Wondering where to go to celebrate the 4th this year? I'm usually the one madly running google searches on the very afternoon of the holiday, trying to find a fireworks display and a good spot to watch it from. So this year I'm getting organized. To wit: MB's Complete (I Think) Guide To Fireworks Displays in the Denver Area. Enjoy!!
Read MoreLast week I gave you a list of free concerts in the Denver area this summer. But some people want more than just a summer-evening soundtracks. They want the whole movie. Sadly, the last drive-in movie theater in town, the Cinderella Twin, closed a few years back and has since been reincarnated as an apartment complex. But fortunately for us, several outdoor venues have stepped in to fill the gap with summer outdoor movies. Granted, you probably can't watch in the comfort of your car, or listen to the audio on those tinny little speakers that used to hook into the window. But the upside is that you can see many of these movies for free, without even having to hide in the truck of your friends' car to get past the cashier!
Read MoreThe good news is that weather's getting beautiful and everybody wants to go outside. The even better news is that there are free or almost free outdoor concerts happening all over town. So let's all start checking 'em out! Let me know if you go!!
Read MoreI have a buyer who's trying to decide between Thornton and the northwest Denver Highlands area. Well, he's actually pretty well decided, but I did some research anyway, to demonstrate that all real estate is TRULY local, right down to the neighborhood. I checked sold statistics for each area over the past 12 months. What I found was fascinating.
Let's start with Thornton, a suburb north of town. I have other buyers under contract up there, and I've been amazed at how much house one can buy up there for around $200,000. No wonder. Prices have come down significantly. Over the past 12 months, the average home price in Thornton has decreased 7.7%, while the median price is down 5%.
Meanwhile, in the Highlands neighborhood, the average price is UP 17%, while the median is up 16%.
Of course, it's important to keep in mind that there is a lot of scraping going on in the Highlands neighborhood, which can skew the price statistics. If you scrape a $100,000 house and erect a $750,000 house in its place, the average sold price in the neighborhood is going to skyrocket, but it won't reflect the increase in value of the individual homes. So, since my buyer is looking in the 200K price range anyway, I searched the Highlands for sold properties under 300K, to eliminate the "scrape effect." And I still found that the average sold price was up 1.3%, while the median was up a whopping 14.3%.
So, what's a buyer to do? Well, if he needs a lot of house for the money, and plans to stay a while, and wants to take advantage of recent price drops, he might want to look at Thornton. However, if he's buying with resale in mind (and wants a very cute, charming area) he might want to stay in northwest Denver, knowing that it has held its value even in a declining market.
This kind of knowledge is important, not just for buyers, but for seller, and for everyone who owns a home or who follows the market. So often we hear news reports that say "Home values in Denver dropped x% over the past year" or even "Home values nationally dropped x%", and we automatically think "Well, what's x% of the value of my house? That must be how much value it has lost."
But it doesn't work that way. Not only are different cities appreciating and depreciating at different rates, but so are neighborhoods within those cities. Often values can shift fairly dramatically within a block or two. Even though a metro area (like Denver) may be depreciating, neighborhoods within that metro area can be appreciating -- sometimes significantly.
Location, location, location.
It’s been a big month for roofs. At least in my world.
Four weeks ago, I had two listings go onto the market the same weekend. Both had a lot of showings. In fact, one had 136 showings!! Both had multiple offers. In fact, one had 27 offers!!
And, as we discovered in inspection, both had extensive hail damage and needed new roofs. So we swung into action.
In both cases, we called the sellers’ insurance agent. On House #1, we discovered that the damage happened earlier, when the sellers were insured with a different carrier. No problem. An adjuster was there the next day. Four days later, the house had a lovely new roof. And four days after that, we closed.
House #2 was a different story . . .
When I bought my first house, back in the Dark Ages, a friend told me “This is a great time to buy. Rates are down to 8%!”
And I thought “cool.” I knew nothing about interest rates. If they said 8% was a great rate, I believed them. So when I secured a seven year balloon mortgage at 6.75%, I felt like I was stealing money.c
I hope your New Year is going splendidly. I know several of you have been laid out with the crazy Omicron variant. For you, I hope it's mild and resolves quickly. And as I wrote that, I thought "If the 'me' of two years ago could see that sentence, she would wonder what the heck it even meant." How quickly life has changed!!!
My year started on a nice note when I was perusing Facebook recently, and saw that my office had posted the Top 20 Agents for 2021. I looked, just to see who of my friends had made the list. I seriously did not expect to see my own name. And yet, there is was!
It’s the classic dilemma, isn’t it? You want to move to a different house. But you have no idea how to make it work. You need the money from your current house to buy the new house. But you don’t want to sell your house before you know there’s a new house out there that you love — and can win in a bidding war. So you find a house that you love, but you can’t buy it because you need the money from your current house, which you still own because you didn’t want to sell it before you found a home that you love. And so the circle goes.
This, my friends, is one of the reasons we have no inventory in Denver. Homeowners are afraid — justifiably — to part with their current homes and try their luck in what they keep hearing is an insane seller’s market. And so, they remain trapped in houses that are too big/small/old/new/far out/close in for them, despairing of ever getting out.
Does this describe you, or someone you know? Never fear, relief is here!
Several years ago, a dear family friend was in a financial pickle, and desperate to sell her house. She called one of those “We Buy Ugly Houses” type companies, and they made her an offer. I took one look at the contract and almost got sick. The offer price was paltry, and there were numerous loopholes that gave the company additional ways to separate her from her hard-earned equity.
I asked her for the opportunity to list the house on the open market. We listed it. It went under contract in a day, for far more than the company had offered, and she walked away with a boatload more equity, which she used to pay off bills and buy another home for her family.
Now the same “We Buy Ugly Houses” philosophy is back, but this time it’s dressed up in a prettier package, with billions in Wall Street money behind it. Now they call themselves “iBuyers”, and they are filling the airways and interwebs with ads about how you can use them to sell your house far more quickly and conveniently than traditional real estate listings.
MB featured in a RE/MAX ad.
Are you thinking of buying or selling real estate?
I would love to help!!
Send me an email at mb@mbsellsdenver.com or call me at 303-759-6605
Mary Beth Bonacci, RE/MAX Alliance, 3900 E Mexico Ave, Suite 970, Denver, CO 80210, 303-759-6605. Each office independently owned and operated
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