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

 
Will Realtors be disintermediated by on-line tools? Probably not, but tech-savvy Realtors will supplant those who do not adapt

The big news in real estate is the market, of course. My view is that the American economy is much stronger and more resilient than you might guess from day-to-day reports.

But the other big story in real estate is the idea of “disintermediation” — replacing Realtors with some combination of do-it-yourself effort and hi-tech tools. The stock retort to this notion — and I have made it myself — is that people will never buy homes like they buy books on Amazon.

Perhaps so. But I lived through the desktop revolution in printing, so I have a different take about the dreaded word disintermediation.

If the triumphant yelp is that some travel agents and some stockbrokers still have jobs, I will point out that some blacksmiths still have jobs, too. Horses still need shoes. That much is beside the point.

Here’s my take on the matter: Don’t think in terms of disintermediation. Use the word “supplantation” instead. In industry after industry, old techniques are being supplanted by new ideas. More importantly, the old technicians are being supplanted by new ones.

This is not a necessary consequence, but it often works out that the “old hands” don’t want to make the change to the new ways of doing business. Even if they do, the “first-mover advantage” can be too great to overcome.

The same goes for everything — most especially real estate. Realtors who are not all the way onboard with the way business will be done in the future will be left behind at the station.

A real estate transaction is so complex that most people will continue to want professional advice — even as they handle many of the simpler functions Realtors might have done in the past. The work we do will be superficially similar to the work others have done in the past — but those others won’t be doing it any longer.

Will they have been disintermediated? Not if you insist that they haven’t. But they will have been well and truly supplanted.

When will that happen? Ask a blacksmith — if you can find one.

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

 
Zillow.com’s Mortgage Marketplace brings anonymous apples-to-apples mortgage rate quotes to consumers, free consumer leads to lenders

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a broad array of mortgage quotes without having to make dozens of phone calls? And what if you could make a true apples-to-apples comparison among quotes? Better still, what if you could remain anonymous, making yourself known to the lender only when you are ready to do business?

Seattle-based real estate start-up Zillow.com last week released its long-anticipated mortgage lending product, called the Mortgage Marketplace, and it offers all those features and more.

Unlike Zillow’s “Zestimates,” the loan quotes are generated by real people, working lenders. Zillow will basically be acting as a hands-off intermediary between borrowers and loan originators.

Consumers using Zillow’s new Mortgage Marketplace will be able to anonymously solicit bids for loans from participating lenders. The consumer will fill out a detailed form disclosing all pertinent financial details.

The form will be submitted anonymously to participating lenders, who will, in their turn, produce estimated loan quotes, submitting them, through Zillow, to the consumer. The consumer will then have the choice to make direct contact with particular lenders to decide whom to do business with.

To a very large degree, the information asymmetry between lender and borrower will be done away with, since the loan quote will detail every fee associated with the loan. Moreover, Zillow will be implementing a reputation-management system whereby borrowers will be able to rate lenders on their performance.

In return, the lenders will receive Zillow’s mortgage leads at no cost.

What’s in it for Zillow.com? When you fill out a form requesting a loan quote, Zillow will be writing “cookies” to your local browser. They won’t be storing your financial details on their own servers, but they will be able to access those cookies in the future to target specific ads at you according to your demographic characteristics. Zillow will also be selling access to these cookies to other ad-supported sites.

So, just as with free-TV, in exchange for looking at advertising, you will get free anonymous mortgage quotes and lenders will get free mortgage leads.

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This is a detailing of the things we do to list a home for sale. We don’t do every one of these things on every home. For example, we know that if we list in a newer tract-home subdivision, much of the noise we try to make will fall on deaf ears. If I am listing a tenant-occupied investor-owned home, we won’t do much beyond the normal MLS, lockbox and sign kind of listing. But this is what we do when we pull out all the stops for those homes that are likely to excite the most attention among buyers.

1. We know from hard experience that if a home is priced wrong, nothing else we do will make a difference, so the very first thing we do for our listings is price them properly. We will work hard from the MLS system, looking at each comparable home physically to see how it really compares. If we have any doubts about the price we arrive at, we acquire a full appraisal at our expense. We want to make sure we get every dollar that we can actually get for the home. By pricing to the current real estate market, we can get the maximum price in the minimum time.

2. Setting the stage for staging. Cathleen Collins will go though the house with a fine-tooth comb, often taking many photos. She will make lists of repairs, touch-ups and redecorating she wants to do, and she will plan her staging strategy.
3. Home-warranty pre-inspection. We put a home warranty on our listings covering the listing period and the buyer’s first year in the home. We use ServiceOne, and they do a fairly rigorous pre-inspection so that any pre-existing conditions can be addressed.
4. Repairs, painting and cleaning. This can take anywhere from a few days to more than a week. Everything’s a trade-off, and we can’t always do everything we might wish for, but we want for our homes to be as clean, as homey, as livable and as turn-key as we can possibly make them.
5. Staging. This is Cathleen, and she is a master at it. We own about three houses worth of furniture, and she is always trawling Craigslist to find more — period, modern, eclectic. She has tons of art and decorator items as well, and her modus vivendi is to take everything she thinks she might need to the house, then move back what she doesn’t use.
6. Professional photography. We have just switched to Obeo for our virtual tours. They send in a local professional photographer to do hi-resolution and panoramic photos. In addition to forming the basis of the virtual tour, the hi-rez photos are also used for Obeo’s Style Designer, virtual remodeling of selected spaces.
7. Floorplan measurement. We put an interactive floorplan on the web site for every listing. Buyers can interactively place their furniture, plus there is a printable PDF version that they can pass along to movers or decorators. We use Floor Plans First, but this is a service that Obeo offers, as well.
8. Amateur photography. That would be by us. We like to have dozens of photographs of everything, including photos of the interior and exterior of the home in all the different colors of light of the day. We can end up taking photos of the home over the course of days, just for the sake of a static kind of verisimilitude. For what it’s worth, I think it is incumbent upon Realtors to do the bulk of their own photography. Use a pro for the print stuff, if you lack confidence, but acquire a camera appropriate for real estate work and learn how to take good real estate photos. You should get in the habit of having a good-enough real estate camera with you every time you leave the office. The language of real estate is photography, after all.
9. Neighborhood photography. We like to have a fairly comprehensive selection of photos of other homes in the neighborhood. We know that buyers want to know for sure that they’re moving into a neighborhood that fits the home we are selling. We show them many of the nearby homes so they can get a feel for the neighborhood.
10. Videography. We don’t do this for every listing. We only do it when we have a story to tell, because video without a story is anti-marketing — worse than doing nothing. If the sellers or the neighbors have an interesting story to tell, that can work. Often, just using the neighborhood photos with a voiceover can make an interesting film.
11. Building business-card-sized Open House invitations. I do this, printing them with OvernightPrints.com. We print these in the thousands.
12. Building custom yard signs and directionals. This is me again. We print these locally, with a company called Signs By Tomorrow. Why do we put a paragraph of small text on our yard signs? To stop traffic. The purpose of the sign is to sell the house, so we do what we can to make sure people stop and take a look. We also add a “rider” to the sign showing the price of the home in six-inch high numerals. It’s the first question anyone is going to have about the home, so why not answer it in no uncertain terms?
13. Building the custom web site for the home. Generally, we will acquire the domain for the home before we even go on the listing appointment. Using engenu, I can set up the gross anatomy of the single-property web site, then Cathleen or I can go in and finesse it page-by-page. In addition to many, many folders full of photos, which engenu will render as slide shows, we supplement our web sites with all the additional information we can find or create. For example, if we can lay our hands on historic photos of the home or neighborhood, we will scan them in order to provide that background information. The same goes for historic documents or newspaper articles. We will research the builder, the architectural styles or the construction methods and document those. Lately we’ve been building custom maps in Google Maps to help buyers discover local amenities. We try to have all these ancillary items done before the listing hits the MLS, but that’s not always possible. But we live by the idea that, if it looks done, it is done, so we don’t tell people about features that are still to come. That way, the web site always looks and feels finished, even if we don’t yet have the link for the finished virtual tour, for instance. Our sites are built to permit the easy addition of new or changed content, so we keep working on the site before and after the MLS listing goes live.
14. Starting now, we are building coffee-table books for distinctive homes. We always have dozens of striking photos of the home, so a coffee table book is just one more way we have of getting those images in front of buyers.
15. Listing the home in the MLS. By now we will have written a ton of text about this home. We use it all and then some in the MLS. We get 680 characters in the remarks and six photos with 250 characters each for captions. If we miss out on using three of the characters available to us, that’s a lot. We can have an unlimited number of “virtual tours,” which are essentially off-site URLs. We use as many of these as we have content for. One of our working precepts is that the listing may be our only chance to make our case for the home to the buyer, so we try to leave nothing to chance. If we can feed the buyer’s agent a good closing argument, we’ll do that, too.
16. Compose the flyer. We build a full-color flyer using our best photos and our most rhapsodic text, printing it on heavy coated stock. We use flyer boxes that will hold the flyers but also have a pocket at the top for business cards. We put the Open House invitation cards in there, just in case someone doesn’t want to take a full flyer. We normally put flyer boxes facing in both directions on the post, and we will store extra flyers and Open House cards inside the home.
17. Set the post, hang the signs and flyer boxes, mount the lockbox. For now we use a normal six-foot 4×4″ white post. When we can afford to have it done, we’re going to switch to a custom-made sign structure, framing off the big sign and the riders and attaching everything will small bungee cords to keep things from flapping around in the wind. We’re always looking for better sign-lighting solutions, too.
18. Promote the listing with online listing bots. We’re using PostLets for the broadcast distribution, but we do Craigslist our way, by hand, and we will go in and hand-finesse other online listings.
19. Write a weblog entry promoting the listing and linking back to the single-property web site. This has all kinds of benefits, as we’ve discussed, but here’s one we haven’t talked about: Linking to your single-property web site from a trusted weblog can break you out of the Google sandbox.
20. Distribute the Open House invitation cards. We will do this with nearby employers and in two sorts of neighborhoods: Move-up areas for our listings, and neighborhoods where BloodhoundRealty.com has a lot of fans. We know that people who like us will try to send us buyers, so we always want to let them know when we have a new house for sale.
21. We hold Open Houses every week until the home is sold. Why? Because there are an awful lot of un- or under-represented buyers out there, and we want for them to be able to see our home. We avoid dual agency, but we have no problem showing the home to buyers who accidentally left their buyer’s agents at home. If a listing is near the commuter traffic flow — and most of ours are — we like to hold after-work Open Houses, too, just to see if we can snag people sick of driving. We hold Open Houses to sell the house — everything we’re talking about here is about selling the house — but we have met a lot of very interesting people at Open House. Sellers come to check us out, of course, and we meet a few buyers. But we also get to become acquainted with fascinating people who love our houses and know a ton about them. I can’t count how many times we have gained access to historic photos of our listings because someone wanted to see what had become of their old home.
22. We service our listings. For vacant homes, we want to be in the house every other day, at the outside, ideally every day. For one thing, a home needs regular maintenance, and we can’t see to it if we aren’t seeing the home first hand. But very often we will end up taking new photos of the home, which we then incorporate into the web site.

We never stop thinking of new ways to promote the home. Our future success at selling homes is directly related to our present success at selling homes, but that’s a secondary consideration. The primary goal is simply to sell the home. We are always thinking and talking abut new ways to draw attention to our homes, new ways to make them more appealing to buyers, new ways to get the best results we can attain for our sellers. We’re not shy about talking about the things we do. We’re always delighted when someone picks up on our ideas, but that’s the rare case. But, regardless of what anyone else does, we are always going to be working at getting better at listing and selling homes.

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

 
Looking for a bargain in Phoenix real estate? Add some elbow grease to your money and go for a bank-owned home

Last week we talked about how home sellers can command a premium price in the current Phoenix real estate market, even if they are competing with nearby foreclosure properties, by putting the home into turn-key condition.

So what’s the counter-strategy? If you’re a buyer looking for the best possible price, what should you do?

Go for the bank-owned homes, of course. Trying to buy a short sale can be heart-rending. The price listed in the MLS will be meaningless. The lender will decide what price to allow. Still worse, lenders drag their feet on short sales. If they have any hope of keeping the loan alive, they won’t let the house go. Meanwhile, your own interest rate could be spiking, rendering you unqualified for the deal if and when it finally comes through.

By contrast, bank-owned homes (you might hear them called REOs, for “real estate owned”) can race through the escrow process. Once a bank has foreclosed on a home, all it wants is to get it off its books and recover whatever cash it can, as quickly as it can. In consequence, your offer might be approved in just a couple of days, with the bank rushing the closing date any way it can.

Because of that, your loan qualification matters a lot. If you look shaky to the bank, it might pick a lower offer from a stronger borrower just to be assured of getting whatever money it can out of the deal.

And then there is the condition of the home. People  losing their homes sometimes let the daily maintenance slide. Expect to see filthy carpets, scuffed-up paint, damaged doors. The air conditioner might have been removed and sold, or the water heater — or even the kitchen sink.

In most cases, the bargain price you get for the home is going to be offset somewhat by the money you will have to put into it. But if you are handy and industrious, the profit on these expenses can be two dollars or more in value for every dollar you spend.

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I was in this home with a buyer on Monday. It made me completely nuts, so, with the permission of the listing agent, Jeff Gary of the Principal Residential Group, I went back in yesterday to make a photographic record of the property the way it is right now.

It’s a short sale, which is always sad. You can see the home in happier days in our catalog of homes in F.Q. Story.

But what struck me about the home were the similarities to homes built around the same time — the early 1930s — by seminal Phoenix home-builder Frank B. Wallace. I believe this home was built by Wallace himself, but, if it wasn’t, it was built by people who were paying close attention to the new ideas he was bringing to the marketplace.

I ended up taking about six dozen photos of the home. I’m showing a few here, but you can find the rest at the web site I built for 718 West Moreland Street.

This is definitely a re-furb candidate. If retains a lot of the original fixtures and hardware, but that means it will need quite a bit of restoration. But if you’re looking for a very Wallace-like home to refurbish, this might be the one.

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Travel and Leisure Magazine is holding its annual online survey for America’s Favorite Cities. Only twenty-five cities are listed to chose from. Between us, Greg and I have lived in five of these. My own hometown, Cleveland, isn’t in the running. Nor is the closest big town to where Greg grew up, Indianapolis. But he was raised in Danville, and Chicago is the nearest big Illinois city to where he grew up.

Last year, the only single-digit ranks that visitors gave Phoenix were a 9 for Weather (obviously those visitors weren’t here in March), an 8 in Shopping for Home Design, and a 6 for Relaxing Retreat. Number One for Relaxing Retreat last year went to Santa Fe. Well, apparently those voters weren’t in Santa Fe in August for Indian Market. Now really, just what is so relaxing about shopping, dining, gallery/museum hopping and Opera 24/7?

Anyway, that’s what visitors thought about Phoenix. We natives have a pretty similar point of view. Last year we ranked Phoenix in the top ten in four categories: 9 for Weather (we know the truth about August), two 8’s — one for Sports Fan’s Vacation and the other for Attractive People — and we share the visitor’s sentiment that Phoenix is the sixth most Relaxing Retreat.

I hope the declining housing market we’re in doesn’t hurt our scores this year. If you want to vote in this year’s polls, just go to Travel & Leisure’s 2008 Survey of America’s Favorite Cities.

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Phoenix is the best-named city in the wild and wooly West. We are the Thunderbird, rising always anew from our ashes, a constant state of reinvention. Surging ever outward — and lately even upward — we are too much the City of Tomorrow ever to spare a thought for the city we were yesterday.

And yet…

That city we were yesterday had its charms… Mostly we recall them through the good offices of PBS Channel 8. At fund-raising time, we get to catch a few brief glimpses of the Phoenix we paved over decades ago. A Phoenix where kids played in the street and swam in each other’s backyard pools. Where their older brothers and sisters cruised Central Avenue — ragtops down and the radios all tuned to the same station. Between the dusty little nineteenth-century town of Phoenix and the vast megalopolis that Phoenix has become, there was a shady oasis in the desert where prosperous people perfected the fine art of suburban living.

Here’s the good news: It’s still there. Everything changes in Phoenix, it seems like every day. But North Central Phoenix endures. In the late forties, through the fifties and early sixties, as Phoenix was surging outward in its first great growth spurts, some very wise people built big, sturdy homes right in the heart of everything. On both sides of Central, between the Canals, North Central Phoenix took root in the desert soil — and took root in the hearts of the people who built it.

Land that had been irrigated orange groves became rich irrigated lawns instead. And the trees that grew from that water spread a thick canopy of shade over the land. And houses made of concrete block were built one-by-one — modern and roomy, with high-ceilings and wide-open sight lines. And big back yards. And pools and barbecues and basketball hoops and volleyball nets.

And here’s the even better news: You can have a house just like that. There aren’t very many to be had, and North Central can be a pricey neighborhood. But the house we’re talking about, 1322 East Vermont Avenue, in the Madison United Neighborhood along the Missouri Avenue corridor, is everything you could wish for in a mid-century modern ranch home in North Central Phoenix — at a price you can afford.

My job is to sell houses — you didn’t know? — but we don’t sell homes we don’t love. We want to understand the houses we represent like works of art, each one unique and unrepeatable. The web site for this home features hundreds of photos, and we even went so far as to build a virtual coffee table book for this property, so that you can send it off to friends and family.

There’s so much more I could talk about, but that’s why we built such an elaborate web site for this home, so that you can see absolutely everything there is to know about it. We’ve always built an interactive floorplan into our web sites, but for 1322 East Vermont, for the first time, we’ve also built in a virtual remodeling feature. I happen to think that kitchen rocks the way it is, but if you’d like to try a different look, the virtual remodeling software makes it easy.

I could go on all day, but — let’s face it — a house either sells itself or it doesn’t. What we have is a spacious, well-kept mid-century modern ranch home on a big irrigated lot in the Missouri Avenue corridor of North Central Phoenix. You’re minutes from Downtown, seconds from the Biltmore. If you’re in love with an older Phoenix, or with that flaming Thunderbird that was always born just yesterday, this home is not for you. But if you long for that Phoenix of the fifties, that cool and comfortable suburban lifestyle perfected by our parents — give me a call. You don’t have to wait around for the fund-raisers on Channel 8. That shady oasis of a Phoenix still exists — and it can be yours…

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

 
In the Metropolitan Phoenix real estate market, our long, slow slide in home prices is finally encountering demand

If you’ve been looking for the bottom of the Phoenix real estate market, it might well be upon us.

The world beyond our control — Washington and Wall Street — is so volatile right now that it’s hard for anyone to make plans.

The Federal Reserve Bank is determined to keep markets liquid, so its own interest rates are heading back toward record lows. The investment banks that brokered the mortgage-backed securities that made sub-prime loans possible are in turmoil. Meanwhile, Congress is desperate to do something — which will almost certainly make things worse.

The interesting thing about all that chaos is that it seems to be isolated to the real estate market. The larger economy is growing so fast that the twitterpated monetary policies of the Fed seem not to have had much of an impact.

That’s a good thing, and let’s hope things stay that way.

Meanwhile, in the world we have some control over — the local real estate market in Metropolitan Phoenix — our long, slow slide in prices is finally encountering demand.

Because so many people wanted to buy houses in Phoenix, our builders gleefully over-built the Valley. This caused the glut of inventory we have been trying to absorb over the past nine quarters.

Many of the resale homes that have languished on the market are by now short sales or have been taken back by the bank. Lenders don’t want to own houses, so they’re cutting prices until the homes get sold.

At the same time, our reliable inflow of population, along with investors and second-home buyers, is there to absorb these newly-affordable homes. The snow belt just got belted with its worst winter in memory, which will bring even more newcomers to Phoenix.

It could be we’ll be back to normal inventory levels fairly soon. The bad news? If your home is for sale, the price it will sell for right now is probably quite a bit lower than you think it should be. If you don’t have to move now, you might be better off staying put for a year or two.

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

 
How do you get visitors to come to your home’s custom weblog? Shoe leather works well. Search engines? Not so much…

Okay, so you’ve built a custom weblog to help sell your home, and you’ve dressed it up with photos, a map, a floorplan — every bit of content you could think of. Now what?

Your home now has a twenty-four-hour salesperson on the internet. How do you go about getting potential buyers to visit your blog?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not search engines. For one thing, your site is brand new. The search engines don’t even know it exists. Even if you manage to get indexed, you won’t have the kind of popularity to bring you to the top of search results for your keywords.

But there is an even more compelling reason why search engines won’t be much help to you: Visitors brought in by search engines are very loosely motivated. Many will have been looking for something else entirely, so they will bounce right back off your site in seconds flat.

Your objective in promoting your weblog is to target people who are motivated to buy your home — or who know someone who is motivated to buy your home. Your job is not to broadcast your appeal to everyone but to narrowcast to just those people who can do you the most good.

You’ll put notices about your weblog anywhere online that you can — Zillow.com, Trulia.com, CraigsList.com, local weblogs supporting nearby schools, little league teams, etc. But your primary promotional strategy is going to be offline — person to person.

We print business card-sized promotional pieces to advertise our open houses. These are distributed to every house in the neighborhood, since the neighbors may know someone who wants to live nearby.

During the school day, there will be more than 100 cars in the school parking lot, most of them driven there from out of the neighborhood. Some of those folks are sick of commuting.

Most local retailers will have some kind of bulletin board. Your cards belong there.

Your buyers probably won’t find your home on a search engine. But if you manage your promotion right, your house will be sold long before that matters.

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

 
Dress up that custom weblog you’ve built to help sell your home

Last week we built a custom weblog to help you sell your home. This week, let’s dress it up a little.

Some of the things I’ll be talking about are free, but others cost money. Your Realtor may have a marketing budget, so that could be a source of funding. But even if not, with only a few buyers chasing a very large number of homes, stinting on marketing costs may not be your best strategy.

Here’s something you can do for free: Go to Google Maps and build a map to your home. At a minimum, you should also provide driving directions from the nearest freeway exit. But, if you sign up for a free Google account, you can link to an elaborate custom map for your home.

Highlight parks, playgrounds, schools and shopping. Saying anything at all about churches might invite Fair Housing complaints, but you can draw attention to other nearby amenities. Even better, you can attach pictures and internet links to your map markers, so that buyers can really get a feel for the neighborhood.

Online real estate sites like Zillow.com and Trulia.com want to know that your home is for sale. You can add photos to those sites and link back to your custom weblog, which will bring you more traffic. On Zillow.com, you can “claim” your home, updating details on any upgrades you have made to it.

We like to use floorplans. You might be able to get one to scan (or better yet, an Adobe PDF file) from your home’s builder. We use a company called FloorPlansFirst.com because they make interactive web-based floorplans. Buyers can move their furniture into the home to see how it will fit. This costs money, but it sells houses.

For virtual tours, we’re switching to Obeo.com. Their tours cost more, but they offer a category-killer feature: Virtual redecorating. Your buyers can discover how much they’re going to love your house after they’ve remodeled the kitchen and repainted the exterior.

And the only stronger commitment a buyer can make is a purchase contract and a fat check.

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I recently traded email with a prospect who is relocating to Phoenix from Nebraska, discussing Mid-century modern style in Phoenix as compared to the midwest.

Prospect:

… the home (that I sent photos of) had a different exterior…reminded me of plain block and I didn’t care for the look. The exterior of our home is more towards the traditional ranch, but it does have Roman brick on a portion of it.

To which I replied:

…The “plain block” that you don’t like is a staple on Phoenix Mid-Century modern homes. It’s called “slump block,” and is a favorite of architects from that period. You might consider this as part of getting used to the desert aesthetics.”

Alison King has a great discussion (and wonderful photos) about Mid-century modern homes in Phoenix in her article titled “Jazz Standard“ over at her ModernPhoenix website.

Midcentury era tract homes in Scottsdale and Phoenix are so ubiquitous that they often pass under the daily radar, and for good reason; classic ranch homes paved the suburbs of the Phoenix Metro area, emulating the romance of ranch style living in this citrus-field-gone-cosmopolitan city. During the same development boom that brought us western-themed ranches and whimsical character ranch styles such as Swiss Chalet and Dutch Colonial, there emerged a desert-adapted style of Contemporary Ranch architecture that passed on nostalgic forms in favor of neat lines and shade-soaked spaces.

Few postwar architects in Arizona can match the volume of production, variety and notoriety than that of Ralph Haver. Californian by birth but Phoenician by choice, Haver offered his accessible contemporary style to thousands by collaborating with local developers on sizable tracts of land. In the postwar era, tinkering with this new style of home became the American family’s leisure time hobby—their imaginations were fueled by a new genre of home-improvement publications such as Popular Mechanics and Sunset magazine. Today, Haver Homes are sought as creative projects for professional architects and do-it-yourselfers alike. Their clean lines, inherent potential for expansion and solid construction have allowed them to endure the decades through every possible design trend, from skimming with stucco to Santa Fe styling. Now Haver Homes are more likely to be stripped down to bare block or clad in corrugated steel to offer additional protection from the sun.

There was little intended as precious in Haver tract homes. Expression of economy and a few signature elements define the Haver Home styles. Preservationists generally agree that these homes retain their character better as one-story structures and that certain hallmark qualities, such as the clinker bricks and clerestory windows seen in several Haver neighborhoods are best left unmolested. But simply put, the tract homes were designed to be modified, including smooth concrete patios that were often destined to become Arizona Rooms, and the carports that could easily transform into a third bedroom to support a growing nuclear family. This inherently mutable trait poses a challenge among today’s designers who appreciate the original forms but invoke an oath to guide their work: Do nothing that cannot be undone.

In this regard, Haver Homes have become one of the Jazz Standards of architecture—a set of simple themes that an artist can improvise around while maintaining general integrity, and in the best cases emotionally thrill those it takes deep inside.

Be sure to follow the link to take a look at the rest of her article and at her pictures of the Lorna House.

I didn’t want to steal any of Alison’s gorgeous photos, but neither did I want to leave you unfulfilled of any visual treat, so here’s Shelby Lynne covering Burt Bacharach’s Anyone Who Had a Heart. She’s neither Dusty nor Dionne, but the setting of this video is cool and clean, and both 60s icons would have been right at home.

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

 
A custom weblog can be your home’s 24-hour real estate salesperson on the world-wide web

I have an unshakable faith in the three P’s of home marketing — Price, Preparation and Presentation.

If the home is priced above its value to the buyer it will not sell in this market — it probably won’t even show.

If it is not well-prepared — repaired, staged, cleaned — to the condition implied by the price, it will not sell even if it does show.

Presentation is your Realtor’s job — or yours if you’re trying to sell without representation. I don’t have space to go into a full-blown marketing plan, but here’s an idea that can make a big difference for very little cost:

Give your home a blog.

Every home for sale should have its own web site. What makes a weblog useful and practical is that weblogging software is so easy to use. And the price to get started? Nothing.

Sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.com will let you set up a blog on a subdomain — an address like 123MulberrySt.WordPress.com — for free. Or you can buy your own domain — 123MulberrySt.com — for less than ten bucks a year. You can host your own domain for a few dollars a month, but using your weblog provider’s hosted option will work just as well.

What do you want for content? Photos — and lots of them. Good pictures of clean, well-lit rooms sell houses. Your text should be just-the-facts, nothing overtly promotional. Not only can people see through hype, it turns them off.

With a weblog, you can document your house room by room — or by the benefits to be realized from the home’s features and amenities.

Best of all, you’ll have a 24-hour salesperson working for you on the internet. Put your blog’s address on your flyers, in any advertising you do, in your Craigslist open house notices, on Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The more you can promote your blog, the more traffic it will draw.

You still have to be priced right. You still have to be prepared right. But a custom weblog for your home could be a key element in your home’s presentation to the marketplace.

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As I understand it, Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t actually coin the word “Usonian,” but he sure is responsible for the style. The word takes its root from the United States of North America, and Wright used the word to describe his vision of the uniquely (North) American style — A democratic style of architecture for the American lifestyle. The intent was to provide small and inexpensive, but stylish and functional homes for the middle class, and he designed about fifty of these. A local Usonian home that I know about is in Moon Valley. Though he didn’t design this particular house, it’s clear that he influenced its style.

I stumbled across this beauty during the summer of 2005. We had a client for the house — an architecture aficionado and a Frank Lloyd Wright purist — who almost bought the house…

… except he realized, when he flew in for the inspection, that he would have to put too much into the house to restore it, including tearing down additions that in his opinion destroyed the integrity of the design.

Still, I’m in love with the house. When Wright designed the Jacobs house in 1936, he created the prototype of the Ranch Style. I know, Ranches are so ubiquitous that they hardly inspire a yawn from most people. Yet, from the time of the first Usonian during the depth of the Depression through the Postwar housing boom and into the 1950s, the Ranch Style projected a streamlined, casual, energetic lifestyle. The house expanded — using picture windows in front and glass doors in the back — to bring in the light and energy of the outdoors.

Of course, this, too, was the birth of Mid-Century Modern.

You can go here to see the rest of the visual tour we created for our client to wander the home from his Boston residence.

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

 
Choosing second-best could get you the best possible home

Last week we talked about how, even with so many unsold properties, multiple buyers can somehow land simultaneously on the one property on the market that approaches perfection.

This is perfectly natural human behavior, if you think about it. Who hasn’t thumped a melon? Who hasn’t reached into the back of the cooler for the fresher milk? Who buys the brown ground beef when there’s redder meat available. We were not just born to shop, we will perish if we don’t learn to shop wisely and well.

It’s no different for houses. You have a certain amount of money available, and a certain selection available to you for that money. It’s completely natural that you would shop until you find the home that is far and away better than your other choices.

And it’s perfectly natural that other buyers would come to the same evaluation of the available inventory. They wold have bought the same melon as you, except you got there first.

But there’s still an important difference. A good melon is as good as it’s going to get, and a bad melon cannot get better. But a house can almost always be improved.

Here’s a melon-improvement strategy for financially-savvy home shoppers.

That home you fell in love with is unique — but it’s not irreplaceable. Yes, it’s in great shape, and it’s staged to perfection. But guess what? There are three more almost exactly like it for sale on the same street. They’re not as clean, not as nicely-decorated, not as well-marketed — but that works to your advantage.

The difference between your dream home and what looks to you like a bad melon is really just a matter of money. If you put that money into the bad melon, it will be as good or better than your dream home.

So, rather than competing for the best house and paying top dollar, you can use it as leverage to get a lower price and seller concessions on a home that could be even more ideal for you — after you do a little work.

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