Coffee heat rising

Real Estate: Looking up?

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Sandy and Bill Goodheart, the Realtors who for years have dominated my part of town (Bill Goodheart actually built a fair amount of the neighborhood), send out a sporadic real estate newsletter to their clients. For many a moon, the news has been pretty glum. This month, though, they report some indications that real estate in the hard-hit Phoenix area may be starting to look up.

Here’s the good news:

We believe the market has bottomed out. In just the last ten weeks, we have gone from a 10.4-month supply of listed homes for sale to a 7.5-month supply. This has been accomplished by a 6% reduction in the number of homes for sale and a 30% increase in the number of homes sold…

We feel prices are stabilizing, although at a much lower price than last year. This new, lower floor will last for all of 2009, then we can expect an average 3-5% increase for the next several years.

This cheer is based on fairly scant evidence: in the past four months, Realtors in our area made only nine sales. Average sales price was $247,000, and it took an average of 156 days (over five months!) to sell. While this comes under the heading of “the bad news”—it represents a 12 percent drop in prices over the past year—it’s better than the overall market, which has dropped 35 to 40 percent.

Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum sold for $247,500. That’s $15,500 more than I paid for my house five years ago, and $77,500 more than the speculator paid to buy the arboretum from the bottom-feeder who bought it out of bankruptcy. That place is two square feet larger than mine, on an identical lot with a similar size and quality pool, freshly out of foreclosure, and not renovated as nicely as mine. The people two doors down from Dave are asking $300,000 for the best model in the tract. It’s potentially a nice house (given a few tens of thousands of dollars in fix-up), but they’re original owners and the house is advertised as “lovingly cared for,” meaning everything in it still dates back to 1971.

In the past, the Goodhearts‘ observations have been pretty accurate. About 18 months or two years before the bubble peaked, they sent out a letter advising their clients to sell and move into rentals, then buy new real estate at what they expected would be greatly depressed prices.

They predicted the bust that much in advance, and in fact, Mr. B*** (the predatory landlord) made a nice little killing by following their advice: he sold his rentals in the neighborhood at the top of the market. Their timing was a little off—they jumped the gun by a few months—but their assessment of the market and where it was going was right on.

Their prognostication for the future:

Our best advice is to wait if you can, because time is now on your side. Ideally, when we have a 3-6 month supply, that is considered a balanced market and is the better time to sell. We do not see prices going up this year.

Define “up,” though: in terms of a traditional increase, absent the bubble, the increase on houses that have not been in foreclosure has been unimpressive but not unacceptable. A house similar to mine sold for $280,000. Assuming that five years ago it was worth about what I paid for mine, a 3 percent annual increase would have put its value at $268,950. So if you think of what it ought to be worth instead of what it might have been worth, its value has increased by a little more than 4% a year.

The rapid drop in inventory is a positive sign. Around here, a three-month supply is considered about normal. If this trend continues, we may begin to approach sanity somewhere near the end of the year. After that, we should begin to see prices rise at a stately but respectable rate.

DIY Deodorant

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Moving on from the Great Desert University to ever so much more important topics, check out this recipe for homemade deodorant. Came across the link at Over the Cubicle Wall, a site whose proprietor seems to be a person after my own heart, via Frugal Scholar‘s blogroll.

Like the whole DIY destinker idea. I’m allergic to most commercial deodorants. Have been known to use plain baking soda, but it’s messy and gritty. A friend has tried one of those crystals; they’re said to work pretty well, but they also are messy: you have to get it wet and then it gets you wet.

Right now I’m using Tom’s, a reasonably benign brand you can get at Sprouts and Whole Foods. Sometimes other items in the Tom’s line appear in mainline stores (spotted the toothpaste in Target the other day!), but more often you have to seek them at New-Agey and health-foodish retailers. And the deodorant is really hard to find.

OMG! Cassie the Corgi just threw a rope toy, spinning end-over-end, about four feet over her head and caught it on the down-sweep. Now she’s throwing the thing at me. I guess she wants me to get up, eh?

This dog is bar none the smartest animal I’ve ever had around me. She actually has learned to pitch a ball into my waiting hands.

And so, off to the playing fields. Happy Easter Egg to everyone!
😀

Laughingstock postscript

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Our Beloved Leader has circulated a memo about the Obama snubbing. It contains this wording:

Since my appointment [as president of the Great Desert University] we have not awarded honorary degrees to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment. We have not offered degrees to our sitting Senators or our sitting Governors as many universities do. We have not invited them as university commencement speakers either.

In this case, the historic election of Barack Obama, we invited him as our university commencement speaker, the first in recent memory. We did that out of recognition of his unique achievements and his deep connection to our mission as a university committed to excellence and access.

If that’s the reasoning, why didn’t we say so instead of emanating the PR double-talk that went out to the Associated Press Friday?

Heee! It gets better and better.

GDU Defends Status as Champion Laughingstock of North America

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LOL! You have to be here to appreciate how ludicrously typical this is. Colleagues are still hooting with ecstatic hilarity (heaven knows we have little enough to laugh at around that place) over columnist Gail Collins’s choice words:

Obama’s round of spring events will culminate in appearances at graduation ceremonies in Notre Dame (where the local bishop is ticked off about the abortion thing) and Arizona State University, where he is not going to receive an honorary degree. A spokeswoman for the university explained that it was withholding that honor from the president because “his body of work is yet to come.”

Tough standards, A.S.U.!

Snark! Gasp…catch your breath, pick yourself up off the floor, and tool on over to CNN, where Our Beloved Employer’s p.r. staff can be seen digging us in even deeper:

The university says that the president’s achievements have yet to rate the honor, and is directing reporters to use a statement given to the Associated Press. “His body of work is yet to come. That’s why we’re not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency,” Media Relations Director Sharon Keller told the AP Thursday.

The university’s guidelines say the degree is merited by “significant contributions to education and society over the course of a person’s career,” though Sandra Day O’Connor and Barry Goldwater — both Arizonans — received the honor after the latter had served just over one term in the Senate, and the former was roughly three years into her Supreme Court tenure. Also honored: activist Cesar Chavez, legendary Arizona senator and former presidential candidate Mo Udall, and broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

Here in the blogosphere, one wit notes that the Great Desert University adjudges Erma Bombeck’s opus sufficient to merit an honorary degree, to say nothing of Jerry Colangelo’s and Steve Allen’s. Backs against the wall, administrators personfully stick with their decision to withhold an honorary degree from the President of the United States but instead will name a scholarship after him.

Mighty white of ’em, eh?

Meanwhile, the highly educated products of our elite institution, patriotic young entrepreneurs steeped in the significance of their nation’s history and place in the world, have made themselves busy peddling their tickets to the graduation ceremony. Entrée to hear the first African American President of the United States in person comes cheap at the Great Desert University: $60 to $100 a seat.

God, what an embarrassment to be associated with that outfit! How can I count the ways I love the prospect of exiting, pursued by…whatever?
MORE!

Laughingstock Postscript
Funnier and funnier!

Light rail is AWESOME!

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So yesterday as a lark SDXB and I rode the city’s new light rail train from uptown Phoenix to the end of the line in Mesa; thenon the return legdropped off in Tempe for lunch at the Great Desert University’s new “local foods” café. What a hoot! The trains, being brand-new, are clean and shiny. The ride is smooth and surprisingly fast: from Tempe to our stop was about 40 minutes, no longer than it takes me to make the drive in moderate traffic. And it was great fun.
Check it out:

trainatcback

Starting Monday, I am going to park my car near AJ’s (my favorite purveyor of overpriced foods) at Central and Camelback and ride the train to campus. That will save about 30 miles of wear & tear on my car plus almost a quarter-tank of gas per trip!

buyingtix
Buying tickets

As an old folk, I can get a round-trip ticket for $1.25, somewhat less than the cost of gasoline for a round-trip drive. They have various packages that save a little, but unfortunately the tickets are for consecutive days, and I don’t necessarily go to Tempe five consecutive days a week. Ditto the university’s cut-rate package: you have to buy a full year’s worth; they take it away from you when you’re canned; and it covers consecutive days. So any day that you don’t ride represents wasted money. With the senior-citizen fare, the best deal seems to be to purchase a ticket from a vending machine for each ride.

But it gets better!

Presently, the end of the line on our side of town is in a shopping center with a Costco and a Target, within walking distance of M’hijito’s house. On days when I need to do make a significant shopping trip, I could leave my car in the Park’n’ride there and, on the way home, hit Costco and Target. This would save an extra trip for supply runs.

Also along the way are a Safeway, a Walgreen’s (both in reasonably safe areas), and the wonted AJ’s. In other words, I could combine about 98% of routine shopping with light-rail trips!

It would cut the use of my car by a good 75 to 80 percent. And once The Hartford hears about this, it will cut the cost of auto insurance: they specifically ask whether you commute on public transport.

In about 18 months or two years, this train is going to run right up the main drag just to the west of my neighborhood. I will be able to walk to the station—or ride Xoot the Xooter, or, as I get more decrepit, ride an electric scooter.

So! In retirement, I will barely need a car.

Good thing, since the amount of savings I’d earmarked to buy the new car was incinerated in the Bonfire of the Bush Vanities, and so I’ll have to make do with my ten-year-old van. Chuck the Mechanic Par Excellence informed me that its next scheduled service, at 90,000 miles, will set me back $1,200. Great timing, eh? I really need a twelve-hundred-dollar bill just as I’m about to lose my job. Well, it’s a lot cheaper than a new car.

And if this light rail system actually works to cut mileage by, say, 60 to 75 percent, the old clunk may survive another ten years.
Frugal and green!
🙂

Economy is all about politics

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Once again, we’re brought back to a raw fact: economy is politics, politics economy.

The Arizona state legislature’s response to the state budget crisis engendered by the collapse of the Bush economy has been pigheaded beyond belief. Elected leaders here, brought into office before the recent national changeover in leadership and set free to work mischief by the loss of Democratic governor Janet Napolitano, cling to the failed Republican doctrine that government borrowing is bad and taxes are worse. The wretches fail to grasp that government is different from private corporations and different from their own little household economies.

As a result, they have engaged in an extended bloodbath that continues to this day, with K through 12 schools forced to fire thousands of teachers statewide, universities closing down entire colleges and canning or furloughing thousands of employees, libraries and parks shutting down, basic services curtailed or eliminated. The kindest term for their strategy might be “draconian”; a more accurate one, “stupid.”

Now, many days late and vast billions of dollars short, it’s beginning to dawn on our august leaders that they’re going to have to borrow some money to keep the government functioning. Local television station KPHO’s online news quotes Sen. Pat Gorman as saying, “We don’t like to borrow. We don’t think that’s a good idea. . . . But right now, we’re looking at what’s a bad idea and what’s a really bad idea.” The station also reports “a spokesman for the Republican governor” as saying that “the governor was reluctant to borrow money as a way to reduce the deficit. She supports the tax increase as a better option.”

News reporters often get quotations wrong, but the strange pin-headed thinking of this state’s elected leaders has been reported so often and its consequences have become so obvious that it’s hard to figure anything but that the reporters are getting the general gist right.

Borrowing now is a day late and a dollar short. The state needed to do that before its workforce and its private industries were devastated by vast layoffs.

And as for raising taxes, let me tell you: I would have voted in favor of a tax increase to rescue the state’s economy while I still had a job. Now it’s too late. A larger percentage of nothing is nothing. How will raising taxes on workers who no longer have jobs raise money to help the state’s economy?

The loss of my job at the Great Desert University and of the wages of thousands of my coworkers is directly attributable the majority Republican legislators’ bizarre short-sightedness and stubbornness. At my age I will not get another job. Social Security plus what shreds of my life savings remain after the collapse of the Bush economy will not support me without my working part-time for the rest of my life. Arizona can raise my taxes and be damned. The tax collectors can visit me at the Seventh Avenue Overpass, under which I will soon be living, in a tent nursing home.

There oughta be a law against electing damn fools to public office.