Recently, I wrote about new case law in Washington that was making it more difficult for buyers of real property to make post-closing claims against the seller for property condition related matters. The Washington legislature has just amended the state’s residential property condition disclosure law to put additional burdens on sellers and will soon require a disclosure form when “unimproved
I’ve been working on my stats to see how 2007 is doing so far. From my experiences of last week I know that there are multiple offers for decent homes close to Microsoft. The two we were interested in both had more than one offer.
While I am updating my stats based on the same criteria I used on March 2nd, given my recent experiences, I decided to check the new stats against properties within two miles of Microsoft. I used a two mile radius, so some of the properties are in Redmond and others in Bellevue. In my experience, buyers who want to live close to Microsoft do not make a distinction regarding whether the house is in Redmond or Bellevue, as long as it is easy to get to work.
While you may not work at Microsoft, it is likely a good investment to buy near there anyway. It’s a stronger market than most of King County. I will test the appreciation levels along with my stats this month.
But while I was doing them I came across this interesting tidbid. All properties within a two mile radius of Microsoft sell better. I can’t say they sell higher, as view property still sells a lot higher than non-view property, and is also a strong investment option. But for property priced under $600,000 (all residential types including townhomes and condos), the rate of absorption says current inventory in Kirkland, Redmond and Bellevue equals a 20 day supply of listings. Within two miles of Microsoft, there is only a 3.75 day supply of inventory. So they are selling at over five times the rate of the area generally.
I’ll try to get my pie charts up this week, similar to those of March 2, but generally there is a 30 day supply of inventory under a million dollars and a 100 day supply over a million. I didn’t do the Microsoft Zone inventory at all price levels,but will likely do that as a separate study, since I find it interesting to check the market at it’s highest and lowest levels of movement.
Age of property does not appear to be a factor, as people are choosing more by location than age of house. So if a popular location has lots of older houses, then that is what sells. Condition of house is very important and remodeling is definitely a plus and pushing prices up, but age of property alone does not appear to be a factor.
When you get over $1.6 million generally in the area (Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland) the rate of absorption skyrockets. Current inventory equalling a 127 day supply, using the average rate properties are selling, based on March and April sales. So still a glut of high priced homes. More property than people buying them.
The most popular price range, selling at a much higher rate than inventory is coming on is $400,000 to $600,000. But no price range outside of the Microsoft Zone is selling at the same rate of those within a two mile radius of Microsoft. Consequently, I would expect the appreciation rate to be higher there as well. I’ll try to do some tests of appreciation rates for different neighborhoods. Most “neighborhoods” follow the elementary school. But radius of Microsoft is “a neighborhood” from a valuation standpoint.
For those wondering where those people come from, many are employees who lived further away until now, but want to move closer in after the troubles they had this winter.
Ever since I started my own blog, I feel like a virgin. It’s like I’m blogging for the first time. I feel so shiny and new. Although, there’s one thing I haven’t quite figured out. Perhaps the multi-bloggers out there can chime in. You see, I’m not quite sure where my blog begins and Rain City Guide ends. Right now, I try to keep the geekier stuff on my blog and the more general interest stuff here. Of course since Rain City Guide has such a large audience, there’s always the temptation to post everything here (even if it doesn’t belong here).
For example, I’m getting ready to start work on the next version of Zearch (codenamed: NIMITZ). I’m thinking about putting my design ideas & implementation notes on my blog. Does it belong there? Well, I think I’ll cross-post things that pass the floor wax and a desert topping test. If it’s geeky and real estate-y or blog-y (BTW – are those real words? It’s so much easier to add a -y than spell out real estate related or blog related) I probably should post on both, but keep the meat on my blog (kinda like what I did with my blogging with Word 2007 post).
I’m sure many folks who participate on ActiveRain face similar dilemmas. The Queen of RE blogging has given me her advice, but I figured more advice is better than less advice. Besides, I don’t have as much dirty laundry to air as she does. I guess I’ll just do what Madonna would’ve done. I’ll just get into a groove and post where it feels so good inside. Ooh baby… Yeah!
I took a drive last night to meet up with the fine folks at Sellsius and more than a few others at the Rooftop Bar of La Casa del Camino in Laguna Beach. What an awesome spot with an amazing view (unfortunately, I arrived at the bar a little late for getting good photos from the deck and instead you’ll have to suffice with this photo taken directly below the bar to get an idea:
[photopress:IMG_9120.JPG,full,centered]
I captured some of the people who showed up in this photo:
[photopress:IMG_9126.JPG,full,centered]
(Back row: Laurie Manny of Long Beach, Kaye Thomas of Beach City, Heather, Rory Siems of Laguna Niguel, Joe Ferrara of Sellsius, and myself. Front row: Brian Brady of Amarica’s Most Opinionated Mortgage Broker and Rudy Bachraty of Sellsius)
Some others who showed up (but didn’t make the above photo) included Sarah Washburn of ActiveRain, Tisza Major-Posner of Route66, Loren Nason of Real Estate Technology, Kelly Kilpatricks of Rancho Santa Margarita and Morgan Brown of Blown Mortgage.
I’m a bit late to the game in that most everyone else has covered the event… Suffice to say, I had a blast and heard a ton of great stories! So many of the people in attendance have been living in breathing the RE.net for a while now that they were able to get me back up to speed with all kinds of juicy stories.
Thanks again to the Sellsius boys for organizing the event.
BTW, I’ve added a few more photos from this event on Flickr . 🙂
Well, I’ve had my own blog for a couple weeks now. So far, I am loving Subtext. Comparing Subtext to WordPress is like comparing a Cadillac CTS-V to a BMW M3. The standard is the still the one to beat, although the race is much closer than you might think it should be. Although it doesn’t have the refinement of the BMW, it does have a close working relationship with the Corvette parts bin and has the potential to be a world beater.
However, during that time, I’ve discovered something even cooler than a V-series Cadillac sitting in my blogging garage and that’s the new Microsoft Word 2007. Think of it as the Lexus LS-460 of blogging sedans.
Anyway creating a blog post with pictures is as easy as using Word (and it creates clean HTML markup too). If you don’t believe me, the View Source command is just a mouse click away. That’s OK, I’ll wait…
Now that I have your attention, here’s a guided tour of how I created this blog post with Word 2007. First, you need put your keys in the ignition and start your engines (or just start winword.exe using your favorite command shell). After your hard drive is done doing its 0 – 60 MB sprint, you’ll see an empty document window.
Now you need to click on the “pearl” (aka the Office button), and select Publish – Blog from the menu. Now that you’ve created an empty blog post document, you need to configure Word 2007, so it’ll be able to post to your blog. If it’s your first time, Word 2007 will prompt you for a Blog Account, otherwise you’ll to click on the manage accounts button in the ribbon (aka where the toolbar used to be) to add your blog. For my demo, I’ll add my Rain City Guide account settings.
From the Blog Accounts dialog, click New and you’ll then see the New Blog Account dialog. Word 2007 has support for Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint, Community Server, TypePad, WordPress, and other blogs that support the Atom or MetaWebLog APIs. Since RCG proudly uses WordPress, I selected that and proceeded to the next dialog. (FYI – Subtext uses MetaWebLog)
Then on the new WordPress Account dialog, you enter the blog post url and your account info, click OK and your ready to burn some rubber. Since I’m behind on my quota for my blog, I plan on writing a comprehensive review of what Word 2007 can do for your blog on my Caffeinated Blog this weekend.
Anyway, if you’re a blogging enthusiast, I highly recommend you take Word 2007 out for a test drive. I usually don’t impress easily, but Ecto and Blogjet has some formidable competition now.
I thought about labeling this post “Does SEO work?” or something similar until I realized that is just stupid. SEO stands for search engine optimization and not only does it work, but in many ways, it is the basis for why blogs work so extremely well for promoting yourself as an expert within a niche topic (as Rhonda has done… Or even a nationally recognized expert!)
So where am I going? I recently had another meetup with my project blogger and I realized I hadn’t made some simple SEO-related tweaks to his wordpress blog that I made to RCG last December. The tweaks I made were to:
I gave one update to this post, but essentially failed to follow through, so I’m hoping to remedy that right now. 🙂
First, I’m a bit surprised that many of my one week observations held steady. For example, RCG is still the #1 result for [Agent Recommendations]. Also, RCG has essentially dropped off of Google’s radar for a search that used to be our #1 organic traffic generator: [Seattle Real Estate]. My expectation was that Google’s algorithms might be temporarily confused by my changes to the site, but that they would pick up our new configuration after a while and continue to drive us traffic on this key search term. No such luck after four months.
As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that Google is still somewhat confused. My logic stems from the fact the page Google has decided is most relevant (using this search term) from RCG changes on a weekly basis. This week it is the link to Robbie’s articles which shows up somewhere down the middle of the page (if you show 100 results per page on Google as I do)
[photopress:robbie_search_result.jpg,full,centered]
However, the real genesis of my SEO tweaks were to see if I could get the “other” search engines to send RCG a higher percent of our organic traffic. The idea is that Google was sending about 92% of the organic traffic to RCG and I wanted to see if I could get MSN and/or Yahoo to send more. As you can see from this Google Analytics chart for stats from the month of March, 2007, I failed:
[photopress:search_origin.jpg,full,centered]
Google sent 91.73%, or approximately 92% of all organic traffic to the site in March of 2007, which means there was essentially no change at all! In other words, the SEO-related changes I made did not have the intended effect of increasing the percent of organic traffic that RCG received from non-Google sources.
However, I’d be ending too soon if I made it sound like the SEO changes were not beneficial. Here is the marketing summary from Google Analytics for the month of March 2007 compared to the month of November 2006 (i.e. well after the changes to before the changes!).
[photopress:stats_mar07_nov06.jpg,full,centered]
What you see is that our visitors from organic sources is up 138% between those months and the visitors from organic Google searches is up 139%. This is almost double the increase from “referral” sources which makes me think that the changes I made to the site were effective and not just background growth!
(Of course, it can’t go unnoticed that the Seattle Bubble sent us over 2000 visitors in March. Wow! That’s well worth a juicy link to the most bubblicious real estate site in Seattle. 😉 )
Also of note… Google really seems to like our article on moving to Seattle. I love that my “little bit of serendipity” has turned out to be so helpful. You can never tell what post is going to kick start an interesting conversation.
Finally, as a treat, I thought I would present the chart that never fails to impress at my seminars. In March 2007, there were almost 25K people who came to RCG once and never returned. 🙁 (that is NOT the impressive part…). On the flip side, there are over 1,800 people who have visited the site more than 200 times.
[photopress:visitor_loyalty.jpg,full,centered]
For the RCG contributors (and commenters!) who wonder how widely that your stuff gets read, realize that there are a HUGE number of people who read without ever letting their presence be known. If you fall into that category (at least 95% of the regular readers do), feel free to introduce yourself in the comments any time! (The first comment is free.) 🙂
So, to wrap this up as a “project blogger” post… I’d highly recommend that anyone starting their own blog get Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to use, and provides a wealth of information about how people use your site! 🙂
In our mail today, we received two very attractive offers to refinance our current mortgage. Wow, how [photopress:MPj03876060000_1_.jpg,thumb,alignright]exciting! Here are the details:
Offer One–This is your “Final Notice”
Reducing our current mortgage rate to 1.75% for 5 years. A Senior Rate Reduction Consultant is waiting to assist you. The APR on this offer is 6.308%.
This offer will expire on May 14, 2007. Here’s my favorite part: No other notices will be issued and no representatives will call you. (Darn…the clock is ticking!)
Offer Two…Takes the Cake! (It’s even printed on pink paper)
“Your Mortgage Master loan in the amount of $375,000 can be restructured to a (you better sit down for this one) a 10 year payment at only $79. This is not a typographacial error. Your payment rate is only 1/4% and is fixed for 10 years….
Call us today and have no house payments until June 2008“.
Of course I had to call them! The gentleman was very friendly (much nicer than the chaps I dealt with trying to help Jillayne uncover the Vacation Mortgage). First you must meet their guidelines. “Slick” tells me that one of their biggest “catches” to get around is loan to value…lucky for me, we meet the 70% or less LTV requirement. You also must have credit scores of 680 or better and not plan on moving for 3 years or you’ll have the opportunity to pay a prepayment penalty.
Me: What is the rate based on?
Slick: 0.25% interest only
Me: I mean, what is the base rate? How much is the deferred interest?
Slick: Wow, you seem to know a lot! 6.750%
Me: At what point does the mortgage recast?
Slick: 150% (yep…that’s what he said….150%). I can’t believe it either!
This means that every month you make the 0.25% interest only payment of $79; the difference between that and the fully amortized payment is tacked on to the back of your loan. This difference is $2,322.17.
This would be allowed to continue until my original mortgage balance of $375,000 reaches $562,500! I estimate this would take 80 months (or just shy of 7 years). Although the rate is fixed for 10 years, the loan will recast into a fully amortized mortgage when it reaches the 150% cap.
If we assume that my house is worth $550,000 today and has a mortgage balance of $375,000. In 7 years, we know that if I did this refinance with Slick, my mortgage balance would be $562,500. We really have no guarantees on what my $550,000 home will be worth in 7 years. Not to mention what would happen to my credit scores having a mortgage balance that was increasing over the original loan balance.
Last but not least…we’ve finally uncovered the “vacation mortgage” mystery! With this program, they also offer to give you 12 months off of your mortgage payment as a “credit”. It’s very easy for this type of lender to do. At $79 a month, 12 months of mortgage payments would be $948. It’s simply priced into the loan by rebate, margins or the prepayment penalty.
Pretty slick….huh?
[photopress:sellsius.jpg,thumb,alignleft]
Sellsius° has Launched!
The Blog that bore a Business…Sellsius
Good Luck Joe and Rudy!!
to announce that Sellsius has launched! 🙂
Check it out at: Sellsius Real Estate
Congrats to both Rudy and Joe!
(This post is not legal advice. For legal advice, consult a lawyer about your particular situation.)
First, my apologies to the RCG community. I recently took a lengthy vacation and have been quite busy since my return. Moreover, I now need to hire additional staff and thus move to a larger office space. So, please forgive my less-than-frequent contributions until things return to “normal.”
Recently, Russ authored a post discussing the recent Supreme Court case of Alejandre v. Bull (beating me to the punch, in the process). This is indeed an important case for several reasons, one of which Russ and the subsequent comments touch upon: the importance of a thorough home inspection.
Initially, the home inspection (if performed competently) provides the buyer with information regarding the condition of the house. Obviously, the buyer is best served having full knowledge of any existing defects and able to make an informed decision about whether to complete the purchase.
In light of the Bull case, however, the inspection also has legal significance. In that case, the Court (in paragraphs 32 and 33) noted that a buyer of real property may still have a claim of fraudulent concealment and/or fraud where the seller fails to disclose a known defect (notwithstanding the fact that the buyer does not have a claim for negligent misrepresentation due to the economic loss rule, as discussed by Russ). To prevail on a claim of fraudulent concealment, the buyer must show that the defect at issue “would not be disclosed by a careful, reasonable inspection by the purchaser.” To prevail on a fraud claim, the buyer must show that he had a right to rely on the alleged misrepresentation of the defect at issue. This “right to rely” is “intrinsically linked” (using the Court’s words) to a buyer’s duty to exercise diligence with regard to the representations at issue.
Accordingly, an inspection is critical to retaining the ability to make a claim of fraud or fraudulent concealment against a seller. If a buyer skips the inspection, the buyer will have great difficulty showing that the defect would not have been revealed by an inspection. The reverse is true as well: by getting an inspection that fails to uncover the defect, the buyer will have a very good argument that the defect would not be (and indeed was not) revealed by an inspection. Similarly, absent an inspection, the buyer will almost certainly have failed to exercise the necessary diligence to identify the defect, regardless of seller’s representation.
An inspection has an immediate, practical benefit. However, it also has a legal benefit. If you forego the inspection, you essentially waive any claim against the seller for failing to disclose a known defect.