Mary Pope-Handy's Silicon Valley Real Estate Commentary

The Los Gatos real estate market is soft - it remains a buyers market for most areas and price ranges. Agents and sellers will tell you that it's harder to sell a home now.  Let's look at the market data, though. It can be analyzed by price point, school district, zip code, square footage, or any number of factors. Today's "mini update" will be a glance by zip code of condos and single family homes with focus on the days on market., amount of inventory and list prices of homes for sale. Data and graphs by Altos Research (to which I subscribe). 

Read more, Mini Market Update for Los Gatos: How Long Do Homes Stay On The Market?

The Median List price for the Almaden Valley district of San Jose (zip code 95120) has been declining overall. Does this mean that homes are declining in value? Or does it mean that less expensive homes are being offered for sale? Information from sold data indicates that by and large, homes are holding their value in Almaden right now. The declines in asking prices may indicate that sellers simply want prices to be rising more than they actually are, rather than the idea that values are falling.

Read more...

Halloween will be here before you know it, so get ready to blog about upcoming events in your neighborhood!

A great way to spice up your posts for this spooky holiday is to doctor a photo. A house is perfect, of course, but this works with pumpkins or almost anything else.

So start by finding a photo of a house that you can use. I'll choose a pic of a listing I sold a few years ago in the Blossom Valley area of San Jose (Silicon Valley). Next, go to www.Picnik.com and upload the chosen photograph. (Picnik is a free site. Just go, and use.)

After uploading the photo to this nice, free online site, go to the "create" tab (unless you need to crop it or otherwise fix the pic - in which case, you should go to "edit" first.) You'll have lots of choices for altering the pic now!

There are lots more fun things you can do to take a wonderfully nice house and make it look creepy for halloween on the Picnik site. Enjoy!

Sometimes photos are "almost right". Occasionally, I end up getting a photo at the wrong time of day or under bad lighting or sky conditions and want to fix it before publishing a pic.

One of the free helps with the sky issue is Picasa.

Below, please see a photo I took a few months back of a neat, older home in the Almond Grove area of Los Gatos, California (close to San Jose and part of Silicon Valley). I liked the photo except for the sky, which was just too white.  I don't have a tool that allows me to "paint" the sky, but with Picasa (a free tool courtesy of Google), I can tint the photo from top to bottom and pick a tint that looks fairly natural - at least, that's the goal! (But I suppose for my Haunted Real Estate blog, I might want to turn the sky a creepy red color, which is also possible.)

Once you've downloaded Picasa, there are bunches of things you can do to your photos. The one that I have found unique to freeware, though, is this tinting feature.  To find it, first double click on the photo you want to edit. The left sidebar will have 3 tabs showing: Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. Choose Effects. Twelve options are given, and the very last one is "Graduated Tint". Chose it, move the mouse to where you want the tint to end, and start playing with colors.

Enjoy!

Willow Glen is an extremely popular area in San Jose which offers convenice, charm, and a strong sense of community. It is adjacent to downtown San Jose, and also borders the Cambrian Park area and the city of Campbell in Silicon Valley.

The "downtown area" mostly consists of the many stores, shops and restaurants along tree-lined Lincoln Avenue. Seen here is a snippet of that road, with the much loved and very famous children's bookstore, Hicklebee's.

Because this San Jose district is older, it's full of interesting architecture and real estate here is highly prized. Neighborhoods tend to be diverse looking and well kept with a lot of pride by the owners in keeping their homes up nicely. Many streets feature Craftsman or Spanish style homes. Others may have Victorians. Newer regions will include ranch style homes.

If you'd like more information on the lovely area known as Willow Glen, please visit "The Valley Of Hearts Delight" (an old moniker for Silicon Valley) and learn more about this always appreciated and charming part of the San Jose real estate scene!

Got Frames?

Recently I learned how to frame what's basically an RSS feed from our MLS (all allowed) and I was very proud of myself for figuring out how to do it. I want to make my sites "content rich", so this seems like a plus. Since I'm doing it through approved vendors and my MLS, which gives credit to the listing broker and agent, there's no foul play.

But what of those who frame content that isn't theirs? Content they don't have a right to use?

Today I was surfing around some Silicon Valley real estate websites to see what other local agents are doing. Everything seemed pretty impressive on one Los Gatos Realtor's website until I noticed that he had framed the official Town of Los Gatos site, and websites for the cities of Saratoga, Campbell, San Jose, and several other places (though his site was confused and all were referred to as "towns", which they aren't).

Most webmasters do NOT want their websites framed. A few commercial sites don't even permit links (which seems nuts to me), but most require that any links open the site in a new window. To me, that seems only fair - otherwise, you're piggybacking off someone else's efforts.

What do YOU think? Is it cool to frame someone else's site? The site of a city, town, county or state? I don't think so - but invite your input.

Statistics are all about tracking what is measurable, from "days on market" and "aborption rates" to "price per square foot" and "list price to sales price ratio". Today's San Jose Mercury News featured a headline story about the ten San Jose zip codes with large numbers of homes in foreclosure that are on the market (up to 2.6% of the listed homes in one area). That dire piece was accompanied by another on the two day crash on Wall Street and was topped off by a small article regarding the California state budget crisis.

It was a distressing front page.

But the short sale situation in Silicon Valley is not so terrible everywhere. For several years, we have had a bifurcated market - a split market in which part of the valley seems to have been doing relatively OK while the other part, the poorer part, was getting sucked down into the murky mortgage meltdown. Most every part of Santa Clara County, and its largest city, San Jose, is now impacted by the lending crisis. But some parts are impacted much more than others.

Most parts of the west valley are not faring nearly so badly. To see a chart tracking selected areas of Silicon Valley in March, May, July and September, please visit my Live in Los Gatos blog and view the post, Silicon Valley Shortsale Snapshot.

Cambrian Park is an area of San Jose that borders Los Gatos, Almaden Valley, Willow Glen, and Campbell. It is considered a safe area with good schools and is fairly affordable. Because of its proximity to Los Gatos and Willow Glen, and a vibrant community with lots of activities, a couple of Farmer's Markets and much more, it's a highly desired place to live.

Cambrian is also a microcosm of Silicon Valley; often it represents what's happening countywide as close to the exact middle in pricing between the most upscale areas on the one hand and the most affordable areas on the other.

Today I took a look at the single family home market in Cambrian Park, first assessing it from the solds data and second by using the active listings - and within the actives, viewing the data by zip code to shed more light on how the area is faring. Please read The Cambrian Park Real Estate Market Update to get a good sense of how the market is doing in this lovely part of San Jose.

In mid-August, I wrote a post here on Active Rain entitled "How Do You Write Your Agent Bio? Put Your Best Foot Forward & Write Something Unique (Lose the Boilerplate!)"  My Rule # 1 was this:  When you write your agent bio or promo pieces, find your own way of expressing why you have strengths that should be factored in favorably. 

I'd like to go back to the "how to write an agent bio" topic and expand on it a little more. Once we're past the copy & paste mentality, what next?  Along those lines, but more focused, I would add "be specific - be very specific". Here are some examples of places you can and should be specific:

First, be specific with your location - don't say that you work the entire east coast. Where do you work? Where do you want to work? Being specific will help you a number of ways, both in terms of prospective clients identifying you as an area expert, but also Google finding you.

Second, be specific with your real estate background (whether it's what type of construction you've sold, what your education or honors or experience is generally). Buyers and sellers aren't moved by fluff comments about how great you are. Be detailed.

Third, be personal enough to name some specific elements that matter in your life or history - again with facts - that consumers viewing your profile get a sense of who you are not just as a real estate professional, but also as a person.

In all of these cases, the information you provide will give potential clients a way of seeing you as distinct from every other professional they're interviewing.

I found a profile of an Active Rainer that I think does these things very well. His name is Michael Mahoney, and his profile URL even has his market territory worked into it, which really impressed me:
http://activerain.com/mmahoeny_boston  From his profile, you can see not only where he works, but also where he grew up (locally in West Roxbury - where my brother happens to live with his family), that he's done military service, been involved in his local Board of Realtors, that he's won awards, and that his clients are apparently very happy. And look at how many local "place" names find their way into his profile - very impressive!

Michael has done a great job of introducing himself to his readers on his Active Rain profile.  I strongly suggest that Active Rain members study what he's done - there are great ideas on his profile that we can all emulate (myself included). My profile can be seen at http://activerain.com/popehandy. I intend to improve my profile with some of the ideas I've gleaned while persuing the study of being specific in our bios.

To recap, Rule # 2 for your real estate bio: be specific so that prospective clients (and Google) can find you and identify you as someone knowledgeable and connected to their area and needs.

A discussion of the Los Gatos condo and townhome market

The landscape for Los Gatos condos and townhouses is varied and truly runs the gamut from simple shelter close to freeway walls and train tracks to newer or fully remodeled luxury homes with gorgeous views of Lake Vasona, the coastal mountains or Silicon Valley.  Prices range from possibly as low as $250,000 to well over $1,000,000. At this writing, one townhome is being offered for approximately $1.3 million.  read more...