Archive for the 'Buying' Category
91 Girard Avenue, Hartford’s West End
Steps from the UConn Law School and Hartford Seminary, this West End home has 4 bedrooms and 1.5 baths over 2,230 square feet.
This classic Scoville Victorian offers original architectural charm and a bright, open floor plan. The foyer with its turned staircase opens into the formal living room with fireplace. The formal dining room has plenty of space for entertaining and leads to an office. The remodeled kitchen features great cabinet space, granite counters, stainless steel appliances and an eat-in area. A renovated half bathroom and mudroom complete the first floor.
Upstairs the master bedroom has a dressing room space with built-in storage. The second floor has three additional bedrooms and a remodeled bathroom.
The third floor has a finished room and plenty of unfinished space which could be completed for additional square footage, if needed. Skylights make this a bright, welcoming space with great possibilities.
Outside the backyard offers privacy, a slate patio and 1-car garage.
91 Girard Avenue is offered at $272,000. If you’d like to see this home, please have your agent arrange a showing, call me at 860-655-2125 to schedule a visit, or stop by the open house on October 23rd between 1:00pm-3:00pm. More details and a photo tour are available.
September Contracts: A Modest Fall
Single-family contracts continued the downward trend in September, falling to 497 for the month. Through nine months of 2011, we remain on pace to finish the year slightly ahead of 2010 but behind the 2009 total.
There was a lot of interest in our markets at the beginning of September; it was a noticeable increase from the end of August and much of the summer. The rest of the month seemed pretty active too, so I’m a bit surprised to see the number of contracts come in at a lower level than August, though 35 deals (532 in August versus 497 in September) isn’t a huge number.
Looking a little deeper at last month versus this month, it appears that two towns experienced major slowdowns that nearly equal the total for the County. The number of contracts accepted in Southington decreased by 15 deals from August, while Windsor decreased by 13. Other towns also saw a less active September, but not by such a wide margin. Manchester, East Hartford, and Marborough reported decreases in the number of contracts of 8, 7, and 6 respectively. On the other side of the ledger, the town Bristol was up 7 deals and Glastonbury was up 6 deals.
Each town is its own market, and this is yet another example of how the data can vary. Below is the year over year comparison for each town in the County, showing a 12% increase in activity for September 2011 over the same month in 2010.
Sharing the Misery
The real estate market right now is not a lot of fun. By that I mean that I’m seeing a lot of behaviors out of buyers and sellers that have me scratching my head. Another agent mentioned to me the other day that she’s starting to lose faith in humanity based on some of the garbage that she’s seen and dealt with this year. I was glad to hear that I’m not the only one struggling with the way people are acting.
Yes, it’s a Buyer’s Market in many cases. But let’s have a little common sense and decency, shall we people? For example, when a house is advertised “as is”- meaning that the seller isn’t going to fix any inspection issues- and you have your home inspections done, don’t come back to the seller and ask for TWENTY EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS in repairs. Not that I had to help a client deal with that exact craziness earlier this year…
Negotiations are long and drawn out these days. Each side is trying to get the better of the other side and “win.” Getting an accepted offer is only a minor victory. Inspection negotiations are terrible in most cases. Buyers, it seems, are trying to extract every last pound of flesh, or dollar, that they can. I say a little prayer, carry a rabbit’s foot, four leaf clover and wear my lucky socks to every appraisal. Because that’s what a crapshoot things have become. Honestly, I wish I could share half of the ridiculousness that I’ve seen this year. But I can’t. Client confidentiality. To protect the guilty. Attorneys are telling me that only 50% of the files coming across their desks are actually closing. It used to be as high as 80-90% of files would close. People really aren’t seeing eye to eye these days.
There seems to be very little taking the high road. I’ve seen instances where a person feels they are being wronged in one transaction (say, on the sell side) so they then carry out equally abhorrent behavior on another transaction (say, on the buy side) to even things out.
Karma, people. Karma. And that’s all I’m going to say.
We Buy Houses Too
This story continues my fascination with the “We Buy Houses” signs throughout the region.
My first attempt to reach out to one of these buyers did not go as expected – it was far more successful.
I decided to call on one of the handwritten signs, though it was one that seemed fancier than some of the others, if that’s possible. It seemed more like a one-off than the type of sign that gets plastered all over the region.
My first surprise was that the buyer has an answering and messaging system – a virtual assistant really – to help route callers to the proper place. I didn’t even need to talk to a real person in order to get the information I wanted, which was perfect! Most interesting is that there was a website with information about the process and a specific property. He has even established a company to make his operation seem more legitimate, though the business address is an apartment.
The essence of this buyer’s business is that he buys homes, updates and resells them … he’s a flipper. It appears to be a small scale operation with one, or maybe two, properties under construction at once. The only property featured on his website has already been sold, though I was able to connect him to a second closed deal and a third property that is actively being renovated.
The purchases and sales that I found had been done through a real estate agent on the public market. This goes against the image I had of questionable characters roaming the streets trying to take advantage of uninformed homeowners. The first two deals even used a mortgage, though the third appears to be a cash transaction. It’s also possible that there are other deals out there too, though I would have expected to see something about them on his website. One final detail is that he seems to be buying the homes in his own name rather than the company’s name. Deal number two was bought as him personally and then transferred over to the company a month later. Why go through the trouble to set up a company and then not use it?
Taking in all the facts, this seems like a small but successful business, likely a part-time operation. It will be interesting to see how this entrepreneur evolves his business in the coming years. And, now that I know his preferred realtor, I should be able to check in on him periodically.
This is just the first step in my investigation, I plan to call a few more in the coming weeks/months to see how their business models compare. Stay tuned!
100 Years of Inflation
As part of our home’s 100 year birthday celebration, we learned that the original cost to build the structure in 1911 was $8,000. Starting with that data point, I tried to do some figurin’ to see how much that is in today’s dollars.
Doing the calculation in my head was a very bad idea. Without actually thinking about it very much, I jumped to the conclusion that the $8,000 was “like a million bucks” in today’s dollars – it just seems like so much money for that long ago. Though, full disclosure, I wasn’t alive 100 years ago, so I don’t have a good sense of how much people earned or how much everyday items cost.
It turns out that adjusting $8,000 for 100 years worth of inflation results in a present day value of less than $190,000. (The government websites only go back to 1913, so I ended up using Tom’s Inflation Calculator – the results were consistent with each other). Far, far less than my initial guess.
Although I find this interesting, and perhaps you do too, it has no impact on the current market value of the home. None what-so-ever. Really, no cost information does.
Buyers don’t care how much the house cost to build 100 years ago. They don’t care about how much that new roof, furnace, or family room addition cost either. And they still wouldn’t care even if all of these projects were done last year.
Sellers are on the receiving end of this kind of logic too. Buyers like to take the current asking price and reduce it by the full cost of the improvements they feel need to be made. If they started with the estimated value of the home once the work was complete it might be more relevant, but they usually don’t.
I just wanted to get that out there – trying to justify a bid or asking price with cost information is an uphill battle. You’re more likely to have success with recent comparable sales and homes that are still available for sale. But even then it can still be a struggle to get buyers and sellers to agree on a price.