Mary Pope-Handy's Silicon Valley Real Estate Commentary

Today I got an email from a buyer couple with a question about permits (and finals). I'd sent them information on a home I previewed in the Cambrian Park and Los Gatos border area near Alta Vista School. The house is in the Garcia tract and the MLS offers to the public the warning that "permits are unknown" for the fourth bedroom and addition.

That's what we call a red flag.

My buyers, who are not from this area, asked me if that's common and what it means.

Yes, it's common to have SOME work that's not permitted, but NO it's not common to have an entire addition appear to be non-permitted! What does it mean? Usually "permits unknown" means "we think there aren't any, but aren't positive" or it means "buy at your own risk".

The City of San Jose has the permit files online now, and anyone (yes you) can pull up the history of any property in San Jose for no cost. Here's the URL: https://www.sjpermits.org/permits/permits/

For the particular house that I had been discussing with my clients, it appears from what's online that this addition was raised as an issue by San Jose's Code Compliance a few times, but it was never resolved. The current owners are lucky!  I once sold a house with a non-permitted addition and the City of San Jose required us to remove the room before we could close escrow!

Will these sellers be lucky when they close escrow? Maybe not. If they need any work requiring a permit - say, a new water heater, a fumigation, you name it - the City of San Jose will review their entire permit history again. And then what? They may be required to remove the illegal addition. Or if there's no work done requiring a permit, perhaps it will be a dormant problem, waiting for the next work requiring a permit to surface.

In any event, it is a significant issue. The sellers would do well to fix it prior to selling their home.

August is often a more "sleepy" month in Silicon Valley. In 2007, the August activity was better than September, since we had the mortgage meltdown occur then, and in 2001 August was better than September for sales. But most years, August is better for buyers than for sellers in terms of closing prices.
How about this year?

Most homes in Los Gatos are in the $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 range, though there are a few homes priced lower (the lowest being about $850,000 for a single family home) and quite a few are higher (it is not uncommon to see homes sell in the $2 mil to $4 mil range, though sometimes they can sell much higher, even more than $10 mil on rare occassion).

For those somewhat typical homes in the 1-2 million price range in Los Gatos, sales prices seem to be going down. Much of San Jose has been experiencing this already, but Los Gatos real estate values have been a little insulated from the brunt of it all. Although only one home in five had been selling, those numbers are worsening. Right now there are 214 single family homes and condos for sale, but only 29 closings in those same groups in August. That nets 7.3 "months of inventory" in the town of Los Gatos. (In other words, if no new listings were to come on the market, it would take a bit over 7 months to empty the current inventory.)

For more details on the Los Gatos real estate market, please have a look at my Live in Los Gatos blog, where you'll find more information on this month's closed sales.

Los Gatos is a very picturesque town, both in terms of the natural beauty and the architecture. Located at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the town includes both hilly and forested areas as well as flat and more densely populated ones. Los Gatos is a gateway into San Jose and Silicon Valley and is a highly regarded place to live because of the low crime, great schools, community involvement, and great town life.

Take a peek into our town by enjoying some slideshows of beautiful Los Gatos.

Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco is sponsoring a tour of a dozen Eichler homes in Palo Alto on Saturday, September 6 from 10am to 4pm. It's a self-guided tour with both remodeled and original condition Eichlers. The tax-deductible cost is $40 per person.

Tickets can be purchased online. Or, for more information, contact Sabrina Pourmand at (650) 568-7337 or spourmand@habitatgsf.org.

If you live anywhere in the Peninsula, San Jose or Silicon Valley area and enjoying interesting real estate & architectural design, this is a great opportunity to see some distinct homes and support a great cause!

Los Gatos, California, like Monte Sereno, Saratoga, Almaden Valley, Cupertino and Los Altos, is an area which is well reputed within Silicon Valley (the San Jose area) for its great schools, low crime, and quality of life.

People flock to Cupertino, Saratoga, Palo Alto, and a few other areas for the high scoring schools. But at the same time, other families feel that those areas are "pressure cookers" or "unbalanced" so look for schools with a great education but not quite so much pressure.

Enter Los Gatos.

It's often thought that people pay the high price tags mostly because of the schools here in Los Gatos. But there are many other excellent attributes in The Town: community involvement, scenic beauty, great parks, a vibrant downtown, and more.

What is surprising is to learn that Money Magazine recently stated that 1/3 of the children in the town of Los Gatos attend private schools rather than the highly acclaimed public schools. I wrote about this on my Live in Los Gatos blog, with comparisons to other places too. For more information, please read that post:

I don't "see dead people" but I do collect ghost stories, and a LOT of agents seem to have had experiences worth reading about! Do you have one to share? If so, I'd love to showcase it (and you) on my Haunted Real Estate blog!

Yes, really. After all, it's almost Halloween!!

Want to be included? Email me and put something about Haunted Real Estate in the subject line (or phone me) and we'll get started. Meanwhile, check out the blog, especially the category for Agent Stories.

Today I went on the Broker's Tour in Silicon Valley's west valley areas of Los Gatos, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Cambrian Park (part of San Jose), and Campbell. There's always a variety of homes available - big and small, elegant to simple. Most are well staged and prepared. But each  week, I see some homes where I just have to wonder why the sellers didn't do this or that. Today was no exception. I saw a home that was great on the inside (in fact, I intend to show it to my buyers). There's peeling paint and other problems along the front of the house, though. And it's listed at well over a million dollars!

Of course, I've also had seller clients who didn't want to do the staging work I've strongly recommended at times, so I do understand how those agents feel when they tell their clients. "You need new carpet and paint", and the sellers just won't do it.

Selling a property always comes down to price, condition, and marketing. Agents only control the marketing part of things, but we can advise on price and condition. It's easier to be convincing with price because there are sales (or lack of them) to indicate an approximate range. Numbers make it easier to convey. Condition is tougher. Sellers don't want to hear that their out-of-date bathrooms or kitchens or decor is going to hurt a home's sale price. Agents know - we are "in the trenches" and hear buyer comments so realize that even if it's not always easy to measure, the impact of good staging is huge.

Today I looked at the ratio of homes selling in various parts of the west valley and discussed some basic staging tips on my Valley of Hearts Delight blog. If you'd like to see some of the data and a few general tips for staging in a tough buyers market, please have a look at that post:
Stage Your Silicon Valley Home Like Your Sale Depends On It!

Isn't it interesting when the shoe is on the other foot?

Right now, I'm just starting to look at real estate in the Westchester area of Los Angeles, California. Why? Because our son, Brian, is an entering freshman at Loyola Marymount University. He'll live on campus the first year, or maybe first couple of years, and after that he may be "off campus".

Westchester is a great area of L.A. In fact, I lived there, directly across from the then main entrance of LMU in 1981-1982, when I taught at St. Bernard's High School in nearby Playa del Rey. It was my first year out of college and I could not wait to get to grad school, so I didn't linger long, but I did enjoy my time there and can attest to the fact that west L.A. and the coastal area near Playa del Rey, Marina del Rey, and Venice Beach is generally a great place to live.

So with our son commencing his studies there, I'm thinking, naturally, about real estate and whether or not we should consider buying a condo in a year or two.

And I'm finding that it's not all that easy to search by map in areas close to LMU.

When I input Westchester into Google, often I end up somewhere on the east coast. Not helpful. "LA" often lands me in Louisiana. Finally, I try neighboring Playa del Rey, only to realize I'm seeing places in New Mexico or Arizona.

What I really want, more than anything, is a "search by map" tool. Something like what I have on my website for clients, prospects, and lookie-lous like myself: http://www.mlsfinder.com/ca_reinfolink/marypopehandy/

I googled for Realtors via the main website and via blogs, and mostly came up with search by parameters (rather than search by map).

I found myself feeling very frustrated.

What I really, really want to know is this: are there condos within a couple of miles of the school? If so, what do they cost?

Like many consumers, I don't want to waste anyone's time. I'm just doing a preliminary scan. And I'm realizing it's not so easy to find the info I want.

It makes me wonder: how frustrated are OUR potential clients, when they know what they want but can't easily find it online?

I may rework my sites for parents of college kids at Santa Clara University, San Jose State and Stanford.

After all, now I know how it feels!

A lot of great blog posts are inspired by questions that I get. Sometimes they are asked directly to me, and other times. I check VisiStat or SiteMeter to see how people have found my posts. At least one time in 50, it's a question that lands a Googler to my blogsite.

After speaking at Bloggers Connect last month in San Francisco, a LOT of bloggers asked me how I find the time to blog, read other blogs, and respond to comments. I know that this is a huge question for a lot of folks, especially those who are not yet convinced that blogging actually pays off.

It does. It just takes time, like any other form of marketing, like farming with postcards. But with THIS form of marketing, it requires more time than money.

As for me, I like to write, so when I have a topic I'm enthusiastic about, it's easy to write and it's fun to write. True confession: reading some other blogs are not so enjoyable. A lot of bloggers don't know how to write. It's as interesting as listening to a dial tone to slog through some blogs. But many of them, even some of the dull ones, have great information. Many are inspiring with the info they've dug up, the pictures they showcase, or whatever new gizmos are on display. (After attending Connect, I finally ordered a flip camera. I will catch up with the times!)

For some, writing is hard. Maybe it's impossible. Or maybe there's just not enough of a buy-in to actually blog, even through they're hearing from the gurus how important it's going to be for SEO.

Is it important enough to hire a ghost writer?

That's an interesting question. My initial take is "it depends". Will the content be local? Will it be unique? That's one thing. People can get national news on any website, so my thinking is that blogging about stuff than can be found on CNN just doesn't make a lot of sense. But even worse is if the content is not unique.

Last year I had a virtual assistant and someone on her team offered to do some posting of sorts for me on my Realty Times subscription. (It expires this month and I'm not renewing - better, I think, to have the traffic on my own site, though I did make one sale from RT.) Anyway, since I was so busy blogging, I had ignored the RT updates and the virtual assistant's team member was going to take my info and update it for me.

Bad idea.

Know what I got?

I got national news and I got something that was copied onto all their other clients' RT updates. And it didn't just happen once.

We're talking fired. At least that member of the team was history.

Today I had a look at a blog - a gorgeous blog, I might add - for a very high end team which is wading into the pool of blogging. The site looks very professional, but there's a paid blogger with national, non-unique content being posted. I Googled two lines and sure enough, it's on other sites as well.

How will that help SEO for them? I'm assuming that's the goal: improve the SEO, get the traffic, and the traffic turns into leads. But if the content isn't unique, I rather think it's not going to help.

What do you think about ghost writers on a blog? Is it a good way to solve the "time problem"?

(Please NO LINKS or "advertising" in the responses.)

Santa Clara Valley homesellers know that in most parts of the region, it's a buyer's market. As they get ready to sell their homes, or perhaps have homes lingering on the market, a few questions arise:

• How many buyers will have to see your Silicon Valley home before it sells?
• How many days, weeks, or months will it take? Is there a rule of thumb?
• If your San Jose area home is not selling, why is that the case? What can you do about it?

The national average is 10 showings for every offer. But what if there are only a few, scattered showings? What does it take to get qualified traffic, especially in this market? I wrote about this extensively today in my Valley of Hearts Delight blog, and I invite you to read more by visiting this post:

How Many Showings Should It Take To Sell A Silicon Valley House In Today's Market?