Real Estate Snippets

REALTOR® Safety

When an ex-con kills a 71 year old REALTOR® in Wisconsin just because her innocent question made him mad, it's no wonder St. Paul real estate agents are taking more safety precautions.  Read the story here.

Safety tips used by agents are becoming more common:

• Do not show vacant properties alone unless you know your customers.  This applies to both men and women as men can be overpowered as well.  A male California real estate agent was kidnapped at gunpoint to get his electronic key to open listed houses with the electronic lock boxes.  When I meet a customer for the first time at a home, I bring a trusted colleague or my husband to stay in the car in case I don't return. 
• Record the names, number, description and license number of a customer you are meeting at a home for the first time.  I call these details into my broker's voicemail.  If someone accosts me, there is at least a modicum of information for the police to use to get the perpetrator back!
• Carry my cell phone into the house with me and have 911 programmed at the touch of a button.
• Never have an open house alone.   The decrease in new buyer clients obtained through open houses and the increase in crime associated with opens is the basis for many St. Paul agents discontinuing the practice.
• Let customers precede you into a house and the rooms in the house.  Personally, I'd never be able to outrun a perpetrator.  If my gut suspects something, I'm not going in!  I would rather be alive and wrong while I lose a future client than dead because I didn't want to lose that commission!
• Carry some form of pepper spray or mace in my pocket.  Good idea, but my pockets are already full of electronic key, car keys, MLS listing sheets, my cheat sheet of combinations for the tour, business cards, phone, daily planner, and sometimes a huge flashlight.  I don't think there's room for that pepper spray.  I think I'll whack the perpetrator with the flashlight!
• One of the REALTOR® safety tips is to pay attention to exits.  Personally, I generalize that to PAY ATTENTION PERIOD!
• Don't assume women customers are safer than men.  Frankly, I think women fight meaner and dirtier than men and wouldn't care to be the victim of either!  Besides, there may be a partner waiting by the scheduled house.
• There always a struggle between leaving the front door unlocked during a showing (easy exit when escaping or easy entrance for bad guys) or not.  Because of discrimination laws, an agent cannot lock the front door while showing a house in one neighborhood and leave it open in another.  That can be perceived as discriminatory or giving a message about the neighborhood to the client.  Some agents choose to leave the key in the front door so they don't forget and lock it in the house.  Others choose to lock the door.  There are pros and cons to each system.
• Leaving a proposed schedule and the contact info for who you are meeting with a family member or colleague is wise.  Checking in after the showings are finished is a good policy.  When there is no check-in your trusted person knows when to call the police. 

The last point on my proposed safety procedures list has a funny story attached to it.  Early in my career cell phones were not common (I know I'm older than dirt!) but my broker's policy was that ALL of his agents would check in by phone after their open houses.  My open house was in a vacant HUD home where I spent the afternoon killing mice with a broom.  My pre-occupation with getting some shopping done on the way home distracted me from making the prescribed check-in call.  When I finally remembered to stop at a pay phone, my husband informed me I had been given 15 more minutes and the two of them were going to call the cops!  That was the last time I "forgot" to check in when done with my St. Paul real estate business!  I can't imagine my embarrassment if I had been pulled over by the cops as a "missing person"!

   

Sunday in Como Park

It's Sunday and a great day for taking the dogs for a walk.  The old Dalmatian and the Lady Bella strutted their stuff this afternoon along with half of St. Paul.  St. Paul dwellers know that the best cure for cabin fever is a good dose of spring fever and its accompanying thaw.  What better place to breath the fresh spring air than around Como Lake?

Tax Day Is Coming

It's getting close to tax day and if you haven't been to your accountant yet, this Diggin' Dino would be more than happy to help.  Accountantasaurus was created for LarsonAllen, a St. Paul professional service firm, by Kim Cope and Joel Dirnberger and spent the summer of 2007 at the St. Paul Science Museum Plaza.

 

If you've done your taxes and come up short, you might want to visit Associated Bankasaurus for a loan.  But then again, if my banker looked like this I probably wouldn't want to visit him for a loan.  Get a load of those shark's teeth!  Associated Bankasaurus was created by Troy Olin for Associated Bank and spent the summer of 2007 at the former St. Paul Liberty Bank (now Associated) at Snelling and Selby.

Condemned Houses II

With more and more blue signs going up around St. Paul marking homes as registered vacant buildings, it's been hard to ignore the repercussions of a home being condemned.

One negative side effect is that mail delivery is ceased within 10 days of the St. Paul home being "tagged".  If the former occupant/owner of the home is not aware that his/her mail delivery will cease, s/he may have moved to a friend's or relative's and be stopping by to retrieve mail.  Important items like paychecks, tax refunds, utility bills, fix up loan applications, utility assistance documents, city correspondence, etc., could be returned to sender once the mail delivery ceases.  My local St. Paul post office confirmed that mail delivery stops.  There is a short period of time the mail is held and then everything bounces back to the sender.  The condemned homeowner has to get a PO box or file a forwarding order to continue mail service.

A second negative side effect is that traditional home loans usually cannot be made on a condemned home.  Plus, the homeowner often has poor credit because of the unpaid bills that may have gotten him/her into the dilemma to begin with.  Unless a homeowner already has an equity credit line in place with funds still available, getting a traditional mortgage is a bit difficult.  Mortgage companies don't lend money using collateral that is not "resell-able" and a condemned house is considered high risk collateral. 

A special "fix-up" loan like a 203K program from FHA would have to be obtained.  Fix-up loans function much like a construction loan in that an estimate is made of the total cost of the entire project and funds are drawn from an escrow account as the work is completed.  The funds are not disbursed without proof of the completed work.  Most of the time, the work must be completed by a licensed contractor, and the closing costs and percentage rate on the loan are usually higher.

The homeowner can be in a bit of a pickle if they can't get a loan and they don't have the money to make the city's required repairs.  What are the options for the owner? 

• Quit.  Find an experienced rehabber to buy the house and move into an apartment or other living arrangements.  Usually the sale price on a condemned house will be very low as it takes a considerable amount of money to fix the home up for resale. 
• If the owner wants to make the repairs and return to their St. Paul home, the city has extensive resources for those who qualify including a 40 yard roll off box for debris removal and deferred loans and grants for fixing the home through their City Living Home Programs.  Applications and income guidelines are requirements of the funding programs.
• Energy assistance programs like Community Action Partnership exist for those with qualifying income.  Some of these programs will replace furnaces, hot water heaters, and other energy saving features of the home.
• St. Paul neighborhoods like the one for Frogtown listed here have grant and deferred loan programs for fixing homes through the neighborhood CDC's (community development corporation).  Some St. Paul neighborhoods even have programs that can be used by landlords.

The important thing to remember is that IF the owner of a condemned house in St. Paul wants to restore the property to safe and functional use, resources are available.  One can start with the sites linked from this blog and branch out from there.

Resources for Kids and Adults

Another one of those circulating e-mails warning of a scam came my way this morning.  Normally www.snopes.com is my first resource to verify if these scam warnings are real or not.  This e-mail had a note attached that the sender (someone I knew) had already checked snopes and it verified, so I read on.  There was a link to an FBI site at the end of the e-mail which I checked.  The e-mail was so old that the original FBI headline was published June 2, 2006 but it's still circulating (nothing ever dies on the internet). 

What was a surprise to me was that the FBI had a public website and there were all kinds of resources available.  There is even an e-mail alert registration in which you can sign up for the kind of alerts that I received from a colleague.  The best part of all for me as a grandma is the kids section.  There are games to play and other teaching tools.  Just the kind of thing parents and grandparents love to do with their children. 

Short Sale Purchases

Practically everyone has heard the encouraging news about the upswing in sales in February this year.  An increase of 2.9% in number of sales over last year is definitely a positive.  The second part of the news story is that this change has occurred because sellers have decreased their prices significantly arousing interest in buyers. 

A large part of this price decrease has occurred because lenders have finally realized they have to accept short sale terms on house sales or end up being the owners of a large amount of real estate!  The only way for lenders to avoid large real estate acquisitions through foreclosure is to become cooperative short sale negotiators.  In like manner, real estate agents nationally, and in St. Paul, are becoming experts in short sales.

What does this mean for today's real estate market?  As I've stated  before, a large number of houses on the market are vacant.  Lower prices because of short sales or foreclosures is a good deal for St. Paul home buyers.  The glitch is whether the buyer is willing to wait while the seller's lender goes through the short sale process.  In some cases the short sale negotiation can take weeks or months.  The more patient the buyer, the more likely other buyers will drop out of the transaction leaving the most patient one as the winner.

Another quirky change that has resulted from the mass of short sales and foreclosed properties for sale is a new marketing statement.  In the last few weeks, St. Paul listings have appeared in my searches with these words in the agent remarks: "Not a short sale . . . no waiting . . . NOT corporate owned . . . ," etc.  The market has quickly identified a private home seller as an anomaly and is proclaiming the advantages of quick decision making by the private home seller. 

Buying Real Estate During a Divorce

I first published this post in October, 2006, but it's a topic that needs repeating!

Divorce is a tough topic for most people.  It's hard enough acknowledging that the relationship is not working, but then everything has to be split up and what happens to the kids has to be sorted out as well.  Occasionally a client has come to me that is separated from their spouse, but not yet divorced.  The client wants to buy a house so they can move on with his/her life.  In Minnesota one person in the relationship can legally buy alone, but when it comes time to sell, if the buyer has been married during the ownership of the house, both spouses have to sign off on the deed to transfer ownership.

Buying a home in Minnesota when you are in the process of a divorce is not a wise choice without consulting legal counsel.  Minnesota has laws which automatically give the absent spouse a legal right to the newly purchased house if it is purchased before the divorce is final.  That would mean the non-resident spouse would need to issue a quit claim deed or some other form of deed before the resident spouse could sell the property. 

One of my first buyer clients had a scenario like this one.  She had lived in and inherited the St. Paul family home.  When she moved to the east coast, she rented the family home in her absence.  While on the coast, she met and married a gentleman and started a family.  The marriage collapsed and she returned to the cities with her children sans husband.  In order to sell the family home and buy a suburban home, the ex-husband had to sign a quit claim deed to release his legal interest in the home.  He had never seen the house, never visited the house, had no emotional ties to the house.  She owned it before and after the marriage.  He stubbornly refused to sign away his rights without compensation!  She ended up paying him 8% of the sale price to obtain his signature on the deed! 

The moral of the story is don't buy a house until your divorce is final OR get legal council to protect your interest in the property and eliminate the "ex's" interest.  Otherwise, a future sale could be a costly endeavor.

Happy Easter

 

State of Hockeyasaurus

Hockey is quickly wrapping up for the year and this poor Diggin' Dino almost got left in the folder.  The Minnesota Wild has only 6 games left so the dino State of Hockeyasaurus is cheering them on.  State of Hockeyasaurus was created by Team Manke for The Minnesota Wild and spent the summer of 2007 by the Xcel Center in downtown St. Paul.

An Ode to Spring

The calender says it's spring. 

The calender says it's Good Friday. 

The calender says Easter bonnets will abound in two days.

Why am I seeing white stuff on the trees?

Actually, March is the snowiest month in St. Paul, but the snow is very different.  Usually it's heavy and full of moisture; the perfect snowball and snowman making snow, but awful for shoveling.   It doesn't last long either because St. Paul temperatures have warmed and the sun is staying out longer.  It's the perfect snow for forts and snowball fights, but it's pretty slushy for skiing.  Minnesotans joke that there is always a heavy snow storm the week of the high school basketball tournaments, and usually the joke is validated by snow!   

Soon, the crocus will peek their blooms through the melt letting us know that spring truly is here and summer is soon to follow.  I'm ready and so is every other person experiencing cabin fever in St. Paul.

Taken on Frank St. on the east side of St. Paul.  Are there buds on that tree in the right picture?  (Click to enlarge.)