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Zillow is full of beans

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What with the proposal that the government should force mortgage rates down to 4 percent, I mentioned to M’hijito that we should be prepared to re-refinance the Investment House, the place he and I are copurchasing partly as shelter for him and a paying roommate and partly as what we imagined would be an investment. He said he didn’t think we’d qualify, because we’re now upside-down in that house. Whence this intelligence? Zillow!

So I thought I’d better check Zillow to see what it claims the house is currently worth. Yup: the site estimates its value at $188,500, which is $46,500 less than we paid for it. But… Directly behind our house is a nearly identical cute little brick house in foreclosure. It has been partially renovated (ours has been completely renovated), but the owners dropped out of the picture before they could finish the job. Flooring is down to the concrete; bathrooms are unfinished; it needs a new roof. Zillow values that wreck at $225,000!

Our house has a new roof, new air conditioner, updated wiring and plumbing, and has been completely gutted out and rebuilt inside. Makes sense, eh?

If Zillow is figuring on a straight square-footage basis, at $188,500 our house is worth $143 a square foot. The house behind it has a 500-square-foot add-on. That should add $71,500 to its value, over the value of ours; in that case, it would be worth $260,00.

Interesting. I wondered what Zillow thinks my place is worth. Entering my address brought up an estimate of $284,500, or $52,500 more than I paid. Noticing a “recently sold” icon to the north, I clicked on it, thinking it was the rental house that Manny, the font of all neighborhood gossip, said was on the market.

But no! It was my neighbor Sally’s house, directly behind me. Zillow claimed it had sold in October for $192,500.

Say what? Sally is still very much in evidence. No “for sale” sign has ever gone up, though sometimes houses around here sell with no notice. But if the house had been sold last October, surely Sally would have moved by now.

A little further investigation showed Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum (now under new management) also sold last October, for the same price.

Hmh. Well, these houses are on two parallel roads with the same name, one ending in “Lane” and one in “Way.” The street numbers are the same, so that packages and workmen meant for 501 West Erewhon Way often end up at 501 West Erewhon Lane, and vice versa. Clearly, someone got the address wrong, and Zillow picked up the error. Not enough, however, to post a picture of Dave’s house when you click on Sally’s: what comes up is a fine photo of Sally’s front elevation.

It gets better. Despite the alleged fire-sale price, Zillow values Sally’s house at $300,000, well above what any house in this neighborhood has commanded over the past two years. Her house is old and unrenovated, replete with the original harvest gold Formica counters and matching appliances. It’s clean and neat, but it needs a paint job, a new roof, a new air conditioner, and a full interior remake to bring it into the three-hundred-grand range.

Dave’s house is valued at $289,500, despite the $192,500 selling price. It is two square feet larger than mine, sits on the same-sized corner lot directly across the street from mine, has a pool about the same as mine, and landscaping comparable to mine (but lacking fruit and shade trees). It was built in the same year as mine by the same builder. It has a minuscule, dark kitchen, needs a new roof and new air conditioner, and soon will need new pool equipment. My house, in contrast, has a large, bright kitchen with a skylight (one of four in the house), sunny and open rooms, gorgeous tile floors throughout, a park-like yard with not one, not two, but three beautiful outdoor sitting and entertaining areas, a new roof, new kitchen appliances, new pool equipment, new bathroom everythings: Zillow values it at $284,000.

And this makes sense…how?

Zillow is the last place I would go to get a reasonable estimate on the value of a house. If you’re interested in buying a house, get your Realtor (and do engage one who alleges to represent the buyer, despite the speciousness of that claim) to run the comparables in the area and show you a printout. Visit those houses to be sure they really are comparable to the place you covet.

If you want to know what your house is worth, any Realtor will run the comps for your place. This is generally a free service, offered in hopes that you will list with the Realtor who is nicest to you. Ask a real, live Realtor, not Zillow, about the value of your house.

Moment of Fame

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This week Funny entered only one carnival, the Carnival of Personal Development, hosted by Happiness Is Better. So I was delighted to see that 10 Stress Reducers made Editor’s Choice!

This is the first time I’ve entered the C of Personal Development—it only recently came to my attention. It gets an eclectic collection of entries. Happiness has organized them by topic: Personal Development and Personal Finance. Each category includes quite a few interesting articles. My attention was caught by Andy of Personal Hacks, who submitted the first installment of his autobiography, starting with the time he arrived, as a youngster, in the U.S. from Egypt. Debt Kid got into the Personal Development section with The #1 Reason You Can’t Get Out of Debt. Ms. Smarty Pants shares an insight into a time management system she says works for her. And Money TLD talks about how to survive without a car, an idea that occurred to me as I was driving to work this morning and realizing that after the probable layoff I won’t be able to afford $1,100-plus a year for car insurance.

Check it out: it’s an interesting round-up.

My job is toast

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From: Michael Crow, President, Great Desert University
To: All employees

The revised FY09 budget passed by the state legislature has singled out the state’s universities for the largest cuts. It deals a devastating blow to ASU, UA, and NAU, to all our students, to every citizen in this state who wants to see a child or grandchild have a quality university education. While some have described these cuts as small, they have, in fact, set in motion a Force 4 financial hurricane whose destructive force has not yet begun to be felt.

Our nation is fighting two wars it cannot afford to lose—one against terrorism and a second against an economic recession so deep it may take several years or more to overcome. At the very time our nation is calling its universities to action in this most important of economic battles, Arizona has gone in the opposite direction, the equivalent of grounding the state’s economic air force in the hope that we can fight a high-tech economic war on horseback.

Since June 2008 the reduction of state investment in ASU has been $88 million or 18% of the university’s base state funding in a single fiscal year.

ASU’s per-student funding from the state general fund has now been reduced to what it was 10 years ago:

$7,976 in 2008

$6,476 in 1998

$6,500 for 2009

This amounts to having more than 30,000 of our 67,000 students with no state investment whatsoever.

Consider also what we have already done to meet these cuts:

– More than 550 staff positions eliminated, including four deans positions and at least two dozen academic department chair positions

– More than 200 faculty associate positions eliminated

– Ten- to 15-day furloughs for all employees, including the entire senior administration, deans, varsity coaches and faculty.

– The consolidation of nearly a half dozen schools and of almost two dozen academic departments.

– A reduction in the number of nursing students the university can admit

– A wide variety of cost-saving measures from the reduction of purchases, to energy conservation to a hiring freeze.

To respond to this new budget we still need another $13–15 million in cuts to take. That could mean eliminating another 1,000 jobs, closing a campus, restricting enrollment next fall and increasing tuition and fees.

As bad as all this is, we must all understand that the state’s budget challenges do not end with the FY09 budget. Another large deficit looms for FY10. But we don’t have to repeat the devastation of the FY09 budget. With the availability of federal economic stimulus funds and other revenue enhancements available to the state and to the university, the FY10 budget does not have to add more severe cuts on top of the ones taken this year. ASU has contributed four of our leading economists and public policy experts to a group being assembled by the Arizona Board of Regents from all three universities to work on recommendations for the FY10 budget.

Thinking of moving to Arizona? Think again. This is not a place where you want to send your kids to school.

With another 1,000 layoffs coming down the pike, the probability that my job will go is about 99.9 percent.

Well… I have to say, I’m almost relieved. I’m tired of being whipsawed around like this, and the drive out there is enough to make you seriously consider quitting a $60,000 job, just to get out of the nasty commute. Saturday night at 6:30 p.m. the traffic was thick as molasses on the damnable freeway—worse than rush-hour. And everywhere you turn, EVERY road is under construction. Wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here.

That old chestnut is beginning to take on some metaphorical overtones of the Waiting for Godot kind.
Wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here.

Busy day today

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Won’t be getting much blogging done today. I have to be at the campus by 2:00 (meaning I have to leave here by 1:00) for a memorial service for the Grand Old Man of the history department, who passed a month ago under difficult circumstances. Quite some time ago, before I realized I would be hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance on Monday, I also promised to have dinner with an out-of-state colleague who spent the fall semester as interim director of a program in that department, she having come back to town for the service. So that will keep me in lovely downtown Tempe all afternoon and into the night.

It also hugely truncates the time available to work on the carnival and do all the weekend chores. So, if I don’t have much to say today and tomorrow, don’t go away. It’s not that I’ve forgotten you.
🙂

Carnival of Personal Finance Comin’ Our Way

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Next Monday, Funny about Money gets to host its first Carnival of Personal Finance! I’m reading submissions now and getting a big boot out of them.

I love hosting carnivals. It always introduces me to sites that I didn’t know about, and it allows you to read a lot of posts you might not have come across. And to review some that you have.

So. If you blog on personal finance, be sure to send a submission by the Sunday deadline. Here’s the link to the C of PF.

Update on layoff vs. retirement benefits

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So I called the state’s General Accounting Office, by some miracle reaching the woman who manages RASL, the state benefit whereby employees get paid a portion of their hourly wage for each hour of accrued sick leave they’ve accumulated. You could hear her hair rising off her head to stand straight on end as I described the story I’d been told: that a layoff means you lose all your RASL.

Nay. Nay verily. She told me that was absolutely, positively not true.

Termination, as it develops, is separate from retirement. You may be canned for any reason ranging from budget-driven layoffs to being caught with your fingers in the till while screwing little boys. That is irrelevant to retirement. Retiring is a different process. To get your RASL, all you have to do is arrange to start your retirement within 14 days after your last day on the job.

Layoffs, she declared in every way she could think of, do not, do not, do not affect your earned retirement benefit.

Thank God!

Nice, eh? This factoid came to me first through the rumor mill, which you would expect to be inaccurate. But then it was confirmed by HR! There’s where the strategy to declare fake retirement plans was actually hatched.

Now all I have to do is perch up here like a sitting duck and wait to be laid off. At least I don’t have to cook up any schemes to make it look like I intend to retire when I most certainly do not.

Not that I wouldn’t like to.