Carolyn Gjerde-Tu's Blog: All Categories

The Residential Purchase Agreement, the contract used to buy residential property in California is currently going through a major revision. The California Association of Realtors is encouraging members to review the proposed changes and comment and give input on the draft.  The major changes appear to be in several categories:

• More precise language - while I'm sure there were a lot of agents who helped create this draft, it  reads like a room full of attorneys went over the contract word for word, there area a lot of small language changes.
• Clarification to meet tighter lending regulations to reflect additional disclosure requirements.
• Additions that the appraisal be completed by a licensed or certified appraiser and pest inspection be…

The housing market in Davis CA has remained fairly stable in the past 12 months.  Low inventory throughout 2009 kept home sales fairly stable.  The low number of total sales in Davis makes it a little difficult to track sales prices, however in November 2008 the median price was $515,000 compared to $490,000 this November.  Days on market has decreased from 85 days in November 2008 to 53 days November, 2009.  The decrease in days on market is likely due to sellers pricing their homes more realisticly here.  While low inventory is very common in Davis, homes still must be priced attractively for buyers to be interested.

Home sales in the past 12 months stayed relatively stable, most months between 20-30 sales.  Davis housing market typically has an…

Natomas has had a huge reduction in the number of homes for sale in the past 12 months.  There has been a 70% decrease in available inventory from November 2008, to November 2009.  Much of this reduction is due to fewer bank owned homes on the market, in November 2008 there were 231 REOs for sale, while in November, 209 there were only 30 currently availble for sale.  This reduction was caused mainly by new California laws that have slowed down the foreclosure process for many homeowners.  New legislation requires lenders to work more closely to see if a work out arrangement can be made before simply starting the foreclosure process after three missed payments.

 Natomas Inventory Change

As of July 1st real estate agents in California now must have their license number on solicitation materials that are considered a point of first contact with consumers.  Most of the discussion that I have seen at my brokerage has talked about the need for updated business cards with the license number added, but I just ran across a memo produced by the California Association of Realtors that also includes the need for the license number to be included on websites.

I had asked several staff people with my local MLS if websites like my Sacramento site were considered first point of contact - they felt they were not.  In their opinion, first point of contact would be an email to a consumer - so I did not fully prepare for this change.  Well with the CAR…

The city of West Sacramento has seen a dramatic decrease in inventory from May 2008 to May 2009.  May 2008 saw 249 homes for sale while the same period this year there were only 98 homes for sale.  The number of sold homes May 2008 was 67 and there were 89 sales pending that month.  In May 2009 67 homes were pending and 50 sold.  Part of the decrease in inventory is due to banks taking more time to complete the foreclosure process. Prices declined during this 12 month period from an average sales price of $285,000 in May 2008 to $236,000 in May 2009.

The state of California recently enacted a moratorium or a suspension on new foreclosures that will slow the foreclosure process even more.  This does not affect homes that were already in the foreclosure…

One big mistake when I started building links to my Davis site was to maily focus on links pointing to my home page.  Probably a lot of people here know that I knew NOTHING about how search engines worked when I started spending time on the forum and the entire reason I wanted a custom IDX was just so I could have a website where I could break the different areas of Davis onto their own page because I felt there are a lot of buyers here that search for homes that way.  I did not really consider the benefits of what an custom IDX would do for SEO - I didn't even know that term. 

To really create a dynamic site though, you probably want certain pages to be considered more important than others.  People often call this page rank sculpting.  Anyway, after…

The average sales price for homes in Winters declined 33.9%  from $339,000 to $224,000 from March 2008 to March 2009.  Like so much of the greater Sacramento region, the majority of sales in Winters for March were REO’s/Foreclosures, only one out of the six sales were not bank owned homes.  March Trendgraphix information indicates that 11 out of the 33 homes listed for sale were foreclosed homes.  To get an idea of where the market is headed, the number of listed foreclosed properties is a good indicator to watch.

Winters, CA is a small town with a population of 6,990 (July 2007) so everything that happens is at a much smaller scale but the numbers do fit into trends seen in the greater…

I started blogging on Active Rain and Real Estate Webmasters about the same time- the last quarter of 2007.  I actually have more posts on my AR blog than my REW blog but I've spent more time recently on REW for a lot of reasons but thought it might be an interesting test to see which blog had more strength. 

Both my Active Rain and Real Estate Webmaster blogs have posts on that rank on the first page of google for similar types of terms.  Both blogs have a couple of posts that pull in a moderate amount of traffic - although one brings in a steadier stream than the other. 

I realize this isn't a completely scientific test - other people are more than welcome to do something similar - more data points the better.  There are so many cities I haven't…