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Real estate

Selling the Older House

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Save your money. Let the buyers fix it up to their taste! Click on the image for a clear view of the popcorn ceilings.

My neighbor Sally, as I probably mentioned, sold her home at what she thought was a good price but for what in reality was slightly below market.

She lived in the house for 39 years, and she and Catherine were the second owners. So…that is an OLD tract house. The only updates have been things that had to be done: more on the order of repairs than updating or remodeling. It still has the old Mediterranean brown cabinets…

Mediterranean brown…that probably predates most of our readers…

Before you were born, Dear Readers, the then-young and then-stylish developed a predilection for cabinetry stained a particularly ugly shade of dark, dark, DARK sh!t-brown. It was almost black.

It was depressing.

It was hideous.

It was the height of fashion.

Yes. So were the harvest gold appliances Sally’s house still sports. “Harvest gold” was a kind of muted mustard yellow, relatively unobtrusive, all things considered. The competing high-style colors were avocado green, Hallowe’en orange, and brit-shindle brown, each comparatively more hideous than the mustard gas.

Sally contemplated the prospect of selling for a very long time. At least a year, probably longer. She knew the house was out of date. So she took it into her head to have a guy come in and lay tile all over the utility room and kitchen.

She was proud as she showed it off. Gazing upon this decorator upgrade, I thought… Holy mackerel! Who sold these to her and WHERE did they come from? They were classic 1990s 12 x 12 ultra-bland tiles: Return of the Creature from the Cocaine-White Lagoon!

As we scribble, the new owners’ workmen are in there chipping the stuff off the floors.

It was a ridiculous waste of Sally’s money to install that stuff. If she couldn’t do a complete remodel — new cabinetry and counters and sinks in the kitchen and bathrooms, new fixtures, new appliances, new flooring throughout — then she would have been better off to do almost nothing: paint, clean, fix anything that’s obviously broken, and leave it at that.

If your parents are aging and considering a downsize move from the Old Homestead — or you are — try to get them to keep a grip. The people who bought Sally’s house claimed they were a young couple about to have a baby who were going to move right in. No: they’re transparently fix-and-flippers. These people give the old folks a line of bull to make them feel good about accepting less than the house is worth.

But whether the Homestead is bought by a genuine young family or by eager fix-and-flippers, all that old 1970s decor is gonna go! The parents should not pay to remove it or update it as they’re on the verge of moving out.

For hevvinsake, don’t let them do an expensive update like retiling the floors or installing granite counters over those fine Mediterranean brown or pickled oak cabinets! They’re not going to get top dollar from an old house that’s had one or two low-end upgrades installed.

Just paint the walls a neutral color. Clean the carpets. Repair anything that’s broken. And get the heck out of Dodge!

Hullo?

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Idle Essay Day…

Item: Are you reading this? I don’t even know for sure whether Funny about Money is appearing online. I think it is. The last post I published appears to be visible. But who knows? Firefox caches things in inscrutable ways. I may be writing this in some phantom site, and a phantom published page may be coming up in the Twilight Zone.

I feel distinctly  like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Most of my websites are nonfunctional, particularly Writers Plain & Simple, my key marketing site, which actually had a decent number of followers.

Then some guy had the nerve to notice WP&S’s disappearance and spam me with an offer to fix it, for a small fee!!!!!

Shee-ut.

As usual, everything happens at once. I just posted a new Fire-Rider story, but I’ve been so distracted with this mess I haven’t been able to even try to market it.

Then my neighbor Sally announced (once again) that she’s putting her house on the market. This time she’s serious: she’s rented an apartment in a Scottsdale old-folkerie.

The last time she stuck her Realtor nephew’s sign in the front yard, the Perp showed up that very day and tried to buy the house. She hates the Perp and says she won’t sell to him, but she simply does not understand that you can’t refuse to sell to a qualified buyer just because you don’t like him.

The Perp, I’ve learned, is roundly feared and hated by the other neighbors. This is the guy, in case you haven’t been following Funny for the past ten years, who vandalized my pool shortly after I moved in — to the tune of $10,000. SDXB and I took him to court and won. When he lost, he threatened the judge, who was so alarmed that he would not let SDXB, me, or our lawyers leave the courtroom until after a police officer reported the Perp had gotten in his car land driven out of the parking lot.

My lawyers were alarmed, too. Terrorized, actually, is le mot juste. They urged me to move out immediately and put the house on the market forthwith. They wanted me to take an apartment and be gone ASAP.

Well, I’d just bought the house. I couldn’t afford the tax hit involved in buying a house and turning right around and selling it, and even if I could, I’d also  had a bunch of upgrades installed right before I moved in. By this time, I’d only been in the place three or four months.

I had a German shepherd and a Ruger and a bad attitude, so I stayed.

Nothing happened except that the German shepherd took after the poor little psychotic Son-in-Law when he tried to enter through a side gate. Scared the guy so bad he never came back.

But obviously the Perp has not forgotten. If he gets Sally’s house, he will work very hard, indeed, to make my life miserable. And he won’t have to work very hard at all: What he’ll do is rent the place to the slimiest trash he can find and let them do the job.

One of the houses he turned into a rental was occupied by a creep who abused his children so violently that the neighbors across the street sold their (very nicely renovated! recently renovated!) home and moved. When asked what possessed them, they explicitly said that the screams of this guy’s tortured children were frightening their children to the extent that they felt they could not stay in the vicinity.

We had not yet made an enemy of the Perp, who lived right next door to SDXB, who had witnessed this creep abusing a pair of puppies (the creep lived directly behind SDXB). So SDXB passed this bit of intelligence along to the Perp, who called the renter and told him that the neighbors had said they were going to call Child Protective Services if they heard his kids screaming while he was beating them again.

The creep moved out that night. Following morning he and his “family” were gone, skipped out.

So that’s the kind of folks the Perp rents to.

He’s been out of the  rental business for awhile. When he first bought and moved into the house next door to SDXB, he started buying up homes in this neighborhood, which is only about two blocks wide by three blocks long. He would watch and find aging original owners — since the houses were built in 1971, these people were getting on in years, and they also had no idea what their houses were worth. He’d then go to their doors and offer to buy the house and pay in cash.

He obtained six houses in this area that way, all of which he turned into rentals. He would tell mortgage companies he was buying them to house family members or to move into himself (until relatively recently, you could get anyone’s real estate paperwork online through the County Assessor’s office, so you could find the deeds and mortgage agreements — that’s how we know he was lying to mortgage lenders).

He would chop down all the trees on a property — he really dislikes trees — and then rent it out.  Any maintenance was done by him, and much of it was out of code. He built what Down-Easterners might still call a “summer kitchen” (they’re Romanian refugees, and their customs are a bit different from the natives’) on the back of the house next door to SDXB’s and bragged that he’d tied into the city sewer without a permit. He presumably installed the electric and plumbing without benefit of permit, too.

A house next door to some friends of mine is back on the market. I almost bought that house during the crisis described above, but it needed some very costly renovation. Much more than I’d spent on this house. I felt I couldn’t afford it.

Now it’s on the market for about $400,000. However, my house may be worth over $300,000 now. And the house in question has been HUGELY renovated. It’ really is gorgeous. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have a gas stove, which pretty much is a non-negotiable for me.

But. With the Perp breathing down my neck…I might manage to make my peace with a glass-top stove. I do most of my cooking on the propane grill, anyway. Next grill could have a gas side burner…wtf?

So that’s where we are now. General frustration. General fear. Ongoing hassles. And I’m not getting any work done while all this disruption continues.

If you can read this post, please say hello in the comments! 🙂

What Would You Do to Realize Your Dream?

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lompocAnd at what point in your life will you be ready to try to realize your dream? OMG. Check out this incredible offering near Lompoc, a rural burg in Santa Barbara County, California.

Ogodogodogod, run your eyeballs over those enticing photos. Imagine living in a place like that, making wine to support your habits, traveling around the world to sell your wine and learn more about wine-making…oooogod!

They only want $950,000 for this property. Although there are no vines planted yet, it has 6 1/3 acres that could be cultivated as one desired…smack in the heart of wine country. Or, failing that, it calls out to host a B&B.

Forwarded this to M’hijito, who says, “Too bad I’m not a millionaire.”

Heh. Little does he know. 😉 Oh well. What he doesn’t know could harm him, I suppose.

But that’s not the issue at all. What else he doesn’t know that could harm him is that if something like this were carried on his books as a business enterprise — say, he incorporated an entity to buy it and the entity did all the borrowing and the spending — he wouldn’t need to be a millionaire to live in it and work for it.

Some years ago, a friend offered to sell me his very successful bed-and-breakfast in Flagstaff. He and his wife had built it into a profit-making enterprise and now were looking to retire — although you can live nicely on a b&b and funnel virtually all of your living expenses through the business (it’s astonishing!!), it nevertheless is a work-intensive business. He wanted a million dollars for the property, the business, and all its accouterments.

Welp. I was younger then and a great deal less bold and certainly every bit as averse to work as I am today…so I declined.

But in retrospect…hm.

If I were 30 or 40 years younger, knowing now what I know about how S-corps and C-corps work and how people wangle a living out of them, I would look at this property altogether differently than I looked at the Flagstaff opportunity lo! these many years ago.

Work? Holeee shit! The amount of work beggars the imagination. But if you’re in your 30s or even your 40s, you can do it. And working that hard for yourself is far less onerous than working half that hard for The Man. Learning curve? Argha! You’d have to pick up the equivalent of a master’s degree in viniculture or the hospitality industry in a year — preferably less. But you could do it. If you wanted to.

How much work would you do — how much risk would you take — to devote your life to doing something that looks like what you’d really want to do?

Good News for the Neighborhood

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Fix Me Up...
Fix Me Up…

…maybe not the greatest good news for my neighbor, but it looks like the ’hood is on its way to major gentrification. At worst, our property values are likely to stay stable no matter what the overall Phoenix-area market does; at best, they’re poised to head for the stratosphere.

Turns out a young couple has bought my neighbor Maria’s house. They have four kids, and Dad is a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young fellow.

This is good: it’s what happened in the Encanto District back in the day, when my then-young husband and I bought a beautiful old house down there. We were among the first to buy in a neighborhood called Willo, where unique and solidly built houses dating back as far as 1929 stood in stark contrast to the seas of ticky-tacky stick-built tracts sprouting in the suburbs.

At that time, the area was just being discovered by young professionals — mostly lawyers and doctors — who didn’t want to commute an hour each way from some look-alike tract of stucco throw-aways. A buying frenzy ensued. And a fix-up frenzy ensued. The area is still gorgeous, and now if you earn a median Arizona income, you can’t afford to buy a two- or three-bedroom house down there for love nor money. These were folks who could afford to put their kids in private schools, mooting the problem posed by the dreadful inner-city schools that served the area. Or disserved it. 😉

Well, the area where I’m now living presents an almost exact parallel to the Willo of 35 or 40 years ago: it’s centrally located; houses are solidly built of block (not sticks and styrofoam) with mature trees and landscaping; it abuts a very upscale neighborhood on one side (similar to Willo’s neighboring tract, Palmcroft) and a very downscale area on the other side; schools suck but a number of good private preschools and K-12 schools are nearby.

Fixed me up!
Fixed me up!

The centrally located part is huge. Not only are we fifteen minutes from downtown (law offices, courts, two enormous regional medical centers, baseball stadium, increasingly vibrant downtown cultural life), the lightrail is being built within walking distance. Read: doctors and lawyers.

The young man I met yesterday when I strolled across the street to pick up the vacationing Carol & Tom’s newspaper was so excited about getting the house! And he was delighted to hear that the place is filling up fast with growing families. His will be the fourth on the block to move in with small kids — and two of those families have twins! 😀

It really is extremely good news. Young, upwardly mobile buyers will fix up the homes, become active in the neighborhood association, and most of them will stay here for at least ten years. As their careers mature and they build affluence, they also will acquire political clout, and that will go a very long way toward preserving and improving our area. The result? $$$$$

My DXH and I bought our house in the Willo district in 1969. We paid $33,000 for it — more than we could afford, but we were so enamored that we just had to have the place. Three months later, the doorbell rang and when I answered it, I found a real estate agent standing there. He offered me $100,000 on the spot.

I sent him away, because I loved the house so much that I wouldn’t have taken any amount of money for it. But…you get the picture. Housing in the area inflated that much, that fast, and with the exception of the Great Recession, values have really never dropped. They certainly never dropped proportionately: even during the GR, for what I could have gotten in a sale of this house, I couldn’t have afforded a two-bedroom fixer-upper in Willo.

The only loser here, I’m afraid, is Maria. Her agent listed the house for a good $30,000 under market. They asked $233,000, when two houses in the same or a similar model are on the market for $280,000. She was persuaded to go that low because the house does need some fix-up. She never got the roof replaced after the hailstorm — I suspect that, because she lost her job during the Recession That Was Not a Depression and is, like me, of an age that no one will  hire, she had probably dropped her homeowner’s insurance. The pool needs work. The trees could use some pruning. The lawn needs aerating and fertilizing. And I expect there’s probably stuff inside that needs renovation. But at base, the house is quite pretty: it has Saltillo tile flooring throughout, professionally designed (though aging) landscaping front and back, spectacular trees in front, and it still has grass.

Because of the roof and pool issues, Maria’s agent engineered a further discount. So these kids are practically stealing the house. It’s a very good deal for them. Not very good for her: the house was seriously underpriced when it went on the market just a few days ago (when something sells in less than a week, you know the price is too low), and pushing it down another 10 grand to pay for the roof is amazingly advantageous for the buyers and amazingly disadvantageous for the seller.

It will depress prices for other houses, temporarily: those two $280,000 shacks were overpriced from the git-go. One has been on the market for several months; the other for weeks. Probably about $260,000 is a fair price for a house here that’s been renovated and attractively updated; maybe $250,000 for one that could use some work (that would be Maria’s), and $230,000 to $240,000 for a fixer-upper.

Except for the roof, which was damaged in the hailstorm, Maria’s house is not a major fixer-upper. If she’d listed it for $250,000 and paid for a new roof and light pool renovation, she would have come away with $230,000 to $235,000 — her initial asking price. So she comes away with the short end of the stick.

The neighborhood loses Maria, a beloved neighbor. However, we gain a vibrant, lively young family with children who will play in front and parents who will upgrade the house and, from the looks of that guy, earn a good living.

These are good things. Very good.

In Richistan...
Home sweet home in Richistan…right around the corner

Click on the images for larger, higher resolution views.

Changing Climate, Changing Property Values?

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Dust storm in Rolla, Kansas
Dust storm in Rolla, Kansas

Let’s dust off the crystal ball this morning. “Dust it off” is the operative term. Here in lovely uptown Arizona, gale-strength winds have been blowing every day and most nights for the past several weeks. Clean the furniture, and the next day it looks like you haven’t dusted in the past ten days.

Arizona is still mired in a decade-long drought, with no end in sight. Actually, the drought has gone on longer than a decade, and “normal” summer temperatures have been steadily rising as development runs amok and cities get bigger and more hectic. When I moved here in 1962, a 110-degree day was hot. Summer temperatures might rise as high as 112, but 114 was unheard-of. Now we regularly get 114-degree days, and we have seen highs of 118. In some parts of the Valley, unofficial backyard thermometers hit 120.

The City of Phoenix, now the eighth- or ninth-largest metropolitan area in the country, has not yet instituted water rationing, although it has raised water bills into the astronomical range, our City Parents hoping to discourage water use. It now costs as much to keep my xeric landscaping alive as it used to cost me to water lawns in front and back yards: often the water bill is higher than the exorbitant air-conditioning bill. The Valley avoids having to force residents to save water, by law, because of the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water into the low desert.

However, the Colorado is running low, and the reservoirs that impound that water are running lower.

Outlying towns are forbidding residents to wash their cars, to refill their swimming pools (which means when your pool drops below the level of the tile rim, you have to shut off the pump and drain the pool, or let it turn into a green mosquito nest), to water their lawns, or even to use their garden hoses at all. Exceed your allotment or get caught in the act and you’ll get a stinging fine.

So…the question is, how long is this region going to remain livable?

If tomorrow the City informed me that I couldn’t run my irrigation system, couldn’t keep my pool full enough to operate the pump, and couldn’t water the trees, life here would take a decided turn for the worse. The shade and citrus trees temper the heat inside the house and help keep air-conditioning bills marginally under control. The pool, besides providing therapy for the chronic back and hip pain, makes living through a Sonoran Desert summer marginally tolerable. Without it, one would either suffer some serious misery for three or four months or, if at all possible, leave town for the summer.

The gardens and the flowering desert trees and the springtime abundance of citrus form a major part of what makes the low desert a good place to live. If suddenly we were told we could no longer have those things…well, it would no longer be a good place to live. My guess is about 90% to 95% of Phoenix dwellers would agree with that. Give us water rationing, and we’ll give you out-migration.

And, as you can imagine, if a lot of people start to move away, property values will drop as dramatically as they did during the Great Recession. Only this time they won’t come back up.

Right now, prices are back to where they were pre-Bubble. Most people are no longer underwater. And interest rates are low.

If I were a young Arizona professional, business owner, or craftsman able to make a decent living, I’d start looking right now for work someplace at least 20 or 30 miles inland – more, preferably – where they have water but no tornadoes. And precious little snow. This could be one’s last chance.

Gunfire in the Night: Bali Hai Is Calling

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300px-Ruger_P89_1Out of sorts most of the morning. Between you and me, I just don’t like it when the Cassie and I are waked up in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire. Even when I get back to sleep, it leaves me feeling damn crabby come dawn.

It wasn’t even automatic or semiautomatic gunfire. Sounded like what my Ruger would sound like if I decided to discharge all its ammo in one happy little frenzy. Six (maybe eight — by the time I woke up a couple of shells could already have been fired) rounds:

BANG…BANG…BANG…BANG…BANG-BANG.

Fvck you very much.

It came from the war zone to the north, which is inhabited by a) a dangerous meth-dealing gang and b) a hapless contingent of America’s poverty-stricken underclass. So, the gunfire could as easily come from some happy drunk who, in a moment of inebriated joy, decided to ejaculate a loud noise into the air as from some entrepreneur shooting at his competition. Either way, though: trash. It’s trashy. Trashy. Trashy. Trashy.

Well, I’ve been looking at real estate and found a patio home in Scottsdale, near the border of North Phoenix. Still unfortunately south of the crucial demarcation line for the middle class, the freeway dubbed Arizona Route 101. But nevertheless: bordering a fancy country club to the east and a tract of $600,000 shacks to the south. One could practically walk to the Whole Foods.

But do I really want to move to 56th Street and Cactus? To do so would be to say good-bye to friends, church activities, and son. It’s a LONG way from North Central, longer still when you’re old and it’s after dark. Why? Just so I don’t have to listen to gunfire in the night?

If I’m going to move away from everyone and everything I love, I’d just as soon move to a whole ‘nother town. Prescott, for example.

Which brings us to my neighbors’ activities.

The guy has hooked up his fifth wheel to his truck. The thing’s a VAST living room on wheels that stretches as long as the north side of his house. To frost the cake, he’s now got himself a four-wheel ORV, which he’s stacked on top of the damn thing. LOL!

I waved at him as he was pulling out of the driveway and hollered “HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!”

He emitted a maniacally joyful laugh.

His wife said they’re headed out on Thursday, long to be gone for the holiday.

Smart folks, those.

But…are they smart enough?

Think of how amazing it would be to get yourself a nice, fully self-contained RV — which I could acquire for about half the sale price of my house. Give the furniture to the kid. Donate whatever he won’t take plus all the old-lady clothing to the Salivation Army. Throw the jeans, the T-shirts, a jacket, the dog, and the pending new puppy into the machine, fill it up with diesel, and DRIVE AWAY.

Never to be seen again.

How far could you drive away from the sound of gunfire?

Rv_classaImages:
Standard Ruger P89, DanMP5, public domain.
Class A Motorhome, Claygate. Public Domain.