Move To Quality

Do the Boston area’s exorbitant prices have you feeling a wee bit discouraged?
Is your work situation flexible enough to allow you work virtually and/or to move to a place
"somewhere further out"? A place where houses are bigger, prices are lower, and
life is better? If so, read on!

This post is the first in what will hopefully become a series of snapshots of
such opportunities. While the properties are real and their owners would love to
show you around, our primary goal is to suggest entire categories of opportunities
that exist within two hours of Boston.

In case you’re wondering, The Real Estate Cafe has no financial interest in the
properties we’ll be featuring in this series, or in their sale. We obtain
permission to feature each property from the owner or their agent, but nothing
more. What’s in it for us? Probably nothing, except the opportunity to share our
love of older buildings with our readers.

Enjoy!

134 Westminster Street, Springfield 


A Lovingly Restored Victorian – Asking Price: $220K

We discovered this property while exploring open houses in Springfield. It’s
located in the McKnight Historic District and has 3300 square feet of living
space situated on a 1/5 acre lot.

General information on Springfield, and our take on Springfield’s potential can
be found here.

Springfield_westminster_134_40_3

The house has been lovingly restored by her current owners. Vinyl siding
removed, exterior paint scraped down to bare wood, and new paint applied. Colors
are historically accurate.

Springfield_westminster_134_43_1

All of the floors on the first floor, and most of those on the second have been
sanded and refinished. Most of the original hardware – doorknobs, hinges, etc. –
has been restored.

Springfield_westminster_134_42_1

Springfield_westminster_134_41

Springfield_westminster_134_19

Front porches have been extensively restored – with replacement posts and
spindles for the second floor porch recreated to match those on the first floor
porch.

Here are some picts of the neighborhood…

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Springfield_westminster_134_11

Springfield_westminster_134_12

For more information on this property, contact Anthony Giarratano. He is both an
owner of the house and listing agent with Sears Real Estate in Springfield.

Related Articles

Pictometry offers best of breed photos to lenders

Mortgage-services provider gains aerial views of real estate

C&S Marketing inks deal with Pictometry

http://www.inman.com/hstory.aspx?ID=47637

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Would home owners trying to sell their own homes be able to access your images on a pay per use basis?  We teach "for sale by owner" courses and are always looking for best of breed applications.

If sellers cannot access the images on their own, could they work with a lender who does?   

http://www.pictometry.com

"Pictometry
gives our clients multiple views of the properties they request, allowing them
at least four directional views of each property," said Schroeder.
"The side views of buildings that Pictometry offers with their oblique
images are unparalleled in the world of aerial photography, allowing our
clients to see all the way around their potential investments."

Pictometry’s
software enables users access up to 12 different views of any property,
building, highway or other feature in a county in a 3D-like format. The
software also allows users to create measurements such as distance, height,
elevation, and area, directly from the oblique imagery, as well as insert
content from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or other data.

"C&S can access the visual information via
Pictometry’s Server-to-Server Solution that enables C&S data servers to
automatically incorporate Pictometry data as needed,"

Idea Bar: Model for mapping open house traffic

Could MIT’s iSPOSTS project, a live map of wireless users as they move around campus with their laptop computers, become a model for tracking open house traffic LIVE on weekends in the future?  If so, who might benefit, who might be harmed, and given that, would buyers willingly share their househunting tours or hide them?  One example of a potential real estate use springs from comments on yesterday’s program about falling real estate prices in 2006.  If buyers and sellers can see the number of people visiting open houses in different price ranges and locations, it could be possible to make more intelligent decisions about how much buyers should offer for houses for sale, or how much sellers should ask for their own home.  Could such a system be developed today, using the same cellphone triangulation on of your previous callers just mentioned?

MIT Museum of Emerging Technologies Gallery exhibit entitled, iSPOTS:  Living and Working in MIT’s Wireless Community

It also provides information on exactly how many people are logged on
at any given location at any given time. It even reveals a user’s
identity if the individual has opted to make that data public.  The files indicate the number of users connected to each of MIT’s more
than 2,800 access points. The map that can pinpoint locations in rooms
is 3-D
, so researchers can even distinguish connectivity in
multistoried buildings.  A model which would serve mid to high rise buildings, and reveal demand and pricing premiums for floors.

MIT’s new experimental electronic maps track any "devices people use to connect to the network, whether they’re laptops, wireless PDAs or even Wi-Fi equipped cell phones."  Time-stamped maps are available to network users anytime online, and are saved for up to 12 hours.

Ability for a buyer agent to track buyer as they go from open house to open house; and for sellers who may be disappointed by attendance at their open house can see traffic flow at comparable properties.  Instead of waiting for properties to show up as solds or "under agreement," sellers and listing agents can view traffic patterns and hence demand every 15 minutes every Sunday. 

The identity of homebuyers can be hidden to the public (particularly sellers), but visible to their buyer agent and other family members, like parents who may be following their children’s househunt from remote.

More likely that open house tracking maps will be cellphone based rather than online access.  Ability to report location of phone call within 50 meters.  Like the MIT system, color coded splotches on maps could show the open houses with the highest traffic.  That kind of information could be factored into bidding strategies and negotations on the subject property, and pricing decisions on rival properties.

Questions:  Collaborative effort of sellers, or of buyers?

Open only to MLS listings, or any home regardless of source:  for sale by owner, foreclosure whether bank owned or government agency, and new construction.

Will phones need to be on, or will location only be trackable when a call is initiated or received?

Will phone communicate demographic information or merely traffic.  For example, it would be helpful to know where baby boomers are looking versus first-time, and trade-up buyers.

Would traffic levels be most valuable at the neighborhood or town level, or metro or regionally?

MIT Museum news releases states:  "The usage patterns should
  be very interesting, not just to the MIT community, but also to urban planners,
  architects, and city policy-makers who will be interested in the implications
  of the changing nature of how and where people work and access information."
 

Use a buyer agent to “Steer Clear Of Bubble Trouble”

Looking for the latest advice on how to protect yourself if you’re thinking of buying a home in these uncertain times?  Business Week’s latest article, Steering Clear Of Bubble Trouble, is worth reading.  If you want the 10 second executive summary, a link to the article recommends doing four things if you are "bearish on housing":  Refinance, Move, Sell, or Take out. (As you will read, their list should have included a fifth bullet point:  use a buyer agent.)

Still, the article admits things aren’t that simple.  There are mixed signals coming out of local markets like Boston, where The Real Estate Cafe is located; and which PMI, as reported by Kiplinger, says "is the riskiest housing market in that nation."  My favorite quote from the Business Week article reads:

In the absence of
solid information, the most sound advice is to hope for the best and
prepare for the worst.

Without pretending to be economists, and running the risk of being criticized by some for stressing the worst that can happen, The Real Estate Cafe will continue to try to help buyers make sense of important trends by providing timely data like that reported in the Boston Globe’s front page story on July 22, 2005.  That article, entitled "Home won’t sell? Some cancel and relist", included a graph showing The Real Estate Cafe’s analysis of MLS data on page
B5, and a quote from one of our buyers (click on the link below for pull quotes). 

Kudos to the Massachusetts Association of Buyer Agents‘s president, Barry Nystedt, for his contribution to the Globe article and the important role their members play helping their clients "steer clear of bubble trouble," as Business Week says.  Think you’ll get that kind of protection from a new breed of counterfeit buyers agents in Massachusetts, calling themselves "designated agents"?    Not if their office is also representing the seller of the same property you are bidding on, which is why Business Week should have added a fifth point to their executive summary:

If you are buying in an overheated housing market, or anywhere for that matter, use a REAL buyer agent who does not have a potential conflict of interest. (For more information on finding an exclusive buyer agent, you download a consumer brochure from AgencyInformation.org or contact The Real Estate Cafe.  We’d be glad to make an instate or out-of-state referral as we did recently to Washington, DC.)

Bubble Hour topic: Money magazine forecast 10.5% decline, SF home prices in Boston by May 2009

Glad to see the pundits agree with the people, again. Boston buyers – interested in a Bubble Hour to discuss this forecast in Money magazine’s Real Estate Survival Guide, summarized today on Boston.com’s real estate blog:

Boston is forecast to see a 10.5 percent decline in single-family home prices by May 2009. While that’s slightly higher than the projected 9.7 percent decline for the nation overall, there are 35 metropolitan areas expected to see bigger declines. In the past five years, prices had increased slightly more than 13 percent in the Boston area, according to Money’s calculations.

The other four areas included in the list are also expected to see price declines: Cambridge (8.5 percent); Peabody (8.8 percent); Springfield (9.5 percent); and Worcester (9.2).

Would One Broadway in Arlington — near the Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, and Medford lines — be convenient for people, particularly parents who can bring the kids to play while adults talk?

Open to suggests on when and where to host this Bubble Hour, as well as future gatherings and topics.  Follow http://twitter.com/RealEstateCafe for updates on time and place, as well as other BUBBLE BITES.  Watch for link to upcoming story on slowdown in Cambridge housing market, too. Preview of market stats and custom research available "a la carte."  Call The Real Estate Cafe at 617-661-4046 or email for details.

Real time “comps”

Link to recent press post Inman re "real time real estate."

Instead of developing a "CMA" type of report that describes sold data, I’ve
been using the "pending date" instead of the sold date.

 
Reason?  The market is changing so much on a daily or monthly basis,
that considering "comps" may not be as accurate if the sold date is used, as
much as using the "pending date."  If you develop a list of 6 houses that
sold in August to compare those sales with an offer you’re making today, then
what if the market has been in a decline since March?  How much of a value
difference may there be from properties that went pending in the spring,
compared to a property on the market now?
 
Some, if not all of those 6 "comps" could have sold last spring.  As
we know, listing agents and appraisers will often use the "comps" that best fit
the subject being appraised rather than an objective assessment of the sales
data.
 
So, next time you structure some type of analysis, why not use "pending
dates" instead of "sold dates" to make any comparison to a subject property
you’re trying to negotiate for on behalf of your buyer clients?
 
I suggested this to one of the "honest" appraises we typically use
here…he said he’s only using month old "comps" because there is an ongoing
decline in values here.

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