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For all those of you concerned about real estate values falling in and around Sacramento, listen up! Today Elite Properties’ floor agent (me!) received eight - count it - eight inquiries from seven different people on eight different listings.
The buyers seem to be waking up and realizing there’s deals to be had around here!
I had lunch with two of my best business associates today at a Mexican Restaurant I wish I could remember the name of (and swore to myself I would) and thought, “Well, this is really what the real estate business should be like.” And then realized, this IS what the business is. It’s about getting the best people together and then making sure everyone gets what they want.
As Realtors, we’re sometimes sidetracked by the all the glamor, the pictures on the Open House Signs, the paperwork, the (shudder!) scripts. Sure, we’re salespeople. But what else is sales but getting people to like you? And if you can help them get what they want, why won’t they like you?
Last year, I promised my clients to provide only the best people - lenders, property inspectors, contractors, and of course, their Realtor, me! Today’s business lunch was in keeping with that promise. One of those people was my new broker-friend-fellowwriter John Lockwood (whom you know enough about now) and the other was my mortgage consultant Huck Ferrill.
The story behind how I met Huck is pretty interesting. I was working in Prudential at the time and was pretty brand new as an agent. I had no contacts, no one I knew except for the company recommended vendors. You know, the kind that hover around the front door and send you cookies and bagels and turn you into lambs for slaughter! Around that time, I also had some clients with challenged credit and some other shady lenders not worth mentioning here because of whom buying a house for myself turned into an absolute nightmare.
That was when I decided & promised my clients I would only have the best people for them to work with. Too many deals go sour at the signing table and make me as a realtor look bad. So the search began. I sent out form letters to about 25 local mortgage professionals. About three answered personally. Two with a phone call and Huck with an email and a reference. Of the two that called, one has quit the business (nice, honest guy, though - maybe too nice?) and the other was just cold when I came to see him. I mean, here I am, trying to set up a busines relationship and he isn’t even friendly!
Huck was completely different and I knew it the moment I met him. He wanted to explain interest rates, the people involved behind the curtains, not just what the loan meant to me. What’s more, he is a real estate investor himself - an acquirer of real estate - much like me and believes in personal service just like I do.
If you want to be successful, you must surround yourself with successful people. John and Huck are definitely it! You can reach Huck Ferrill at 916-788-9802
I woke up yesterday smelling smoke. “Someone’s burning something,” my husband said. Someone was actually trying to put something out. As I went through my morning routine (coffee, workout) I watched the news and realized my street was the last one the CHP has chosen as the last safe exit off highway 50. Everything from there on until the state border was closed and thousands of homes were being evacuated. 240 homes burned down yesterday.
Honestly, Realtor or not, the sight of a fireplace being the only thing left in a home burned to nothing is a sobering sight.
While I prepared an overnight bag, just in case, I packed up the jewelry and the insurance documents, realizing we were not prepared for an emergency of any kind. See, I always believed I would pick up sentimental things if the house were threatened by fire. But I didn’t. Your mind in survival mode is cruel, but very efficient.
Every home needs a fire safe. Every household also needs a safe deposit box - about 30 miles away. And having home insurance yesterday for everything including valuables inside the home was priceless.
This has got to have been the most painful episodes I’ve watched on TLC’s Property Ladder. A young couple - they were 21, I think, bought a home in Del Paso Heights hoping to flip it and make some money. After an agonizing hour, the show ended with them having made maybe $10,000. Bad contractors and just wood rot threw them overboard and they may have walked away with the $10,000 if they were lucky.
Sad. But not the only case of flipping houses here in Sacramento gone wrong. This year, in early spring while I was out previewing properties in the Colonial area, almost every other house on the market was someone’s ambitious flip gone wrong. Failure, when it relates to homes, is extremely painful to watch.
So what can you do to avoid these mistakes? Here are a few ideas:
1. Know the neighborhood - know the prices like the palm of your hand. If you don’t know what the houses are going for, it gets easier to let optimism get you carried away. Also, make sure you can get to the neighborhood easily. Anything more than an hour’s drive is too far.
2. Do the math. This should probably be number one. If the math doesn’t work out for you to make a profit that’s substantial, do not do it. The carrying costs might eat into that profit and probably will. The best math will not save you from a market crash, so do more than your homework and leave some wiggle room.
3. Get to it! This is the biggest piece of advice I can give you. Vacant homes are a liability. The sooner you can get done and get out from under the mortgage, the more profit you can make. Time is literally money. Treat it as such.
More tips coming up! Mostly from experience, so believe them!
Thank you for that famous introduction, John! I’ll be sure to frame it and show it to my grandchildren when they’re 18 and I’m still out selling real estate. That’s the hope anyway. Who retires from this business anyway? Especially when everything gets so mixed up - clients become friends, relatives are clients, and referrals are always coming - well, we hope. I will not be doorknocking when I’m 65, okay Mr. Broker? (That, by the way, was not a jab at you, John.)
I’ve been wrestling with the name for this blog.
This is a blog in transition.
Yesterday it was a cheesy map blog, the result of what happens when crazy, typaholic software guy turned real estate broker meets some interesting Javascript APIs for drawing maps on his web sites.
The pinnacle of yesterday’s version of this blog was my apology to Jeff Turner for running out of steam.
Today Purva Brown joined Elite Properties. Writer on deck!
Now it’s obvious that the main thrust of the writing here will consist primarily of the excellent contribution Purva will make, and overwrought Broker publishes maps will be at best an afterthought. A guest column. A sideshow.
I always knew if I combed my hair this way I’d end up in a side show eventually.
“Sweet Home Sacramento” works as a title, at least for today. Maybe it’ll stick. Maybe Lynyrd Skynyrd will sue me to within an inch of my life, but I hope not. Anyone with that many Ys in his name probably has bigger fysh to fry.
If anyone has something better, that’d be awesome.
We’ll just go with that name in the meantime. Talk about famous last words. The last time someone said that, the poor kid ended up being named Lynyrd.
My apologies for the fact that the mapping blog has kind of sputtered. I’ve been working out some personal issues, filling in for an agent on vacation, and landing little boats on vast beaches of Web 2.0, so I haven’t had time for much good ol’ regular software development. Perhaps if I get the writer I’m hoping to get we can split the load and rock and roll.
Actually, I know I’m only apologizing to Jeff Turner at this point. 
Mark Twain once said that golf is a walk spoiled.
I took a walk recently. I didn’t spoil it with golf, but I did embellish it with overengineering.
A simple stroll, correctly overengineered, becomes a Sacramento Map Blog nerdfest.
The walk itself was in the Fabulous Forties, one of my favorite Sacramento neighborhoods. In fact the walk was an event, sponsored by the Sacramento Walking Sticks. The nice Volkssport folks have been 
overengineering walks a lot longer than I have, and at one time I used to like going on many of their events.
Turning this walk through the Fabulous Forties into a map blog nerdfest took a bit more doing. First, going out there, naturally I needed to use the new TomTom, which got me there just fine, as expected.
Once there I was pretty much in walking mode, so I picked up my event map in the designated location and got going. I was originally going to take a set of Fabulous Forties pictures, but getting out there, I realized I didn’t have as much time as I wanted. Moreover, the best photos I could have taken were of peoples’ houses, and as much as I wanted to embellish the walk with overengineering, the walk was still more important than getting a bunch of photo releases. So for the walk I was pretty free of any special technological trappings.
Once home, though, of course I wanted to map out the walk, so I first had to find an application to draw the points. It turns out the Gmaps Pedometer was just the thing. This application allows you to draw your waypoints, ticking off the miles (and, optionally, the calories) as you go.
Clicking through from there to the GMaptoGPX utility showed how to convert the map route into a GPX (a standard format for GPS data — more on GPX here).
Once you have the map data in GPX format, you have created a file that is the perfect food for the outstanding free GPSVisualizer web site. Among other things, you can create the map above.
Of course, how overengineered would a walk be if all we got out of it were one image and one data format? GPSVisualizer doesn’t stop there, but allows you to get your data into KML format so Google Earth can read it. (In principle you can also create Google Maps directly but I’ve had less success with this feature). So having driven to your walk using a GPS device, you can then plot your walk on a map, store it as GPS data, then convert that data into a Google Earth to “fly” there in Google Earth.
Can we generate the GoogleMap from GPSVisualizer as well? Sure we can.
One walk. Three maps. Two data formats (three if you count the Javsascript for the map).
So much for golf.
For several months now my clients have wondered where the GPS navigation system is in my car. The answer was that it was the Sacramento County Thomas Guide sitting on the back seat. Recently I finally broke down, succumbing to the self-imposed pressure of being the premier (only) Sacramento Map Blogger, and purchased a TomTom One. This unit is TomTom’s entry level navigation system, and my first impressions are that I like it quite a bit. Originally I had been looking at the TomTom 910 at about $200 more or the TomTom One XL (which is basically the TomTom One with a little more screen space). However, as I played with the one and with the 910 in the store a bit, it struck me that the extra screen space was not something I needed, since even an old guy like me could read the map on the TomTom One screen fairly well.
Of course, there was the usual bubble pack to contend with.
Bubble pack is the scourge of technological society.
Other than that, my experience was mostly positive. The user interface was quite simple to use. To be honest, I know a Realtor with a $660 per month car payment with a Navigation system that has a somewhat simpler interface, but given that I got the whole system out the door for less than half of a single car payment, I’m happy.
One of the features of the 910 is the Text-To-Speech, which allows the unit to call out road names instead of saying a more generic “In 400 yards, turn right”. In practice I’ve found that The TomTom One’s generic street names have not been a problem at all. Having the TomTom One on and talking to me made getting where I was going pretty much a no brainer.
There was only one area (quite near my house) where the street configuration had changed recently where the TomTom got confused. To give the unit its due, however, this was after I’d selected that street as an alternate route. The primary route probably would have worked without a hitch.
Right now I’m going to take the unit out to see how it does in a more live scenario. When I don’t get lost, I’ll report back.
This being a new blog about maps, yesterday I started to think about what sorts of categories and topics might spin out of that. In other words, what might we end up talking about?
One major category is mashups, since publishing mashups is more than half the reason for this blog’s existence. Related to that are all the things one might want to mash: Schools, Neighborhoods (Subdivisions), Homes for Sale, Sold Homes, Foreclosures, Short Sales, Shopping, Parks, etc., etc. This is basically the list of anything we can grow a local database for.
Getting into the mashups fever may take us frequently well outside Sacramento as we make honorable mention of other sites.
This is also a huge potential learning area where we have the ability to bounce ideas off others and make the site really cool.
There is the user side of the mashup equation, and if we feel like getting extra nerdy, there’s the developer side — where we explore the APIs and tools.
Beyond that there are topics directly related to types of maps. Health and Safety seems to be a huge one as I look over many of the government offerings. Recreation is one that comes up a lot. Real Estate is obviously one that I’m interested in.
Then there are special-purpose or special-resolution maps. Key ideas here are topographical maps, bike maps, walking maps, and the like. Where do you get these? What’s available? On the real estate side you can talk about parcel maps and subdivision maps.
Now then, paper or silicon? There are several traditional navigational topics we might want to explore, such as orienteering and map reading. On the silicon side are all the modern tools and the topics that arise from that: Global Positioning System (GPS), geocaching, and the like. So there’s a “tools and technology” category that’s quite possible.
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