Arizona Real Estate Notebook

One of the serendipitous things about blogging is that I’ve become friends with some of my fellow Phoenix area real estate bloggers.

Jonathan Dalton of Dalton’s Arizona Homes mentioned in his blog last week that he has season tickets to ASU football. Well, so do I!

Liz couldn’t go to the game last night, so it was great fun during half time to go chat with Jonathan and meet his mother.

By the way, ASU football games are very family friendly. There is no alcohol, no fights and few drunks so you see tons of kids and families at the games. Compare that to an Arizona Cardinals football game!

ASU was down by 19 points before the first half of the first quarter was over! But they came back and won. An exciting game.

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Elliot Pollack:

“The economy is no longer running on eight cylinders but on three or four cylinders,” he said. “So the economy will still be driving forward, but . . . it will be a sub-prime year.”

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If you like classical music, go to this concert.

There is one more performance on Saturday night. Get tickets if you can on the “piano side” so you can see the pianists hands. If you were standing on the stage looking at the audience, the piano side would be the right-hand side.

My wife Liz loves classical music and we’ve gone to the Phoenix Symphony for years. Sitting in Symphony Hall I’ve slowly discovered that musically I’m a Russian. I love Rachmaninov, Shostakovich (delightfully depressing) and Tchaikovsky.

Seeing a live performance of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat minor, Opus 23 is spectacular. The rest of the program is fine but nothing special.

The pianist is Simon Trpceski who will be playing the same piece next month with the New York Philharmonic.

Ticket information here.

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It’s hard to find a good camera for taking real estate photos.

The ideal camera for real estate will have:

• The widest angle lens possible so you can see as much of a room as possible in one photo
• The best flash possible so you can minimize the dreaded window burnout where the bright light coming in through the windows makes everything else in the room way too dark
• The smallest and lightest camera possible because you’ll be schlepping it around everywhere
• The lowest price possible

Whoops!

Yesterday, I thought I had lost my crazy-expensive Nikon camera set up ($2,500 and I still need a tripod). To console myself, I spent hours on the internet researching replacement cameras… that is, much less expensive replacement cameras.

I found what I think is an extraordinary camera set up for real estate, a great value.

For only a few hundred more than the cost of the pocket cameras that are popular with Realtors, you can have a camera that will make the photos of your listings jump off the page.

Real Estate Camera

The Nikon D40 is a super camera for Realtors. (You don’t need the more expensive D40x.)

You can get a Nikon D40 kit including an 18mm-55mm lens, an SD card and a bag for $569.95 at Amazon.

Flash

It’s super important that you also buy the Nikon SB-400 flash which is $107.99 at Amazon. You gotta have a good flash to get good interior photos. There’s no way around it. The flash is key. Tilt the flash up at the ceiling to illuminate the room when you shoot.

Lens

That lens is pretty darn wide angle at 18mm. (Be careful, the Nikon D40 can come with other lenses.) Professional photographer quality wide angle lens go down to about 12mm. The “wide angle” pocket cameras popular with Realtors go down to 23mm.

So for wide angle, the 18mm-55mm lens is halfway between the wide angle pocket cameras and the wide angle pro lenses. Keep in mind that a 12mm wide angle pro lens can cost $500 to $1000 for the lens alone - no camera! So to go from an 18mm wide angle lens to a 12mm wide angle lens is very expensive indeed.

This Nikon D40 camera, 18mm-55mm lens and SB-400 flash are not the top of the line, professional photographer Nikon equipment… but they are indeed Nikon equipment.

Cost

For only $677.94 you can have a lightweight camera that isn’t bulky that will create photos that will blow away the pocket cameras. The pocket cameras aren’t that much cheaper anyway, one popular pocket camera is $388.00 on Amazon.com.

To see some other cameras recommended by a Realtor, check out the cameras at the bottom of the right-hand column here.

Sure, this Nikon set up is larger and more expensive than a pocket camera but it is also much smaller, much lighter and much less expensive than a professional quality Nikon camera set up.

Is real estate photography important to you?

If the quality of your real estate photos is important to you, I think you will find this D40 set up well worth your money, .

If you own a Nikon D40, tell me if I’m right.

Happy Ending

By the way, I got a call last night, Thursday, that I had indeed left my camera bag at the lunch house for the Heart of Scottsdale Realtor Tour on Wednesday.

I had called the listing agent about the camera bag twice earlier on Thursday and she said it wasn’t there! I assumed, of course, that the camera bag must have been stolen out of my car after the Realtor tour.

Whew! I’m glad they finally decided to quit blowing me off and look for the camera! Now I have to call the police and cancel the stolen property report.

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Realtor Jay Thompson has a post about perspective, breast cancer and a young Phoenix real estate lender who could use your help.

Putting it in Perspective at The Phoenix Real Estate Guy.

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Dian Hymer

The first thing to understand is that lenders are moving back to basics. No- and very low-down-payment mortgages are available only to buyers with high credit scores. This means no more 100 percent and 95 percent mortgages for subprime borrowers.

Lenders are also backing away from low-documentation and stated-income mortgages. Many lenders now require buyers to have a cash down payment, good credit and the ability to verify income.

For years, home buyers stretched the price they could pay by using adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages. Not long ago, lenders qualified buyers for these loan products based on the lower initial rates and on interest-only payments. Now, borrowers must qualify based on the fully indexed rate and amortized payment. In other words, qualifying for a home mortgage is more difficult.

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The Case-Shiller index of home prices is the best measure of home price appreciation when looking at entire metropolitan areas in the United States. It doesn’t measure appreciation in smaller areas such as cities or zip codes, however.

A previous discussion of the pros and cons of different appreciation measures is here.

Case-Shiller came out with data for June 2007 this week. You can see a clear trend in housing price depreciation in Phoenix and our neighbors.

Home prices in metro Phoenix peaked in June of 2006 according to Case-Shiller data. From then until last June, metro Phoenix home prices have depreciated 6.6%. Since September 2006, prices have had an average depreciation of 0.66% per month.

Some news reports said price declines were “worsening,” however, the monthly price declines have been similar throughout the September 2006 to June 2007 period. It’s a fairly straight line decline.

Although the monthly declines aren’t worsening, the total decline from the peak in June 2006 is worsening as the months of decline add up.

This trend means that time is not on the side of home sellers. If you have a home listed for sale, you should price it to sell ASAP.

Keep in mind that we know from other data sources that Phoenix and closer-in cities like Tempe are doing better than average and areas on the fringes have been doing worse than average.

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In the 6 years I’ve been publishing Home Sale News, I believe the latest it ever went out was Saturday. I shoot for sending them out on Thursday.

Even when I was on a family vacation in Europe 2 years ago I was able to get Home Sale News out on time more or less.

But after having 4 closing in 4 weeks totally $4 million (Thanks, Mike and Kathy, Bob and Kathy, Randy and Sharyn, and Tim!) I saw a hole in my schedule and wanted to jump on it and take a week’s vacation with my 17 year old son. He’ll be off to college in a year and I really wanted to spend some one-on-one time with him before he flew the coop.

Unfortunately, the internet connection up in the Sierra Mountains near Lake Tahoe was terrible. The cabin owned by a brother and 2 sisters was beautiful but the connection was just too slow for me to handle some technical problems that popped up with this issue.

So I punted and waited until my return today to send out Home Sale News.

But I’ll tell you, putting off Home Sale News really helped me have a great time with my son. He was, however, bored sometimes. He got so bored, in fact, that at some points he actually talked to me. (I love it when my plans work out!) My son Chris is a great guy but teenage boys aren’t especially talkative to their parents at home.

Anyway, thanks for your patience.

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I’m in Truckee, California taking a week with my younger son up in the mountains. Actually, I’m staying about 30 minutes from Truckee at a cabin owned by a brother and 2 sisters. It’s a gorgeous area but I need to drive into Truckee to get internet!

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I got this great email today.

Hi John

I don’t know if this website of yours is still active but I just wanted to tell you about an experience I had recently with an air conditioning company I found recommended on your site. I urgently needed work done to my a/c and after various calls to contractors with sky high prices, I found the following name on your site.

Hi John, I have an air condition company that is very honest, and has good prices. It’s called Arizona Air. The owner is Mark Gamma, he is the best! He has worked on my air conditioner several times, and I have been very pleased. He has worked on many homes in the Las Sendas area. His phone # is 480-733-0845.

I called the company, spoke with Mark and his technician Octavio was at my house the next day. The best work I’ve ever seen was done on my a/c and the price was half that of the other guys.

Please let anyone know that needs a/c work done that Mark is the best!

Thanks John

Regards,

Francois

Thanks Francois for taking the time to remind me about the list. It’s so cool that it worked out so well for you!

A couple of summers ago I needed a new roof and AC system so I asked subscribers to Home Sale News for personal recommendations for Phoenix area AC guys and Phoenix area roofers.

Now, I like to use Angie’s List, although you have to pay to use it. I like Angie’s List because it is easier to compare tradesmen against each other and whether the job they did for the person making the recommendation is similar to the job I have in mind.

I’ve had good luck finding a house painter, irrigation repair guy and an electrician. (It turns out that a electrician that had great recommendations in my neighborhood was a guy I went to grade school with at Orangedale Elementary in East Phoenix!)

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While checking out the San Diego real estate market I stumbled upon this gem that has nothing to do with real estate, although I feel like he let me into their home.

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This long piece from the Tribune covers the messed up reasons that traffic is messed up in the Pinal County part of Queen Creek.

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If you tried to unsubscribe from my Home Sale News e-newsletters June 3 - 20, you were not unsubscribed.

I’m sorry about that!

I wondered why I was getting an unusually high number of emails from people having problems unsubscribing and subscribing.

Once I realized there was a problem it took me a long time to to figure out what the problem was.

The problem was that my ISP (FastQ Communications) “upgraded” on June 3 and it messed up many of my Perl scripts by moving the location of sendmail. It was easy to fix but a bear to figure out what was wrong.

If you think you unsubcribed from Home Sale News since June 3, you didn’t.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

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I’m checking out a new, cool system of ads for the homes I have listed.

I like tons about it. My biggest worry is that the changing photos in the sidebar ads will be too distracting. What do you think?

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30-year fixed-rate mortgage, average in Western U.S. for week ending May 31, 2007. Blue line is Freddie Mac forecast made 5/8/2007.

“Interest rates on fixed-rate mortgages increased further this week following stronger growth in orders for durable goods,” said Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac vice president and chief economist. “Recent reports have indicated that economic growth outside of the housing market remains robust, with a healthy consumer sector and improving business spending.

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