Have you ever walked into a home that you were showing and about passed out from the smoke smell? Well it really turned my buyers off and they loved the home but would not make an offer on it for just that reason.
I know there are alot of smokers still out there but my advise would be about 6 months before you are going to put your home on the market smoke only outside and in the mean time let the home air out completely.
My buyers wanted new carpet and paint just to try and get the smell out as they have 2 infant daughters.
So sellers, if you smoke, please remember it could cost you the sale of your home.
Active Rain Real Estate Network
You can find great local El Paso, Texas real estate information on Localism.com Patti Olivas is a proud member of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, a free online community to help real estate professionals grow their business.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
The Calvary comes to El Paso
This was in Real Deal Magazine out of New York City-great article about El Paso, TX
August 2008
Calvary comes to El Paso
Strong fundamentals, expanding army base to bolster housing market
By Vic Kolenc
More than 70,000 Army soldiers and their families are expected to march into El Paso, Texas, in the next five years.
That prospect has boosted El Paso's housing market in the past three years, and it's expected to lift it again. Although the number of homes sold in El Paso has declined this year, prices continue to rise — counter to what's happening in many other metro markets around the country.
"To a certain degree we've been insulated from the rest of the country, and part of that is the government investing $5 billion in infrastructure at Fort Bliss and the growth of Fort Bliss," said Dan Olivas, president of the Greater El Paso Association of Realtors.
Fort Bliss, an Army post with 17,600 soldiers, has always been an important component of El Paso's economy, but its influence should grow as the post's military population is scheduled to more than double in the next five years.
El Paso, with more than 730,000 people, is also helped by growth across the Rio Grande in Juarez, Mexico. That area has a population of more than 1.3 million and still enjoys a healthy manufacturing economy despite the economic woes in the United States.
Attracted by El Paso's low home prices and the promise of growth, out-of-town investors pumped up the housing market in 2005 and 2006. That's when home prices increased 18 percent and 14 percent respectively, according to National Association of Realtors data.
"Historically, this city has never had huge appreciations or depreciations. It's been a real steady market for decades" with appreciation of around 3 percent a year, said Charles de Wetter, president of Coldwell Banker de Wetter Hovious, one of El Paso's largest real estate firms. "When there's a slower economy nationally, it's good to be in a place like this."
The median, or market midpoint, price for single-family resale homes in El Paso increased 8.5 percent in the first three months of the year — the sixth-largest percentage increase among 149 metro areas surveyed by NAR. The median sales price in the first quarter was $134,600, compared to $124,000 a year ago.
In 2007, the median price increase was 3.4 percent.
As far as trouble goes, El Paso home foreclosures decreased 52 percent in the first quarter, while foreclosures more than doubled nationwide, according to RealtyTrac, a California company that tracks foreclosures nationally.
One thing that's helped keep El Paso foreclosures down is the fact that adjustable-rate mortgages and other creative financing vehicles are not used much in the city, El Paso mortage experts said. Conventional 30-year mortgages are the most popular forms of home financing here.
"A lot of areas of the United States where real estate markets have collapsed are areas where prices rose excessively. In El Paso, that type of market condition did not materialize," said Tom Fullerton, an economics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
"The local economy has remained in good shape throughout 2008, and whenever job creation is strong, it helps support good real estate fundamentals," Fullerton added.
El Paso home prices have continued to increase, even though inventory has risen; the more than 5,100 resale and new homes on the market in early July were substantially above the more than 3,200 homes on the market a year ago.
"Houses are selling in El Paso, but at a slower rate than a year, two years ago," said de Wetter, the real estate broker. "There is demand out there. A lot of sellers in the marketplace are not realistic about pricing, but are getting more so."
New home starts in El Paso are slower this year than last year, noted Ray Adauto, executive vice president of the El Paso Association of Builders.
"We'll be fortunate to hit 3,000 [home starts] this year," Adauto said. "People are having a harder time qualifying for mortgages."
Home builders have spent part of this year trying to get rid of high-end homes above $250,000; some are offering substantial discounts to sell their inventory. Builders have shifted to constructing more affordable homes, at prices below $200,000.
Eugenio Aleman, senior economist for Wells Fargo Bank in Minneapolis, said in a recent report that El Paso's economic performance since mid-2006 has been "impressive." Even so, El Paso's housing market is "suffering the consequences of the national credit crunch," and home sales will "remain weak for the rest of the year," he predicted.
Olivas, the El Paso Realtors' Association president, doesn't see it that way.
"I don't think we'll see the market dragging for the rest of the year," he said.
He said more troops are expected at Fort Bliss later this year, doctors are going to be moving in for the new Texas Tech University medical school scheduled to open next year , and more home buyers from Mexico are looking in El Paso as violence in Juarez and other Mexican border cities increases.
Olivas added, "We're not going to follow the pattern of the rest of the nation. I think we're ahead of that curve."
Vic Kolenc is a business reporter for the El Paso Times.
The Real Deal reserves the right to delete any comment it finds to be rude, obscene
August 2008
Calvary comes to El Paso
Strong fundamentals, expanding army base to bolster housing market
By Vic Kolenc
More than 70,000 Army soldiers and their families are expected to march into El Paso, Texas, in the next five years.
That prospect has boosted El Paso's housing market in the past three years, and it's expected to lift it again. Although the number of homes sold in El Paso has declined this year, prices continue to rise — counter to what's happening in many other metro markets around the country.
"To a certain degree we've been insulated from the rest of the country, and part of that is the government investing $5 billion in infrastructure at Fort Bliss and the growth of Fort Bliss," said Dan Olivas, president of the Greater El Paso Association of Realtors.
Fort Bliss, an Army post with 17,600 soldiers, has always been an important component of El Paso's economy, but its influence should grow as the post's military population is scheduled to more than double in the next five years.
El Paso, with more than 730,000 people, is also helped by growth across the Rio Grande in Juarez, Mexico. That area has a population of more than 1.3 million and still enjoys a healthy manufacturing economy despite the economic woes in the United States.
Attracted by El Paso's low home prices and the promise of growth, out-of-town investors pumped up the housing market in 2005 and 2006. That's when home prices increased 18 percent and 14 percent respectively, according to National Association of Realtors data.
"Historically, this city has never had huge appreciations or depreciations. It's been a real steady market for decades" with appreciation of around 3 percent a year, said Charles de Wetter, president of Coldwell Banker de Wetter Hovious, one of El Paso's largest real estate firms. "When there's a slower economy nationally, it's good to be in a place like this."
The median, or market midpoint, price for single-family resale homes in El Paso increased 8.5 percent in the first three months of the year — the sixth-largest percentage increase among 149 metro areas surveyed by NAR. The median sales price in the first quarter was $134,600, compared to $124,000 a year ago.
In 2007, the median price increase was 3.4 percent.
As far as trouble goes, El Paso home foreclosures decreased 52 percent in the first quarter, while foreclosures more than doubled nationwide, according to RealtyTrac, a California company that tracks foreclosures nationally.
One thing that's helped keep El Paso foreclosures down is the fact that adjustable-rate mortgages and other creative financing vehicles are not used much in the city, El Paso mortage experts said. Conventional 30-year mortgages are the most popular forms of home financing here.
"A lot of areas of the United States where real estate markets have collapsed are areas where prices rose excessively. In El Paso, that type of market condition did not materialize," said Tom Fullerton, an economics professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.
"The local economy has remained in good shape throughout 2008, and whenever job creation is strong, it helps support good real estate fundamentals," Fullerton added.
El Paso home prices have continued to increase, even though inventory has risen; the more than 5,100 resale and new homes on the market in early July were substantially above the more than 3,200 homes on the market a year ago.
"Houses are selling in El Paso, but at a slower rate than a year, two years ago," said de Wetter, the real estate broker. "There is demand out there. A lot of sellers in the marketplace are not realistic about pricing, but are getting more so."
New home starts in El Paso are slower this year than last year, noted Ray Adauto, executive vice president of the El Paso Association of Builders.
"We'll be fortunate to hit 3,000 [home starts] this year," Adauto said. "People are having a harder time qualifying for mortgages."
Home builders have spent part of this year trying to get rid of high-end homes above $250,000; some are offering substantial discounts to sell their inventory. Builders have shifted to constructing more affordable homes, at prices below $200,000.
Eugenio Aleman, senior economist for Wells Fargo Bank in Minneapolis, said in a recent report that El Paso's economic performance since mid-2006 has been "impressive." Even so, El Paso's housing market is "suffering the consequences of the national credit crunch," and home sales will "remain weak for the rest of the year," he predicted.
Olivas, the El Paso Realtors' Association president, doesn't see it that way.
"I don't think we'll see the market dragging for the rest of the year," he said.
He said more troops are expected at Fort Bliss later this year, doctors are going to be moving in for the new Texas Tech University medical school scheduled to open next year , and more home buyers from Mexico are looking in El Paso as violence in Juarez and other Mexican border cities increases.
Olivas added, "We're not going to follow the pattern of the rest of the nation. I think we're ahead of that curve."
Vic Kolenc is a business reporter for the El Paso Times.
The Real Deal reserves the right to delete any comment it finds to be rude, obscene
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wall Street Journal on El Paso
With a Little Help From Its Friends
For years, governments have tried and failed to revive El Paso. Then local investors decided to take action.
By KRIS HUDSON
July 28, 2008; Page R3
EL PASO, Texas -- This border city, once the thriving commercial hub of the U.S. Southwest, is reviving its moribund downtown with the help of some native benefactors.
Still in its early stages, the effort to overhaul dormant hotels and office towers has delivered results already. Over the past two years, property values in a 288-acre section of downtown defined by a new tax-reinvestment district jumped 40% to almost $446 million. And many prominent El Paso structures that have stood empty for decades, including the Plaza Hotel, are being renovated.
This border city, once the thriving commercial hub of the U.S. Southwest, is reviving its moribund downtown with the help of some native benefactors. WSJ's Kris Hudson reports.
The difference between this and earlier revitalization efforts that fizzled is the involvement of deep-pocketed investors, who decided in 2004 to gather their own resources and chart a course for revival. Among them: longtime El Pasoan William Sanders, the founder of real-estate firms Security Capital Group Inc. and LaSalle Partners, and Paul Foster, chief executive officer of Western Refining Inc., an independent oil refiner and marketer based in El Paso.
"This is El Paso's shot to revitalize downtown," says Brent Harris, managing partner of Mr. Foster's real-estate interests. "With the folks that are involved in this, if it doesn't happen now, it's never going to happen."
El Paso, a city of 610,000 tucked into the far western corner of Texas between the borders of Mexico and New Mexico, was one of the first cities settled by Spanish explorers in what is now the U.S. El Paso established itself as the primary stop on the trail from the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Santa Fe, N.M., and later served on the all-weather route for travelers headed from the East Coast to California and back. In 1913, Texas established its college of mines -- now the University of Texas at El Paso -- in the city. For much of the last century, El Paso's major industries were cattle, cotton, textiles, copper refining and the neighboring Fort Bliss U.S. Army post.
El Paso began to lose momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. City leaders point to myriad causes. The spread of suburbanization after World War II produced greater growth in southwestern cities such as Phoenix, Ariz. El Paso lost big industries as the textile trade migrated to Asia and copper refineries and smelters shut down. As the city of Ciudad Juárez, directly across the border in Mexico, grew rapidly -- there are 2.6 million residents in the "borderplex" region of El Paso, Juárez and surrounding suburbs -- El Paso's economy became more intertwined with its neighbor's and subsequently suffered from the devaluation of the Mexican peso.
Hotels closed downtown, as did the Kress department store, leaving its iconic storefront vacant at a prominent street corner. Many floors in downtown buildings remain vacant with boarded-up windows, and department stores are mixed in with pawn shops and an outdoor swap meet.
Various levels of government have tried to boost El Paso's downtown, building a county courthouse in the 1980s, a state office building in the 1990s, a parking garage in recent years and a federal courthouse now under construction.
"For years, the city had tried redoing downtown on its own," says Verónica Rosales-Soto, redevelopment manager in the city's economic-development division. "But none of that mattered because the private investment didn't follow."
It wasn't until 2004 that private investors began gathering their resources to reverse the downtown's decline. Led by Mr. Sanders, the newly formed Paso Del Norte Group, a club of El Paso's business elite, hired a San Francisco-based consultant to help it draft a plan for overhauling downtown. The group brought in city officials to advise it on the plan's feasibility, but in a move that proved controversial, the business group elected not to subject the plan to widespread public scrutiny in its early phases, reasoning that too many opposing viewpoints might stymie the process.
DEEP POCKETS
• The Problem: El Paso's downtown was dying, and various government efforts to revive it had failed to take root.
• The Economic Game Plan: A group of local investors decided to gather their resources and chart a course for revival that included buying and overhauling dormant hotels and office towers.
• The Results So Far: Property values downtown have jumped 40% to almost $446 million over the past two years.By 2006, the plan was finalized. The Paso Del Norte Group unveiled it for an audience of 1,200 business owners, city officials and citizens at the historic Plaza Theatre downtown. The plan envisioned separate zones for an entertainment district, historic preservation, mixed-use development and a Mercado shopping district, among other things. In October 2006, the City Council adopted a revised version of the plan, which included changes such as removing a few blocks from the revitalization area to avoid disturbing adjacent neighborhoods. The council voted two months later to form a downtown tax-reinvestment district, where property-tax revenue in excess of 2006 amounts is used to help finance new city infrastructure, such as streets and sidewalks.
Mr. Sanders, who declined to comment for this article, formed the Borderplex Community Trust REIT in early 2007, specifically to buy and rehabilitate buildings in El Paso and Juárez. A REIT can pool its investors' money; buy and sell properties; and forgo paying corporate taxes as long as it pays out 90% of its income as dividends.
The REIT, with 216 investors so far, has purchased more than a dozen properties, investors say, including the O.T. Bassett Tower, a 15-story office building erected in 1930, and the 18-story Chase Bank Building, where occupancy has risen to 93% from 43% over the past 17 months.
The REIT intends to sell most of the O.T. Bassett Tower to apartment developer TVO Groupe and retain the first floor to convert to retail space. TVO will begin converting the tower to 30 luxury condominiums later this year. The El Paso-based developer anticipates the project will yield less than half of the 20% return it typically seeks in its investments, but it is willing to accept that to support the broader revitalization push, Chief Executive Charles Garrett says.
Mr. Foster, meanwhile, purchased the 98-year-old, 12-story Mills office building in 2006 and the adjacent, six-story Centre building last year. He also bought the 294-room Plaza Hotel, built in 1929 but vacant for the past two decades, directly across the street from his two office buildings. Mr. Foster has begun a renovation and expansion of the office buildings and moved Western Refining's headquarters there. Plans for the hotel still are in flux, though eventually it will be reopened.
Developments elsewhere in El Paso have added momentum to the downtown revitalization. Texas Tech University has begun construction of a medical campus in El Paso. The U.S. Army's realignment of its domestic and foreign forces stands to nearly double the size of Fort Bliss to almost 37,000 soldiers within the next five years.
MAN WITH A PLAN El Paso attorney James Scherr is renovating the International Hotel (in background).
But even with the rise in property values, not everyone supports the revitalization unequivocally. Some business and property owners object to the Paso Del Norte Group devising the plan privately before unveiling the final version. Their biggest fear is that the city will use eminent domain to seize properties and turn them over to developers if multiblock projects such as shopping centers are proposed.
"To have the city being manipulated by developers into scaring people out of their property is an un-American process," says Enoch Kimmelman, whose family has operated the Starr Western Wear store since 1964 and owns the store's 40,000-square-foot building.
Mayor John Cook denies that developers are steering the city government. A two-year moratorium on the use of eminent domain downtown is set to expire in November, but Mr. Cook says, "I don't really see that the city is going to have to use" it.
Meanwhile, El Paso's problems extend well beyond the vacancies downtown, according to Tom Fullerton, a University of Texas at El Paso economics professor. He says below-average graduation rates in El Paso's public schools and community colleges remain the city's biggest problem, resulting in a loss of $1 billion in personal income annually. The city's median household income measures $33,103, well below the national median of $48,451.
Still, James Scherr, a native El Pasoan, is betting the renaissance downtown is the beginning of something bigger. The attorney bought the 38-year-old, 200-room International Hotel downtown out of foreclosure for $1 million in 2004. He is spending $20 million, including $5 million in city-provided incentives, to get it back in operation as a Doubletree hotel by the end of the year.
"El Paso is going into the 21st century with our running shoes on," he says. "Right now, this town is poised for takeoff."
--Mr. Hudson is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau.
Write to Kris Hudson at kris.hudson@wsj.com
For years, governments have tried and failed to revive El Paso. Then local investors decided to take action.
By KRIS HUDSON
July 28, 2008; Page R3
EL PASO, Texas -- This border city, once the thriving commercial hub of the U.S. Southwest, is reviving its moribund downtown with the help of some native benefactors.
Still in its early stages, the effort to overhaul dormant hotels and office towers has delivered results already. Over the past two years, property values in a 288-acre section of downtown defined by a new tax-reinvestment district jumped 40% to almost $446 million. And many prominent El Paso structures that have stood empty for decades, including the Plaza Hotel, are being renovated.
This border city, once the thriving commercial hub of the U.S. Southwest, is reviving its moribund downtown with the help of some native benefactors. WSJ's Kris Hudson reports.
The difference between this and earlier revitalization efforts that fizzled is the involvement of deep-pocketed investors, who decided in 2004 to gather their own resources and chart a course for revival. Among them: longtime El Pasoan William Sanders, the founder of real-estate firms Security Capital Group Inc. and LaSalle Partners, and Paul Foster, chief executive officer of Western Refining Inc., an independent oil refiner and marketer based in El Paso.
"This is El Paso's shot to revitalize downtown," says Brent Harris, managing partner of Mr. Foster's real-estate interests. "With the folks that are involved in this, if it doesn't happen now, it's never going to happen."
El Paso, a city of 610,000 tucked into the far western corner of Texas between the borders of Mexico and New Mexico, was one of the first cities settled by Spanish explorers in what is now the U.S. El Paso established itself as the primary stop on the trail from the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Santa Fe, N.M., and later served on the all-weather route for travelers headed from the East Coast to California and back. In 1913, Texas established its college of mines -- now the University of Texas at El Paso -- in the city. For much of the last century, El Paso's major industries were cattle, cotton, textiles, copper refining and the neighboring Fort Bliss U.S. Army post.
El Paso began to lose momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. City leaders point to myriad causes. The spread of suburbanization after World War II produced greater growth in southwestern cities such as Phoenix, Ariz. El Paso lost big industries as the textile trade migrated to Asia and copper refineries and smelters shut down. As the city of Ciudad Juárez, directly across the border in Mexico, grew rapidly -- there are 2.6 million residents in the "borderplex" region of El Paso, Juárez and surrounding suburbs -- El Paso's economy became more intertwined with its neighbor's and subsequently suffered from the devaluation of the Mexican peso.
Hotels closed downtown, as did the Kress department store, leaving its iconic storefront vacant at a prominent street corner. Many floors in downtown buildings remain vacant with boarded-up windows, and department stores are mixed in with pawn shops and an outdoor swap meet.
Various levels of government have tried to boost El Paso's downtown, building a county courthouse in the 1980s, a state office building in the 1990s, a parking garage in recent years and a federal courthouse now under construction.
"For years, the city had tried redoing downtown on its own," says Verónica Rosales-Soto, redevelopment manager in the city's economic-development division. "But none of that mattered because the private investment didn't follow."
It wasn't until 2004 that private investors began gathering their resources to reverse the downtown's decline. Led by Mr. Sanders, the newly formed Paso Del Norte Group, a club of El Paso's business elite, hired a San Francisco-based consultant to help it draft a plan for overhauling downtown. The group brought in city officials to advise it on the plan's feasibility, but in a move that proved controversial, the business group elected not to subject the plan to widespread public scrutiny in its early phases, reasoning that too many opposing viewpoints might stymie the process.
DEEP POCKETS
• The Problem: El Paso's downtown was dying, and various government efforts to revive it had failed to take root.
• The Economic Game Plan: A group of local investors decided to gather their resources and chart a course for revival that included buying and overhauling dormant hotels and office towers.
• The Results So Far: Property values downtown have jumped 40% to almost $446 million over the past two years.By 2006, the plan was finalized. The Paso Del Norte Group unveiled it for an audience of 1,200 business owners, city officials and citizens at the historic Plaza Theatre downtown. The plan envisioned separate zones for an entertainment district, historic preservation, mixed-use development and a Mercado shopping district, among other things. In October 2006, the City Council adopted a revised version of the plan, which included changes such as removing a few blocks from the revitalization area to avoid disturbing adjacent neighborhoods. The council voted two months later to form a downtown tax-reinvestment district, where property-tax revenue in excess of 2006 amounts is used to help finance new city infrastructure, such as streets and sidewalks.
Mr. Sanders, who declined to comment for this article, formed the Borderplex Community Trust REIT in early 2007, specifically to buy and rehabilitate buildings in El Paso and Juárez. A REIT can pool its investors' money; buy and sell properties; and forgo paying corporate taxes as long as it pays out 90% of its income as dividends.
The REIT, with 216 investors so far, has purchased more than a dozen properties, investors say, including the O.T. Bassett Tower, a 15-story office building erected in 1930, and the 18-story Chase Bank Building, where occupancy has risen to 93% from 43% over the past 17 months.
The REIT intends to sell most of the O.T. Bassett Tower to apartment developer TVO Groupe and retain the first floor to convert to retail space. TVO will begin converting the tower to 30 luxury condominiums later this year. The El Paso-based developer anticipates the project will yield less than half of the 20% return it typically seeks in its investments, but it is willing to accept that to support the broader revitalization push, Chief Executive Charles Garrett says.
Mr. Foster, meanwhile, purchased the 98-year-old, 12-story Mills office building in 2006 and the adjacent, six-story Centre building last year. He also bought the 294-room Plaza Hotel, built in 1929 but vacant for the past two decades, directly across the street from his two office buildings. Mr. Foster has begun a renovation and expansion of the office buildings and moved Western Refining's headquarters there. Plans for the hotel still are in flux, though eventually it will be reopened.
Developments elsewhere in El Paso have added momentum to the downtown revitalization. Texas Tech University has begun construction of a medical campus in El Paso. The U.S. Army's realignment of its domestic and foreign forces stands to nearly double the size of Fort Bliss to almost 37,000 soldiers within the next five years.
MAN WITH A PLAN El Paso attorney James Scherr is renovating the International Hotel (in background).
But even with the rise in property values, not everyone supports the revitalization unequivocally. Some business and property owners object to the Paso Del Norte Group devising the plan privately before unveiling the final version. Their biggest fear is that the city will use eminent domain to seize properties and turn them over to developers if multiblock projects such as shopping centers are proposed.
"To have the city being manipulated by developers into scaring people out of their property is an un-American process," says Enoch Kimmelman, whose family has operated the Starr Western Wear store since 1964 and owns the store's 40,000-square-foot building.
Mayor John Cook denies that developers are steering the city government. A two-year moratorium on the use of eminent domain downtown is set to expire in November, but Mr. Cook says, "I don't really see that the city is going to have to use" it.
Meanwhile, El Paso's problems extend well beyond the vacancies downtown, according to Tom Fullerton, a University of Texas at El Paso economics professor. He says below-average graduation rates in El Paso's public schools and community colleges remain the city's biggest problem, resulting in a loss of $1 billion in personal income annually. The city's median household income measures $33,103, well below the national median of $48,451.
Still, James Scherr, a native El Pasoan, is betting the renaissance downtown is the beginning of something bigger. The attorney bought the 38-year-old, 200-room International Hotel downtown out of foreclosure for $1 million in 2004. He is spending $20 million, including $5 million in city-provided incentives, to get it back in operation as a Doubletree hotel by the end of the year.
"El Paso is going into the 21st century with our running shoes on," he says. "Right now, this town is poised for takeoff."
--Mr. Hudson is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau.
Write to Kris Hudson at kris.hudson@wsj.com
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
My latest buyers are very happy
My last couple of buyers have been very happy with the negations that I have been able to get for them.
Right now sellers are helping in alot of cases with buyers closing costs and on the last couple of closing I have had I have been able to negotiate anywhere from $1600-$3000 in help from the seller. In some cases there is a give and take meaning that to get that much help the buyers had to be willing to pay close to list price(as long as it was priced well from the beginning).
All in all it is a great time to buy in El Paso. There are alot of homes to choose from and sellers that are willing to help buyers get into the home easily.
Right now sellers are helping in alot of cases with buyers closing costs and on the last couple of closing I have had I have been able to negotiate anywhere from $1600-$3000 in help from the seller. In some cases there is a give and take meaning that to get that much help the buyers had to be willing to pay close to list price(as long as it was priced well from the beginning).
All in all it is a great time to buy in El Paso. There are alot of homes to choose from and sellers that are willing to help buyers get into the home easily.
Monday, July 14, 2008
What a great market we are having
I bet you don't hear that too often in today's markets! What is a short sale? We just don't have them here in El Paso.
El Paso has a great market right now, even with alot of homes on the market and some seller's giving concessions to the buyers, we are not seeing home prices dropping.
June was a great month and we are expecting July to be even better.
Our foreclosure rate is down almost 50% and that is due to the fact that most sellers can sell their home before they get into trouble.
We are the 21st largest city in the nation and the 2nd or 3rd safest year after year.
Ft Bliss is growing by leaps and bounds (almost 96,000 new troops and family members by 2013) and they are enlarging the base by 3 times what it is right now.
There is a new medical school and border research center opening next year that is the first one on a border ever and a new Children's Hospital has been approved.
What else can I say? IT IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY A HOME IN EL PASO, TEXAS
El Paso has a great market right now, even with alot of homes on the market and some seller's giving concessions to the buyers, we are not seeing home prices dropping.
June was a great month and we are expecting July to be even better.
Our foreclosure rate is down almost 50% and that is due to the fact that most sellers can sell their home before they get into trouble.
We are the 21st largest city in the nation and the 2nd or 3rd safest year after year.
Ft Bliss is growing by leaps and bounds (almost 96,000 new troops and family members by 2013) and they are enlarging the base by 3 times what it is right now.
There is a new medical school and border research center opening next year that is the first one on a border ever and a new Children's Hospital has been approved.
What else can I say? IT IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY A HOME IN EL PASO, TEXAS
Monday, May 19, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
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.
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.
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