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.

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…

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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