Wine Country And Horses

I stepped away from the office to admire the sun streaming through a
very large Japanese maple in the back yard. It is brilliant red orange
sorrounde by the lemon yellow leaves of two adjacent mulberry trees.
This was shot with my iPhone.

Posted via email from pambuda’s posterous

I am offering a break from all the market stat and technology posts. This video has great views of some Sonoma county back roads. Did you know you could do 2 rides a week for a year and not do the same ride twice? Courtesy of the Press Democrat, the Santa Rosa Cycling Club and today’s spring like weather!

Posted via email from pambuda’s posterous

This story from Inman News was published a day after my previous post about the national real estate market–and reinforces the point I was making about the differences in our market and its phase in the recovery process.California resale inventory shrinking | Real Estate and Technology News for Agents, Brokers and Investors | Inman News

Inventories of existing single-family homes in California are dwindling, reaching just four months of supply as the sales pace picked up from September to October, the California Association of Realtors reported.

Home sales historically trail off during the fall and winter months, CAR said, but affordable home prices, low mortgage rates, and the extension and expansion of the federal homebuyer tax credit are expected to drive home sales through the end of the year and into early 2010.

Existing single-family detached homes sold at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 562,400 in October, up 5.9 percent from September and 1 percent from a year ago, the group said.

The months supply of inventory fell from 4.2 months in September and 6.1 months a year ago. A 6-month supply of inventory is about what analysts consider an even balance between supply and demand.

It took a median of 34.1 days on market to sell a home in California in October 2009, compared with 45.5 days for the same period a year ago. At $297,500, median home price was essentially unchanged from September, but down 3.2 percent from a year ago.

Although the $890 increase in median price from September to October amounted to 0.3 percent, it was the eighth consecutive monthly gain. CAR Chief Economist Leslie Appleton-Young cited that trend, along with continued strength in sales, as “signs that California has hit and passed the bottom of this real estate cycle.”

For the first-time since July 2007, she said, sales of homes priced $1 million or more rose in year-to-year comparisons, and the number of distressed sales as a share of total sales has shown considerable improvement since the beginning of the year.

In Sonoma County and much of the Bay Area of Northern California, inventory supply is hovering around 2 to 3 months, reflecting the strong regional differences in the California markets. The Bay area and North Bay are limited geographic areas bounded by mountains, hills, the Bay and Pacific Ocean. In the central valley of California new home construction booms simply expanded communities into flat, seemingly limitless former farmland. Those areas from Stockton and Sacramento south and east of the Bay Area in Antioch and Brentwood, were much harder hit by the foreclosure wave.

8 of the 10 cities in the state with the highest growth in median price are in the Bay Area, probably reflecting the recent increase in sales of million dollar plus properties. (Bay Area towns are bolded.)

Cities with the greatest median home price increases were Palo Alto (49.1 percent), Atascadero (33.3 percent), Cupertino (24.2 percent), San Rafael (24 percent), Emeryville (22.2 percent), Livermore (20.5 percent), Culver City (19.4 percent), Pleasant Hill (17 percent), La Habra (16.2 percent), and Novato (15.4 percent).

I enjoyed this photo essay by Maira Kalman in the New York Times today. Sonoma County is home to many adherents of local, sustainably produced food. Worth a browse to see her photos of a journey to Northern California and back to New York-from fast to Slow Food, with tales of locally, sustainably produced food and the Edible Schoolyard movement. Worth a look–enjoy! and Happy Thanksgiving!

A thanksgiving turkey in all his glory

As I head off to Thanksgiving dinner in Sebastopol, I want to say how much I appreciate all of you who visit this blog, and of course I want to thank all my clients for entrusting me with the important business of selling or buying your homes, as well as your referrals to your friends and family. I am privileged to work with some wondeful people–thank you so much!

But what about Sonoma County and Northern California? If you read this article in the business section of today’s New York Times, An Upturn in the Housing Market May Be Reversing – NYTimes.com you’d find very justifiable skepticism about the increase in real estate sales volume nationally that we’ve experienced this summer and fall. As some friends and I discussed at dinner in Healdsburg Monday night, no one is convinced that the economy is on firmly recovering footing, Wall Street enthusiasm aside. So are we up for a “W” recovery–meaning another downturn in housing prices? From the article, which discussed the latest Case Shiller Housing Index Report:

The two housing price reports lag, by a month, the figures on the volume of home resales, which were issued Monday for October. Home resales jumped 10.1 percent to the highest level in two years, better than analysts had expected.

Much of the increase was attributed to the $8,000 first-time buyer’s tax credit, which had been set to expire Nov. 30 but has been renewed through spring. Buyers who have already owned a home are now eligible for a $6,500 credit.

While brisk sales volume should, in theory, push up prices, Maureen Maitland, the vice president for index services at S.& P., said the oversupply of inventory was acting as a brake. “You can look down the street and have 10 houses to choose from,” she said.

About 3.57 million used homes are for sale, a number that has been declining but is still higher than the historic average. It represents seven months of inventory at the current sales rate.

Ms. Maitland speculated that the housing market might follow a “W” pattern, as the price lows plumbed last spring are tested again this winter.

It’s all well and good to look at national statistics, but (and this is a cliche so forgive me)–looking at the national housing market to try to determine what is happening with home values in your neighborhood is like trying to know what the weather will be like by knowing what the average temperature in the US is at any given time. Just look at the paragraph above–7 months available inventory nationwide.

In Sonoma County we have less than three months of inventory available county wide, and less than two months at the lower price ranges. Even at the upper price ranges we have about 10 months of inventory and I suspect that is changing as we speak. Next week I will take a look at the market for properties priced over a million dollars. (In Sonoma County that would be considered high end.) In southern Marin, Palo Alto, Piedmont or San Francisco $1 to $2M for a house will get you a tract house or nice condo.)

I have been struck by how active our market currently is, and how many properties at the mid to upper price ranges have been selling in the last month or so, after laying dormant for so long. I think buyers in those price ranges are perceiving good value and striking quickly when they see what they want. A property closed in Healdsburg yesterday: the quintessential wine country farmhouse on 12 acres in Dry Creek Valley, pool, nice house, vineyards, wrap-around porch. It was listed at $2,650,000 and received four offers, selling for $2,825,000. I am told there was a backup offer over the eventual sales price.

Another stylish property on acreage with lavendar and olive fields in Sebastopol, sold recently after receiving four all cash offers, for about $1.7 M. Stylish properties, well-priced with classic locations and settings, are finding that there are buyers out there who have decided that it is again time to put there money in wine country real estate. I am also hearing the same kinds of stories from agents in San Francisco, the East Bay and the Peninsula.

Will this last? How will values be affected? It is too soon to tell, but interesting to signs of life in parts of the market that were dead most of this year. One factor which encourages me is that the tech companies in the Bay Area are experiencing sales growth, venture capitalists are investing in startups again, and the IPO market has some life, witness the succesful IPO earlier this year for Open Table. Facebook is starting to take some steps along their path to a public offering–all those factors are positive ones in our Bay Area economy. After so long a time of negative news and still a lot of hard times for many people, there do seem to be some glimmers of hope. And as I noted in one of my earliest blog posts a couple of years ago, the rising Bay Area real estate tide definitely floats Sonoma County’s real estate boat.

One of the great features of Flickr, the rich photo sharing/photo management site offers is a way for people to group their photos by topic or other features such as location. I recently discovered this pool of images from 638 (and counting) photographers exploring the diverse beauty of Sonoma County. Enjoy!

A Photo of a Google Tricycle scanning a neighborhood for Google Street View

And I am not talking about the weather. Increasingly, information about US homes lives in the cloud, served up over high speed internet connections. For example, the National Association of Realtors is rolling out its own real estate database (directory) called Residential Property Resource–its goal is to provide comprehensive data on 150 million homes in the United States. (For a description and first take to the recent announcement, click here.)

Google has been moving in this direction for several years. I recently wrote about Google Map’s 3D Modeling Tool, Sketchup, and the ability to search real estate listings in Google Maps. Also, Google Street View in Google Maps simulates a 2D drive-by of many properties. Google Maps gives satellite views of most properties and their goal is to have a place page for individual structures.

So even before your home is on the market–there is already a lot of data about it on-line.

As a practical matter, if you are selling your home, make sure your agent knows how to take advantage of these tools and at the very least, is aware of how your property presents online already and that it is accurate.

I have used Google Maps to look at aerial views of country property for example, and sometimes the pin indicating the property address is literally a mile or more away from the actual location and put it in the middle of a flat vineyard rather than a scenic hillside. I know that but a potential buyer may not. Or on one country property listing I had, the pin gave a very misleading view of the house’s location in relation to the neighbors. I was able to relocate the map pin to the home site, which gave a more accurate view of the home in relation to the acreage surrounding it.

Google Street View adds a whole other dimension, literally, to the cloud view of your home.

Google actually sends people out in cars (lots of hybrids supposedly) and on tricycles to photograph neighborhoods, as in the photo above. Kind of creepy actually. Unfortunately, sometimes the photos on Google Street View are not very current, as a I discovered on one of my listings earlier this year. The home had be re-roofed and painted a year earlier but the Google Street view was a before picture which prominently featured the garbage cans and dumpster in front of the house. The listing flyer software we were using automatically included a Google Street View of the property, but it was very misleading. I was able to tweak it slightly, and chose not to link to it in my marketing materials since ultimately it was giving the wrong view of the property.

Every buyer I work with, especially the ones who are from out of town, from Marin to New York to Piedmont and Palo Alto, studies Google Maps to learn about properties that they are interested in. If they don’t like what they see, they move on. That is why it is important for you and your listing agent to know how your home looks out in the cloud because these tools will either be working for you or working against you.

Google has added property search of current real estate listings to Google Maps. You can go to Google Maps and search a community, even add in your criteria in terms of beds/baths/etc. and the map will highlight current listings and display detailed listing information on the left hand column–Google provides a video overview below.

I thought I would check it out for accuracy. I ran a search for Healdsburg and found a property listed for $639,000. which was news to me as I have clients looking for something like that–I follow all the key markets in Sonoma County regularly on the search for new inventory and sold results.

So I clicked through to the property info and it turns out the listing was on Piper Lane in Sonoma! Somehow Google pulled the listing info, stripped the town of its Sonoma address (about an hour away) and added Healdsburg to the property address! That’s one way to get new inventory! (not) Very misleading.

It also picked up a listing in town on North Street which had four lots of about 25 acres each. Not possible–that would swallow the whole town of Healdsburg. When I clicked through the property links I found an empty page on a local broker’s site. And these are only the first two errors that I saw. It appears that data is pulled from a variety of sources, including print magazines and other listing aggregators such as ListHub. All I can say is don’t go to the bank on what you find because it can be very erroneous. Obviously the search itself is not ready for prime time but also the data being searched is unreliable. Garbage in Garbage out. Until there are agreements with regional MLS’s (don’t hold your breath) take the real estate information offered on Google Maps with a grain of salt.

Stephen Fells of Agency Logic, a real estate marketing company in the East Bay, has been blogging up a storm lately, and he recently drew my attention to some amazing new tools by Google. Recently a FREE 3D modeling tool called Google SketchUp made its debut–this will allow anyone to create a 3D model of any image. Imagine a 3D flyby of your home for sale, or a virtual fly by of the town you want to move to! Check out the tour of LA and San Francisco, below. (The song is great too!) And oh! Imagine your home for sale here!

(Note: the second video talks about the community effort involved in rendering the images. I wonder how much of these were done with the free tool and how much with the Pro Version?)