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Real Estate: That light at the end of the tunnel may not be a train

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Realtors are perennially optimistic, even in the worst of times. You pretty much have to be an optimist (even to the point of self-delusion) to sell things. Especially real estate, these days.

Over the past few months, friends who sell, finance, and renovate real estate have been saying the low-end market is extremely hot. At the weekly business group meeting, our former developer (reduced to handyman status by the depression) reported that he picked up a customer who bought six houses in Sun City—in cash!—to fix up and rent or flip. And the Realtor in our group echoed the same story the Realtor who sits near me in the alto section in choir tells: they can’t keep up with the business. They’re closing on so many houses they’re working six or seven days a week. Almost all these sales are short sales, but the level of foreclosures is dropping drastically. They say that the inventory of homes for sale has dropped below the historically “normal” three-month supply.

The mortgage broker remarked that it is simply not true the banks are, as the myth goes, sitting on a huge inventory of foreclosed houses. He says banks are not in the real estate business. They do not want to sell houses, and in fact, they can’t. He says there is no giant pool of foreclosures waiting to be dumped on the market.

Now comes a newsletter from the Realtors who work our neighborhood and who live here. Bill Goodheart built a fair section of the infill here, having been a builder of upscale homes before he retired and joined his wife in the real estate business. “The weather is finally turning in our favor,” he says. “Believe it or not, we actually are short of houses to sell below $400,000.” A chart from the greater Phoenix Arizona Residential Multiple Listing Service shows the inventory of all homes is well below the normal three- to six-month supply, and in the range below $200,000, the inventory is well under three months.

They report that for houses with sale prices between $25,000 and $200,000, we’re in a seller’s market. The market is “neutral” for homes between $200,000 and $600,000, and it’s still a buyer’s market in the $600,000+ range.

I give this pair a lot more credence than I do friends who report anecdotally that their business is getting better. Why?

The Goodhearts predicted the crash of the real estate market well before it happened. About ten months or a year before the crash, they published a newsletter that made one point and only one point: people who were in a position to to sell their homes should do so, and fast. They suggested that even if you were not considering a move, you should sell; then rent and plan on renting for several years. They urged people who even thought they might want to sell in the near future to do it quickly.

They saw the crash coming, so I figure they’re pretty savvy.

Says Goodheart: “If this trend continues, and I think it will, we should have stable prices for the next four to six months. Then, gradually, the prices will increase. . . . Repos are not a problem. . . . Current repo inventory is under a one-month supply.”

If they’re right again this time, it’s good news for M’hijito and me. Our Realtor thinks the house is worth about $150,000 (vs. the $235,000 we paid for it). In that case, it won’t have to go up much for us to be close enough to even when the 40/15 balloon comes up that we can either get out of the place or refinance the full amount. It’s too bad we can’t refinance now with the rates so low, but I’ll be happy if we can just get enough water bailed out that we won’t sink beneath the bounding main.

Now all we need is some decent jobs.

Image: Sötétkapu, or “Dark gate” in Esztergom, Hungary. Public domain.

Ancient Roman Wine

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The other day while editing a novel set in Britain during the first-century Roman occupation, I had occasion to look up the drinking habits of the ancient Romans. Particularly their wine-drinking habits.

As it develops, Romans of the first century AD drank lots of wine. They thought it was good for one’s health. They even fed it to their slaves, because they figured it would keep them going despite the low-grade nutrition slaves were given.

Interestingly, though, they didn’t drink it straight. They cut it with water: about three parts water to one part wine. Ancient wine was very sweet by comparison with today’s dry preferences—roman vintners would let the grapes sweeten on the vine before harvesting and fermenting—and people flavored the product with some very strange things. The result, I imagine, was something like soda pop without the fizz.

Flash forward to the twentieth century, to a kitchen in Arizona.

After dinner I’d had a second glass of cheap red wine but couldn’t get through it, so had left the glass with about one swiggle sitting on the kitchen counter. Later, I was thirsty and wanted some iced tea. Knowing there wasn’t enough room in the dishwasher for another glass, I was going to toss the wine and pour the tea into that glass. But…throwing out food (or wine) (especially wine!) frosts the tightwad’s cookies. So, casting my mind back over the facts of ancient Roman tippling style, I thought…hmmmmm….

And tossed in some ice and cold tea on top of the wine.

The result was amazingly good!

This sounds bizarre, but iced tea with a few drops of red wine—maybe a tablespoon or two—is really delicious! And very refreshing. It gives the tea a nice little zing, but the combination contains so little wine, it can hardly be called an alcoholic drink.

And so…in vinum veritas! To say nothing of dona nobis pacem.

Image: Red wine in a glass. André Karwath aka Aka. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Round-up: Fresh weather edition

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Morning in the Sangre de Cristos

It’s 70 degrees out there in the backyard! At last, the worst of the heat is breaking. Even though the days are still in the low 100s, the evenings and mornings are cool and the temperature of the pool has dropped enough to make a swim refreshing again. Hurrah!

Let’s celebrate with a tour around the blogosphere.

Mr. and Mrs. Accountability have been married for four years and for twenty-five years! Next month they’ll be celebrating the fourth anniversary of their second marriage. Spinning off a review of blogger Tightwad’s first ebook, Tightwad’s Frugal Bride, Mrs. A. reminisces interestingly about the many clever ways she built frugality into her most recent wedding.

At PF Firewall, Jesse discovered a fitness gadget that, in addition to reporting your calorie-burning activities, can track your sleep patterns. Could come in handy for those of us who live with chronic insomnia.

Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche agonizes about the wisdom of having a child, given some challenging health issues she has to deal with day by day. It’s one of two thoughtful posts on the subject, and this post contains two links to moving stories by other young women in the same predicament.

At Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman as usual has a whole bouquet of great posts. She holds forth with passion on the subject of lending to friends, and, a few days  later, produces a playful encomium to the bandanna.

If your insurance covers an annual physical, Money Beagle suggests an easy way to remember to get it done.

Crystal, proprietor of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, is endlessly amazing. I can’t even begin to imagine how she finds time for all work and activities she does related to her blogging empire. Now, though, we learn she manages to watch an amazing list of television shows. The woman must never sleep.

Frugal Scholar has an interesting rumination on the practice of couch surfing—you know, where people rent out a spare bedroom or the sofa to penurious travelers. Frugal Son is planning to travel around Europe this way…with his grandmother! Check out the comments, where an attractive, if slightly less frugal, alternative is offered.

Speaking of travel strategies, at Five Cent Nickel writer Hank Coleman holds forth with a series of caveats about timeshares.

What do college professors worry about? Nicoleandmaggie agonize over the classic headaches at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured.

At The Digerati Life, Silicon Valley Blogger discusses the pro’s and cons of charging extra-large bills (such as taxes or annual homeowner’s insurance premiums) to a credit card. Interesting post with some nice insights.

Simply Forty’s proprietor Mary takes note of what she suspects is a new trend: women toting not one but two handbags around. Hey! If one heavy bag puts you out of balance and knocks your shoulder out, then two oughta put you back in balance and relieve the neck pain. Right?

Free Money Finance recently noted the risks of discussing subjects such as insurance claims on social media sites. It’s amazing what people will put out there! I find myself having to remind students who want to write about the glories of legalizing marijuana not to discuss their shady behavior in writing. Sometimes this elicits nothing more than a blank look.

Welp, it’s 6:00 a.m. at last and time to get going. Later!

Funny Gets a Makeover

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How do you like Funny’s new look? Week or so ago, we converted to the Thesis WordPress theme, a creation of DIY Themes. Fellow PF blogger and all-around clever dude Jesse, proprietor of PF Firewall, suggested and installed it and then made it click with Funny’s 1,614 posts, 6 pages, 54 categories, 424 tags, 7,495 comments, and 16 plug-ins. Getting this to work in one short weekend: IMHO, pretty magical!

Jesse does web page consulting as SplycedVentures.com. He certainly made this conversion easy. If you’re interested in adjusting your site or in creating new, customized sites, give him a holler. For a modest quarterly fee, he’ll also provide light housekeeping for your site and answer questions as they arise.

Thesis lends itself to all sorts of decorative manipulation, but the last ten days have been so hectic in these parts that I haven’t had time to play with it. Plus I tend to be a little scared of dorking up things that have to do with code. But Thesis provides some options for the technically challenged, and so I fiddled with it a bit.

Thought it would be kewl to have the header show as red, with the kinda Wedgewood blue we used to have as the old theme’s main color appearing when you mouse-over it. That blue is the same color as the links. Then the decorative color in the first few words of paragraph one and at various other points in the body copy is the same hue as the red in the Funny about Money header. It’s a little brighter than the generic dark red I’ve been using, which some readers perceive as dim brown.

So bright, as a matter of fact, that against the white-white background it was pretty eye-piercing.  After some experimenting with background colors (some extraordinarily unfortunate!), I’ve come to rest on an ivory white. For the time being…

It’s hard to tell how this will look from the reader’s point of view. The MacBook I’m working on has a bluish cast to its monitor, so colors are a bit inscrutable.

Anyway, so far I like it. Thesis has a lot of SEO options, said to be very effective. It’s easy to use and, I’m told, easy to customize. It’s not the radical change I was contemplating—the newness effect is fairly subtle, I think. Maybe too subtle… Has anybody noticed?

🙂

Real Estate, the Neighborhood, and the Ideal Dwelling

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Sally, my neighbor to the north, remarked as she was dripping sweat in the alley that she thinks it’s time for her to find a smaller place to live, one with little or no yard work. Yesterday we chatted some more about real estate, the virtues and nonvirtues of our neighborhood, and what we want to live in as we dodder into old age.

I’ve already looked at a few of the condos my Realtor has shown me lately and thought she might like one or two of them, so I forwarded the MLS descriptions he’d sent. She says she wants to move to Scottsdale, not downtown. He’d sent a couple of listings for Scottsdale places, but I could only find one of them, a two-story patio home. Dunno about Sally, but I figure two stories is out of the question for the place where you expect to holler your last hurrah. I don’t want to climb up and down steps every ten minutes now, much less in another ten years when I’m getting really decrepit.

Sally’s determination to move bodes poorly for the Funny Farm. She is the best person to have as a neighbor: quiet and responsible about upkeep. She does not litter the driveway and the street with her rolling stock. She does not allow the paint to peel or the roofing shingles to curl. She’s not a raving mental case. Best of all, she has no barking dogs and no screaming children.

Whenever a neighbor moves, it makes one nervous. It’s such a crap shoot, what moves into the vacant property. Around the corner—mercifully out of earshot from my yard—some moron keeps a big, barking dog locked out in the backyard at all times. The animal is never taken indoors, and that (sensibly) is where it wants to be. It barks and cries nonstop: literally. It never, ever stops barking and begging to be let in out of the heat or cold. Apparently the neighbors complained, so the idiot owner had its vocal cords cut, to little avail. Now it makes a nonstop hoarse, groaning bark, a sound that’s even more disturbing (given the cruelty of the human’s behavior) than the only slightly louder normal barking.

Since the morons seem to outnumber you and me and Sally, I naturally worry about what kind of chuckleheads will move into her house.

Sally’s restlessness exacerbates mine. She’s almost ten years older than I am, and right at the point where yes, she probably does need to get into a smaller, easier-to-maintain place. Me, I could last another decade here. But I’d kind of like to get set in a place where I could reasonably live out the last years of my life before I reach the point where I absolutely, positively have to move.

The place on Portland is really very nice in many ways. It’s almost perfect except for its cramped size. If it had a den in addition to the two tiny bedrooms, or if it had just a little more living/dining space, I would jump at it, even though it is on top of a freeway. But I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my life in three tiny rooms.

The two big problems with my house (besides the encroaching blight) are that it has four bedrooms and I only need two, and that it has a pool, which I don’t think I’m going to be able to care for many more years. A pool requires daily work and is a hole in the ground into which you pour money.

Otherwise, there are many, many things I love about it and that I really don’t want to forsake. For what I can afford, it’s very hard to beat this house. Therein lies the problem: I run around the city and look at perfectly acceptable places but find them wanting compared to what I have. When I do find something that has everything I want and nothing I don’t want, the cost is way more than I could get for my house.

Every time I go through this exercise, I find myself listing pro’s and cons: what’s good about this place, what’s good about that, and so on ad nauseam. This morning it occurred to me that since that strategy gets me nowhere, it might be more useful to consider what my lifestyle is like—or at least, what I value in my lifestyle—and then think about what a house needs to have to accommodate those qualities.

Here’s what happens when I try to codify that thought:

What, in daily life, do I do or like to have that the dwelling needs to accommodate?
• I love to sit outdoors. I’m not crazy about gardening or doing yardwork, but sitting outside to eat, edit copy, or relax is an important part of my daily life.
• I have a dog and probably always will have a dog until I’m too frail to care for one.
• I prefer not to have to drive far through homicidal traffic to get to shopping, work, and social life. Centrally located dwelling minimizes driving.
• Because I can’t afford to travel, I use the house and yard as a vacation venue.
• I really should be walking or running every day; so need safe, pleasant places to walk, bicycle, or hike.
• I crave quiet. Don’t like to be near traffic noise and would prefer to be out from under the helicopter flight path.
• I cook outdoors more than indoors. The gas grill is not an option.
• I cook almost all my meals at home and so need a roomy, well equipped kitchen, preferably with a gas stove.
• In the winter and spring, I live on fresh oranges. And I love fresh lemons and limes from the backyard.
• I dislike housework and am not fond of yardwork; the house needs to be low-maintenance and easy to clean.
• I spend most of my time in front of a computer and hardly any of it in front of a television. The house needs to have computer or office space but does not  need room for a TV/entertainment center.
• I love the park (i.e., open space), even if I’m not walking the dog or exercising.
• I do use the pool all summer.
• I use the outdoors as living space, and expect to be able to come and go in privacy.

A house that would accommodate these quirks would look like…what?
• Two or at most three bedrooms
• Updated kitchen with gas stove
• Enclosed garage with storage cabinetry
• Centrally located
• Reasonably far from blighted areas
• Small, quiet yard with sitting and outdoor cooking areas; at least one shade tree and space for container gardening
• Very private
• No pool
• Sybaritic bathroom; or at least one with a tub that has a view of something other than the toilet
• Far from airports, freeways, and main drags
• Centrally located

And what does that describe?

Yup. The house that I’m in. Or…it comes very close to it.

Given that you can’t have everything—it may be, for example, that I never will be able to afford a place that fits that description in a better part of town, and in a city like Phoenix, it’s impossible to find quiet—maybe what I need to do is rebuild this place so that it can and will shelter me in old age without killing me.

Looking again at the pro’s and cons of the house and neighborhood I’m living in:

What qualities do I most like about my house? What elements do I dislike or feel concerned about?
Citrus trees Pool
Covered deck and shade trees, creating great outdoor sitting area Yard maintenance and costs
Gas stove Two bedrooms too many; having to air condition more space than I use
Skylights Worsening blight in surrounding areas
Full room dedicated to office space Noise from flicking helicopters; planned double-decker freeway will increase traffic noise.
Desert landscaping (relatively low maintenance) Lightrail, if it’s ever built, will exacerbate blight along 19th.
Central location Not a disability-friendly building—narrow doors, steps
Close to son, choir, and friends
Ample storage space; place for freezer
Outdoor gas and charcoal grills

One of the neighbors remarked that if this neighborhood were going to succumb to the creeping blight, it would have done so by now. I don’t know about that…nothing lasts forever. However, let’s assume it stays moderately safe, especially if the resident is armed with a nice little Ruger, for another ten to fifteen years. In that case, there are some things I could do to make the place work for an aging Boomer:

The totally unused room is adjacent to two bathrooms: plumbing and drains are right on the other side of the east wall. I could pull out the shower stall in the joke of a minibathroom that serves the tiny master bedroom and install a door, joining the two bedrooms through a pass-through half-bath. Then, put in a fine sybaritic bathtub (actually, I’m thinking one of those fake claw-foot things made of the plastic stuff that’s ludicrously easy to clean), lots of lights, and a set of cabinets to serve as a dressing table. Hang capacious and handsome mirrors over and around this dressing area. Replace the louvered folding closet doors with mirrored sliding doors. Replace the aged, tacky aluminum-framed window with French doors opening onto the back patio.

This would at least make that room useful. The existing bathtub in the hall bathroom could then be replaced with a shower stall that’s accessible by wheelchair; the doorway into that bathroom could be widened to make it possible for a wheelchair or walker to get in there.

Alternatively, I could move the storage in the front secondary bedroom into the unused back bedroom; move my office from the adjacent front secondary bedroom into the so-called master bedroom, tear out the wall between the two front bedrooms, reroute one of the AC vents, rebuild the entrance to the (now new) room, tear out the ridiculous closets and install a large walk-in closet, and end up with a very nice, huge master bedroom. This, too, would eliminate completely unused space and improve living space.

Replastering the pool, which will have to happen in about five to eight years, will cost $8,000 to $10,000 in today’s dollars. For about the same amount, I could fill in the pool. So…why not take, say, $20,000 to fill in the pool, jackhammer up the hideous KoolDeck, and relandscape the backyard, extending the shade cover the length of the back and planting a big, gorgeous emerald paloverde out there? This would eliminate the entire pool care issue and extend the low-maintenance garden, making the back sitting area much more pleasant and cutting power and water bills significantly.

Welp. I have to get up and go to work, so this little reverie needs to end. But…it’s something to think about: would it not be better to make this house work than to try to move to a different house, with all the hassle and expense that entails?

Can’t get through the work…

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Endless, endless work and hassles and pains in the beautocks and twinkling starfields of interruptions! Haven’t found even a few minutes…

….

….and didn’t even find enough to finish that sentence: Puppy barked to go out (and is now doing…what?). While out, he had to try to excavate the paloverde tree; then, back indoors, had to gouge some new claw-tracks into the kitchen cabinetry…..

…where was I? Yes: haven’t even found a few minutes…

…oh, he’s chewing something…i can hear it…

….

…haven’t even found a few minutes to punch out a short post.  So it’s been going, hour after hour, day after day.

deskmessYesterday felt I’d accomplished a lot because I finished entering elaborate instructions on a set of stoont drafts and altering the rubrics in both courses to specify 50 points off the 100-point final version for those papers whose authors ignore all advice on their drafts and just stick the same illiterate stuff into a Word file and send it in. Posted the new rubrics; harangued the stoonts.

Meanwhile, as I was wasting my time with these activities two last-minute-hurry-up projects awaited on my desk amid all the other trash I haven’t been able to get to. The pile to the left is just a small sampling of the mountain of paper that has come to rest in my office. What a mess!

Finished one rush project about 7:30 this morning.

Meanwhile, among many other things I’d arranged to have the trainer KJG uses come over to help us with a few puppy issues, like flinging himself at the kitchen cabinets, which are now wrecked (so the cost of having her come over is pretty redundant…) and tupping Cassie and nipping hard enough to draw blood and depositing more pee on the floors than Noah had floodwaters. At the time we made this appointment, he was still peeing on the floor, but he seems to have gotten past that, so there’s another redundancy. But we could use some help with the beginning leash training, so I guess it’s not a total waste.

However, what IS a ding on our time: she was supposed to get here at 10:00 a.m. She called at 9:45 to say she had a headache and wanted to put off the appointment for an hour. Well…this shindig is supposed to go on for a minimum of two hours, and KJG says you have to tell her you need to be out the door by a specific time or she won’t stop talking. So now we’ve gone from a 10:00 a.m.-to-noon time slot to an 11:00 a.m.-to-1:00 p.m. (at least) time slot. Since both M’hijito and I have a LOT to do in our respective lives, this is not so good. I suggested we put it off for another weekend. She was having none of that (her urgency hints that she needs the money).

So I called M’hijito, and of course he wasn’t answering his cell. I e-mailed. Of further course, he didn’t see the message.

When he showed up a few minutes before ten, he was distinctly annoyed. So he left the dog with me so he could race off and run some of his errands. This means my dog gets locked up and I don’t get to do the things in the house and yard I need to do. Specifically, I can’t do the laundry, because Pup will pull it off the line; the laundry needs to go out early enough in the day to get the sheets dry. If the new dog trainer indeed hangs around until 1:00 p.m., it’ll be 2:00 p.m. before the sheets come out of the washer IF and only if I kill an extra hour around the house waiting for the washer to run.

I don’t have an extra hour to kill, unfortunately, because I have about a billion errands of my own to run, and so that means the bedding won’t get washed today and very likely won’t get done tomorrow, either, because once I get back here after the Sunday songfest I’ve GOT to shovel out the mess in the office and attend to all that paperwork that I’ve dropped there thinking some one of these days I’ll get to it.

Getting to the endless chores I need to do next week will be delayed by  another foray into the effing Medicare bureaucracy. Every  year Medicare has “open enrollment,” which gives the schools of private insurers an opportunity to raise the bills. So every year you have to plow through the details of 60 or 70 policies, trying to figure out how to get yourself covered at the lowest cost. It’s a monster time-consuming nightmare, and it means, to boot, a nice little disruption in your bookkeeping, too—something else to kill your time.

Three minutes before the woman is supposed to show up. No sign of my son. The laptop has gone offline and I don’t know how to reconnect it. Still haven’t had time to scan the $310 check from a client and e-deposit it (takes about 10 minutes to make the scanner work and then…

…

So the trainer surfaced in the middle of all this, within minutes of the son’s reappearance. Dog peed on the floor not once but twice in the hour-long interim.

Yesh. Peed not once but twice on the floor that I stayed up until 11:30 last night cleaning.

It’s been a good six or eight weeks since I cleaned the house. Ran a dust-mop over the gritty floors a couple of times, when poor Cassie’s eyes started to run from dust allergies. But otherwise, have had time for no cleaning, none, zero, zip. So last night it was FIND TIME after dinner to vacuum in a cursory way, pull the stove apart and scrub up the grease, move everything off the kitchen counters and scrub up the grease, dust the furniture, wet-mop the floors, scrub the woodwork, clean the bathrooms, fall exhausted into bed, continue copyediting the ASAP assignment, fall asleep over it, wake up at 1:00 a.m. with it spread across the bed, pick up the debris and stack it on the floor next to the bed, turn off the light, go back to sleep.

Bedtime around 11:00 p.m. is about the only quiet period a person can expect to be able to focus on a job without an unending series of interruptions.

…

The trainer was much as KJG advertised: chatty, eccentric, and amazingly savvy in the workings of the dog brain. She demonstrated several effective techniques for getting Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy to join civil society and dispensed much practical advice about living with a dog and coming out on top.

Some of the things she suggested, I already knew but had allowed to lapse. Others were fresh ideas, in a couple of cases unique ideas she had come up with herself. Among them:

• Keep the dogs’ water dishes outdoors. Take the dogs out frequently to pee and let them drink while they’re outside, but do not leave ammunition sitting on the kitchen floor with which to reload the puppy bladder.

• Banish the dog from the kitchen. This is safer for the dog (less likely that you’ll pour boiling water over the critter as you carry the pasta from the stove to the sink, stumbling over the dog on the way) and obviates the destruction of your kitchen cabinetry by flailing dog claws.

• Do not lock up Cassie to protect her from Charley’s exuberance. Instead, put Charley in his crate when he gets rambunctious.

• Discourage attention-getting barking by ignoring the dog and by withholding the response for which the dog is lobbying. (Weirdly, this worked!)

• Teach sit/wait before sit/stay; use “wait” to control behavior and as a training device.

• Keep Pup on a leash at all times, so he cannot get out of your sight for his floor-pissing frolics. Place your foot on the leash to help keep the dog where you want him while leaving your hands free for typing and other tasks.

• Rather than limiting crate time to the periods when you’re out of the house, put Pup in the crate whenever you need to focus on a job that requires uninterrupted attention or time.

• To discourage nipping and biting, hold him firmly by the nape of the neck until he quits it.

• Grasp Pup’s collar under his neck rather than at the back of the collar, to avoid injuring the esophagus.

• Want to sleep in past the crack of dawn, when dogs think the day starts? Set your alarm to go off about a half-hour before Dog’s customary awaking. Take the dog out to eliminate. Put the dog back in its crate and to back to bed. Get up at your convenience, not at Dog’s.

Gave the trainer the 30-year-old crate we had, the one that fell apart. She was pleased; says they’re better made than newer ones. She’s probably right. Got it out of my house, anyway.

6:59 p.m.: I can’t hold my head up another minute.