3141 E 28th Street

This colorful home is a visual delight. Cozy and sweet.

 Large family room is currently used as a third bedroom. Mature desert landscaping and an orange tree. The back yard is enclosed by a fence and block wall for privacy.

Two room shed with electricity and a workshop. Laundry room off the carport.

Evaporative cooler is about three years old per owner. The inviting front porch welcomes you home.

Only three miles to UofA and downtown on the Golf Links Parkway bike route.

Just six blocks to Reid Park, where you can enjoy concerts, theater, festivals, dog park, golf, baseball, zoo and recreation center with pool. Our City parks are nationally recognized for excellence. This is the affordable urban life style everyone's talking about. Get your place in the sun now. Sold May 14, 2013 for the incredibly low price of $77,000.

Rainbow

I love it when it rains while the sun shines brightly. This was actually a double rainbow, but it faded before I could capture it. There are plenty more where that come from during this lovely winter rainy season

New Down Payment Assistance Program

A new down payment assistance program offers down payment grants to qualified home buyers in Tucson and Pima County. The buyer's income must be under $65,500 and the buyer needs a credit score of at least 640. The house doesn't have to be a vacant foreclosure like that cumbersome Neighborhood Stabilization Program grant, and the house can be anywhere in Pima County, including the City of Tucson.

To see whether you qualify, please call loan officer extraordinaire Catherine Ellinwood at Fairway Independent Mortgage. 520-954-1907. Or email her at cellinwood@fairwaymc.com.

What's a REALTOR®?

Many people use the word Realtor as a synonym for real estate agent. I was surprised to learn that only 30% of the real estate agents in Arizona are Realtors. Most real estate agents are in sole proprietorships or small companies where they have little oversight and training. In Tucson, the largest companies require that their agents be Realtors.

Why does this matter? Realtors (or REALTORS® as the National Association of Realtors wants us to spell it) have sworn to uphold the 17 page Realtor Code of Ethics. Eighteen years ago this March, I actually had to stand up in a room with one hundred other new agents, raise my right hand, and swear to uphold the Code of Ethics.We need to take a refresher course in the Code of Ethics every four years when we renew our real estate licenses.

This Code is over 100 years old, and has been updated to keep up with changes in the business and technology. I think these are the two most important paragraphs:

The term REALTOR® has come to connote competency, fairness, and high integrity resulting from adherence to a lofty ideal of moral conduct in business relations. No inducement of profit and no
instruction from clients ever can justify departure from this ideal.

In the interpretation of this obligation, REALTORS® can take no safer guide than that which has been handed down through the centuries, embodied in the Golden Rule, “Whatsoever ye would that others should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

Oh, by the way, it's pronounced just the way it is spelled, not Reel-lah-ter!

"Flip This House" Coming to Tucson

The television show "Flip This House" will be here next week recruiting people who want to buy houses to renovate and resell, which is called flipping. Whether this will do anything for the flippers remains to be seen, but it will probably generate some positive national interest in Tucson.

Too Cold for Tucson

Two inches of ice on my fountain this morning. This is wrong in so many ways. After I broke it up, dozens of birds appeared for an icy drink. Apparently they couldn't find water any where else.

The thermometer from the cellar at my parents' house in Massachusetts is now on my back porch. It is at least as old as I am, so confusion is understandable. With six degrees of mercury stuck up in the eighties, the thermometer reports the temperature as 12. I am sure it never experienced such extremes of temperature in my parents' cellar.

December Residential Sales Statistics

The Tucson Association of Realtors has published the Residential Sales Statistics for December 2012. The average sale price was $183,011, the highest average for any month in 2012. This is unusual, because sale prices in Tucson usually peak in the summer, and then go into a seasonal decline until the market picks up the following spring. We are back to the prices of 2004, the last normal market before the housing bubble started to expand.

Cash sales are still 33% of the sales. Many of these cash purchases are made by investors. Cash buyers have an advantage over buyers who are getting a mortgage, because mortgage companies require that the house be in habitable condition. A stolen air conditioner, leaking water heater, termite damage or even a broken window can prevent a buyer from getting a mortgage on a house. Many of the distressed properties are neglected and vandalized, so only a cash buyer can purchase them.


15% of the sales were short sales, and 24% of the sales were foreclosures. Distressed sales still have a grip on 39% of the market. These distressed sales must be used as comparable sales on appraisals, and they drag down the value of non-distressed houses. It seems we still have a long way to go to get rid of all the distressed inventory.

The LA Times says that short sales are now more common than foreclosures there. The real estate boom started in California, and the real estate bubble burst in California first. We can only hope that Arizona catches this wave of more cost-effective and productive distressed sales.