Why Isn’t this house Selling

Back in October, I wrote about Stupid Seller Tricks. What I forgot to add to that post was that it isn’t always clear who is doing the driving: the seller or their agent.

Ready to Move In

The house is listed as MLS 08420018 (note: you may need to create a Redfin account to see all the history). Notice that it says (as of this posting) this property has been on the market for 45+ days.

You never really know the story behind a house, unless you have inside information, but you can make some educated guesses.  For one thing, the pictures have no furniture, so presumably the owners have moved.

This house sold for $237K in 1999. Now, 14 years later it’s listed for almost twice that amount. The listing says, and the photos confirm, that the house has been updated.

Newly refurbished & updated thruout w/ refinished hdwd flrs, repainted interior. New 2nd flr bathroom & 1st flr powder room. Lg kitchen w/ island & new granite counters. New ceramic tile flrs in mudroom & bsmt.

To be sure, based on what I know about the neighborhood and this type of house, the asking price isn’t unreasonable. In fact, this is a wonderful house if you like stainglass and woodwork combined with modern amenities like an updated kitchen and Central A/C.  So why hasn’t it sold in this hot, hot market?

Couple of things to consider. One, the house is about 200 yards away from Family Fruit Market, a neighborhood Grocery store that is known for its fresh fruit and vegetables at affordable prices. Kinda like a Stanley’s West. While this shouldn’t be a reason for concern, the fact of the matter is, there is a lot of traffic in and out of the small parking lot. And let’s be honest: where there’s traffic there is inevitably some Dbag who feels that his way of driving trumps common courtesy and/or standard rules of the road.

We actually passed on a house across the street from this one for that very reason. While we were looking at the home, we noticed several cars park on the permit only street, or fight to get into some of the few legal spots in front of Family Fruit Market.

The other thing is that while this house is on a nice tree-lined street, it is also a street that a lot of people seem to use to cut across from Cicero to Milwaukee Avenue. In the less than 5 minutes I spent there taking these pictures, almost a dozen cars came drive through, and not at residential speeds either.

Another thing that is hard to analyze but I would say the number of buyers looking in Portage Park is less than the number of homes available for sale.

Icarus Theorem of Realty: In many cases the person who can afford your Asking Price, doesn’t want to live in your neighborhood and most of the people who want to live in your neighborhood cannot afford or flat out won’t pay your Insane Asking Price.

Portage Park is a great middle class neighborhood in the northwest side of the city. It has reasonable proximity to downtown, O’Hare Airport and is accessible from the highway and the Blue Line.  But unless you grew up here, you probably don’t know it exists.  And most people who cannot afford to buy in the really hot trendy neighborhoods (aka The Green Zone — I’ll do a post on that soon) figure if they are going to go West, why not just move to the Suburbs and be done with it.

My prediction: this house will have to drop under $400K to sell.  Remember, all predictions correct or double your money back!

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Chicago Bears: Pretenders or Contenders?

It’s a bit early to have visions of facing Peyton Manning in the Superbowl, but the Bears have surprised many fans this season with their 3-0 start.  The Bears have started well before, only to fizzle once the season brought on real opponents, or the injury bugs.

My prediction for this Sunday and next: Bears lose a close one to Detroit.  Then next week they shock everyone by beating the Saints, with New Orleans never in the lead.  Because this is what the Bears do, they win games they have no business winning and then they go and lose games they should have wrapped up.

I thought this even before I heard Charles Tillman was Probable and now I just think it’s par for the course.

I first became a Bears fan in 1995.  I wasn’t much of a watch sports-on-TV type of guy.   But I got into a Confidence Pool at work and figured the best way to learn about the teams was to start watching.  And for better or worse, the 1995 Bears team taught me a lot about how the pieces are not always in place.

It was the year they went 9-7 and missed the playoffs.  They didn’t win their division because of losses to Green Bay and they didn’t get a Wild Card spot because of a San Francisco loss to Atlanta.  A loss brought about by a field goal if I remember correctly.  It was such a painful loss that I’m sure I’ve done all I can do to remove it from my memory banks.

So while that wasn’t a good year for the Bears, it was decent preparation for a lot of bad Bears seasons to follow but it was a great lesson in how Professional Football works:

• If you don’t win your division, you might not go to the playoffs,
• If you don’t win the tie breakers, you won’t make the WildCard
• If you are the Chicago Bears, you seldom control your own destiny.

Another reason I think Detriot will win this Sunday.  Remember the catch that wasn’t a catch?  Yeah Karma is gonna come cash that in.

 

 

Going back to that dream Superbowl. How ironic would it be if the Football Gods did have Jay Cutler face his former team, which is now Quarterbacked by the only guy to ever beat the Bears in a Superbowl! A fan can dream.
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Internet Troll Love Song

By the Doubleclicks, a pair of sisters — Angela and Aubrey Webber — who sing about Dungeons & Dragons, dinosaurs, and Mr. Darcy. They play cello and ukulele. This song, which seems more and more appropriate in the world of anonymous commenting is part of their new “Weekly Song Wednesday” program.

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When its time to buy a new PC

So the time has come to get a new home computer. The ones I have at home are old, taking up valuable real estate while not quite pulling their weight any longer. One of them I built from scratch, the other I purchased at a yard sale for $20.

I really hoped these two would mate and produce netbooks

My usual MO for buying a desktop is to get the best processor I can and max out the memory, and make that puppy work until Judgment Day. Alas how I use computers has changed quite a bit. For one, since Wi-Fi now exists I am no longer tethered to a desk. To that end, it is more enjoyable to sit outside on my back deck or front porch as I write my posts.

I’ve also gone over to the Dark Side and got an iPad and have to admit, I find it easier for surfing and email than a clunky old desktop. That said, I’m not quite ready to give up the old dinosaur concept of a desktop in favor of the new all-in-one touchscreens. Sure they are probably the direction we are going until we succumb to just having our smart phone fused into our brains and accept our evolution into the cyborg/Cylon world.

So back to the desktop. Even though computers are more powerful than ever before, until next week when they release the new HPDellAsus 3000a with better tint control, the basic guts remain the same.

• Processor or CPU.
• Memory or RAM.
• Hard Disk space or the place where your files go to die if you don’t back up to the cloud.

I’m no longer versed in the latest GeekSpeak for types of RAM (DRAM vs. DIMM, DDR, DDR3, SDRAM) or processors. I went to the various websites to look at some computers and all that got me are ads showing more computers whenever I visit my favorite blogs.  And by the time I got some input from my fellow Geeks about the choices, the website had already removed the reasonably affordable yet quite servicable CPU option and now only have the really slow or the CPU on Meth options.

When it comes to any technology, I generally wait for the next new thing to be released — iPad, smart phone, toilet paper warmer– and wait a few iterations for them to work all the kinks out. Then I buy the best I can afford and make it last as long as possible.

Whenever I can, I try to Future Proof the item. That was the strategy when I bought my first desktop in G-school in 1999! I had the good sense to get a LAN port even though I didn’t know what the hell a LAN port was at the time. It’s actually an Ethernet port but in 1999 the Dell technicians were required to call it a LAN port because that was the currency at the time.

So I have to find the happy medium between finding a machine that can last me a long time, and my pocketbook. Given all the other bills I have, by the time I can afford to upgrade to one of those all-in-one touchscreens, the latest and greatest computer technology might just be your very own Cylon.
 

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Inviting the office to your wedding

Wedding invites at the office are tricky business. Let’s say you have a standing arrangements with three co-workers were you pretty much eat lunch together almost every day. Unless you have a really good reason for omitting one of them, it’s best to invite them all or none of them to your wedding. Otherwise, until you change jobs or departments, it makes for an awkward moment.

Bad enough we work together, did you have to seat us at the same table?

I’ve been to weddings where I was the only person invited from the office. I’ve also worked at places where I seemingly was the only person not invited to a wedding. Most of the time it was simply because I wasn’t close to the person and just didn’t make the cut. I’ve said before, you cannot invite everyone and hopefully the person getting married is classy enough not to talk incessantly about it in front of your face.

A few years ago, two co-workers at the No-Name Software Company got married the same summer (not to each other). I was invited to one wedding, not to the other. I was perfectly content with not being invited to Jacob’s wedding. We were not best buddies and we had little in common other than both having started at the company around the same time. In fact, he’s rather a DBag. I was a little surprised that he had invited someone else from the office who had only been there a couple months.

Had he invited me however, I would have gone out of some misguided sense of obligation and, as it would turn out, give up a Saturday evening that was better spent at a street festival getting some hottie’s phone number [I was single at the time]. Worse yet, I would have shelled out cash for a wedding gift that would be better spent on said hottie.

Hanna on the other hand, did invite me to her wedding. But the difference is we are friends in the sense that we talk about subjects outside the realm of work and even share advice on personal matters. She not only invited me to her traditional Indian wedding, but I also somehow scored an invite to the rehearsal dinner. It was a little awkward because I didn’t know anyone there and no one else from the office was apparently invited.

Perhaps the culture at the No-Name Software Company simply bred odd behavior. A few years later I was invited to my co-worker Jacob’s wedding. Jacob and I happened to go to high school together and he also invited our mutual friend Larry, whose parents practically raised him. He said he could not invite Larry’s parents because he was at the Wedding Guest Limit. At his reception, he had invited our boss, Director Palpatine, and a couple of other mangers from the office.

I get inviting the Big Boss and your direct manager. It’s a good career move and it doesn’t hurt when it comes to asking for time off for the honeymoon. Jacob also invited two goons who were not his direct boss but merely Palpatine’s hand-picked band of merry ass kissers. [They all came over to the No-Name Software Company under the Motorola Outreach Program our director implemented the moment he was hired.]

How do you not invite the Parents of your high school best friend in lieu of two people you barely interact with at the office? You only get one first wedding and what a beautiful way to say thank you to the people who you claim helped raise you and provided a safe place to hang out after school? It still boggles my mind today.

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The Mythical and Elusive Creature known as The Comp

Today I want to talk a little bit about comparable sales, or “comps” as the realtors call them. If you want to sell your home, you have to figure out how much can get for it. Sure you could just add the amount of money you want to how much you still owe on your home but this strategy seldom works. How much your home is worth to you and how much your home is worth to someone else can often be numbers that are light years apart.

The elusive Comp searches out recent activity

Alas, A home’s fair market value is determined by what a qualified buyer will pay for it at any given moment in time. Sort of like the old commodities explanation: if you can find someone to pay $500 for a watch, that watch is worth $500, otherwise, it’s only worth whatever you can get for it.

During the Boom, a lot of people were willing to pay a lot for “watches” that may or may not have been worth the asking price. After the Boom ended, it took a long time for sellers to realize that they were not going to find someone to give them their asking price. Unfortunately, it’s hard to take a loss on a property because we are usually talking about tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. So before you waste anyone’s time, especially your own, trying to sell your home, you want to get an idea if what someone will pay is even in the ballpark of what you owe.

The only way to estimate what that Qualified Buyer will pay for a home before it is actually sold is to look at what qualified buyers have actually paid for very similar nearby homes, as recently as possible. This is what agents call looking at the “comps”. – Most listing agents will do a formal version of this process called a Comparative Market Analysis.

Before the days of the internet, comps were a little tricky to come by. Agents might not have known about a listing or recent sale in time to add it to their CMA. Or they would cherry picked listings to justify their case for setting a price.

In all fairness, unless the homes are part of a subdivision built by the same developer where the only difference is one house has red shutters and grey siding and the house next door has grey shutters with red siding, it can be hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison of one home to another.

“To determine which homes you should compare against your own, you’ll want to target a search area of about a quarter- to half-mile radius around your house. It helps if the homes you research are in the same school district as yours and the neighborhood is generally the same as your own. You’ll want to focus on homes with approximately the same square footage and number of bedrooms that are a similar age, condition and style home with comparable features and upgrades. All of these factors will help determine how a home is priced. ”
Source: sharimack

Today comps are more real time. There’s still a chance for error. Certain Realty Websites will simply grab everything on the market in a 1 mile radius, divide by the number of properties listed and spit out the average. Some agents, even when doing the formal CMA, don’t always weed out dissimilar properties. Over the years I’ve had agents offer to run CMAs and I always take them up on it because I need a good laugh and don’t have cable.

They’d show me listings that were miles away or me condos with more bedrooms and/or bathrooms than I have. An extra bathroom might not throw a comp off a lot but an extra bedroom is a different animal.

How much your home is worth to you and how much it is considered to be worth in the real estate world are often two different things. Believe me, I’ve been watching sellers with very unrealistic expectations list their properties over the last few years only to have that home languish on the market. The reality of realty is putting your home on the market is like a putting together a Broadway show. You only have one opening night when everyone is watching.

If a home is more upgraded, spacious or better located than the comps, or if the market has shifted since the time the comps were sold, it might warrant listing the property at a price higher than the comps indicate. Otherwise, you have to price it right if you want it to sell or even get any showings in the first place.

If a home hasn’t been selling, especially in a so-called sellers’ market, the first thing people assume is there is something wrong with it. Once the home has been rejected, they won’t come back, even if the price is lowered. They have already mentally discarded it.

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Chicago Marathon 20 Miler done. Next stop: The real deal

20 miles is easier on a Divvy Bike

If you are training for the Chicago Marathon, or any fall marathon, chances are good that you ran a 20 mile Long Run over the weekend. Maybe it was your first, or if you are a marathon veteran, perhaps your training schedule called for two ot three 20 milers. Or maybe you’re one of those ego-maniacs who took an 18 mile LR and went for two!

In any event, Sunday was the last 20 mile run for most marathoner training for Chicago. CARA sponsored a point-to-point run that a lot of my running friends participated in.

What’s special about this 20 mile run is that it mimics the marathon experience, complete with the hydration and gels available on the course at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon. It’s also a point-to-point course for runners instead of a traditional out-and-back, which lends to the marathon experience. But even though there is a party at the end of the 20 miler (just like at the end of the marathon) it’s still important to remember that this is an important training run that will help prepare you for the marathon itself.

20 milers can make or break your confidence because they are as close to running the marathon as you get. Here’s something I wrote as a group leader over the years and have sent out to the various groups I’ve trained:

It’s over. Whether it was your first, second or third 20 mile run, it’s now over and done. Make your peace with it and say good-bye to long mileage. You won’t have to run that far again until the marathon.

There’s nothing more to do other than focus on the things you shouldn’t do. Watch what you eat, get enough rest and keep the leg muscles loose with the minimum allowed mileage.

CARA Downtown Site: Water Station

If you haven’t already, this is your last chance to get a new pair of shoes as there are just enough miles left to break them in properly before race day.

If you had a good Twenty, that’s terrific. Keep those positives thought alive and build on it during the taper.

This is where your body rests and heals itself and stores the energy it will need on Marathon Day. You can help by eating right and getting plenty of rest. In fact, you have no choice. This is part of the deal between you and your body. You’ve shown it what you expect and it will deliver, provided you front the necessary nutrients and appropriate pillow time.

If this 20 miler broke your spirit and introduced doubt into your life, let me tell you a little secret: it doesn’t make any difference. How you perform on your 20 miler may be a benchmark for where you are at today, it’s not a prediction of how you will do in 3 weeks. You’ve come too far and worked too hard to give up now. You made it through the training, the early hours, the long mileage, unpredictable weather and you proven that you have the mental toughness to go the distance. Confidence is believing in a positive outcome when the empirical evidence suggests otherwise. And you have every reason in the world to be confident.

Remember your training and you will cross the finish line!

Having a bad 20 mile run is not an indication that your race day is going to be bad. Which also means that having a good 20 mile run doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to have a great race day either.

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What Pope Francis said and what it really means

Popes say the darndest things! in a lengthy and refreshingly blunt interview with La Civilta Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit magazine, Pope Francis said the Catholic Church must shake off an obsession with teachings on abortion, contraception and homosexuality and instead focus on the greater need to make The Church a merciful, more welcoming place for all.

Photo Credit: articles.chicagotribune.com – by Philip Pullella

His comments were welcomed by liberal Catholics; but they are likely to be viewed with concern by conservatives who have already expressed concern over Francis’s failure to address publicly the issues stressed by his predecessor, Benedict. Source: Chicago Tribune.

As a Catholic, I’m very proud of this statement issued by the Pope. The more I learn about this Pope — who replaced Pope Benedict only six months ago — the more I believe this Pope genuinely believes what he’s selling: the future existence of the Church relies on inclusion, not exclusion. Either that or he is a way better actor than anyone gave him credit for when he took over the shop.

That being said, this interview — which is being treated more like a revelation — isn’t exactly what some people seem to think or hope it means. For one thing, there are no doctrinal changes. No change on the teachings re homosexual conduct, abortion, women’s ordination, or birth control. Rather, it seems this Francis guy just wants everyone to pick their battles more diligently and focus on what really matters:

So just like it isn’t he job of brain surgeons to put out forest fires, the Pope seems to be saying that it isn’t the job of the church to punish sinners or marginalize anyone. That’s up to God.

“So we’ll keep being misogynistic homophobes; we’ll just be quieter about it.” Call me when they start ordaining women and stop meddling in politics and advocating against human rights for women and homosexuals. This was a commenter named Joseph Finn on Change of Subject.

Lighten up, Francis.

Its priests should be more welcoming and not cold, dogmatic bureaucrats. The confessional, he said, “is not a torture chamber but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better.” Source: Chicago Tribune.

The Bible’s got plenty to say about greed, adultery, caring for the poor, loving others (even your enemies). Somewhere between all the translating from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to dozens of other languages, one of Jesus important messages has been lost: Stop being D-bags to one another!

Sounds to me like that’s the message Pope Francis is trying to send.

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Have Home Prices come back enough to sell your home?

Everyone seems to be buzzing that the Real Estate Market is returning. No one seems to have a clue what it is returning to. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that home sales have finally started moving in the up direction after so many years in the slumps. Pundits who write about Realty finally have something exciting to publish besides the tired old What Renovations Return the most bang for your buck articles they’ve been hawking.

ChicagoNow resident real estate expert Gary Lucido actually called it a few years ago: “The most recent Macro Markets home price forecast survey of 111 economists predicts that over the next 5 years home prices will average an increase of about 2% per year. In other words…the market is not going to come roaring back.”

Basically, If you were deep underwater a year or two ago, today you may be only treading water. Which brings us back to the question on the tips of many homeowners: Is it finally a good time to sell my home?

According to a lot of realtors I’ve met, it’s always a good time to sell your home. They often leave out the part about needing to owe less on it than its worth, or when you factor in realtor commissions and other transaction costs that still means bringing a check to the closing table.

How much your home is worth to you and how much it is considered to be worth in the real estate world are often two different things. Believe me, I’ve been watching sellers with very unrealistic expectations list their properties over the last few years only to have that home languish on the market. The reality of realty is putting your home on the market is like a putting together a Broadway show. You only have one opening night when everyone is watching.

If a home hasn’t been selling, especially in a so-called sellers’ market, the first thing people assume is there is something wrong with it. Once the home has been rejected, they won’t come back, even if the price is lowered. They have already mentally discarded it.

Or maybe you really need to update your bathrooms

Once your listing goes “stale” your agent will tell you that it isn’t priced right and you have to reduce the price. Yep the same agent who reviewed the comps and came up with the price in the first place. Not “sorry I boo-booed” but “Sorry you have to lower your price.” as in I cannot believe you actually thought you could get that price for this place that I priced at that amount.

When I tried to sell my place in 2010, my agent and I sat down and we looked at the comps. He thought we could price it from $200K to $210K. I knew that was high so I said lets go with the low end of that range. We got a few showings but even with the cash for clunkers tax incentive, we didn’t get an offers. I never expected to make money or recoup my costs. I merely wanted to sell the condo for enough to cover my mortgage. Bonus if I actually got some money for a future down payment to buy dinner that night.

I had enough room to make one price adjustment. We dropped it $5K hoping that would insight someone to make an offer of $190. Didn’t happen. When I wouldn’t lover my asking price anymore, the agent dropped me except he wouldn’t let me take the place off the market. I had foolishly signed a contract that had a clause about de-listing before the contract expired, six months.

That’s on me. I knew it was there and should have asked to have it removed. In a normal market there’s a very valid reason for having this clause. You don’t want to do a lot of work, showing a home, only to have the seller find a buyer independently and then cut you out of your hard earned commission. However this wasn’t a normal market, it was the middle of the Bust and leaving my listing Active was only punishing me for not being rich enough to sell at any price.

But what is on my former realtor is that he pulled the comps and set the price and made no acknowledgement or took any responsibility when reality didn’t measure up to his advice.

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Chicago Marathon training brings the Labor Day Blues

If you are training for the Chicago Marathon — or most any fall marathon — chances are that by now, you’ve begun to notice something about your training that you might never imagined: you’re sick and tired of it all. The getting up at the wee hours of the morning, the almost religious adherence to a training schedule and the piles of miles you’ve logged by now. And if you have to wash down another gel pack with Gatorade you are going to puke. Literally.

Are we there yet?

No matter what time of year it is, when you are two-thirds through any marathon training program, you start to feel a little worn down. You’re banged up, worn out and you still have a 20 mile training Long Run (LR) on the horizon. But there’s something extra depressing about training for a marathon once Labor Day weekend comes around.

The sun comes up a little later, and it gets dark a little earlier. Kids are back in school and new television shows promise to banish the reruns of summer. And being Chicago, the baseball teams have been out of contention since your first LR and you cannot wait for Opening Day football.

I’ve trained for and run 22 marathons — most of them in Chicago. I’ve also spent many of those years as a Group Leader for CARA, helping other runners train for a marathon and I can tell you first hand that I see it every year. Even if you are just running to finish and check it off the old bucket list, marathon training takes a bit of discipline, dedication and determination. This time of year, it can be hard to channel those first two items.

Even us group leaders whose job it is to help you get ready for Chicago get sick of the whole training thing. This time of year, I want to sleep in, eat Hot Wings instead of pasta and watch football instead of pounding the pavement. I’m ready for the whole worshipping a training schedule thing to be over.

The good news is in just over a month it will be over. That’s like, Super SOON!

Remember that as race day approaches, you’ll start seeing the banners, the commercials and all things marathon. Suddenly all your friend will be envious that you are running the marathon and they sat on their butts this summer — or not.

Some other things to feel good about if you are training for a marathon:

• The day you run the 20, you’ll feel like a rock star.
• Your metabolism is probably in such high gear that you can eat nachos like no ones business.
• There’s still time for at least one more street festival (Taste of Polonia, German-American Fest anyone)
• The LRs are getting shorter which means the weekday mileage decreases as well.

What often helps me gets me back in spirit is going for a run in the evening just as the sun is starting to set. The path is noticeably quieter with the tourists gone and less crowded since the fair weather folks head inside to the gym. When I do encounter another runner, I don’t even have to look for the color-tagged shoes to know he or she is also training for Chicago. We don’t know each other, but we do the Runner’s nod.

And if all else fails, you can always look forward to the little known post-marathon ritual where you toss your running clothes into a bonfire while drinking anything but Gatorade.

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