Be Careful buying Gift Cards

Buyer Beware.  If you plan on buying gift cards for the holidays, be careful.  Some stores are going out of business and won’t be honoring those cards. Below is a partial list of stores that you need to be cautious about.

1. Circuit City (filed Chapter 11)
2. Ann Taylor- 117 stores nationwide closing
3. Lane Bryant
4. Fashion Bug
5. Catherine’s to close 150 stores nationwide
6. Eddie Bauer to close stores 27 stores and more after January
7. Cache will close all stores
8. Talbots closing down specialty stores
9. J. Jill closing all stores (owned by Talbots)
10. Pacific Sunwear (also owned by Talbots)
11. GAP closing 85 stores
12. Footlocker closing 140 stores more to close after January
13. Wickes Furniture closing down 
14. Levitz closing down remaining stores
15. Bombay closing remaining stores
16. Zales closing down 82 stores and 105 after January
17. Whitehall closing all stores
18. Piercing Pagoda closing all stores
19. Disney closing 98 stores and will close more after January.
20. Home Depot closing 15 stores, 1 in NJ ( New Brunswick )
21. Macys to close 9 stores after January
22. Linens and Things closing all stores
23. Movie Galley Closing all stores
24. Pep Boys Closing 33 stores
25. Sprint/Nextel closing 133 stores
26. JC Penney closing a number of stores after January
27. Ethan Allen closing down 12 stores.
28. Wilson Leather closing down all stores
29. Sharper Image closing down all stores
30. K B Toys closing 356 stores
31. Loews to close down some stores
32. Dillard’s to close some stores
33. Mervyns

The Truth about Short Sales

by Catherine Reagor - Oct. 18, 2008, The Arizona Republic

More than 7,000 homeowners facing foreclosure in the Valley are trying to sell their homes through a process known as a short sale, according to Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service data.

But less than 5 percent manage to sell before lenders seize their houses.

The failure by banks and homeowners to agree to a short sale – to sell a home for less than the amount still owed on the mortgage – is adding to the Valley’s growing foreclosure problem.

And the government’s recent financial-bailout package to help alleviate the nation’s housing crisis will do little to address the problem of short sales.

When homeowners whose property values have collapsed fall into arrears on a mortgage, short sales allow them to negotiate a deal with their lender to sell their home for less than they owe and avoid foreclosure.

An increase in the number of short sales could slow the Valley’s record foreclosure rate, which has yet to peak.

However, a number of factors are preventing short sales:
• Lenders, overwhelmed by a record number of mortgages in default and their own losses in the financial-market meltdown, are not negotiating with many borrowers seeking a short sale.
• Many homeowners facing foreclosure wait too long before contacting their lenders.

“I don’t see many people having success with short sales, either sellers or buyers,” said Mike Orr, a Valley real-estate agent. “For buyers, the process of getting lender approval is lengthy and tiresome. Sellers often run out of time if they are already behind in their mortgage payments.”

Because there are so many foreclosed-on homes that lenders are trying to resell at bargain prices, he said, there is little incentive for a buyer to go through the “laborious” process of a short sale.

Lenders have foreclosed on almost 30,000 Valley homes this year. Most are sold for tens of thousands of dollars below what was owed on them. And many resell for thousands of dollars less than what was offered through short sales.

Better than foreclosure

The purpose of a short sale is to allow a homeowner to sell a house at its current market value and get off the hook for however much of their mortgage isn’t paid off by the sale.

Homeowners don’t get any cash from a short sale but avoid a foreclosure black mark on their credit. A short sale impacts credit, too, but not as badly.

A short sale is better for a neighborhood because it means a home is being purchased by someone and not foreclosed on by the lender, left vacant for months and then resold for even less.

Also, short sales usually cost lenders less than a foreclosure. Research from the national financial-consulting firm Clayton Holdings Inc. indicates lenders lose only 19 percent of a home’s loan amount on a short sale, compared with 40 percent on a foreclosure.

“Short sales are the best solution out there for the borrower, the bank and the buyer,” said Randy Kutz of HomeSmart’s Phoenix Heritage Real Estate Group. However, he said short sales are “the brain surgery of real estate” and take time and expertise to execute.

Bank-Owned Properties Drive Market

 

Valley home-owners who are trying to sell have some steep competition these days: motivated lenders.  A little more than 49 percent of all the resales recorded in Pinal Country in March were bank-owned properties, according to RL Brown’s Phoenix Housing Market Letter.  These “REO” – real estate owned – homes that have gone back to the lenders through foreclosures are selling for real deals, of course.

Maricopa Country’s REO sales are climbing as well, but make up a smaller portion of the area’s housing market.  About 22 percent of all resales in Maricopa were REO in March, Brown reported.  That compared with 21 percent in February and 16.7 percent in January.

Source: Catherine Reagor, In Pinal, lender-owned properties drive market, Arizona Republic 4/27/2008

 

Gilbert Home Auction

Looking for a good deal?  Not interested in the outskirts of Maricopa, Buckeye, Surprise, or Queen Creek?  Consider Gilbert!  Stillbrooke builders have thrown in the towel at their Higley Park Villages community and have handed over the 17 already-built homes over to a company to auction them off to the public at a steep discount.  What type of discount you ask?  How about $89,000 opening bid for a house that was once valued at $250,000?  The smallest home (1,550 square feet) in the Higley Park Villages going to auction starting out at $69,000 (allegedly once $236,000).  The largest home (2,302 square feet) will start bidding at $109,000 (allegedly once valued at $301,000).  Higley Park Villages is a neighborhood near the crossroads of Ray and Higley!

If you’d like to see pictures, prices and floorplans of the 17 homes being auctioned, let me know and I’ll get you the information.

The Auction will be held at the Sheraton Wild Horse Resort and Spa in Chandler on Saturday, April 19th only.  You must inspect properties prior to that date.  If you’d like more details about this action, feel welcome to email me at Becky@BeckyWyattOnline.com or call me at 480-383-9209. I plan on going to observe – I’d love some company!

Best Places to Get Foreclosure Deals

In markets where housing appears to be stabilizing, buying a foreclosure could be a very good deal.

Forbes magazine has analyzed the country’s 100 largest metro areas and then differentiated among inexpensive foreclosure markets and those that were undervalued.

For instance, there are plenty of homes going for practically nothing in Detroit, but the chances of recouping your investment are made more difficult because of the city’s economic challenges. On the other hand in a city like Raleigh, N.C., where the local economy is booming, searching for and buying a discounted foreclosed property could be a very good deal.

Forbes identified the healthiest economies and then looked at the spread between median prices and foreclosure prices, with data supplied by RealtyTrac, to determine where banks and sellers were offering the largest discounts on foreclosed properties.

Here are the top 10 cities where the magazine believes the best bargains can be found:

1. Charlotte, N.C.
2. Raleigh, N.C.
3. Nashville, Tenn.
4. Oklahoma City, Okla.
5. San Antonio, Texas
6. Albuquerque, N.M.
7. Knoxville, Tenn.
8. Seattle, Wash.
9. Indianapolis, Ind.
10. Washington, DC-Arlington-Alexandria, Va.

Source: Forbes, Matt Woolsey and Jon Bruner (03/19/08)

Wanna Investment?

Builders resort to selling homes at auctions
Opening bid for a $349,900 home: $190,000

Rebekah L. Sanders
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 22, 2008 12:00 AM

Home builders in Arizona, whose lavish incentives haven’t attracted buyers in the slumping market, are turning to the auction block as a last resort to sell empty houses. Scottsdale-based Cachet Homes is auctioning 28 of its luxury homes on Sunday in the West Valley, some once priced at more than $750,000. Bids start at about half of the homes’ original prices. Most properties will have no minimum reserve. The developer is following a national trend of builders’ letting home buyers set their own prices. The sale is the first live auction in Maricopa County by a home builder, said Diane Byrne, Cachet Homes vice president of marketing. Online auctions and sales of foreclosed or individual homeowner properties also are gaining traction, she said….

…In Arizona and nationally, home builders are faced with a glut of unsold homes and canceled contracts, as well as less traffic and fewer offers at their developments. Potential customers are fighting suddenly stiffer credit hurdles and often the challenge of selling their existing homes.  Cachet has faced similar problems with its homes at Verrado, a DMB master-planned community in Buckeye. “We’re tired of being landlords; we’d rather be builders,” Byrne said. Recent marketing strategies, such as promising two-year Lexus leases with home sales last fall, failed to unload enough inventory, she said. “We would like to see those homes filled up with families,” Byrne said.

Such low prices show how eager the developer is to get homes off its hands, said RL Brown, publisher of the Phoenix Housing Market Letter.
“Not only is it a cost drag every month to keep (inventory) on hand and fresh,” he said, “as long as a builder has inventory, his lenders are likely not going to allow him to build more houses.”  Similar new-home auctions have taken place in Florida, California and Colorado, said Rhett Winchell, president of the Kennedy Wilson Auction Group, which is conducting Sunday’s sale.  “Most sellers don’t think about auction-marketing programs when the market is hot,” he said.  But when the market is slow and previous incentives haven’t worked, sellers rely on auctions to get rid of one to two years’ worth of homes in a day, Winchell said.

In Cachet Homes’ case, about $21 million in property will be on the auction block. “There has been a tremendous amount of interest in the auction,” Winchell said, declining to give information on the number of registrants. However, current Cachet Homes property owners visiting the auction office Thursday said they had paid “royally” a year ago to live in Verrado and were concerned about the auction’s low starting bids.

Cachet is offering 15 townhomes and 13 single-family homes at Verrado, as well as 16 condos at Flagstaff Ranch in Flagstaff. The prices just cover Cachet’s costs to build, Byrne said. The cheapest in the Verrado collection is a 1,975-square-foot townhome with three bedrooms and two baths starting at $190,000. Original price tag: $349,900.  The highest-priced house, at almost 5,000 square feet, features four bedrooms, a game room and 3.5 baths. It’s going for $375,000, a markdown of 55 percent.

Realtor James Lee of Jess and Associates in Phoenix said he is taking a client to the auction “looking for her dream retirement home.”
The minimum bids starting “really, really low” caught his client’s attention, he said. “She really likes the neighborhood. She wants something newer than her home in Avondale. And her husband likes to golf.” Cachet Homes’ properties have access to Verrado’s Raven Golf Course, plus features such as granite countertops, courtyards, pools and views of the White Tank Mountains. Despite current residents’ worries about pricing, marketing agents said sales could reach original listing prices with enough competition among bidders. Brown said the strategy could create a “mini-market frenzy,” driving up prices through bidding even better than other methods of sale. “If this auction has success,” he said, “you’re going to see auctions galore.”

Interested in attending an auction like this? Call or email me and I’ll get you more information.  – Becky 480-393-9209 or Becky@BeckyWyattOnline.com

My New Year’s Resolutions

Happy New Years!

I wanted to share 3 personal New Year’s Resolutions with you all. If you have one of your own you’d like to share, feel welcome to add a comment!

1. Invest in Real Estate. I hope to practice what I preach by taking advantage of the low low prices in the Phoenix real estate market. We are seeing 2003 prices back again. Lender owned properties are all over the place. Home builders have slashed prices. I plan to either upgrade myself and buy a new-build, or find an ugly lender-owned property that failed to sell at foreclosure auction. Phoenix real estate will be one of the first markets to rebound considering our weather, jobs and popularity. See related post here. It can be confusing out there…for more on the differences between REO/bank/lender/corporate owned properties, short sales/pre-foreclosures and other investment deals stay tuned for another post or email me at Becky@BeckyWyattOnline.com.

2. Capture Memories. I took some great vacations in 2007. San Francisco, Austin, San Antonio, and I took some great photos. But I haven’t gotten around to putting them in an album, or framing them, or putting them on a DVD. I really want to get organized. So far www.picasa.com has been a help. I’d also like to convert VHS tapes of home movies to DVD form. I’m actually waiting for the technology to get beyond DVDs (they break, they scratch, they skip) and go to some indestructible memory stick.

3. Throw a Party. I realized this holiday season that I haven’t hosted a party at my home in a long time. I had a fun client party at Freestone Park with burgers and soda…but nothing with cocktails, adults and desserts. Maybe for Valentine’s Day…

Deal of the Week!

Each week as I’m out looking at property I keep my eye out for smokin’ deals.  This week I’ve found one.  This deal considers the very valid old saying “LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION.”  While builders typically have the best deals right now as they try to push inventory off their books in time for 2008, often the deal is tainted by a crumby “outskirts” location. Similar to a car dealership, builders are desperately trying to move product.  This week’s deal is in a community in South Gilbert – but conveniently located right near the new San Tan 202 Freeway.  It is near TONS of shopping and the new San Tan Village mall. 

This home is a brand new builder spec.  A “spec” home is simply a pre-built home where you don’t get much choice on the upgrades or options.  It’s built. Ready to go.  Begging for new owners.  The begging goes like this…

  

Hi, I want to be your new home.

• I am a popular floor plan with 3,912 square feet
• I have 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms
• I am on a huge private lot (13,500 sqft)
• I have stainless appliances, double ovens, gas cooktop
• I have granite countertops and crown moulding
• I have beautiful cherry cabinets with decorative moulding
• I have pavers in the driveway to your 3 gar garage
• I am in a neighborhood where all the homes look really nice
• I have an RV gate and Home Theatre package
• I was priced at $628,625 but now am only $463,625 ($165,000 off)

So, lets review. Almost 4,000 square feet of home, NEW, on a BIG LOT, in a NICE neighborhood for $463,625. That’s $118 per square foot – amazing price for Gilbert.  There is another spec in this neighborhood that was $109 per square foot.  But since I have very strict criteria for a Deal of the Week, that house didn’t make it because the floor plan was dumb.  If you’d like to see the floor-plan or pictures of this Deal of the Week email me at Becky@BeckyWyattOnline.com and mention “Deal of the Week in Gilbert posted Nov. 15th”.