Elizabeth Newlin – Arizona Real Estate Agent

This weekend I actually had no real estate related appointments for the first time in several months. It was really nice to take a break and get things done around the house that were begging to be accomplished. I paid bills, changed beds, I even ironed the sheets. Which is moronic. I swear I only did it because we have these really nice new sheets from Pottery Barn (my sister-in-law works there and we get 40% off! How awesome is that?), and I thought maybe I would try it this once. You know, like, ‘One time i went sky diving!’, ‘One time I peed in the snow’, ‘One time, I ironed my sheets.’ I’m never doing it again. It took an hour and was entirely pointless. So there.

Anyway, notably, this weekend (besides the sheets):

I had dinner with my Papa (my mom’s dad) and his wife, Ann, who were in town from Florida for the first time in a few years:

Gray has developed an utter obsession with bananas. I think he’s going through a growth spurt, but he literally had three yesterday and two of those were just to stop the incessant ‘NANA!!’ demands he was shrieking:

I made a cover for the bench at the end of our bed. I used fabric from IKEA and whipped it up last night. I’m really proud of it. I’m going to make pillows to go on the bed from the same fabric:

I think that pretty much covers it. I’m working on several new marketing campaigns for my biz and am in talks with my web designer over a new look for my site (you can expect it May 1st!). More info on all of that will come later in the week!

I have a new listing. It’s not one of my normal cute houses, though. It’s raw land up in the North Country. It’s just over 37 acres in Seligman, Arizona, which is part of Yavapai County. It’s currently owned by a California resident who bought the parcel several years ago with the plan of eventually building his dream ranch and retiring on it. He has since decided against this idea, for whatever reason, and thus a listing is born. We are asking $89,000. Contact me for more details, I’d be happy to email you the listing.

This is the county map of the piece of land. As you can see, it’s pie shaped and has a wash running through. The owner says it is a beautiful wooded area with nothing but gorgeous scenery as far as the eye can see. It’s in a subdivision called Sierra Verde Ranch. Here you can find a little bit more about the town of Seligman, which is, according to the Arizona Department of Commerce, the birthplace of the historic route 66.

So if you’ve ever thought about building a dream ranch and retiring up North, this might not be a bad place to start.

So I’m sitting here in my real estate office doing what’s called “Floor Time.” Basically it means that I’m on call to help anyone who walks in off the street or calls in to our office looking for help. I can sit at my desk and get things done like usual, but it gives me the opportunity to pick up a new client here and there.

A woman just called and was transfered to me. She lives in New Jersey and is trying to decide if she will retire in Montana or out here. She wanted me to check into 55 and over communities and let her know prices and the like. We even had a lovely conversation about the weather difference between here and New Jersey. I was just finishing up getting her information so that I could contact her back when she said she had one last question:

NJ Lady: “I don’t want you to think I’m dumb or anything, but,”

Me: “No no, of course not, there are no dumb questions.” (A statement I will quickly learn to regret.)

NJ Lady: “OK, um, what kind of class of people do you have out there?”

Me: “I’m sorry, um, what do you mean by class? Like economic class?”

NJ Lady: “No, you know, like type of people…”

Me: Confused silence…

NJ Lady: “Like blacks and whites, and do you have any of those, well, we call them dot-heads out here? Cause I don’t like the dot-heads, but they’re everywhere and I just can’t get away from them. The American Indians I’m fine with, it’s those Iranian people I just don’t want to be near. Do you have those?”

I honestly had no idea what to say to the woman. My mind went utterly blank with horror. I may be on the slightly sheltered side, having grown up in a pretty liberal home and community, but I was honestly shocked and appalled. I didn’t even know this woman and there she was, metaphorically flashing me all of her racist tendencies from her dirty trench coat. I mean the gall. I could very well have been East Indian for all she knew, we were on the phone!

I probably should have hung up right there, but I took her information and politely promised to mail her the information she requested. I decided shortly after the call ended that I can’t, no won’t, work for a person like that. That’s the nice side to my life right now. I’m my own boss, and if I meet someone who so sharply offends my sensibilities, I can decide not to take them on. I will send her a polite letter recommending that she call another company. I’m sure there’s someone out there who’s hurting enough for the business. Not me, though, not me.

Sometimes I think they rule the world, sometimes they drive me to drink; usually it’s a little of both.

Things I love:

Gray’s a human beat box. We will be walking in the parking lot at the supermarket and someone will disarm their car alarm. Gray will instantly mimic the noise as closely as he can in pitch and time. He does it often with birds and other animals too. He’s that guy from Police Academy as a one and a half year old, I swear.

We were in the car the other day going to the post office, riding in silence but for the radio tuned to NPR. I was zoning, the kids were quiet and calm for once. Out of the blue Ben says, “Mommy, did you hear that?!”

I looked around outside, not remembering hearing anything sharp or memorable, “Hear what, Sweetheart?”

“That there’s a giant block of ice the size of Mexico on top of Greenland? Is that true?”

The kid soaks up EVERYTHING. As much as I like NPR, even I was tuning out the global warming discussion, but not Ben, he was hanging on every word.

Things I love less:

Gray is the most demanding child on the planet. He can say, “MAMA!” Loudly, shrilly and often enough to rupture my ear drum. He also knows this works more quickly if he does it in public.

Ben cannot, no matter how hard I try, be convinced to eat his breakfast in a timely manner, remember to bring home his jacket from school, eat anything green or clean up his room.

I know the good definitely outweighs the bad, but today, I have a headache.

I know I’ve mentioned this already, but it’s one of those things that someone always misses, so I thought we’d revisit.

To most people who are beginning the process of buying a first home, or even making an upgrade, the first step in the process is to start looking for a house. I’m here to tell you, this is NOT THE FIRST STEP. Your first move, when deciding whether to purchase a house, needs to be a discussion with a lender or mortgage broker. Looking for a house before consulting the money professional is really putting the cart before the horse. It’s difficult for anyone (even your competent real estate agent) to tell what your price range is without quite a bit of computation, so it’s really just a bad idea to start looking and get yourself attached to anything until you know for sure what you can afford.

OK, and now while we’re on the subject, here are four mortgage professionals you can feel free to contact if you are thinking about buying a house:

Chad Peare – Hamilton Mortgage
email: cpeare@hamiltonmortgage.com
cell: 480-201-1234

Alisa Arnold – Century 21 Mortgage
email: alisa.arnold@mortgagefamily.com
cell: 602-826-5861

(Both of these are my in-house lenders who I have worked with and know personally. Both are very approachable and knowledgeable.)

Mick Askew – Transnational Financial Network, Inc
email: micka@transnational.com
cell: 602-510-3951

(Mick is an expert at repairing credit with problems and does lots of work in sub-prime lending, which is lending for less than ideal credit scores.)

Maria Gonzalez – Pacific Coast Mortgage
email: a-mgonzalez@cox.net
cell: 602-525-4347

(Maria is a Spanish-speaker and the mother of a friend. She’s very fun and totally approachable.)

In the last week or so, I keep hearing about Zillow.com. Jason was the first one to send it to me. He always keeps up on the latest technologies in websites, and he had read about it on one of his techie blogs. He told me to check it out. This weekend a family friend mentioned that she had been on it checking out the value of her house. The kicker was when I found a post about it on a random website I was surfing yesterday. The gal claimed that Zillow.com is the real estate agent of the future. Being that I am the real estate agent of the present, that statement sent me surfing on over to check out the competition.

I have to say, it seems to be complex and interesting program. It’s not, however, totally unique technology. If you go to the Maricopa county assessor’s site and do a parcel search, you have the option to click and pull up comparable properties. In the ARMLS system, Arizona Realtors have access to another similar program that pulls from the tax records. Here’s the thing, though, even though I have access to all of these programs, I never use them when determining the value of a property I am going to list. The big problem with programs like any of these is that they are dumb. They lack the human component. They don’t take into consideration the remodeling a home owner has done, or the fact that the property has been a rental and not well cared for. The programs don’t know that the market in a particular area is moving faster than another and that we can afford to ask more because of it. When it comes down to it, pricing a home is more of an art than a science, which is why a computer will never be better at it than a knowledgeable and talented human.

And here’s the proof for you:

Property A: A condo in the Central Corridor in Phoenix that I have been researching to possibly list for a client who lives in California.

Maricopa county assessor’s website says: $99,500
ARMLS tax site says: $98,500
Zillow.com says: $123,563
I say: $145,000

Yep, Zillow.com is the closest, and definitely the smartest of the programs. It’s unfortunately not smart enough to call the owner of the next door condo which was recently purchased for $98,500 that is dragging down the averages in all of the programs, and find out that he only acquired it through a cash offer to the known drug-offender who was living there and had completely trashed the place.

Property B: A house near me that just went on the market.

Maricopa county assessor’s website says: $157,500
ARMLS tax site says: $351,621
Zillow.com says: $340,800
It’s currently on the market for: $410,000

This one’s all over the map with ARMLS winning closest bid. I think the big problem is again a comparable property that sold for $27,000. It was probably a gift to a family member or some other unusual situation, but it has the programs all confused.

So, in conclusion, I think Zillow.com is fairly brilliant in concept and design, but I think it needs some help in accuracy; and I’m not worried it will ever take my job.

PS – Curbed has a bunch of interesting comments on Zillow, and, even more interestingly, Zillow itself presents info on its own accuracy.

Jason and I had decided not to do anything huge for the big VDay this year, but I was still determined to have a nice dinner. Monday I planned out a three course menu and shopped for all of the ingredients. Tuesday morning I woke up with a 101 fever and raging case of the ‘Don’t let that food get within 10 feet of my nostrils or I will totally hurl on you’ Flu. It was a date killer because not only could I not eat, I couldn’t prepare the meal without severe injury to the sanitary nature of our kitchen.

And then Jason got the flu too. So we had to reschedule a couple of times and ended up doing the third course on a different night from the first two. But we did eventually eat our gourmet Valentine’s Dinner.

Course one: Baked Brie with Roasted Garlic, Crackers and Apples

I used this same recipe, except I wrapped the Brie in puff pastry before I baked it.

Course two: Soothing Chicken Lettuce Wraps, ala PF Chang’s’

For this course I used a recipe I found online. These were my favorite and I plan to make them again this week for a Project Runway viewing party I’m having. YUM!

Course three: Chocolate Fondue

This one is an old standby at our house. It takes literally 10 minutes to prepare from start to finish. I buy a bag of Ghirardelli semisweet chocolate chips, pour them into a small sauce pan on the stove set to medium low and add a couple of tablespoons of milk and a little bit of Baileys. Stir constantly until it’s all melty and good. Pour the chocolate into a ceramic fondue pot with a candle to keep it warm. Serve with strawberries, angel food cake bites, bananas and green apples (and marshmallows too, if you like).

Yesterday was our Century 21 Arizona Foothills Yearly Awards Banquet and I’m happy to tell you that I managed to take home a little bit of bling (is glass ‘bling’? Because maybe I just used it incorrectly, I so am not down with the hip hop slang, dawg):

There are nine offices in my 500+ agent company and each office gave out a ‘Rookie of the Year’ award and an ‘MVP’ award. I received the Ray Road 2005 MVP award, and I’m very proud to say it was in part, at least, because of this site. My manager mentioned in his speech that I have a “blog” (he didn’t actually use air-quotes, but you could practically see them in his tone of voice) and that the company’s broker, Floyd Scott, really thinks it is a technologically savvy approach to marketing (yes, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s totally what he was thinking). So there you go. You, my lovely and loyal readers can pat yourselves on the back for helping me win my pretty glassy award.

I have to admit that when I went up to accept my award, I had a small bout with a thing we like to call in my family ‘Social Anxiety Disorder.’ As soon as I could tell my manager was talking about me, I started to tremble (yep, tremble’s the best word to describe it, even my hair trembled) and decided the best idea would be to coolly take a sip of my water, which, in my trembling hand shook like that puddle in Jurassic Park and everyone at my table, who were looking at me because they also knew my manager was talking about me, immediately began to giggle about my earthquake hands. That was when, according to Darren, sitting behind me, I went white as a sheet and he was afraid I was going to puke on everyone around me. Thanks, Darren. That completely restores my confidence and makes me feel better about the entire experience.

I’m telling you, it’s genetic and I can’t do anything about it. Ask my sister and brother, they totally have Social Anxiety Disorder too. My sister once gave a presentation to her graduate studies class with her skirt tucked into her underwear (which, incidentally totally matched her shirt), but that’s her story and I should really let her tell it.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure my nervousness came from being presented with a room full of these amazingly successful real estate agents. I had just sat through two hours of awards to people like Jason and Kala Laos. Jason and Kala have only been in the biz a couple more years than I have, are ridiculously successful, AND just had a baby like six months ago. And she had the gall to show up looking totally stunning in an all white pantsuit to accept her umpteen achievement awards. It’s a little intimidating, is all I’m saying. And, you know, totally inspiring.

So, I guess my point is, I’m SO THERE. Next year. I’m kicking some bootie, and I’m totally going to get the social anxiety thing under control. I swear.

I have a conference today, so not much time to chat.

Check this article out. It’s not totally shocking if you’ve been paying attention at all, but it’s very interesting…

This guy tried to scare me to death when I was putting towels away Monday night:

These arrived on my doorstep yesterday (The delivery man said, “They must be from your lover, they’re the lover’s bouquet.” I said, “Oh no! What will my husband think?!” Just kidding, babe.):

These are some of the so far unused ingredients to the romantic gourmet meal I had planned for Valentine’s Day (felled by yet another debilitating round of THE FLU):

This is the shape my living room is currently in, thanks to the mingling of sickness and holiday: