| Home Contact Us Blog | |
|
The Crossland Team
Sylvia Crossland, Broker Steve Crossland, MPM (512) 301-5811 |
-
Featured Listings
Latest in Staging Tips for your Austin Home
May 16, 2008
There is a big difference between decorating your home and staging your home to sell.
To start, stand at the street in front of your house and look. What do you see? Is your home inviting? Is the landscaping fresh and well groomed? Is there maintenance that needs to be done? I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at a house where the gutters were so crammed with dirt and leaves that plants were growing up out of them! This is definitely time to get your gutters cleaned!
As far as the shrubbery, the best age for shrubs and plants in landscaping is 2-3 years. Anything older starts looking bedraggled, so add some younger plants in front of older ones to give a tiered or layered effect. Lantana and Mexican Heather are good for this for this.
Read more
Scorpions in Austin Hill Country
May 16, 2008
I was stung by a scorpion in my sleep the other night. This was the 5th or 6th time since 1999 I have been stung in my sleep by a scorpion crawling in the sheets. There are many upsides and positive aspects to living in Austin, but the scorpions might be viewed as a negative by most people.
Scorpions seem to like me for some reasons, as I’ve been stung 5 or 6 times now, all while sleeping. Sylvia has been stung 2 or 3 times. Our kids have never been stung by a scorpion but my youngest daughter did get stung by a centipede when she was 6 years old, which was a harrowing, nightmarish scene that night. The centipede, which I captured with kitchen tongs, was 8″ long and about 1.5″ thick - the biggest I’d ever seen. It struggled so violently to escape the tongs that I freaked out and flushed it down the commode. Normally I would have released it far from the house.
This is par for the course living in a rural “country” neighborhood as we do in Oak Hill. We have a large wooded acreage lot that backs up to undeveloped land, so we see a lot of wildlife around the house including deer, squirrels, birds, snakes, spiders, scorpions, etc. We constantly find scorpions in the house and toss them outside, especially in the summer.
So, what is it like being stung by a scorpion? In a word, painful. It’s a sharp, piercing burning sting, similar to a wasp or yellow jacket sting, but worse. Imagine a sharp hot needle being poked into your skin and left there as the searing pain slowly spreads outward.
The good news is that the pain does usually goes away within 20 to 30 minutes. Meanwhile, for me at least, it hurts more than a severe burn. I have a friend who claims to have gone into sweats and hallucinations after being stung multiple times while pulling on a pair of jeans with that had a scorpion inside the pant leg. Your pain and reaction may vary.
So what does a groggy Realtor, writhing in pain, say to the scorpion who stung him at 4AM?
Read more
Austin Energy-Efficiency Property Upgrades at Point of Sale
May 6, 2008
Some weeks ago I received an interesting email from the Austin Board of Realtors government affairs committee. It was a scare letter warning us, as Realtors, that we need to take action to oppose a new ordinance, and it has since been making the rounds on Realtor email lists and forums in Austin. What struck me about the letter was that, on face value, a reasonably intelligent person can quickly ascertain that it contains biased and untrue information.
Let’s have a look at the content of the letter, compare it to the truth, and see what the proposed “point of sale” upgrades might mean for Austin home buyers and sellers, and if there is cause for alarm.
From the letter:
Austin homeowners will need your help to understand the reasons single family homeowners will be required to obtain a license from the city of Austin prior to selling their homes.
Uh, actually they need our protection from your blatant misinformation campaign. Nothing has been decided. This will be further explained below.
The City of Austin is introducing an ordinance to mandate energy efficiency retrofits for all types of properties in Austin, including single family owner-occupied homes. This is ordinance is being looked at as part of Mayor Will Wynn’s Climate Protection Plan.
They intend to enforce it at the point of sale. In other words, prior to the sale of any single family owner-occupied home, a certificate of compliance proving the required efficiency retrofits have been done must be done prior to closing.
Again, not true. Not only “not true”, but not true at a level of incompetence that’s hard to comprehend. A task force is working on a plan, but there is no ordinance. There is no proposal. The task force has Realtor representation, so one would think our Board of Realtors would be better informed than this letter suggests.
But then it gets better, and this is where my eyebrows lifted as they lay on the fear tactics and dish up even more inaccurate and false information.
Read more
Is Your Austin Realtor a Beta Test or a Production Version?
May 3, 2008
I was evaluating some Property Management software recently, which was still in the “beta” stages of development. Beta software is commonly thought to be ready enough to function, but is expected to have undiscovered bugs and flaws, and may not be ready or stable enough for production use. I decided against this particular software because it has shortcomings and limitations I cannot live with.
I started thinking of some of the many past encounters we’ve had with what I would call “beta version” Realtors. These are freshly minted, green agents who have passed some testing requirements, such as passing the real estate exam and completing basic training classes, but have not yet been proven as stable and reliable in a “production” environment.
Now all they need are some beta testers. Like beta software, many of these beta agents will never achieve the level of maturity and stability required to move into full production release status. They’ll never become Version 1.0. But they will be tested by some users (clients), with varying results, before the market spits them out. Some will pass the test and become great agents, but they still have to be tested first.
Will that beta tester be you? And is it a good idea to use a Newbie Agent to help buy or sell your home in Austin?
Read more
Does MLXChange MLS Software Calculate Price Per Square Foot Properly?
April 30, 2008
I have have been critical of our new Austin MLS System called MLXChange since it was first placed into production in Austin in November 2007. It produces what I believe to be incorrect data. I was contacted yesterday by a product manager from MLXChange because they saw my last blog article showcasing some of the bad data. In that article, I mentioned that the price per square foot is not calculated correctly by the system.
The product manager was very nice and I enjoyed our conversation. She wanted to explain to me how the average price per square foot numbers are calculated and that, in fact, the numbers are calculated correctly. She is right on a certain level. That is, if one understands and follows the formula being used by MLXChange, it can be argued that their number is a mathematically correct.
But I maintain that the method being used by MLXChange to calculate average price per square foot is not the correct formula. I’m not smart enough to articulate it in a scientific or mathematical argument, but my intuition and instinct tells me I’m right. I’ll do my best to explain below and I hope a smart reader can chime in and offer a mathematical or statistical point of view and explanation of why two different methods, each of which seems correct independently on face value, produce different results.
So let’s look at an example that illustrates the MLXChange formula versus the method I believe most of us would use, and the method I believe makes the most sense. I’ve created a small sample set of data, shown in the chart below.
|
Square Feet
|
Sold Price
|
Sold $ per SQFT
|
|
| House 1 |
1200
|
$150,000
|
$125.00
|
| House 2 |
1300
|
$110,000
|
$84.62
|
| House 3 |
1400
|
$95,000
|
$67.86
|
| House 4 |
1500
|
$120,000
|
$80.00
|
| House 5 |
1600
|
$85,000
|
$53.13
|
| MLXChange Avg |
1400
|
$112,000
|
$82.12
|
| My Average |
1400
|
$112,000
|
$80.00
|
What is the average sold price per square foot of the 5 homes shown above?
MLXChange computes the Average Price per Square Foot by adding together all of the individual price per square foot numbers (the five psf numbers in the far right column) and dividing by the number of sales (five). This produces a result of $82.12 per square foot as the average price per square foot of the sold homes in our sample set.
I compute the average price per square foot by taking the average sqft size of all homes (1400) and dividing it into the average sold price of all homes ($112,000). My result is $80 per square foot. That’s what you would see on a stats chart that I manually produce and post regularly on this blog.
The two methods, in this particular example, produce results that are 2.65% different. 2.65% is not an insignificant amount when pricing a home. It’s a bigger gap than the List/Sold price difference on most sold homes in Austin. It’s a $5,300 difference on a 2500 sqft home at our example psf rates. Would you like to sell your home for $5,300 too little? Would you like to pay $5,300 too much, based on your Realtor’s CMA, produced by MLXChange?
Let’s dig deeper into why I think the MLXChange method is flawed.
Read more
Responding to Unsolicited Offers to Buy Your Home
April 27, 2008
I received a call recently from an Austin homeowner looking for a place to rent. After further questioning I learned of her situation. The neighbors have offered to buy her home, and she is willing to consider selling it. The neighbors have outgrown their smaller home and would love to move up to her larger home while remaining on the same street. The homeowner is now exploring rental options in case she were to sell.
“Have they indicated a price they’re willing to pay?”, I asked? No.
“Have they provided a pre-approval letter indicating their financial ability to buy?”, I asked. No.
“Well”, I said, “you’re out looking for a place to rent but you haven’t first established that your prospective buyers are legitimately interested. How do you know you’re not wasting your time? Do you really want to spend time looking for a home to rent before knowing that your neighbors aren’t just daydreaming about your house, and that they might turn out to be flakes?”
“No”, she said. “I guess not. What should I do?”
When you, as a home owner, are approached about selling your home, and your home is not on the market for sale, there are a couple of up front requirements you should request before you spend even 3 seconds thinking about it. Assuming you are open to the possibility of selling and you wouldn’t simply say “no thanks” immediately, you would tell the prospective buyer the following:
Read more
Austin Property Tax Appraisal Map 2008
April 24, 2008
The Austin Statesman published this map today of the property value increases around Austin, broken down by School District area, for 2008. There is a link to the full story below.
This is a good time to once again draw the distinction between the Appraised Value of a home for property tax purposes, as set by the County in which the home is located, versus Market Value of a home, which is determined of course by supply and demand.
The County does in fact attempt to value your home at market value, but they do not have the resources to perform an individual market analysis for each property. Instead, they paint with a broad brush across neighborhoods and areas.
The majority of appraised values around Austin are below market value, but there are plenty that are above. Also, just because the Appraised Value of a home increased 12% from last year, that doesn’t mean the Market Value of your home (what you could actually sell it for compared to last year) increased by that amount. The appraised value was probably low to start with, so the amount of the appraised value increase may or may not have any correlation with true market value.
Yesterday a home owner contacted me asking for a CMA on his home. The County appraised value is over $200K. The CMA I ran showed the market value, as of Jan 1st of this year, at about $180K. That owner will need to file a protest, gather data, and attend a protest hearing to have the price lowered. Otherwise, he’ll be paying too much in property taxes to Travis County. So don’t assume your value is low. It may be located in one of the neighborhoods or price ranges where the broad brush of the county over-estimates the value.
Huttoparke Problems Continue, Values Suffer
April 22, 2008
It is with great fascination that I first saw last year Huttoparke home owners made sure that everyone knew how poorly their homes were built. They may have had no choice but to bring public attention to the problems they were having. The homeowners felt that Lennar was unresponsive to their complaints about poor construction quality. Lennar Homes did have some major problems with sheetrock cracking, foundation movement, and crumbling driveways as Huttoparke is built upon the clay farmland soil prevalent east of IH35 in Austin, and these homes were apparently not built with sufficient consideration given to the implications of expansive soil.
Today, yet another Huttoparke story in the Austin Statesman brings attention to the construction quality problems of the neighborhood, and reminds me why I don’t sell homes in these types of subdivisions in the first place. Never have, never will. We refer buyers who want those homes to other Realtors, mainly because I don’t want to sell poor product.
If you’ve followed my blog or read our investment page, you know that Sylvia and I believe, for most buyers, especially those seeking stability and appreciation, a home in an established neighborhood is a safer real estate purchase than venturing out to buy a new starter home on the edge of sprawl.
The reason is that you never know for sure what you’re getting into when you buy in these fast growing new starter home subdivisions. In this case, in Huttoparke, you would be living/owning a home in a neighborhood where the home owners have resorted to picketing the builder, putting signs in their yard to let everyone know how poorly built the homes are, plastering their vehicles with anti-builder messages, setting up websites to warn other buyers not to buy there, and in general driving their property values into the ground.
Let’s see what property values have done in Huttoparke the past few years:
Austin Sales Market Update - 2008Q1 Stats Breakdown by MLS Area
April 21, 2008
Below is a chart breaking down Austin MLS Sales of single family homes by MLS area for Jan-Mar 2008. Not all MLS areas are included due to low or no sales activity in some.
Of the 42 areas covered 36 saw a decrease in the number of homes sold and 6 saw an increase in the number of sales. 32 of the 42 areas saw an increase in Average sales price, 35 saw an increase in median sales price, 30 saw an increase in average sold price per square foot. Only 15 of the 42 areas saw a decrease in average days on market and only 7 saw a decrease in median days on market.
In summary, sales are slow in Austin but overall prices are holding steady or rising. Chart of 2007/2008 sales stats by MLS area is below.
Read more
Austin MLXChange MLS Software Still Falls Short
April 20, 2008
I just finished running my stats for my Austin Rental Market update. This month I only had to report three listings to the Austin Board of Realtors which had bogus and incorrect data. Check the screen shot above to see the sort of thing Austin Realtors deal with on a regular basis.
Hopefully if you have an agent running a Market Analysis for you, he or she is keenly aware that the data from MLXChange cannot be trusted. It needs to be double checked before you rely on it. How would you like to go into an important math test with a calculator that spits out bad answers? Well, imagine trying to be an effective Realtor with an MLS System that spits out bad data.
As agents, we really have to pay attention to the MLS data from MLXChange. I always have a calculator at my side when crunching numbers because the MarketLinx MLXChange MLS system for Austin cranks out unreliable results. I could make 10 screenshots like the one above with other examples of miscaluculated data, the most frustrating of which is incorrect price per square foot calculations.
Those price per sqaure foot amounts you see above?… they are incorrect. I should have circled those in red also for the screen shot. Divide the average square foot Sold/Leased price by the average square foot amount from the colums to the left and the number is way off. They’ve had 6 months to fix this and it still produces incorrect values.
Read more