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Dallas Real Estate: Should A Homeowner Measure His Home’s Square Footage?

Great reader question:

How to calculate home square foot real estate?
What Gotchas should I be aware of?  A little advice would go a long way right now.

Big  “Gotcha”:  LAWSUIT. Disputes over square footage are one of the biggest reasons for trips to the courthouse in real estate. Justifiably so.  Say you buy your house for $300,000, you are told it’s 2200 square feet. Two years pass, you sell, get a buyer, that buyer hires an appraiser surprise surprise turns out your home is only 2100 square feet. Depending on the statute of limitations, you could sue both the seller you bought from and also perhaps your realtor. That’s why smart agents (and homeowners) only measure rooms for furniture, not legal square footage.

“Realtors have to document the source of their square footage,” says veteran appraiser Brad Edgar.

The documentation usually comes from the tax rolls, house plans or a certified appraiser who bears the responsibility.  CYA.

Dallas is a serious square footage town.  In some parts of the country, folks are more concerned with number of bedrooms or other attributes. But in Dallas, house size counts. That’s how we pay and no one likes to get shortchanged. (Don’t get me started on my soapbox of how real estate is a local story: call this reason number 999 why you cannot have an agent in Timbuktu sell you a home in Dallas.)

My advice: Find $150, the cost of an average home appraisal, and hire a certified appraiser who will take the legal heat in the rare event an error is made in calculating the square footage of your largest investment, your home. And keep a copy of that in your security deposit box at the bank.

D Sale Of The Week: Perfection On Pebblebrook

Calling all honeymooners, Mark Sanford would not have been crying in Argentina had he owned this home. Master-tub a must-see in this week’s listing, just reduced to $995,000 seconds before I hit publish. Dallas ranch homes really do make sense, and are making a huge resurgence. Not only does this home have it all — 4400 square feet, five bedrooms, four and a half baths, formals, three car back-entry garage, it is located in Russwood Acres, one of North Dallas hottest neighborhoods off Inwood and Royal. (Click here to see another hot North Dallas ‘hood.) Russwood (where President and Mrs. Bush also searched) boasts large lots like this half-acre honey loaded with leafy trees and beautiful lawns. 5340 Pebblebrook has been completely (and beautifully) remodeled with a state of the art kitchen, open spaces, granite slab counters, sauna in the tricked-out master bath, and a patio/pool area that screams “let me entertain you”.

Indeed!

Should You Really Shop On-Line Like Kate Middleton and Prince William For A House In Dallas, Texas?

Everyone’s doing it — even Kate and Will.Funny that I was thinking about shopping on line for homes while at Tuesday’s foreclosure auction. What spurred my thoughts? The heat, perhaps, but also the blind-ness of it all. As I perused the foreclosure lists in other people’s hands (one of these days I’ll pony up for a list of my own) I thought gee, sounds like a good zip code but what if this house backs up to power lines or Walnut Hill Lane? Then the “aha” moment: this is almost like shopping for a house on-line. Sure, we see glossy photos and drool over the house porn, but clever folks doctor those photos and spin the copy. (I even offer you tips to do so!) Face it: even when you kick the tires with the toes of your stilettos, you miss a lot. Like the time I bought a home and thought I had scrutinized every inch. Oh no. I am cleaning the floor in a closet one day and guess what I find? A hole right down to the crawl space, an open underground tunnel for rats and other critters.

Was that the home where a snake greeted me one morning?

Ilyce Glink has a great overall take on this, but here’s what I suggest you look out for in Texas: (more…)

Dallas Home Price Performance

Today Steve Brown tells us that, even though our home values have taken about a 15% price hit from the highs of 2007, Dallas home prices are projected to remain constant over the next twelve months while they are expected to continue to decrease nationally by 6.6 percent, all this according to yet another home price consultant guru, North Carolina-based Local Price Monitor. At a real estate event last night — so fun,  commercial brokers had to dress up in tuxedos and serve the ladies wine — I heard tale upon tale of buyers coming in with low-ball offers. At least one agent said, if you don’t have to sell your house, why would you have it on the market now? Getting back to the North Carolina study: yesterday, Steve quoted the folks at Harvard, who I personally find morbidly doom and gloom in their reports, as saying our home values were back to 1990’s values.  (CNN says new home sales in May down a third from 2008 levels.) While today’s report seems to contradict that report, I guess this means it still is not as bad as the 1980’s.

Real Estate Value Security for UP, PC: the End of Helicopter Parenting

I am STILL a helicopter mom, though my children are grown. Which shows you how out of style I am. Mommies du jour now apparently embrace  “free range-parenting”, raising kids like the hormone-free turkeys we buy at Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is, unstructured time rather than six activities per week to stimulate their brains. (I flashed educational flash-cards at my infant son after taking a course from the Better Baby Institute before he was born — and supplied him with non-violent toys. My daughter was getting brain stimulation from classical music the second the rabbit died even though the first test was a false alarm. That is all now so eightes.) Whether or not just letting a kid ride a bike all summer long and build tree houses is psychologically healthier or not, who knows. But I smell rising real estates values. This trend will clearly point parents to buy homes in communities like Highland Park, University Park, and gated neighborhoods (Vaquero) where the kiddos can run free safely — ditto safety capsule vacation communities like Watercolor, Seaside, Sea Island, Park City, Snowbird, Deer Valley, Jackson Hole, and  Cornerstone, CO near Telluride. I think it was our quest for a Harvard degree in the family that drove us all to driving them to perfection. But we were scared, too — a young girl on roller skates was approached by a child molester the week we moved into our home on Ricks Circle in 2000.