Elizabeth Newlin - Arizona Real Estate Agent

Our new house is currently under construction and due to be completed and close December 23, 2008. Which, I know, is an insane date to attempt any kind of move. But I’ve decided that I’m kind of into it. I really do not love the whole ‘decorating for Christmas’ thing and I actually think it will be pretty special to spend our first night in the new house on Christmas Eve.

Anyway, we are building in a new planned community out in North East Mesa called Mountain Bridge. It’s a Blandford Homes community and I couldn’t be more excited. Check out the view from our balcony off of the master bedroom:

Yeah, that’s right; a green belt AND MOUNTAINS. I’m genuinely sick-to-my-stomach-ecstatic over the idea of mountain views from my own balcony. WITH ENOUGH BEDROOMS FOR ALL OF MY KIDS TO HAVE ONE OF THEIR OWN (yep, that’s how excited I am, I’m shouting at the Internet). Whee!

But enough of my own glee. My point is that building a new home is kind of an awesome option. I have several clients who have either gone this route, or at least considered it recently. I’ve shown 3,600 square foot houses for $299K out at Signal Butte and Elliot. I’ve sold 1,800 square foot houses in Maricopa for $114K (last month!). I currently have a client under contract to build at McQueen and Ray on an over-sized lot, 2,200 square feet, for $250K. There are fabulous deals to be had. There are great builders still in business.

Don’t however, make the mistake of going this route alone. The deals may be amazing, but the pitfalls are deep. Builders continue to declare bankruptcy without warning. Brown Family Communities, a local builder who was in good standing with all of their creditors, abruptly filed for bankruptcy, October 24 of this year, leaving buyers under contract high and dry. Keep yourself covered. There are things you can do to protect your earnest money. Hire an agent to show you the way and watch your back. And keep a close eye on this page.

I’m currently trying to schedule enough continuing education classes in, around and between the activities to which I’m already over-committed, to manage to keep my license in good standing when it comes up for expiration at the end of February. Today I wedged three credit hours of Disclosure into the morning and then three ‘General’ credit hours dedicated to ‘Blogging for Realtors’ into the afternoon. The class was taught by Rob Gibbs and although I didn’t have extremely high expectations for the class (the Disclosure teacher was a little ‘new’ and ‘nervous’, so to speak), I walked away motivated, inspired and enriched.

This blog is good for me and my business for several reasons. I need to recommit myself to making it work. I know that it is going to require some time and dedication, but in the long run, it will be worth it. Part of my problem in keeping with it in the past, is routed in my perfectionist, do it the BEST or don’t do it at all attitude, which tends to veer into the ‘don’t do it at all’ lane on a regular basis (IE: most of the time, my house is kind of a pig sty, except the random night when I’m vacuuming lampshades and taking a toothbrush to baseboards and not sleeping until 3AM).

The point that I’m attempting to embrace is that it’s better to post SOMETHING of small to medium value on a regular basis than the equivalent of “War and Peace” once every six months. And thus, a plan is born. Here are my goals: Five posts a week; two of general real estate content, one kid/my life related, one recipe and one about a local event/restaurant/activity. However, I do not guarantee length, or even Earth-shattering-ness (or, for that matter, even all actual words).

That said, feel free to categorize this post as General Real Estate Content. And here you go, on to the real estate related portion of the post. During my Disclosure class this morning, the teacher (also a home inspector) gave us a list of useful websites to help buyers obtain information about the house they are buying:

Arizona Repair Masons & Arizona Ram Jack
Arizona Registrar of Contractors
The Arizona Geological Survey
Environmental Data Resource
Better Plumbing

So there you go. I’m going to do my best. Hope to see you often!

I attended a property auction up in Scottsdale last weekend with a client looking to buy. She was in town from Montana wanting to buy a second home/investment property out here for her and her husband to be near to warm winters and his daughter, who lives in Paradise Valley. I had set her up with an email auto-search of the types of properties for which she was looking, and one of the houses that popped up on the search was a model home being sold at auction.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the auction phenomenon. The Dobson Bay Club townhouses down the street from my parents had a huge ‘UP FOR AUCTION’ banner hanging from their front gate for several months last spring, inciting many a passing conversation among the Dobson Ranch bunch.

“Starting From [some inconceivably low number]!”, the advertising always reads on these types of sales. People who aren’t in the market for this kind of property at all suddenly sit up and take notice, wondering to themselves, How can I make this work for me and sell it for a huge profit? Even those who consider themselves to be savvy of the market, like myself, see deals like these and wonder, What will these end up going for? And how exactly does the whole thing work?

So I was excited to find myself in sitting the fifth row back from a stage in one of the ballrooms at the Hyatt Regency, Scottsdale last Sunday, at a Kennedy Wilson run property auction of Trend model homes.

Here are the basics:

1. My client had to view and do any inspections she wanted on the properties before the auction date. The houses were sold ‘As-Is’ with no inspection contingencies.

2. She also had to be pre-qualified through the preferred lender at the auction in order to be given a number to bid (in fact, just to be let in the door).

3. They were auctioning off 30 properties total; all model homes from four different Trend Home communities: Cooley Station in Gilbert, Lakes at Annecy in Gilbert, Tartesso in Buckeye and Cortessa in Waddell.

4. The starting bids were the minimum sales price (versus having an unknown reserve amount that the house won’t sell for unless it is met).

5. The starting bids ranged from $90,000 for a 1351 square foot house in Buckeye to $375,000 for an almost 7000 square foot house in Waddell.

And basically, it was pretty much just like an auction you see on TV. There was a head auctioneer on the stage shouting out prices and all of the buyers had big yellow numbers. The auctioneer had three helper guys in matching suits who would ran around the edges of the crowd and shrieked a sort of ‘Hep!’ when someone bid. It was loud (I don’t love loud). And sadly, my buyer didn’t even get a chance to bid. She had a maximum bid price that she and her husband had predetermined that was about 145% of the lowest bid price, and she didn’t even get to raise her big yellow card. That’s how quick things went.

We only stayed for the first 18 houses (about 45 minutes) because my client was bummed out that she’d lost. But here are some numbers:

House #1 (3/2, 1801 square feet, Gilbert): Minimum Bid of $125,000 - Sold for $213,000
House #2 (3/3, 2455 square feet, Gilbert): Minimum Bid of $145,000 - Sold for $225,000
House #7 (5/3, 6914 square feet, Waddell): Minimum Bid of $375,000 - Sold for $446,000

I did the math on the 18 I watched and together, they sold for about 137% of the minimum bid. The closest to minimum bid of the ones I saw went for 113% of the minimum and the farthest went for 169%. The ones my client liked were the most desirable ones and went for the higher end of things.

All in all, I think for the most part these houses were a decent deal. I have some concerns about buying a model home in a half-built community (Trend Homes filed for bankruptcy in February of this year), but the prices stand up to the comparative properties. However, I think a lot of the people who came in to this auction had their eyes on the prize of the minimum bid. In real estate, that listed number is generally a maximum bid, so it’s easy to get excited about the idea of no one else wanting that one house that you do. That was just not the case. There were plenty of people there who would have taken any one of those houses for anywhere close to the minimum bid.