Nice little ditty here in the DMN offering sales tips, but I couldn’t disagree more with the advice on two counts:
1. Home warranties. Garbage, I say. Not worth the paper they are written on. These are like HMO’s (or any health insurance plan) that promises you everything, but in reality pays for as little as possible. Sometimes there are kickbacks to realtors involved: ERA Buyer Protection Plan — $240. Divide that $240 into four, $60 for national, $60 for regional, $60 for the agent, $60 to underwrite the actual insurance. Then you have a “co-pay” transaction fee, and if an item really needs replacing, the company reserves the right to repair it, cobble it together with duct-tape or whatever just to make it functional. If you want to replace your A/C compressor, for example, you will still have to fork over the dough rae mi. We had a home warranty on one of our homes, made a few claims, they dumped us as soon as they could and blacklisted us from re-joining their club for four years.
Full disclosure: one of my colleagues here says that the home warranty did save them big bucks when they bought their condo last year and the A/C broke right after they moved in. Of course, a year later, it’s broken again and we are praying the work is under warranty.
What do you think about Home Warranties?
2. “A lived-in, maintained home is easier for buyers to imagine themselves living in than a vacant foreclosure.” BS — given the chance, buyers want new sparkling clean homes (no scuffed baseboards, marred trim, cooking grease on the backsplash) if they can afford them. I think buyers can imagine themselves in new construction just fine, and almost any builder with a brain now stages the home.
That is the development fantasy of Dallas real estate broker Randall Turner, and while my first thought was no way, Jose — everyone I know loves Southwest and prefers to fly Southwest whenever possible. Was in Panama City, Florida recently where they are building the first new international airport since 9/11 and those folks are drooling to land Southwest jets in Panama City. No, we don’t ever want to alienate Southwest. But then I started thinking about noise in Bluffview, Highland Park and Midway Hollow from Love Field and wonder — maybe Turner’s idea is not so crazy after all.
Toured several new homes in Dallas yesterday, including a new, gorgeous $2.9 million spec home that has no formal living room. According to the architect/designer, Don Caperton, Caperton Johnson, two things are out: formal living rooms and wine cellars. The formal living rooms are considered a waste of space and building dollars. Unsaid but widely known: they also keep the Dallas Design District afloat and serve up to many a Dallas husband heart-attack-sized design bills. Wine rooms are also over-rated, costly to install, a legal nightmare if you have teenagers, and people never end up filling the cellar with all that wine.
They just drink it.
Next thing you know, people will be filling their swimming pools.
USA Today quotes Realty Trac saying that foreclosures are spreading from the Big Four Bad Boys — California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona to other locales like North Carolina, Wisconsin (!) and even the land of potatoes, Idaho. Culprits: lost jobs, lay-offs. Steve Brown tells us that Dallas real estate values have re-visited the 1990’s when adjusted for inflation. The median price of a Dallas home in 2007 was $158,000 — today that same house can be picked up for $129,000. Just please don’t tell me that we are going to re-live the 90’s in decor: if the southwestern look returns, I’m outa here.