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Real Estate: Lookin’ Up…WAY Up

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So I cruise into the neighborhood just in time to spot a perky-looking Realtor setting up a couple of open-house signs pointing up into a little enclave I happen to covet (unrealistically). Naturally, nothing will do but what I have to take a side-trip to view that thing.

It’s at the end of a pretty, quiet cul-de-sac…and it’s a place I’ve seen before. It was on the market last fall for $290,000; sold in September. At the time, it defined “dump.” I couldn’t believe such a wreck was standing on such a sweet little street, but then had to acknowledge that our big, sprawling classic 1950s North Central ranch houses are getting old. Very old.

So I thought, well, what the heck. If they couldn’t unload it, maybe it’ll be on the market for something close to what I can afford, and for a modest 100 grand or so I could renovate it and dwell in genteel splendor until they cart me off to the old-folkerie.

HOLY mackerel! Take a look at what they’ve done to the thing:

See that refrigerator? It’s bigger than my master bedroom closet!

These photos of the kitchen do not do justice to what the fix&flippers have done. Everything in there is absolutely primo, and it is GORGEOUS! Too, you have to have seen what a disaster area the place was to appreciate what they’ve accomplished.

I want this bathroom. I don’t want to clean it, but I want it:

You, too, can wipe down the shower from ceiling to floor and clean the inside of those glass doors every time you bathe:

Only a person who enjoys supervising servants could covet living in this house. But…it really is quite beautiful. They’ve done an awesome renovation job.

For 3,254 square feet of this, they want a mere $545,000.

And that is a good sign. About $500,000 is what an updated North Central ranch house a block off a large, green park is worth. Or rather, what it was worth before the bubble inflated. While prices were insane, places like this in the neighborhood were selling for between $750,000 and $1 million. In the ensuing bust, you could have scored a comparable shack for $350,000. Or less, if it needed serious renovation. I came very near to buying one on an irrigated half-acre for $250,000, but backed off after contemplating the sheer amount of work required to modernize it. Someone else bought it and turned it into a palace.

That prices are returning to their pre-bubble state bodes well for M’hijito and me, who are still upside-down on a house we bought as prices were falling and (falsely) appeared to be about to bottom out. La Maya noted that an identical house on the next street north of M’hijito’s place was on the market for $225,000. We don’t yet know what it sold for, but since it moved quickly, we figure they probably got around $200,000. That is in the ball park of what we owe, suggesting that within another five years we should be more or less OK on the mortgage.

Four factors are working in our favor:

• First, residential inventories are reaching historic lows. The Valley now has slightly less than a two-month supply of houses for sale on the market.

• Second, people who defaulted or did short-sales two or three years ago are starting to recover and become eligible to take out home loans again. This means a lot of folks who have been paying off debt while living in miserable rentals are anxious to get back into homes of their own.

• Third, mortgage rates are in the sub-subbasement.

• And fourth—this is huge!—appraisers and lenders are beginning to provide two appraisals: one comparing a property with all other recent sales in the vicinity, and the other using only “regular” sales (not short sales; not foreclosures) as comparables. That strategy produces a valuation considerably higher (and IMHO more realistic) than the likes of Zillow are tossing out there.

I think we’ve got a good shot at seeing values return to where they should be, which is where they were before the crazed frenzy took hold.

First to recover will be central areas like mine and M’hijito’s. His neighborhood is just as ripe for gentrification as it was before the crash of the Bush economy, and as a matter of fact houses up and down his street are already beginning to look a lot better maintained.

My neighborhood at least is holding up; we were really thumped when the city ripped out an entire row of nice homes along 19th for the construction of the damn train that now is never going to be built. It’s not outside the realm of possibility the houses that were blighted by this moment of bureaucratic idiocy will recover someday. It’ll be quite a while, but it could happen. As gasoline prices rise (and they certainly will), the houses here and in M’hijito’s even more centrally located neighborhood will grow more and more desirable.

At any rate, it looks like we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the housing crisis, at least in the central parts of Phoenix, Arizona.

Opportunity Cost/Hassle Cost

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Every now and again, a PF blogger will consider the ramifications of opportunity cost: what it costs to use your potentially valuable time to do tasks that could be hired out to others for a fraction of what your time is worth. Or, alternatively, the amount you can save in the future by spending on a relatively pricey project now. True, all that. I’d like to propose a variant, though: hassle cost.

Hassle cost: the value, y, of time, energy and aggravation spent on something that could be eliminated at a cost, x. If y > x, then it’s worth spending money to get rid of the nuisance.

Problem is, time is easy to value. As for the dollar value of energy spent and aggravation aggravated…it’s anyone’s guess. It’s a figure you may be able to calculate only in retrospect.

Case in point: I expected to feel really bad about cutting down the devil-pod tree. I don’t like to kill a wilted basil plant, to say nothing of a large shade tree. Figured to get depressed whenever I stumble into the backyard. But nay! Every time I walk out there and see that empty space, what I feel is a profound sense of contentment.

♥ No more bushels full of wet strappy leaves to haul out of the pool.

♥ No more wads of devil-pods choking Harvey and sticking out of his little orifice like black fangs. No more trips to the pool store to have Harvey disassembled, disentangled, cleaned, and reassembled.

♥ No more yellow spots to bleach out of the bottom of the pool.

♥ No more dunes of goopy pollen clogging everything that looks like a sieve or a filter anywhere near the damn pool.

There actually is a cost benefit to assassinating the tree. Chopping it down cost about $350. With the city’s new, inflated water rates, draining and refilling the pool cost about $400. Protestations of pool guys who profit from this adventure notwithstanding, the truth is it should not be necessary to drain and refill a swimming pool every other year. Far from it: my ex- has lived in the house we bought just off Central Avenue for more than 20 years and has never refilled the pool. The specific cause of my having to change out the water in this pool is the vegetative material that the tree has been dumping in there. Phosphates. That’s what you get: organic stuff that makes it impossible to keep the pool chemicals balanced. Gives you algae. Lots of algae.

Cost benefit, though, as you can see, is different from hassle cost. The hassle cost of the tree is measured not in hundreds of dollars but in hundreds of hours.

Hassle cost benefit: deep in the positive numbers.

🙂

 

w00t! Guest Post at Planting Money Seeds

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Over at her new blog, Planting Money Seeds, problogger and full-time freelancer Miranda Marquit has kindly published a guest post from Funny, Work Is a Place.

All you who think you’d like to work from home—or who already are doing so—should take a look at it.

😀

Therein lies a tale, one I figured was way too long for the guest post’s purposes. As I’ve suggested at Miranda’s place, when you work from a home office, sometimes it’s not easy to persuade people that you are working.

When my son was little, I had a very active freelance business. To give you a feel for this, one day a friend and I went into a Shakespeare and Company bookstore, and I realized that two of my books and a half-dozen of my various articles were sitting on the bookshelves. They got there because I hustled a lot of business and I made it a point to operate professionally. That last bit included never missing a deadline.

One late October day I was pounding out a story. It needed to move off my desk within a day; meanwhile, another couple of assignments were hanging fire. So I had three assignments that had to be done that week.

Phone rings.

It’s some volunteer mother at the school. She tells me—does not ask, but tells—that I’m to drive a vanful of five-year-olds to a pumpkin patch south of the city for a Hallowe’en outing. And I’m to do this tomorrow.

Understand: I have not volunteered to do anything. This is not a co-op school: we’re paying more than the tuition at the University of Arizona’s medical school send our kid there. I do not volunteer because I’m not the join-y type and because I truly do not fit in with society wives. I make them uncomfortable (that’s probably not the word for it; the actual word begins with b- and ends with -y) and they  make me uncomfortable to the nth power. And even if I were the sosh type, I was working more than full-time as a paid writer.

Sorry, said I, but I can’t do that: I’m working on a deadline and can’t drop an assignment for a client.

She would not take “no” for an answer. She continued to insist that nothing would do but what I had to drop what I was doing (which clearly, in her mind, wasn’t much), pick up a half-dozen kids, and spend the day schlepping them back and forth across the Valley.

I explained what is meant by the term “deadline.” Then I explained that I was working and I could not quit working on short notice, because I had assignments due to my editors.

Now get this: She says, “You can’t be working. I called your home phone number!”

No joke. Then she launches into a diatribe, the gist of which was I was to get off my tail and drive the kiddies to a pumpkin patch. She went absolutely ballistic.

I ended up telling her, not in a friendly tone, “NO.”

LOL! Those were the good old days!

These days, with many people telecommuting or running small businesses out of their homes, attitudes toward entrepreneurs who work at home may be changing.

I doubt it, though. For most people, work is a place, and that place is not in your back bedroom.

O Lucky Man! Gene Hackman Survives Biking

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We’re told that 81-year-old actor Gene Hackman got away with a few bruises after he was walloped by a pickup truck. What unbelievable luck! Especially considering he was riding without a helmet. And…who would think Gene Hackman could possibly be 81, anyway?

bicycleBicycling is great exercise and fun. I love to ride around the neighborhood on the wonderful purple bike my friends gave me a year or so ago. And I must say, I’m not fond of wearing helmets either, and don’t. Even though I stay inside the neighborhood and avoid even the feeder streets, I’m still wary—it’s very dangerous.

One of the local peccadilloes that I can not figure out is the habit of getting on a bike and traveling on the main drags around here, effectively daring the nutcase drivers to run you down. People get into the traffic lanes where the speed limit is 40, meaning most people drive 45 to 50, and putz along at 20 or 25—not bad for a bicyclist, but exceptionally annoying if you’re running late and you get stuck behind one of them. Even though the law treats bicycles as vehicles and so bikers are expected to obey the traffic laws, too many ignore them, crossing against the red and weaving across main drags, apparently expecting drivers will just naturally stop for their wonderful selves.

It’s hard to tell which is more annoying, too: a biker who behaves like a jaywalking pedestrian or one who obeys the law and thereby clogs the traffic lanes. To go east or south out of my neighborhood, you have to get through one of two truly interminable signals. Because Arizona allows right turns on red, you can get around a several-minute wait by turning right at one of these signals, then going south to an east-bound main drag.

The other day, I was late as usual and headed for Scottsdale. As usual, the light turned red, and there was a bicyclist, bundled against the cold and helmeted up like a gladiator (which she needed to be, to live through her ride), parked in the right-turn lane. She blocked me from turning right as we sat there and sat there and sat there and sat there and SAT there waiting for the signal to change. Could she have lifted her bike onto the sidewalk? Of course, but that would violate the law, which says her bike is a vehicle. Could she have stood in the left-and-straight lane, where she would not be impeding southbound drivers’ progress? Of course, but that would make sense.

Yes, car and truck drivers do this all the time (more often, they take up their half out of the middle of the road, so no one can get around them on either side). But a car driver has a half-ton of metal and plastic between herself and her enraged fellow roadies.

Biking enthusiasts have persuaded the City Council to rip out a lane each way, northbound and southbound, of Central Avenue from Dunlap to Camelback. It’s imagined that hordes of commuters will jump on their bikes, ride across to Central on the canal banks, tool down to the train stop at Central and Camelback, and jump on the lightrail train from there.

Goofiest thing I’ve ever heard.

In the first place, because Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, the flanking north-south main drags, are no-left-turn streets during the rush hours, the only way to go east or west out of the North Central district is to wend your way through neighborhoods to Central Avenue (I have to navigate three neighborhoods to do this), from which you can turn onto the east-west main drag of your choice.

Second, and far more important, is that cowboy drivers do not give one thin damn about bike lanes. You’re scarcely safer behind a white line on the asphalt than you are riding in the unmarked street. Sooner or later you are going to get hit if you ride on a main drag, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a bike lane or not.

And third, that stark fact is the reason virtually no one rides a bicycle to work around here. Well. That and the 118-degree heat. You would be crazy to do a thing like that.

Will Phoenicians start biking to work when gas reaches $5 a gallon? I kinda doubt it. What part of 118 degrees do our city parents not understand? When gas reaches $5 a gallon, Arizonans will drive to work in hybrid and electric plug-in cars. And they’ll resent having two lanes of a key artery torn out while they’re driving their high-mpg cars as much as they’re going to resent seeing that happen right now.

I’m glad Mr. Hackman came away almost unharmed. Wish every bicyclist who tangles with a vehicle could be that lucky!

I Don’t Wanna Know…

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Today I’ve GOT to stuff the numbers into Quickbooks. That, as part of a day of general housecleaning. But really…I don’t want to know how desperate the dollar situation is.

$450 for the tree extermination and cleanup.
$150+ (when all is said and done, probably more like $225) for plants and gear to barricade the excavating puppy from digging up the proposed new shade screen
$158 for the water bill, the cost of refilling the pool whose water chemistry was again put out of whack by the devil-pod tree
$35 for a bag of dog food, moi having run out of patience with begging my son to keep me supplied with dog food for Charley

Ugh. During the winter, when utility bills are low, I can usually go about $300 over budget without breaking the bank. But this is ridiculous. Clearly, I’ll have to drain short-term emergency savings to cover half or more of those costs. What a bummer.

Oh well. At least I have some emergency savings. So can’t complain too much.

Ah, lovely. I’ve lost another earring. Ugh and ugh.

If pruned right, vitex can get to be a fair-sized tree

Returned the trellises I’d planned to use to block the view into the backyard while the vitex and hopseed bushes grow, retrieving about $50.

On reflection, I realized it would be a lot less hassle and expense simply to wear clothes while swimming next summer than to cobble together a jury-rigged privacy screen. Costco is selling light T-shirts in the underwear department. They’re apparently intended as underwear, but they come in bright colors—from a distance they’ll look like clothes. Two pairs of my jeans are fraying around the cuffs, so I can convert those into cut-offs.

Truly, I loathe squishing my body into a Spandex girdle so I can take a five-minute dip in my own backyard pool. At least with cut-offs and a cheap T-shirt, I won’t have to break my fingernails, cut off my respiration, and resort to cussing just to go swimming.

Charley is excited about the excavation possibilities in the area where I’ve dug up the soil—had not only to dig holes for four new plants but to dig trenches and run new irrigation  line, and while I was at it, trench and irrigate around the existing vitex, which I hope will flourish in the absence of the devil-pod tree. This required me to wet down the entire area, since the dirt here in Arizona has the consistency of cured concrete.

So now Charley not only has a nice patch of sticky mud in which to frolic, much of that mud is nicely tilled and ripe for some serious digging. For the nonce it’s barricaded off with old, decrepit trellises, yard furniture, and a big trash can laid on edge. That’s a mess, and so this afternoon while I’m out to meet the client, I’ll need to stop by a Home Depot and pick up some more wire fencing. The stuff works nicely to deflect the dog, but two more lengths of it will cost almost as much as the returned trellises.

Hopseed: Unspectacular but useful

By the end of the summer, the hopseed bushes should be high enough to top the wall, and with any luck at all, the vitex will have filled out enough that by the summer of 2013 the combined jungle should restore my solitude. Except for the swarms of helicopters, of course…but as for those guys, they shouldn’t be peering into my yard, the SOBs, so if their eyes are put out when they see a hideous old lady paddling around, they deserve what they get.

While digging up the ground, I discovered why the vitex has been struggling. To soften the dirt, I ran the sprinkler on the area around the tree for about a half-hour. Let the water soak in…and discovered that only about two inches of soil was dampened. The ground all around the vitex is so dry the water just ran off. It hasn’t gotten city water in years. The little tree must have been getting by on rain, at least until this year, when we’ve had hardly any rain at all.

So I fed it, installed a couple of sprinkler heads near it and also on the feeble cat’s-claw vine whose failure to thrive I’d blamed on the devil-pod tree—like the vitex, it, too, was getting virtually no water. Reminded myself that I’ll need to drag the hose over there about once a month in winter and once a week in summer.

Must prepare an estimate for the client, clean up this pigpen, fix the pool chemistry, clean the pump pot, schlep Harvey to the repair shop,  and go buy enough gas to make it out to the Scottsdale meeting with said client.

And so, to work.

Images:

Vitex: Ripped off from PlantAnswers.com
Hopseed: Ripped off from Arizona Living Landscape and Design

Yipe! Stop the World…

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Turned into a somewhat more hectic day than I’d planned.

Ohhh well. Got a lot done. In the staggeringly selfish department, while flying across the city I dropped in at what is now the last freestanding locally owned nursery in Phoenix’s once impeccably upscale North Central district. In addition to plants, they sell house and garden kitsch, and their owner apparently mainlines Mexican pottery. And so, how could I resist this?

Ohh, cute and silly-looking butter dish!!! How is it better than a clear glass butter dish from Corning or a knockoff thereof, purchased from Cost Plus? Let me count the ways…or not.

It’s so crudely painted as to be primitive. Outsider, even. I mean, seriously: most Mexican pottery artists are very skilled. This looks like it was made by the artist’s nine-year-old. And therein lies its charm. You can hear the conversation out in the studio:

NIÑO: Papà, how do you like this leaf?

HOMBRE: M’hijito, a rose leaf is nowhere near as large as a cantaloupe. Did you intend to draw a head of cabbage?

NIÑO: Rose leaf? Ay, no! This is a BANANA leaf. (NIÑO, nearing adolescence, rolls eyes heavenward with considerable expressive élan.)

HOMBRE: Uhm…claro que sì! How could I not recognize it: a banana leaf!

OMG! Puppy just made off with my slipper and now, having lost it to the raging human, is trying to reclaim it from my foot. It’s 6:00 p.m.—donde donde DONDE m’hijto mine?—and, as you might sense from the piles of paper pictured atop the desk, I must get back to work.