Washington DC

We just got back from the National Association of Realtors convention in Washington DC and it was very informative and lost of fun.

We stayed on Connecticut Ave close to Dupont Circle and took the Metro everywhere. From someone out in the desert that is still fun!.

We learned that alot of markets are dealing with short sales and lots of foreclosures so that makes the real estate market in El Paso, Tx look super. We do not have many short sales and our foreclosures are down 50%.

It is still a great time to buy in El Paso and the market has really picked back up and sales are strong. Some sellers are still giving concessions but prices are selling about 3% list price to sales price ratio.

Back to DC, if you go there soon there is a great Tuscan restaurant on 19th St called I Ricchi that was wonderful and the presentation was what made the evening. Our waiter was an appraiser also so he was fun to talk to since we were all in real estate.

We got to visit our Congressman and State Senators at the Capitol Building and we went to the Newsmuseum near the Capitol Building and it was fantastic.

Great News about Local Markets

Markets that missed the boom now sport rising home prices
Monday April 21, 1:37 pm ET

By Amy Hoak

In some housing markets, homes aren't only retaining value -- they're gaining


CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Challenging real estate markets can be found across the U.S. as home prices decline, sales fall and foreclosures rise. But in some places the biggest challenge has been convincing would-be buyers and sellers that local conditions don't resemble the national trends.


It's a challenge that Randy Jeffers, chairman of the Texas Association of Realtors, faces all the time.

While the number of sales has fallen somewhat, he still regards his market of Amarillo, Texas, as a seller's market right now. The median price of an existing single-family home in Amarillo was up an annualized 11% in the fourth quarter, according to the National Association of Realtors.

"Often they're surprised about what is going on locally or statewide," he said of his clients. As the country's collective housing ills land bold headlines, locals incorrectly extrapolate the information to their own markets, Jeffers added.

The housing problems largely aren't national but regional in nature, said Susan Wachter, a real estate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

"The interesting thing is that there are parts of the country where housing prices are doing fine, thank you," she said. In fact, only five states are in what she would consider a housing recession: California, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Michigan.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, 73 out of 150 metropolitan areas showed an increase in the median existing single-family home price compared with the same quarter in 2006, according to statistics from the national Realtors group.

That isn't to say these markets are immune from some national trends.

For one, stricter lending standards put in place in the wake of poor mortgage performance in many parts of the country are affecting people regardless of where they live. Requirements of larger down payments and higher credit scores are keeping some people from buying homes, especially first-time buyers, and are often driving down the volume of sales.

If the job picture weakens as a result of a slowing economy, that could also affect some of the most stable markets.

Recently, however, the places where homes seem to be holding the most value are those where prices didn't surge during the boom years and where economies are staying strong. In large cities, it's often the areas that are located closest to the city's core.


Places the boom forgot
Single-digit appreciation may have looked meager in the years of the boom, when red-hot markets experienced bidding wars and high investor interest. Now, as some markets experience steep price drops, those rates aren't looking so bad after all.
Areas in upstate New York, Texas, some Rocky Mountain states and the Carolinas are faring better than the rest of the country in terms of price appreciation these days, said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.

In general, there weren't caravans of speculators in these areas driving up prices. Plus -- unlike some trouble spots in the Midwest such as Detroit -- many of the local economies in these markets remained stable.

Utah -- where home prices rose 9.27% in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared with the fourth quarter of 2006 -- was the state with the highest appreciation rate, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Utah was followed by Wyoming, where prices rose 8.27% over the year, North Dakota, where prices rose 7.87%, and Montana, where prices rose 6.90%.

Still, in Billings, Mont., buyers often say they're waiting for prices to come down, said Dan Wagner, president of the Montana State Association of Realtors. But because they never soared during the boom years, prices likely aren't in need of a correction, he said.


Where the jobs are
The strong employment picture in Seattle caused home prices there to rise after other major cities reached their peaks. Appreciation there in the fourth quarter was just over 1%, according to NAR, but it is believed that the city's employment landscape is keeping Seattle housing from losing value.
A similar situation is shaping up in other markets.

Home-prices in major cities fell 10.7% in January compared with January 2007, according to the Case-Shiller home price index. The index tracks 20 cities, and 19 of them saw year-over-year declines. But one market experienced modest home-price gains over the year: Charlotte, N.C., another market that never saw a huge run-up in prices during the boom.

An influx of banking and research jobs in the Carolinas -- especially in Charlotte and the Research Triangle -- has been important to its stability, said Marty Frame, general manager of Cyberhomes.com. About 15,000 jobs were created in the Charlotte area last year, said Dot Munson, president of the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association. Large employers in the area include US Airways, Bank of America and Wachovia.

The jobs are luring people to the city, she said, and one of the biggest challenges transplants have is getting their former homes sold if they're coming from a market that is sluggish.

"They have to rent for a while or do something creative for a place to live," Munson said.

Job growth has also been strong in Texas, where the oil and gas industries are big employers. In March, the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown metropolitan area experienced the fastest year-over-year rate of job growth among the nation's major metropolitan areas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Second place went to the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington market.

Texas ranked eighth in OFHEO's list of states with the highest year-over-year appreciation during the fourth quarter of last year, preceded by Alaska, Washington and New Mexico.


Close to the core
In metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, Washington and New York, homes are typically retaining more of their value the closer they are to the city's core, Wachter said. In fact, declining home values in an area's suburbs are tending to drag down the average for the rest of the metropolitan area, she said.
Manhattan, however, tends to be a real-estate juggernaut all its own.

The average price of a Manhattan apartment was up 47% in the first quarter, compared with the first quarter of 2007, according to Brown Harris Stevens, a provider of real-estate services in the area. The boost was largely due to an increase in high-end sales that occurred at two luxury condo developments.

But the median price of a Manhattan apartment, which is less impacted by high-end activity, also rose 13% over the year, according to the firm.

One driver of the market: A rising demand for three- and four-bedroom units in Manhattan, said Jim Gricar, executive vice president of Brown Harris Stevens. More families are opting to live in the city as opposed to seeking larger homes in the suburbs, as was common in the 1980s and early 1990s, he said.

"After years of the city reinventing itself... (Manhattan is) attracting families and keeping people who might have moved to Scarsdale," he said.

Foreclosures WAY DOWN in El Paso (YEAH!!!)

NOW IS THE TIME TO BUY IN EL PASO- this just shows that our market is not like most of the country:

El Paso foreclosures fall 52%
By Vic Kolenc / El Paso Times
Article Launched: 04/17/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT


El Paso continues to see a declining number of home foreclosure filings while foreclosures continue to skyrocket nationally.
El Paso had 328 homes in some stage of foreclosure in the first three months of this year, down 52.3 percent from the 688 foreclosure filings for the same period last year, show data from RealtyTrac, a California company which tracks foreclosures nationally. Filings decreased 24.5 percent in March.

Meanwhile, home foreclosures increased 58 percent in the United States in the first three months of this year compared to the same time last year. Foreclosure filings increased 57 percent in March.

Foreclosure filings are decreasing in a few areas around the nation, especially in Texas, where the housing market has been more stable than in other parts of the nation, said Daren Blomquist, a RealtyTrac spokesman.

"El Paso seems a little more dramatic than some other areas in terms of the downward trend," Blomquist said.

Texas had a 5.5 percent decline in foreclosure filings in the first three months of this year and a 16.1 percent decline in March, RealtyTrac data show.

"We see a lot of foreclosures in areas where (home) prices skyrocketed out of control, and people couldn't afford the homes, but people were able to get into homes because of the (past) loan products out there," Blomquist said.

Pam Sparks, who oversees the mortgage loan department at Pioneer Bank in El Paso, said El Paso's foreclosure decline "is not surprising. I think that's because we've always been a fixed-rate (mortgage) community, and that's kept El Paso out of trouble."

Jose Escobedo, head organizer in El Paso for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn, which counsels people with mortgage troubles, said the RealtyTrac data is "encouraging."

But Acorn continues to see an increase in the number of people coming into its El Paso office with mortgage problems and trying to avoid foreclosure, Escobedo said.

For more information: www.realtytrac.com.


Heading down:
Foreclosure filings in El Paso for the first quarter in recent years, and percentage change from previous year:

2006: 775, up 37.2 percent.

2007: 688, down 11.2 percent.

2008: 328, down 52.3 percent.
Source: RealtyTrac

Life is Great in El Paso and NOW is the time to buy

Today is suppose to be in the mid to high 80's and with slight breezes. This is our windy season but that is the only weather related problem that we usually have and that only lasts for a few months.

Are you ready to buy in El Paso, TX. Now is the time because there is going to be so much happening that will change our market and we are going to see prices start going up again.

As I have mentioned in earlier blogs, Ft Bliss is already expanding and will expand by close to 100,000 people (soldiers and families) by 2103. The new medical school and research center for Border Health will open its first class in 2009. The high tech weaponary has already started here and soon the defense contractors will follow. The new Children's Hospital will bring in close to 300 more nurses and doctors.

That is just a short glimpse of what is going on and where will all those people live? Don't you see that now is the time to buy in El Paso?

Don't Fence me In

I'm sure most of you have read about the Border Fence that the Gov't wants to put up to keep illegal immigrants out of the county and especially along the Texas border.

Well does the Berlin Wall ring a bell for anyone and weren't we the ones that wanted the wall torn down in the first place?

Why do we want to wall in our country? I do understand that we need to handle our immigration problem but I don't think that building a wall is really what we want. How do you think that will look and more importantly do you really think it will work?

How about if we charge ( and a big amount) a fee to the people that employ illegal immigrants so that it is too costly to employ them-maybe they won't want to come over illegally and maybe they will want to become citizens and earn a living the way the rest of us do.

I would love to hear your comments.

Great Weekend in El Paso Real Estate

Just wanted to let you all know that the El Paso real estate market is starting to get a little busier.

This past Saturday I had 4 back to back listing appointments and one showing. On Sunday I showed some homes and wrote an offer.

I think that I will get 3 of the 4 listings and they are all in nice areas and if the seller will let me price them correctly, they should sell if we can get the buyers in there to see them.

With close to 4,000 homes on the market we need to let our sellers know that buyers are now very picky and can get almost anything they want. It is also a time to make sure that all buyers are pre approved for their loan before they start looking for homes.

Our market is starting to see some pretty funky (low low ) offers but the sellers are not giving in and giving the homes away. Most buyers are trying to see how low they can get a home and for some buyers it takes 3 or 4 contracts to fail for them to find out that we are not in a bargain basement real estate market.

Sure prices are coming down some and some sellers are giving help with closing costs but not to a great extent. Each market is regional and we are not like the rest of the country and taking big hits and we don't have alot of foreclosures (thank goodness).

Now is the time to buy in El Paso before our prices start going back up again and the reasons are below in some of my other blogs.

Are you going to buy in El Paso?

Now is the time to buy a home or income property in El Paso, TX. The market is on an upswing meaning that our prices should start to climb very soon.

I know that you read all the doom and gloom in the newspapers but all of that information is national not regional.

Ask any Realtor in El Paso and they will tell you that there is too much going on in our town for it to be a bad market.

Ft. Bliss will have over 37,000 new soldiers and over 50,000 family members arrive by 2103. What do you think that will do to real estate prices?

A new 4 year medical school and Border Health Research Center will open its doors in August 2009 and will be hiring doctors, professors, researchers, nurses, etc. What do you think that will do to our real estate prices?

Ft. Bliss is developing high tech weaponry already and when the high tech companies start coming in to do business, what do you think will happen to our real estate prices?

Now is the time to buy before we start going up in price. There are alot of homes on the market and some sellers are starting to give some incentives and builders even more, but that will change shortly.

Don't let this opportunity pass you up.