This past August, Teresa Boardman published a piece on Inman News on how the real estate blog was dead. Her point was more intricate than the tag line. In my view, she was decrying how all the noisy bad content was crowding out the small proportion of quality content. It got a fair bit of attention on Active Rain and other platforms, and made for good discussion with the fall season of conferences coming up. 

This past week, Inman republished another piece on something dying, namely map-based home searches. This wasn’t Teresa Boardman, respected real estate blogger noticing all the bad content out there, it was from the looks of things  a software guy with a better thing to sell writing the piece. He wasn’t the only one other than Teresa to use the metaphor. But I hope he’s the last. 

Enough already with the obituaries. The literary device of declaring something in real estate dead should be declared dead. 

There are a number of reasons. 

• The too cool for school technique of predicting the end of something before it ends is tiresome. 
• They’re just wrong. In the example sited, map-based searching will not go away anytime soon, especially as technology improves. I have buyers looking at back yards on Google Earth. 
• Too often, the self appointed coroners have their own agendas. 

This Market Report is for the Yorktown school district and all data is taken from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam Multiple) Listing Service. It compares the sales of single family homes from October of 2010 to October of 2009. Prices of Active and pending listings are list price only, as contract prices are not disclosed until closing. 

Previous postings on Yorktown can be found here. 

To check out the 119 available properties Yorktown has to offer, register yourself for a free Listingbook account. 

This market report is for single family homes in the Croton-Harmon school district. All data is from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam) MLS. Contract and asking prices are list prices, as contractual prices are not disclosed until closing. 

Croton had 5 closings in October at a median price of $400,000, considerably lower than the $679,000 median of a year ago. I wouldn’t read too much into this, as the month just had lower prices homes close this time around. Last month the median price of homes under contract was $420,000, so a lower median sales price this month is no surprise. Expect a far higher median price in November. The median asking price of the 12 homes under contract is a very robust $679,000. 60 homes are available for sale.  

To find your dream home in Croton, get yourself a free Listingbook account. 

Previous posts on Croton on Hudson

I got the following email today: 

we are withdrawing our offer of purchase on XX Rd.  The reason is the mold problem.  He is hearing that the mold goes right through to the studs and even the beams and he doesn’t want to subject his family to that.
 
I thought this was a good buy and I told him so but…

These people insisted that my client turn on all the utilities and de-winterize the house. They didn’t need all that done to know that there is mold. 

This isn’t an isolated example. Thanks to the media and basic groupthink of the current market, buyers are expecting not just great deals, but unbelievable ones. The problem is, in our area, most foreclosures are not recent builds or recent renovations. REO and short sale homes in New York are often the poster children for deferred maintenance and, upon occasion, vandalism. Yet 2/3 of the buyers I speak with mention foreclosures. Nine out of 10 people that see a few foreclosures have visceral, negative reactions to the condition. In cases where you have an ambitious soul who is handy and doesn’t mind a fixer upper, a chunk of them get the “in-law veto” where parents, friends or relatives put the kabosh on the transaction. 

It is our job to educate the public and manage expectations. In the case I first brought up, I got the distinct sense that the agent is hanging onto the people for dear life to make her commission. And that is not the posture to competently advise clients on the biggest transaction of their lives. 

In Westchester and surrounding areas, people stop maintaining their home long before they default on their home loans. By the time the home hits the market, you have old decks, old paint, old baths, and needed repairs put off with unpleasant consequences. Buyers need to understand this. In those rare cases where you do have a foreclosure in great condition, you’ll get wide interest based on scarcity, and the deal of a lifetime goes instead to the highest and best offer in a bidding war. 

You may have a cousin who just paid 50 cents on the dollar for the Taj Mahal in Las Vegas or Wichita. But this is New York, and it isn’t Kansas. I would advise any perspective buyer to stop getting educated by hearsay and national media and instead hang their hat on the the local expertise of their qualified buyer representative.

After putting a short sale into contract just a few weeks ago, I was pleased to get a call for the broker price opinion just yesterday. For the uninitiated, a broker price opinion is part of the short sale approval process and I have waited months in some cases for one to be ordered. It is the banks way of ensuring that they are getting fair market value for the home in exchange for a lower payoff than the mortgage balance. 

Good news, right? 

The agent doing the BPO had a familiar name, so after meeting her, I looked her up. She lists a fair number of bank-owned foreclosures. And yes, she lists foreclosures for the lender we are negotiating our short sale with. Am I cynical to wonder why she’d do an honest BPO when she has the power to tank our sale and get the listing herself at foreclosure? 

Fifty bucks, or a foreclosure listing. Hmmm. Am I being paranoid? 

This market report is for single family home activity in the Ossining school district for October of 2010. All information is derived from the Empire Access (formerly Westchester-Putnam) Multiple Listing Service. 

After a poor September, Ossining rebounded nicely with 11 closed sales at a swollen median price of $535,000. Volume was actually down from October 2009, however, so it appears that the place is accustomed to strong Octobers.  

While not as robust as the prvious October transaction-total-wise, 27 pending sales are very healthy (up from 22 last month), and the available inventory of 144 homes offers prospective home buyers lots of choice. 

Overall a very solid month given the economy. 

Previous postings on Ossining.  

You can search for a home in Ossining by getting yourself a free Listingbook account. 

Governor-elect Cuomo, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand, Representative Lowey, State Senator Oppenheimer, and Assemblywoman Galef: Congratulations on your election and re-elections today. I didn’t vote for any of you. With the exception of Mr. Cuomo, it was on your watch that I have watched this great republic brought to its knees. I voted for Jimmy McMillan for governor, Mr. Cuomo, because I found it necessary to lodge a protest vote. I voted to unseat every incumbent. As a matter of fact, the only sitting official I supported, Mayor Bill Hanauer of Ossining, I couldn’t vote for because I live 100 yards outside the village. 

But- you all got elected anyway. 

So here’s the deal. I am watching you. Every one of you. And I have an idea of what needs to be done to improve the quality of life of New Yorkers. I want to know what you are going to do to solve the foreclosure crisis. I want to know what you are going to do to help people not lose their homes to foreclosure. I want to know what you are going to do to help people in red tape hell trying to modify their mortgage or do a short sale and are getting hammered by the banks you voted to bail out. 

If the answer is not satisfactory, and you’ll just do what you need to do to get re elected, I’ll remember. And I won’t be so quiet in 2012. 

Yet again, I find myself nodding in agreement with the latest New York Times editorial on the mortgage mess. This has me wondering if I am becoming like so many other NY Times readers, some sort of limousine liberal, anti-business, anti-free market, pro government intervention, lefty. I was always a laissez fair kind of entrepreneur, against government regulation and supportive of the Adam Smith, Invisible Hand notion that market forces will stabilize even the most troubled of times. 

What happened? Why am I agreeing with the Times? I have even agreed with Paul Krugman’s last two columns! Paul Krugman!! Has the world turned upside down? Am I um, changing? Hell, 31 readers  have “liked” my last comment on the editorial! I used to get about three. And my friend Pam told me that I was echoing some things said by Ariana Huffington. 

Now that I ponder it, I see two forces at work. 

1. The problems and injustice I see is so pervasive that both conservative and liberal sensibilities have common ground. The recognition of the problems and need for action is bi-partisan. 
2. I have always viewed the government’s role as that of a referee who should not interfere with the game, but ensure that the rules are followed. I am pissed because the ref is not whistling a foul. We just had a mugging on the field, facemask, pass interference, balk, travelling, high sticking, offsides, and no whistle. 

Well, it’s Halloween, so why not a report on Sleepy Hollow? Yes, there is a Sleepy Hollow, and yes, Washington Irving is buried here. There is an Old Dutch Church, a Sleepy Hollow Bridge, and the high school’s mascot is the Headless Horsemen. Old Sleepy Hollow road is VERY spooky at night, winding along covered by trees which almost create a corridor as you drive down the road at night. A few times in high school we’d turn off the car headlights to magnify the effect. 

But is Sleepy Hollow a haunted, scary place? Residents laugh at the notion. It is a charming river village on the banks of the Hudson, and thanks to the location of Phelps Hospital, it is also where I was born. Of course, back then it was known as the more benign North Tarrytown. The village changed its name to Sleepy Hollow in deference to history in 1996. They do an outstanding job of observing Halloween every year, but beyond that there aren’t many spooky things to speak of. 

The Tarrytown school district serves Sleepy Hollow and the village of Tarrytown as well, and the high school is known as Sleepy Hollow High School. The village is nestled between Mt Pleasant and Pocantico to the north and east, and Tarrytown to the south. Briarcliff Manor is just a stone’s throw to the north. 

5 single family homes sold in the school district in October of 2010 at a median price of $575,000. 

7 single family homes are under contract as a median asking price of $645,000.

42 single homes are available and active on the market, and the median asking price is $674,500.

The area also has a significant amount of multiple family dwellings, co ops, and condominiums. The first sale my company ever closed on in 2005 was a condo in nearby Tarrytown by the Tappan Zee Bridge. 

If you want to check out available homes in Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, get yourself a free Listingbook account.