Unless you live in a pre-war downtown home or in a custom built home in the hills chances are you live in a tract of homes.  Most tracts in the Santa Clara Valley area are about 50 to 40 years old and are typically post war style ranch homes.  There are some neighborhoods with semi-custom homes or homes that were developed by individual developers who may have developed 3 or 4 lots, but the feel of the neighborhood is the same.  Lot sizes are generally uniform.  Also these neighborhoods generally have homes of the same floor plan or maybe 4 or 5 different floor plans with a vareity of elevations to make them appear unique.

That’s typically what to expect in the Santa Clara Valley when it comes to housing.  So for home buyers what makes real estate so special and unique are the individual homes or lots within those tracts. 

Once in a while a unique property will hit the market in a neighborhood that hasn’t been sold in 30 years, a property that perhaps has a unique lot, location, or home.  Generally these are prized properties and do not come up on the market often and are generally sold quickly at top values.  This is the case of my latest listing at 552 Hillsdale Avenue in the Westwood Oaks neighborhood of Santa Clara. 

 The neighborhood of Westwood Oaks is already quite desireable for its convenient location and Cupertino Schools.   The make up of the neighborhood consists of mainly 50 year old Ranch style homes with some modern contemporary styled homes situated on 6,000 Sqft. lots.  The unique and rare attribute of 552 Hillsdale Avenue is definitely the home’s spacious 9,000 square foot lot.  A large lot doesn’t automatically guarantee any uniqueness.  What is important in a lot regardless of size is how the lot is shapped and how it is designed.  The home on Hillsdale features a deep lot and is surrounded but mature trees and features a large covered patio.   

As you sit in the living room and gaze into the backyard you feel as though you are in your own private park.  For people who value entertaining and family living these homes are the source of memories, parties, and play dates, as well as serve as a nice sanctuary from what can sometimes be a chaotic day. 

For someone who understands this importance, they will pay almost any price to get it because they realize the next opportunity may not arrise for many years.  For those buyers who don’t recognize this importance or don’t place a high value on this will likely not offer sufficiently to buy the property, and will likely not see another opportunity like this for another 5 or 10 years.

The moral of this story is if you know what you are looking for and if is a home like this you have to seize the opportunity.Similar Posts:

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My last two listings sold quickly and sold over asking. My clients were ecstatic with the result, but there was still some obstacles left before the sale closed, namely the buyer’s property inspection and the lender’s appraisal. During the buyer’s property inspection there is always a possibility that the buyer’s inspector may find something that the seller’s inspector overlooked but as a seller you can mitigate the likelihood of this by doing your inspections before listing the property.

I always encourage the sellers to secure their own inspections before listing the property. These are crucial to ensuring a smooth transaction and avoiding any renegotiating during the escrow. Also the inspections may uncover some physical aspects of the property that could easily be repaired and that will improve the marketability of the home.

Appraisals are different. There is little agents can do to ensure that the home appraises at sale price. What makes matters worse is that we are experiencing the fallout from the mortgage crisis where there existed rampant appraisal fraud and extremely lax appraisers and appraising practices. As a result, the appraisal industry has been shaken up and tight appraisals and unwavering appraisers have become our reality.

The most frustrating aspect of appraisals is that they are extremely subjective. On one of my past listings I had a particular property appraised three times with three different appraisers and all three values were were considerably different. One appraisal came in at the contract price, one 10% undercontract price and another 5% under contract price.

How can appraisals have so many descrepancies and be so subjective you wonder? Well, appraisals come up short for many reasons. A lack of comparables, an updated or an expanded home in an area where a majority of the homes are not similar, many dissimlar tracts within a small area, characteristics of an area which may not be consistent among all the homes in the area such as schools, unique locations, flood zones, and the use of appraisers from outside the area who are unfamiliar with the local market. To make matters worse improved homes are seldom reflected acurrately on an appraisal report and the appraiser generally does not give adequet credit for the improvements or any superior characteristics.

A good example of these is swimming pools. Appraisers generally follow generic guidelines that may not reflect what buyers may value in a particular area. For instance, swimming pools in our area are generally seen to be a negative to buyers and affect the value of a property negatively. Nonetheless, appraisers will generall give a $10K premium to a property with a swimming pool. When you are comparing a home in the same neighborhood which sold with a swimming pool and your home sold $10K more, and the appraiser thinks it should be $10k less, in the end you have a $20K discreptancy.

The biggest issue is that buyers and seller’s see appraisals in different ways. In reallity, an appraisal is a third party assesment of value requested and used by the buyer’s lender to determine what the loan to value on the subject property should be. From the standpoint of a seller a low appraisal rarely affects reflect the subject property’s true value and can be highly scrutinized especially since the buyer chooses the lender. To a buyer, the appraisal is what the lender is willing to loan on the property and therefore can affect the buyer’s ability to purchase. The problem arrises for both buyer and seller when the appraisal discreptancy is large and making up the difference is too much for the buyer. This is when the seller faces a difficult decision; delay the contract to get a second appraisal from another bank, cancel the contract and sell to a different buyer, or renegotiate the price to a level that is acceptable to all parties and the buyer can secure the loan. The second option may not be favorable to the buyer and therefore the result may just be to cancel the contract.

So as a seller you must be thinking whats the point then of going through fixing up your home to sell or staging it if the appraiser is just going to treat the home like every other generic home in the neighborhood and not give me credit for the improvements. My response is you never can be too sure what will happen when you sell. You might be fortunate and get an appraiser who is more open and reasonable to your home’s value. Also depending on the seller and the circumstances surrounding the sale of your home, your agent may be able to convince the buyer to remove their appraisal contingency.

This is not recommend to all buyers and sellers, but if the buyer is confident in the home’s value and the price he or she offered and can make up the difference than this provides some assurance to the seller, but is not a 100% guarantee but I’m won’t go into the complexities that may arrise for fear of confusing or boring you to death.

The other factor and the most powerful and effective is choosing a real estate agent who knows the area, the values and recent sales, and making sure the agent is present at the appraisal. I for instance make it a point to meet the appraiser at all my listings and sales so that I can go over comps with him that I feel reflect the true value of the property. Its never a sure thing, but as long as the appraiser is open minded and your comparables are within appraisal guidelines then it should be no problem. The main goal is to prevent a lazy or over extended appraiser from using just any comps which may negatively reflect the property’s value.

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I just closed one of my latest listings in Santa Clara.  A small home in a quiet Santa Clara neighborhood.  The homes in that particular neighborhood were designed with wall furnaces.  Not very common in some areas but homes like these are still out there.  One of the first things buyers often ask is what it would take to put in central heating and air conditioning.

Typically about $5,000 is what I tell them, but that will vary from home to home.  Fortunately this particular seller had central forced heating, it was done by the owner prior to him and just this past year he replaced the furnace in the system.

One of the things the seller neglected to do is make sure a permit was taken out for the new furnace.  What made matters worse is that when he bought the property he didn’t check to see if the previous owner had secured a permit for installing the system and to the surprise of the current owner he didn’t.

People don’t realize this but many cities in the area will request that permits be applied for and taken out for many repair items on a home even a toilet replacement in some cities including Santa Clara require the use of permits.  Permits can be applied for at any city planning office and are relatively inexpensive.  What permits are designed to do is ensure the that work complies with the city code and these codes are generally concerned with public safety.  Regardless of who you hire the responsibility of taking out the permit falls with the owner.  So as an owner you really have to make sure your contractor is doing things by the book and at the end of the job you’ll want to see that the permit was finalized.

You might ask yourself if its really worth the hassle of getting a permit.  Maybe your friend works under a contractor and doesn’t have his license but he assures you he knows how to do the job and that you don’t need a permit.  The reality is if you never do any significant remodeling and the work is inside a city inspector may never realize that you have unpermitted work and will likely never hassle you.

However, this problem will eventually haunt you when you sell the home or do a major home renovation.  You see when you sell a home you have to disclose all the work that you have ever done to the home and whether or not you have documentation for the work or a permit.  Easily enough you just disclose and say that you replaced the furnace and that you didn’t get a permit for the work.  That should let you off the hook.

Some buyers and agents may think nothing of it and feel that permits are nothing but city government putting there hands in the pockets of residents.  However, a good and responsible buyer or agent will see a bright red flag.

You see, if anyone down the road wants to do some work that will require a permit, maybe an addition or put in air conditioning or even replace the roof, (required in some cities) and the city inspector notices that you have a forced air heating system in your home but the city documents clearly say wall furnace.  Well that inspector may want to have a closer look and before he signs off any work on your home he will want to make sure that the furnace is permitted.

Once the inspector concludes that the heating system was unpermitted he will request that you go down to the planning office and apply for a permit and begin the retro-permitting process.  Retro permits generally cost a bit more than regular permits.  Also to apply for a permit you need to get plans and submit them.  So if you know how to draw up plans for HVAC, electrical and plumbing then that wouldn’t be a problem, but generally those are not skills that we all posses.  So you convince your buddy to draw up the plans or pay another contractor to do that for you.  You go down to the city planning office meet with the planner, he approves your plans, you pay the permitting fees and you schedule an inspection.

The city inspector comes out to the property and looks at the installation.  Now if this installation was done relatively recently and by a qualified individual this may go fairly smoothly, but chances are that both those assumptions are false and the inspector has pointed out a number of violations and items that are no longer in code.  Those items will have to be addressed and resolved before the inspector signs off on anything.

For something like the cost of repairing a furnace these items may not exceed $500 to repair.  With more complicated issues like pools and additions these can get rather pricey.   Don’t forget about the time you will need to take to get these matters resolved, time and money you could have saved if you had just got a permit or made sure the item was permitted when you bought the home.

Back to the story about the home I sold in Santa Clara.  When the buyer discovered the central heating system was not permitted, immediately this set off a number of problems, especially since she was planning to put in an air conditioning system.  In the end we had to contact several heating and cooling services to determine if there were any issues.  Fortunately for my seller there were not too many issues with the current installation that had to be addressed and the buyer really wanted the home.  In the end my seller agreed to credit the buyer $300 for the repairs, but the cost and time spent on getting the issue resolved could have been much worse.

So buyers and homeowners make sure you get permits for those items that require them, it will save you loads of hassle and costs in the future.Similar Posts:

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With only three months until the new $8,000 first-time homebuyer and the $6,500 existing home buyer federal tax credits are set to expire, time is running out on an opportunity that buyers and sellers may not see again. The tax credit, which was originally created in mid 2008, then expanded in January 2009 and extended again this past November, was only designed to be a short-term incentive to drive more buyers into the housing market.

That’s why many people in Congress are saying that, come April 30, 2010 when the credit expires, “That is it!”

So the clock is ticking. The average real estate transaction, from offer to closing, takes approximately 90 days and that is just about where we are now. To meet the federal deadlines, a buyer must have a binding sales contract in place by April 30, and have the home purchase completed by June 30. To achieve those time frames, buyers need to act almost immediately. Those deadlines also mean that this is also a prime opportunity for sellers. As the April 30 deadline gets ever closer, we are bound to see an influx of home-seekers who are hoping to find a house and make an offer in time to receive the tax credit. So for sellers who have been considering moving up in the market, downsizing, or relocating, now is an opportune time to put their house on the market.

We’re at a unique time in real estate. The tax credit deadline is helping to create the “perfect storm” in the market, due to four key elements – I.I.I.P:

• Inventory: Although there are an overwhelming number of markets where inventory is down, and even with a decline in inventory year over year, there are still plenty of homes on the market for buyers to choose from.
• Interest Rates: Mortgage rates remain at near historic
lows. This means higher purchasing power for buyers.
• Incentives: The extension and expansion of the homebuyer tax credit is providing benefits to buyers who may have otherwise not been interested in getting into the market.
• Prices: Affordability remains at an all time record level nationally and in many of our local markets as well. While the urgency of trying to find and close on a home before the deadline may seem stressful, it doesn’t have to be. For those who are in the early phase of the home buying process, there are a few key things that you can do to speed up the process:
• Find A Qualified Real Estate Agent. If you do not already have one, work with a real estate agent who will be able to help identify mortgage lenders, home inspectors, lawyers and others who will play a role in helping to get the buying process completed by the April 30 deadline.
• Know Before You Go. Free online tools and mobile applications for smart phones are available to help you quickly and conveniently learn about neighborhoods and view homes on the market. Consult with your own tax advisor as to your ability to qualify for the tax credit based upon income levels, length of residency/homeownership and housing prices. Arming yourself with as much knowledge as possible in the beginning is bound to save time in the long-run.Similar Posts:

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154 S 33RD ST., SAN JOSE

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