60646 Blog Has Moved!

As previously announced here, 60646 Blog has moved to its new home, and is now up and running in a self-hosted environment. Many thanks to Matt Mullenweg and the folks at Wordpess for being such gracious hosts over the past few months.

 

Happy Holidays

 

I just wanted to take a moment and wish all readers of 60646 Blog a happy holiday season, no matter what your faith is. I’ve been honored and blessed to have you as our loyal readers, and I look forward to blogging about 60646 in the new year, which I hope will be a happy, healthy, and prosperous one for all of you.

My family and I will be taking a few days off during the holidays, so there won’t be any posting activity, however, the updates on Edgebrook and Saugansh home inventories should not be interrupted during this time. And please keep in mind that 60646 Blog will be completely revamped in a few short weeks. Have a happy and safe holiday.

 

Planes, Trains, And Automobiles

It’s one of my all-time favorite Thanksgiving, and holiday movies, in general. And tomorrow, it’ll be that time again: the Christmas traveling season will be upon us. But don’t despair, because Google has introduced a new search feature: Flight Stats Search. Simply type an airline name and flight number into the search box, and Google will direct you to the information you’re seeking.

 

Coming To A Closing Near You: Radon Disclosure

I remember a closing that I attended a few years ago that was rather “paper-intensive”, as the purchaser had obtained an 80-10-10 mortgage (80% first loan, 10% second loan, 10% own funds) and therefore had to sign two mortgage packages at the closing table, instead of one. Visualize for a moment, if you will, a stack of papers, almost two inches tall. This closing was taking forever. It was then that the seller’s (admittedly experienced) attorney, in his boredom, casually remarked how he missed the old days, when the parties to a transaction had to sign four or five pieces of paper each, and the deal was done.

No siree, not no more. In Chicago, it all starts with your listing agent asking you to complete and sign (and sometimes initial) at least a IL-Residential Disclosure Form, a Lead-Based Paint Disclosure Form, a Mold Disclosure Form, and a Heating Disclosure Form (which must be obtained from People’s Energy first).

And here comes another one, starting January 1, 2008: The Radon Disclosure Form (officially: Disclosure of Information on Radon Hazards – pdf file). Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just reporting on the newly enacted “Illinois Radon Awareness Act” (“The Act”, harhar). What is this disclosure all about? Radon is an odorless radioactive gas that comes from naturally occurring uranium in the soil, and can enter homes. Some basic information about Radon hazards can be found here (pdf-file).

In other words, starting January 1, 2008, before a buyer will become bound on a contract to purchase real estate in Illinois, the seller will be required to provide to the buyer a pamphlet entitled “Radon Testing Guidelines for Real Estate Transactions” (pdf-file) and the above mentioned “Illinois Disclosure of Information on Radon Hazards”. Your Realtor should have both pieces of information (pamphlet and disclosure) in their toolbag.

 

Winter Is Here! Be Safe Out There!

This just in from ibegin.com:

 

Rehabbing 60646 Blog

Late fall and early winter are always appropriate times for Realtors to do some of the things that we can’t seem to find the time for during the busy season, such as business planning for the next year, and gathering receipts and documentation for the next tax filing (which will arrive sooner than you may think).

This year, I am working on an additional project: Remodeling 60646 Blog! And I’m not talking about a measly face-lift. I’m talking about big changes under the hood, behind the curtain, etc. In other words: A gut-rehab.

This was necessary, because a lot of the things that I’d like to accomplish with this blog are reaching technical limitations. This blog is hosted by WordPress, arguably the finest blogging platform on the face of the earth. With hundreds of thousands of bloggers using WordPress as their blog host, there are some technical limitations that WordPress has to put in place, to ensure the security of their platform for the good of their entire community. And that means, for instance, that scripts cannot be utilized. WordPress, in their infinite wisdom and genius though, have made their blogging software freely available to bloggers who would like to operate their blogs on other hosts, without any of these technical limitations.

And that is the way I’m going with 60646 Blog. Starting in January 2008, 60646 Blog will be self-hosted (and still WordPress-based), with a (mostly) new face, and some neat changes under the hood. If you’ve gotten used to perusing the inventory of homes for sale in Edgebrook and Sauganash (about 7,500 unique views since June 2007), you will continue to see that on the new 60646 Blog. In addition, you will have access to browsing the entire MLS of Northern Illinois (map- and criteria-based) through the RE/MAX interface. You won’t want to miss our new RE/MAX Neighborhood Valuation Report (move over Zillow) at your fingertips. More videos about homes, listings, and happenings in 60646 in general, will be forthcoming. In short, I am excited to announce “60646 Blog – Reloaded”. Stay tuned for the unveiling in a few weeks. There’s no “trailer” for it, but take a peek at the preliminary new (alpha) look of 60646 Blog, below.

 

Happy Thanksgiving Day

You don’t know this, but I worked out the entire month of October in anticipation of turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie, apple pie, you name it. The problem is that I won’t have enough time to lose the post-Thanksgiving weight gain ahead of Christmas. I guess I just have to delay that until January. I hope it snows hard.

Best wishes to all readers of 60646 Blog for a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday.

 

More Cook County Shenanigans…

Sometimes I can’t help but speculate that Cook County government, in its insatiable appetite for revenue, has hired a couple of people whose jobs primarily consist of coming up with unorthodox ways of finding additional sources of money (which can then be used for cronyism). I already knew that banks are pretty good at this revenue-game, but Cook County must have hired a few bankers lately, because it appears as though now they’re going to levy fees for mortgage companies who pay property taxes on behalf of their customers. I say that because here’s a letter that I received from my mortgage company a few days ago:

 

Lessons from A Car Wash Operation In Atlanta

Doug Quance, a broker colleague from Atlanta has been observing the pricing tactics of a newly established car wash in his neck of the woods. From his observations, he draws some, imho brilliant, parallels to the housing market that many home sellers find themselves in, today. Excerpt from his post:

The car wash owners obviously realized that the market did not accept their initial price – no matter how much promotion they had done… and they responded with price adjustments. Home sellers should take note of this market economics fundamental.

You can read Doug’s post in its entirety here.

 

60646 – Edgebrook and Sauganash Market Conditions

We’re more than three quarters into the year, and it’s time for a home stretch recap of real estate market conditions in Edgebrook and Sauganash. To put the current market conditions somewhat into perspective, I decided to compare the aggregate of the first three quarters of 2007 with those of the two previous years, and I’d like to point out that the current buyers market we’re experiencing, had its humble beginnings some time in the spring of 2006. This analysis accounts for the sale of single family homes only.

Edgebrook:

Amidst reports of tumbling home sales around the country, and even in various neighborhoods of Chicago, the Edgebrook residential real estate market has proven to be quite resilient in 2007, thus far. With 56 homes closed during the first three quarters of this year, sales were ahead of the same time-frame last year (52), and just slightly behind 2005 (58). Incidentally, 2005 could possibly be viewed as the year in which the sellers market finally reached its peak. What put a slight dent into this pretty picture though, was the fact that homes stayed on the market for an average of 137 days before they were sold. Compare this with the first three quarters of 2006 when it took 84 days on average to sell a home in Edgebrook, and worse, only 70 days on average, in 2005. That’s almost twice as long compared to just a couple of years ago.

Longer market times led to a 4% decline of the average sale price vs. last year, bringing it back to the level of the 2005 average sale price. The median sale price though, recorded a new high of $545,000 which represents a 2.25% increase over the last year period, and a 3.7% increase over the first three quarters in 2005.

One of the metrics not shown in these graphs is the ratio of average sale price to final listing price, which stood at 95.1% in the first three quarters of 2007, vs. 96.2% in 2006 and 96.8% in 2005, respectively. Hence, longer market times in 2007 encouraged successful Edgebrook home sellers to adjust their asking prices slightly downward, thereby eliminating the need to accept offers that were substantially below asking. In my view, this is a classic market correction.

 

Sauganash:

During the first three quarters of 2007, residential real estate market conditions in Sauganash were almost a mirror image of the ones in Edgebrook, in terms of sales rate and market time. A semi-major point of difference between these two markets is the fact that the Sauganash real estate market consists of more condominiums and even more townhouses, as well as more multi-unit buildings than the Edgebrook real estate market. As mentioned above, these two property types (“Attached Type”, in MLS lingo) and multi-unit buildings (2-4 flats) have not been considered in this analysis.

That being said, it took a whopping 149 days on average to sell a single family home in Sauganash during the first 9 months of 2007. During the same time-frame in 2006 this task was limited to 82 days on average, while in 2005, successful Sauganash home sellers walked away with an accepted contract after only 60 days on average. Not unlike in Edgebrook, the relatively long wait to find bona-fide buyers didn’t have any negative influence on the sales rate in Sauganash: 53 homes were closed in the first 9 months of this year, vs. 43 homes last year, and 55 in 2005.

As if completely oblivious to declining home values in most other parts of the country, Chicago’s Sauganash home values have been on the rise. With the exception of a slight hiccup last year, when the average sale price fell to $542,998 from $550,138 the year before in 2005 (a minuscule 1.3% decline), the average sale price in Sauganash has gone nowhere but up: During the first nine months of 2007, it stood at $553,757. Meanwhile, the median sale price of homes in Sauganash has been on a continuous climb. Thus far in 2007 it has been pegged at $520,000, a 2% increase over last year, and a 6.2% increase over 2005. Impressive, given the real estate climate we’re in at the moment. And once again, lending credibility to the old real estate adage of “Location, Location, Location”.

All data are compiled and aggregated from the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois.