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

 
Are you planning on making expensive changes to your home? Make sure they’ll make sense to future buyers

I was in a house once where the sellers had spent $20,000 remodeling the kitchen. Black Corian countertops with lime green trim. A black sink with gold-plated fixtures. Black and green marble flooring. And all of it was set off by dramatic spot-lighting, blinding where it hit, gloomy everywhere else.

That kitchen was gauche by Las Vegas casino standards, but the owners could not understand why their house wasn’t selling.

If you’re going to spend money improving your home, be sure your work results in real improvements.

Updating kitchens and bathrooms can be a good idea, but make sure your design decisions fall somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. A bathroom pleasing to a king — or to a gangster — might suit your tastes, but it could make your home hard to sell.

Adding a second story to a ranch home is usually a pretty terrible idea. Like them or not, ranch homes are what they are, and if you violate the low, sleek lines of your home, you may end up with something that looks like the neighborhood goiter.

If you decide to convert that patio into living space, do it in a way that makes architectural sense. A huge family room leading, through the removed double-doorway to yet another huge family room won’t make sense to future buyers. And whether you call it an Arizona room, a Florida room or a Lanai, if it’s not ducted to the main HVAC system and insulated to the same rating as the rest of the home, appraisers will not count it as livable space.

Likewise, a converted garage can be a great way to get a overgrown teenager to move out, but it’s not really a bedroom. The garage is probably worth more as a garage, on resale.

Here’s a useful question: “Would this make sense to me if I were buying this house?” If the answer to that question is not an obvious yes, don’t make the change. No matter what you might want, if your house doesn’t make sense to buyers, it won’t sell.

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

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

 
Remodeling your home — if you do it right — can add to your enjoyment now and to your resale value later

Removing interior walls and low ceilings can make your house feel more open — and more modern. Combined with other improvements — kitchen and bathroom remodeling and energy-efficient windows — opening up your floorplan can add substantially to your enjoyment of your home now, and to its resale value later.

Simply opening the kitchen up to the living and family rooms can make a huge difference. Modern homes are built around the “greatroom” concept, where the kitchen leads to an island which in turn leads to the entertainment space. Whether people are cooking, hanging out or watching television, family and guests are all together, rather than being isolated into separate spaces by function.

A common upgrade people will make to older homes is converting the carport into a garage. This is not a difficult change to make, but there are safety considerations: The door leading from the garage to the house should be fire-rated and self-closing to keep exhaust fumes out of the home.

People also try to convert carports to livable space, often to the home’s detriment. When you step down off the slab, you are stepping out of the house. If you want to convert a carport — or an existing garage or a patio — to livable space, you should start by pouring new slab to the same level as the rest of the home. This is not just a cosmetic issue. You need a better footing for the extra weight the slab will have to bear.

But that’s just the beginning. The walls will need to be built to the same insulation factor as the other exterior walls of the home. And the roof will need reinforcement — and insulation.

It’s not uncommon to see homes that have doubled in square footage by means of converting outdoor spaces to indoor spaces, sometimes with one vast converted patio leading to another. But if these additions are not built to the same standards as the rest of the home — and if they are not ducted to the central heating and air conditioning systems — appraisers will not evaluate them as livable space.

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

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

 
Fannie and Freddie fall to foreclosure, but, still, lenders lend

I write this column at the beginning of the week, and it appears at the end of the week. My topics are usually timeless, but, if I turn my attention to current events, there’s always the chance that I’ll end up with my foot in my mouth.

Even so, the news that matters most in residential real estate this week is the takeover by the federal government of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FannieMae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FreddieMac). These two quasi-private corporations define the lion’s share of the secondary mortgage market in the United States.

What does that mean? If you got a conforming loan for your home, it will have been sold into the secondary mortgage market in short order. FannieMae or FreddieMac would have guaranteed the loan to investors, this so your lender could have had a renewed supply of capital from which to make new loans. Federal Housing Authority and Veterans’ Administration loans would have been guaranteed by those entities, and sub-prime (non-conforming) loans would have been marketed directly to private investors. The secondary mortgage market exists to keep loan originators liquid in a market where very few people keep their savings in banks.

Given the federal takeover, has the sky fallen on the secondary mortgage market? No, although things may be a little sluggish as the newly-installed management teams learn the ropes. But as San Diego real estate broker Jeff Brown says, “Lenders lend.” There are still plenty of dollars chasing mortgages, so there will be mortgages chasing dollars. It’s plausible that interest rates could even go down, now that the secondary mortgage market has a rich Uncle Sam to back its loans.

What is not so plausible is the notion that investors will suddenly abandon housing altogether. Things will shake out. The ideal situation would be for a new free-market clearinghouse for the secondary mortgage market to arise. A business like that could cherry-pick the strongest loans, those least likely to go into foreclosure, leaving the more marginal loans to the Feds — the FederalExpress principle.

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

This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link). There is a fuller review of this new technology here.

 
With its new iPhone application, Trulia.com is taking on-line real estate search to the streets

So who is winning the Realty.bot race, Trulia.com or Zillow.com? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, but this week marks a decisive change in the game: Trulia just released an iPhone application.

Trulia Mobile will offer a limited set of location-based searches from Apple’s iPhone, from an array of other smartphones and from Dash Navigation GPS devices. The user-experience will differ by device, but the design premise is based on location-sensitivity: Your iPhone always knows where you are, so it can interact with Trulia’s file servers to show you a list of nearby listings or open houses. You can get a detailed summary for each home on your list, and you can then email the listing to a friend, contact the listing agent directly or map the home so that you can hop over for a quick peek.

It’s hard to argue with the design premise: If people are going to go out house-hunting on their own, whether they are really looking for a house or simply touring open houses for decorating ideas, why not use the location-sensing power of modern electronics to hook them into Trulia’s listings database?

The ability to contact the listing agent plausibly increases the likelihood of dual agency transactions, but the fact of life is that many, many people are at least starting their home search without the advice of a buyer’s agent.

But here’s the bonus that popped out at me when I heard about Trulia’s iPhone application: Listing agents who want to compete for mobile-empowered buyers need to get their listings into Trulia and they need to keep their open house schedules up to date. I like anything that makes listers more diligent in their duties to their clients.

The iPhone application is slick and useful as written, this because “data is the new Intel-inside” and Trulia has a rich store of data to draw upon. The usual caveats about opt-in versus MLS listings apply, along with concerns about decay among voluntarily-maintained listings. But, all that notwithstanding: Trulia’s mobile-computing initiative is cool.

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

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

 
New FlexMLS system is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for Phoenix-area Multiple Listings Service

Metropolitan Phoenix got a brand new MLS system this week. MLS is the Multiple Listings Service, the system by which Realtors share their listings with one another. Until this week, the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service had been using a computing system called Tempo to share listings. As of this Monday just past, we have switched to the FlexMLS system.

Had you guessed that something had changed? If your Realtor has been sending you listings from a saved search, or if you had been receiving updates to a Tempo Gateway, all that stopped on Monday morning. Chances are your agent has spent much of this week rewriting searches and reestablishing gateways. The FlexMLS system is more robust than anything we’ve had before, but it’s also quite a bit more complicated. It may take a while before things get back to normal.

So why make the switch? For one very good reason, to tap into that much more robust technology. Tempo permitted a crude kind of map-based search, but FlexMLS allows you to select houses from within multiple non-contiguous irregular polygons. So, as an example, I can search for homes that are either within walking distance of Apollo High School or within walking distance of Valley Metro bus lines servicing Apollo High School.

There’s more: The FlexMLS pricing software is comparable to the tools appraisers use. Realtors will have to stretch themselves to learn how to tap this power, but our Comparative Market Analyses are going to be painstakingly accurate.

But not without some growing pains. ARMLS is by far the largest MLS system FlexMLS has taken on so far. This first week has been a trial for the North Dakota company — a strain on their servers, and, no doubt, a strain on their tech support staff as well.

And workaday Realtors are sharing the pain. No doubt many are grumbling, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But FlexMLS is a bold stride into the twenty-first century for ARMLS. This transition may not be fun, but it will be a boon to everyone in the long run.

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

This is my column for last week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).

 
What’s the obstacle to a paperless, iPhone-able real estate transaction? The sclerotic real estate industry itself

I carry my digital still camera and my Flip video camera with me wherever I go. I have belt-mounted camera cases, so they’re easy to carry, never in the way. I keep those two cameras with my car keys, along with everything else I take with me when I put my keys in my pocket: My wallet, my business cards, my watch, my phone, my Bluetooth headset and my MLS key.

All of these things are small and portable, either pocketable or belt-mounted, but I have almost all of the tools of my trade upon my person when I leave the house. I look like a cop — not always a bad thing — but I have my stuff with me so that I can work when I need to.

This is what I want for the iPhone or for some later iteration of the idea of a hand-held computer. A laptop or a notebook computer is luggable, not portable. Even rechargeable printers are luggable, not portable. I might have a laptop and printer in my trunk — absorbing damage from every bump in the road and cooking in the summer heat — but I don’t have that computing power on my person.

My dream is simple: Everything that I might do on a desktop or laptop computer, I want to be able to do from a hand-held computer. I’m perfectly happy to give up printed documents if I can shoot PDFs in all directions at will. This sounds almost implausible, but I think we might be down to the sclerotic real estate industry itself as the obstacle: Realtor associations, lenders, title companies, and all of the many branches of government.

It’s common, when discussing ideas like this, to throw up technical issues. The technical problems are truly trivial. The problem we face in real estate is the dinosaur mentality of our leadership. Properazzi.com has an iPhone interface, as do Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The National Association of Realtors doesn’t even have a clue, much less a plan, even though the importance of the iPhone has been undeniable since January 2007.

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

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

 
Phoenix real estate conference teaches Realtors and lenders the brave new world of internet social media marketing

What happens when you bring the brightest Realtors and lenders from all over the country to Phoenix for a social media marketing conference? Great ideas are cross-pollinated, germinated, planted, take root and flower.

We run a national real estate industry-focused weblog called BloodhoundBlog.com. There are 24 contributors — Realtors, lenders and investors from all around the country — and hundreds of daily visitors. We’ve been doing this for nearly two years, and, in that time, we have avidly pushed for excellence among real estate practitioners, especially in the burgeoning internet side of the business.

This past week we hosted the inaugural BloodhoundBlog Unchained event at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. People came from all over — a third from Greater Phoenix, a third from the rest of the Southwest, a third from places where it rains and snows. Together for three days we explored the world of social media marketing in real estate.

What’s that? Social media marketing is the commercial arm of the participatory internet. As more and more people make the internet their primary means of interacting with the world, real estate professionals are learning how to move their own practices online.

The important question: What’s in it for you? The internet is a brave new world of commerce. No one likes sleazy sales people, but sleazy sales tricks cannot work on the internet, where every suspicious claim can be checked in an instant. Transparency rules, and the practitioners who succeed with net-empowered consumers are the ones who are prepared to back up everything they say.

The bonus for people willing to work this way is that consumers will have a much higher degree of trust in their Realtor or lender. Rather than picking a name out of a phone book or off of a yard sign, they will have gotten to know that person — passively and anonymously — online.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained was put on by me and my partner, Brian Brady of MortgageRatesReport.com. If you’d like to sneak a peek at the world of real estate as the professionals see it, feel free to join us at BloodhoundBlog.com.

Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, technology

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.

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

The Las Vegas Monorail is different in important respects from the fixed-capital transit systems being built in cities like Phoenix.

For one thing, the population density of potential riders is much higher than in the other car-driven cities now avidly building trolley systems. Moreover, that population — tourists — is more favorably disposed to alternatives to driving. In other words, even though it is failing, out of all the new mass-transit systems in the United States, the Monorail is the one that had the best chance of succeeding.

For another, the Monorail is putatively privately funded, although it seems certain that local, state or national taxpayers will be left holding the bag when the project fails.

But, for a third thing, private funding seems to make acknowledging the failure of the Monorail more politically palatable. In cities newly afflicted with municipal mass transit systems, the facts of life usually go unreported. Ridership will be well below projections, costs will be well above projections, busy bus routes will have been cut or curtailed to subsidize empty trolley cars and there will be frequent accidents ensuing from building a rail system at grade level. None of this will be reported in the newspapers in plain language, and people who insist on discussing these facts in plain language will be denounced.

This was actually the case in Las Vegas for many years, as well, but just lately the dam of silence has broken and the truth gushes forth about the impending financial collapse of the Monorail, how it came about, and how it was foreseen in detail long before the system was built.

From today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal:

In the three years the Las Vegas Monorail has been shuttling empty seats back and forth behind the Strip, we’ve heard excuse after excuse why ridership levels have never met what was originally billed.

First, it was the mechanical problems that kept the monorail sidelined for most of 2004. Then it was the time needed for tourists to know the monorail was there. Then it was a fare hike. And the time necessary for new marketing efforts to take root. They might have cried about global warming for all I know.

But there’s another theory that monorail people have mostly ignored: that the monorail’s sluggish ridership levels of today could have reasonably been expected from the start.

That’s an answer that came to mind recently as I read a draft ridership analysis prepared in 2000 — four years before the monorail’s first paying passenger hopped on board — by Wendell Cox, an Illinois-based consultant hired by monorail foes to counter the rosy claims made by monorail backers.

Back then, monoplanners trumpeted expectations of more than 54,000 riders per day, projections that Cox’s report called “among the most aggressive in U.S. transit history and could emerge as the least accurate.”

Cox noted that the Las Vegas Monorail was “projected to carry more passengers per route mile than the New York subway, the London Underground and the Stockholm Metro, and more than double that of the most heavily used new rail systems in the United States.”

“It is not likely that such an intensity of ridership would be attracted,” Cox wrote.

He predicted between 18,500 and 26,600 riders per day would use the monorail.

Last year, the monorail averaged just over 19,000 daily riders.

“I apologize for being too optimistic,” Cox said recently.

How could a city smart enough to see through any scam get snookered so completely? “Strategic misrepresentation” combined with wishful thinking:

So, how did Cox get things so right, while monobuilders got things so wrong?

Cox said he just followed the facts.

“Nobody ever gave this stuff a laugh test. And it was laughable from the first day,” Cox said. “What I put in that report was not shocking. I just compared it to things that were similar,” namely other rapid transit lines that failed to gain traction with customers.

The track record of such peer projects meeting ridership and cost projections is “absolutely dreadful. What’s going on is something called ‘strategic misrepresentation.’” Cox said. “Basically, lying.

“They wanted to build the project. They believed in the project. That doesn’t make them any less wrong.”

Why does that happen? In general, because facts might get in the way, Cox believes.

“People tend to overestimate ridership and underestimate cost, fearing if they don’t do that projects won’t be approved,” Cox said. “I don’t know if that’s what happened here.”

A kind of faith-based approach to mass transit projects, I suppose.

Sometimes, such projects are enabled by the work of consultants who profit by telling project backers what they want to hear. Consultants take their cut and walk away, leaving the financial mess to others.

“I’d love to see projectors have to take a financial stake in their projections. I bet we’d see more conservative projections,” Cox said.

Because the Monorail is quasi-private, it lacks the legislative clout to stack the deck in its favor in the style of municipal transit systems. It can’t disrupt traffic flows on busy thoroughfares, for example, or impose automobile-hostile real estate development restrictions. Even so, mass transit is never profitable, and it is only popular when it is the preferred alternative to walking — that is to say, where traffic (or parking) is very difficult, as it is on Las Vegas Boulevard, or where income is too low to pay for a reliable car. Where people can — and can afford to — drive, they will. This is a simple and completely obvious fact — which suggests that you are unlikely to find it in the newspaper.

Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Monorail, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing

This is me in Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
By-owner home seller is no match for a skilled listing agent

We’re about to list a home for sale in a fairly pricey neighborhood, so we are very aware of our competition.

We knew a similar home was ready to go on the market, but we were convinced it would be marketed as “for sale by owner,” so we didn’t feel threatened.

Why not? Because a by-owner seller is no match for a skilled listing agent.

I’m willing to concede that there are some unskilled listing agents, but that doesn’t matter to us. We compete against professionals, not amateurs.

In fact, the seller instead went with a limited-service listing, which is slightly — but only slightly — more likely to succeed.

By now, go-it-alone sellers are thin on the ground. You can get a true MLS listing at a range of discount prices, from $3,000 down to $99.

So why is a limited-service listing unlikely to succeed? In this market, a home must be marketed perfectly from Day 1 or it will sell slowly and at a deep discount, if at all.

Except for the MLS listing itself, the home will be offered by owner in every respect: priced wrong, prepared wrong and inaccessible to buyers and agents.

This is not a necessary consequence, but it is very common.

In the case of our newly listed competition, the home is offered at $200,000 over its market value. It will not be a threat to our listing.

But it wouldn’t be a threat even if priced right. A professional home marketer will bring too many weapons into battle for an amateur, no matter how dedicated, to compete.

Even worse, a limited-service listing shouts out a warning to buyers’ agents to stay away.

Why? Because it is being marketed by an amateur. The seller will have no one to turn to for advice, exposing the buyer’s agent to double the legal liability in the transaction.

There’s nothing wrong with negotiating the best price you can get for a full-service listing. But in our opinion, limited-service listings are a false economy in this market.

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

About a year ago, when I was hosting an open house at one of Greg’s listings in F.Q.Story, a young man came to tour the home. While he and I spoke, I mentioned the home’s proximity to Phoenix’s planned light rail system, expecting that he, like most people whom I have talked with on this subject, would subscribe to this being a benefit.

“Bah” (or something to that effect), he declared. “I’m from Houston, and I know that light rail systems don’t really help people… they only sound good, and make politicians popular. They’re just another boondoggle.”

Well… I pretty much agreed with him. Greg’s very first post on the weblog that eventually became BloodhoundBlog compared the “popular” (read that “politically correct”) heralding of Phoenix’s light rail with The Goldwater Institute’s forthright white paper on light rail.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about killing the 27-year-old reversible lane system on 7th Avenue and 7th Street that has served us so well. It came up again yesterday in an article in the Arizona Republic, which talked about how nice it would be if our streets were more pedestrian-friendly.

And now I have to compare that to a podcast I listened to recently, in which Randal O’Toole, Senior Fellow with the Cato Institute, and author of the insightful book, The Best-Laid Plans, discusses how Portland deliberately created gridlock as a way to ensure their failing light rail system would work.

Hmmmm….

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

In a perfect world, folks back “home,” who chose to not leave the Great Lakes cities for milder weather would force me to move back, or acknowledging that forced relocation is frowned upon in a free society, the “rational” folks can always hope for global warming to push me back.

“Once the heat becomes unbearable, they may find the freezing cold a little more bearable–especially if it’s not quite so freezing cold as they remember.”

But even then,

It won’t happen without help. In Buffalo, Shibley speaks of a federal urban sustainabilty plan that funnels federal money to the Great Lakes region to help draw population back. It’s been more than 30 years since the U.S. had a comprehensive national urban plan. Looming ecological crises in burgeoning urban centers more than justify a revival. “Cities don’t grow by topsy, it’s not a thing of nature – it’s a function of public policy,” he says.

As objectionable as I found this Toronto Star column when I read it yesterday, I was — nevertheless — wishing for some relief from this summers’ heat. I’ve been putting on weight all summer, despite five dogs who would love for me to take them for walks. It’s just been too uncomfortably hot for any of us to spend any time other than what’s necessary outdoors.

But since this afternoon’s storms, have you noticed? The temperature has dropped to the low 80s! (A much more pleasant low-80s than I remember ever of a July evening in Cleveland, by the way.)

Channel 12 reported on some less-than-ideal consequences of the storms on the east side.

However… as I was driving up Central this evening, it couldn’t have been nicer. I was delighted to see all the walkers along the Murphy Bridle Path. You’d think that when I got home I would have grabbed a dog and joined the neighbors. But, alas, I made only enough time to run up to the canal to snap this photo of the stormy sky.

When you’re not living under the endlessly gray skies of the “more verdant climes,” cloudy skies sure do have their appeal.

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

This is me last Friday from my Arizona Republic column (permanent link):

 
What makes a home sell? Marketing, preparation — and especially price

I looked at houses with a long-time client last week. We shopped ten houses, of which two were actually in turn-key condition. Two others were fix-ups in every way but price. Three of the homes had front-yard landscaping so overgrown they were virtually inaccessible. And the prices were all over the map.

The resale market is not as dire as it is portrayed to be, but it’s not great, either. There are a lot more homes for sale than there are qualified buyers. For a home to sell in this market, it has to be priced right, perfectly prepared and properly presented to the marketplace. Miss on any one of those factors — especially price — and the buyers will take the home up the street instead.

Consider the Terracina floorplan at Ashton Ranch in Surprise. I’ve sold several these, and I really like them. They’re bright and spacious, with wide-open sightlines. Without pools, there are seven of these available right now. Two are priced at $199,000, then they shoot up all the way to $231,900.

The two lower priced homes will probably sell first, even if the others have better landscaping and better interior amenities. Only one of these models sold in June, for $200,000.

A few miles east, at the Sundial subdivision in El Mirage, there are 25 units of the 1,238sf Zocalo floorplan available. Prices run from $166,900 to $213,900, a huge spread.

Three of these homes sold in June, and it would be reasonable to argue that the market value of this model is $185,000. The problem with that is that ten of the 25 listings are offered below that price — and they’re still not selling.

In any subdivision, I would have to look at the listings house-by-house to tell you which ones will sell soonest, and for how much. But it’s a certainty that if a home is not marketed properly, is not cleaned and repaired to show-room condition, and, especially, is not priced aggressively to the current market, it will not sell.

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

I was browsing The Library of Congress’ Maps Collections, and found a Bird’s eye view of Phoenix, sketched by C.J. Dyer in 1885. I don’t know how large the original map was, but it needs a lot of area in order to make out the detail… much more than I can see on my monitor; much more than I have to show it to you here. But for fun, I made a screen shot of the northern edges of civilized Phoenix.

The sketch is oriented as though the artist was standing southwest of the center of town. That’s Central, which was called Centre back then, shooting past Monroe Street and then Van Buren Street. Do you notice the canal running along the south side of Van Buren? The map’s legend tells us that this is the Salt River Canal! You can’t see it from this shot, but the complete map shows another canal that used to run through the city further north, around Indian School, called the Maricopa Canal, with the Grand Canal just north of that.

The next gridline north of and parallel to Van Buren — the one with the little white structure on the northeast corner — must be Roosevelt, so would that make the next grid line, the one with a few trees lined up along it east of Central, McDowell? If so, the next road to the north should be Thomas. But… the legend tells us that the estate on the northwest corner of that intersection belonged to J.T. Simms, who came to Arizona in 1881 with the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company. However, we know that the property that Colonel Simms owned along Central, between Roosevelt and Moreland, was subdivided in 1893 and is now part of the Roosevelt Historic District. Since we have no reason to expect this map was drawn to scale, perhaps that corner of this map is the forerunner of today’s Roosevelt Historic District. Have any of you already researched this? If so, I’d love to see comments on what you’ve learned…

Anyway, the map is pretty cool. You can look at the full map at The Library of Congress site, which uses a technology developed by LizardTech, called mrSID. You can even download the map to your own Mac or PC, and download a free mrSID viewer from LizardTech, which gives you much more control over the pan and zoom.

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

I’ve been hearing about it for the past week. Greg painted it vividly in his post describing Phoenix’s palpable heat. Since the dew point this morning is only 45°F, the season is still not officially begun — but early this morning, when I was picking up the bowls of food I leave out at night for the little colony of feral cats that AZCats has helped me to keep in check, I knew it’s just a matter of days now. No matter what the climatologists end up calling it, if you’ve ever spent even one summer in Phoenix, you know what a Monsoon is!

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