Helen’s favorite ride ten times.

In LA we also rented a car, and drove that down to Disneyland.  Our first day there we went to Disneyland classic and caught a few rides, including the new, Jack-Sparrowed Pirates, and the old Thunder Mountain, the Wildest Ride in the Wilderness.

Day two found us at Disney’s California Adventure, where Helen met Pluto, for a couple of iterations of California Screamin’, once down the Grizzly River Run, and a drop at the Tower of Terror, among others.

We had a third day and a possible jaunt to San Diego planned, but after baking in about 98 degrees of Anaheim heat on what turned out to be our last day, Helen called a halt.  Yesterday we traveled.

Today I’m back, but I still have several days left on this rail pass…

The Sacramento Bee published this story today which is worth reading. Anyone would admit there is a lot of information out there about the housing market today and it comes at us from all over the country. In all this panic, I begin to wonder: does no one realize that all real estate is local?

Just within Sacramento there are neighborhoods that are far more stable than others, as mentioned in a previous post. Sales in certain zip codes just “zip along” as the Bee put it.

All real estate is local. And as long as the local economy is doing fine, it will bounce back.

I don’t know why it is, but somehow everyone online loves Mondays. We get more hits reading this and our other blogs on Mondays than any other day of the week.

Yup, including Sundays.

So what are we Realtors doing on Mondays? Mostly recovering from showing homes all weekend and yes, submitting short sale and REO offers to lenders.

But not cold calling. I promise. Not on a Monday.

I’ve always maintained that all real estate is local. And while sales have slowed all over Sacramento, there are still neighborhoods that have maintained their value. And according to the SacBee, if you’re a buyer and are concerned that as soon as you buy a home, its value will drop, these are the zip codes and neighborhoods in which you should be shopping:

1. 95616 in Davis

2. 95603 in Auburn

3. 95678 & 95661 in Roseville

4. 95655 in Mather

5. 95816 - downtown Sacramento

6. 95841 in Foothill Farms

Of course, Land Park, Curtis Park and the Fab 40s as always made the list without being needed to be listed.

Last week John wrote about the focus of the Sacramento real estate market on condos. In my experience we are seeing a lot of activity when the price of a home falls below $200,000. In the last week and a half all the calls I have received have been for homes under the ‘2′ mark.

Are the 2s really that terrible? Maybe not. Perhaps all the activity we’re seeing under that number is because the investors that had been sitting along the sidelines are finally seeing the opportunity to add to their portfolio here.

First-time homebuyers are also finally able to think about becoming homeowners and build some equity for the future.

One of the things Elite Properties has yet to do well is gather testimonials.  That doesn’t mean we don’t provide excellent service — I’m not talking about that.  I’m talking about the next step in the process, where you ask someone to fill something out that SAYS we provide excellent service, so we can show others that someone said something nice about us.

The traditional sales site is loaded with testimonials — they’re very effective because it’s better to have some third party person talk about you than to watch you talk about yourself.

Of course, every so often we have a client who wasn’t as satisfied as the rest.  It’s gratifying to me that the number of these clients is low as a percentage of all the folks my agents work with, which shows me that they’re doing such a good job that I don’t hear a lot of complaints.  I’ve also found that I’m better at working with such clients than I thought I would be at the outset, because a lot of it boils down to just listening to their concerns and then deciding if it’s something I can fix or not.  If I can fix it, I do.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the clients who love you enough to write a testimonial about you are the barking dogs, people who:

• Are not clients
• Are generally not even potential clients
• Are by and large (perhaps 90% of the time) anonymous
• Enjoy bashing Realtors®

I had some of these folks hanging around here at one time, and I didn’t like how they hung on my every word and popped up at the most surprising times — like  a Jerk-in-the-Box.  So I pretty much made it a matter of policy at both the moderation and software level not to engage them here, and that’s worked out well.

The reason I’ve started thinking about them lately is that Elite Properties now enjoy’s having on board our second Realtor®/Writer, Purva Brown, and Purva’s been getting barked at quite a bit recently.

It’s always seemed to me that trying to educate a bubble blogger about Realtors® is one of those Sysiphean tasks — like rolling a rock up a hill and then sticking your head under the rock as it rolls backwards. 

Jay Thompson would probably know the right thing to do.  Jay gives them what for without kicking them out.

Loving them would really be cool.  What if I did that — not that I’m spiritually advanced enough for it, but I know the principle.  “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”  - Buddha, as quoted by the tee shirt.

Stranger things have happened.  Maybe I should buy those guys some shirts.

In June, Condos in Sacramento County fared about the same as Sacramento County real estate in general.  The eighty-two condos that sold in Sacramento County in June fetched an average price of $243,786 in June, down 6.6% from last year’s $261,129.  The median price dropped 2.6%, from $228,500 to $221,500.  With this year’s average footprint being somewhat larger than last year’s, the average sold price per square foot dropped a more dramatic 9.9% from June to June, being $223.95 last year and $205.26 this year.

The drop in unit volume from June to June was less dramatic for condos at 14.6% than it was for single family homes (31.9%).  If you think about it, that means that condos made up a bigger percentage of the total sales this year than last year.  Sure enough, last June condos accounted for 6.5% of total sales, versus 8.1% this year.

Inventory numbers are slightly higher for condos (11.2 months) than for single family homes (10.1 months). The expired to sold ratio is slightly higher for condos than for single family homes, but in this case the difference really appears to be marginal.

I just ran the numbers for the Sacramento areas of Rosemont / College Greens / Mayhew, which are in 95826 and 95827.  I have a tendency to call the whole area Rosemont, myself, so that’s the convention I’ll use here as well.  Rosemont has been hit harder than average in Sacramento by depreciation over the past year.  (To me that was pretty much expected, since I had a listing there during the price drop which we finally got sold).  The average home sold in Rosemont for $281,760 in June, down 14.5% from last June’s average of $329,378.  Since the average sized home worked out to be about the same size, the sold price per square foot was very close to this figure at 14.4%.  Likewise, the median price dropped 14.3% during this time, from $332,500 in June of 2006 to $285,000 in June of 2007.

On the brighter side, Rosemont’s inventory, though high, is lower than Sacramento’s June average of 10.14 months.  Rosemont in contrast currently has 8.2 months of unsold inventory.  The expired to sold ratio is up to 55.6%, which is somewhat high but not exhorbitantly high.

Holy Listing Agent, Batman.  Stay tuned.  I should have some more vFlyer goodies for you today or tomorrow.

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”  - William James

The quotable quote today from famous American psychologist William James was today’s Joke of the Day.  Ever since looking at that, I’ve been seeing it come true all day long.  Perhaps this very saying installs itself as its own prejudice, and I understand what I see and hear in light of it.

A woman on a real estate site I frequent asked for honest feedback into her web site, which was basically an ad for how yippie-skippy she was (so far so good I suppose), but which hid the listings under an obscure click path seven layers deep.

Anyone who’s been here more than a minute knows I don’t hide the listings.  If anything, I try to err on the side of hiding everything else.  Well, except maybe our company phone number.  I have a definite idea in mind about who you should call when you’re looking at those listings and have a question.

Regarding the woman with the web site feedback request, I should have known better.  “What do you want to hear?” is already overkill.   One should probably look at “Give me honest feedback on my web site” as one of those questions on a par with “Does this dress make me look fat?”

Of course, I am no different from anyone.  I have my prejudices as well.  Pepsi, not Coke.  SEO, not Image Marketing.  Don’t check the box that says Buyer will pay Section 2, not do-check-the-box.  However, I do allow myself the conceit of believing that, occasionally at least, if I ask for an opionion, I’m really interested in the answer.

In the last couple of days, I’ve been answering the phones again and emails again, working to pick up a buyer / seller or two myself.  I guess I felt I needed to get out there and enjoy some of that invigorating Sacramento July weather.

Everyone outside of maybe Phoenix should find that ironic.

In between calls, I had the pleasure of watching Bruce Willis blow stuff up (John gives this movie two thumbs up).

Also, in the fine mad-scientist tradition, I arrive back from the lab with my face only slightly burnt and exploded to report on my Web 2.0 experiments.

1. I’ve actually published the Web 2.0 John Lockwood Profile that I had earlier threatened to write.  There’s probably a Web 2.0 application to be written that’s just the ultimate aggregator of all your other Web 2.0 junk.  I’m sure Ben Franklin felt much like this when he wired up his kite to the printing press for Poor Richard’s Almanac.
2. I’ve begun a Squidoo Lens consisting of a list of Sacramento Area Bloggers. 
3. Using Yahoo pipes, I’ve created an aggregate web feed from our five most active Elite Properties blogs, and published it here.

I tend to go overboard on statistics some times.  This is partly because it’s nice to be able to tell buyers and sellers that there are just over ten months of inventory in Sacramento County, or other quotable quotes.  It’s also partly just rhetorical laziness.  Ask any real estate writer and they’ll tell you that one of the easier articles to write is the market statistics article.  All you need is access to the MLS, an Excel spreadsheet, and half a brain.  (Anyone who knows me can vouch for the fact that I have half a brain).

My half a brain and I don’t always reflect on the numbers much, though.

One of the sadder things I’ve read in recent memory was a colleague of mine on real estate forum exhorting us all to say the market is “Great” whenever anyone asks us.  Clearly someone with that much forced optimism is feeling pretty beat up.  As for me, when people ask, I tell them it’s not as active as it was three years ago, but I’m still doing well.

Since I had enough wherewithal in this business to have a goal, my goal has been to reach more Sacramento area buyers via the Internet than any other agent, team, or company.  Because that’s worked out well for me, I still have more business than I can do personally, so I suppose that’s doing well.  If you have to share your business with others, that’s a good thing.  Does that mean there are still as many homes selling this year as there were in 2004?  No, of course not — the numbers are clearly off.  I guess for me the important thing is to be successful enough in reality that I don’t have to create a perception of success.  I just do my job, work with the transactions in front of me, and try to create more for me and for my people.

The same feeling that I am responsible for the results is actually making us pretty successful lately on the listing side of things as well.  We’re beginning to not just have a story to tell about Elite’s Ultimate Online Listing — I’m starting to see buyer prospects come through from these marketing efforts, including a lot of prospects for one home that one of my agent now has an offer on.  So if you’re a seller and you want to work with someone with real success instead of just the perception of success, give us a call.  The market’s not gr-r-r-reat (as Tony the Tiger would say), but it’s OK, and we don’t believe in taking it lying down.

Sacramento’s real estate market statistics for June of 2007 are fairly discouraging, with prices falling from last year and inventory up compared to the month before.

The median sold price dropped to $329,000 this June, down 10.5% from last June’s $367,500.  The average sold price for residential real estate according to the MLS was $373,266, down 9.3% from last year’s average of $411,352.  This figure, combined with a very slight increase in the average size, pushed the sold price per square foot value down to $219.18, on average, which is down 10.3% from last June’s average of $244.42.  Sacramentans who want to console themselves with the rate of decline here can tell themselves, “Oh well, at least we’re not in Roseville” (where the sold price per square foot dropped 14.4% from June to June.)

Meantime, unlike Placer County, the expired to sold ratio has not started to improve.  The expired to sold ratio is simply a fraction (decimal) of the number of listings that have expired unsold in a given period (many of these will later appear back on the market) versus the number that have sold.  This June’s expired to sold ratio in Sacramento County was 84.8%, which is up not only from last June’s 60.7%, but also from May’s value of 76.2%.

Inventory is also up.  Currently it stands at 10.14 months, versus last month’s figure of 9.5 months.

I was spending a few minutes on Facebook today, checking if I have enough friends yet and so forth, and I learned something cool:  here’s another place your listing can go! 

Facebook has a classified ad system they call the Marketplace, where you can post houses or whatever.  I thought I’d try it out on Susan’s beautiful listing in Foresthill.

It seemed like there were a lot of views of the flyer right off, but we’ll see how it goes.

Susan Norris just listed this terrific home in Rancho Cordova.  For more information or to arrange a showing, please call Susan at (877) 735-5657.

Beautiful Upgraded Brick House

Location: Rancho Cordova, CA

Lowest price per square foot in Rancho Cordova!!! Beautiful upgraded brick house in a quiet neighborhood. Remodelled kitchen and baths with lots of tile. New carpet, laminite floors, and tile floors. Tile counters, tiled mud room, large bonus room. Dual pane windows and fireplace. Large outdoor shed and landscaped yard.

Information

Contact Information

Susan Norris

837-735-5657

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Pricing

Asking Price: $279,900.00

Property Location

2538 Augibi Way
Rancho Cordova, CA 95670
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Schedule a Showing

Features

Bedrooms: 3-4

Bathrooms: 2

Parking: 1 car garage

Year Built: 1956

Lot Size: .14 acres

Garage Size: 1 car

School District: Folsom Cordova

Square Footage: 1504 approximate

Agent Name: Susan Norris

Broker: Elite Properties

MLS #: 70070090

Attributes

Appliances

Range/Oven

Dishwasher

Sink Disposal

Interior Amenities

Fireplace

Exterior Amenities

Grass Lawn

Tool Shed

Photo Gallery

View as SlideshowView Photo Gallery (10 Photos)

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Equal Housing Opportunity

VFLYER ID: 1161197

Remember back when the Internets was just a series of skinny tubes — you know, back when people got on it with AOL and we called it the World Wide Web?  This is before you knew you could have a whole web site, let alone a zillion of them, and the best most of us got was a “Home Page”.  Like this:  http://www.SomeISP.com/~johnlockwood.

And as long as we’re being nostalgic, my sister Joyce used to walk me to the store for penny candy.  Cherry stones were 3 for a penny.

Cherry stones were a bargain.

Anyway, fast forward, and here we are connecting to the Internets via high speed broadband, at just about the time in my life when I’m getting too old to use high speed broadband to connect to any high speed broads.

I’m falling apart.

And that’s just part of the reason why I’m primed and ready to become some sort of Web 2.0 victim.  It’s not so much that I was run over by it just standing here, as I was run over chasing it.

When I was a kid, about the time I was eating penny candy with Joyce, I had a dog named Rascal that was killed chasing a neighbor’s car.  This poor dachsund that I loved so much was no match for the left rear tire of Mrs. Schesinger’s car, or any of her other tires, for that matter.

Gosh, that went from nostalgic to moribund in about a minute, didn’t it?

Anywho, I’m not dead yet, so it ain’t all like that, but the classic question for dogs like Rascal has always been, OK, dog, you can chase a car, but what happens if you catch it?

Fortunately I’m so far behind that the danger is minimal.

Today I spent a half an hour on facebook.com making sure I had a few friends so I wouldn’t look stupid if I sent anyone over there to be my friend.  Mostly I was just re-adding friends that I’d already laboriously set up on LinkedIn.com.  

I still haven’t quite gotten Jay Thompson right.  I tried to get him to be my friend on LinkedIn twice, and a bunch of computer glitches got in the way — but along the way I think we managed to fire off a couple of emails. 

I think Jay Thompson sent me the invitation to Facebook by way of revenge, so I’d have to make the same friends out of same people I barely know all over again.

I don’t really think that.  It’s OK for me to pick on Jay, because he know’s I’m just kidding.  After all, he’s my friend on Facebook, and he would be a connection on LinkedIn, too, except for a bug.

Sometimes all your social life needs is a good QA department.

While that was being sorted out, I signed up for 30Boxes.com, which strikes me as useless, but there I am on it, and Yelp, which looks cool but when I tried to use the cool parts they told me a salesman would call me.

Gee, swell. 

Then another time today I spent about an hour and a half putting together a web portfolio, so you could see where I am on Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, and YourGrandmothersLeftNostril.

Really, you haven’t been up to YourGrandmothersLeftNostril?  You should check it out. 

Don’t forget to add me as your friend. 

I realized today that I was playing Listing Whack a Mole.

If you’ve never played, here’s how to start:

• Start a real estate company.
• Hire several talented agents.
• Make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to really try to help your agents market their listings, instead of just sticking the listing in MLS and letting your agents and your sellers take their chances on a down market.

That’s all you need to do.

In no time at all, you’ll be playing listing Whack a Mole.  I’ve saved a game for you:

• Bridget gets you high quality photos on East Marlette.  Create vFlyers and publish.  Whack!
• Vicki sells her listing on Sandhurst.   Sellers move on with their lives, hooray!  Payday doesn’t hurt.  Whack!
• Purva joins the company, get two new listings transferred in Metrolist.  Whack! (Or is that: Whack whack!).
• John and Vicki’s Birchgrove listing gets multiple offers.  Get one accepted and put it in escrow.  Whack!
• Enter first of Purva’s listings in vFlyer and copy it up to a bunch of sites.  Whack!
• Next day, Purva gets a huge $40,000 price reduction.  Deja vu all over again, new price.  Whack!
• Just as you’re getting ready to write about the pending and sold, Susan faxes you a new listing!  Hooray.  Whack!

And with that, I’m off to beat the new mole over the head with a mallet until it’s in the MLS.  Then I’ll come back and beat it here some more.

Those of you who don’t have a real estate company, you can enjoy Whack-A-Mole here.

For those of you who may have cleared the original article from their feed reader, Purva’s listing on 25th Ave just had a huge (more than 20%) price reduction.

If you’re a contractor and want to get a great home for some sweat equity, give Purva a call at 916-712-4255.