Category — Real Estate

I was meeting my brother for breakfast at Arrigonis yesterday and thought I’d look at a few properties while I was waiting. This currently active listing in Santa Rosa is a very nice fixer opportunity. It’s in the heart of downtown, but just far enough away from the busiest streets that it’s got a peaceful feeling. It’s in the Cherry Historical District and is listed for just under $500K. From my point of view, this historical home downtown is a great opportunity to support the new urbanism, grab a property that will be the envy of your condo-dwelling friends, and take advantage of excellent appreciation over time. Sure, it’s going to take some work to maintain, but so would any other home, old or not.

9 out of 10 buyers are looking for a house in great, move-in condition. Homes like that sell faster, get a higher price, and obviously save wear and tear on buyers who are probably stressed enough from the move that they don’t need additional headaches. So why do I like the dilapidated houses that are gently known as fixers?

I suppose it comes from my background in construction. I see the sagging roof and the three inch drop in the kitchen floor as interesting challenges rather than show stoppers. I also know how much money is involved in new construction and think the decades of work put into most structures represent building capital that should be conserved. On the other hand, it’s a whole lot easier to start from scratch than to try to work with someone else’s mistakes and the effects of neglect on wooden structures.

I did a quick search on the Sonoma County MLS listings and came across 75 properties in which the listing agents were honest enough to use the term “Fixer”. The best priced fixer in Sonoma County right now is a $99,000 project in Guerneville. What makes this cabin such an interesting opportunity is that the neighboring duplex with good parking and solid foundations is also on the market. There’s work to be done, but it’s hard to find three units on four lots for $400K. Let me know if you’d like more details on this.

At the other end of the spectrum is a <cough> bargain</cough> in downtown Sonoma with the low, low price of $1,145,000. A tear down on .14 of an acre. It’s amazing how much scope the word “Fixer” can provide. All I can take from this contrasting example of a fixer is that location, location, location is still alive and well as the primary driver in real estate values..

We don’t have a lot of old bridges left, at least steel truss bridges that remind me of the Erector Sets I grew up with. There’s one in Guerneville, but so many RV’s got dinged up trying to pass each other that they’ve made it into a pedestrian bridge and created a functional, but un-dramatic concrete replacement. This bridge, the Wohler Bridge, not only represents the engineering past for all of us, but it crosses the Russian River between Healdsburg and Forestville at a particularly beautiful stretch.<More>

I can’t help it. I’ve always found round porches to be enticing features for a home. Maybe it was growing up in the 50’s with Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe as prototype women, but curves have always attracted me. Healdsburg’s grand dames have more of these finely detailed fronts than anywhere else I’ve been. Here are a few choice models from within a few blocks of the Healdsburg plaza.

Many long time Sonoma County residents have been a little skeptical of Windsor. In the immortal words of Gertrude Stein about her childhood home in Oakland, “there is no there, there.” That may have been a little unfair since Windsor has a long history as an important farming town and market center. The residential building boom in the last thirty years has converted the sleepy town into a typical subidivision town, but with the new efforts going on in the town core, tt’s time to reconsider.

In the last few years old downtown Windsor has been rebuilt with a smart new mixed-use pedestrian friendly core. The new buildings are vibrant and represent a new burst of creativity for this town between Santa Rosa and Healdsburg along the Highway 101 corridor.

Driving down the road yesterday I just had to stop and grab this picture of Sonoma County’s most prideful crop; the grape. One look should convince you of the correctness of the proposition that the grape is among the most beautiful, the most luscious, the most perfect expression of nature’s goodness. We are beloved creatures to have such bounty lavished upon us.

I got inspired to write today by a question from a Silicon Valley dweller. He asked about getaway properties, distances from highways and cities, peace and quiet and related issues. This is a topic worthy of an extended discussion, so I’m going to break those topics down into separate posts over the next few days. For now, the main message I want to convey is that Sonoma County is an excellent land and housing value along the Highway 101 corridor. From Salinas in the south to Cloverdale at the north end of Sonoma County, none of the other counties are as affordable. Speaking as someone who adopted Sonoma County just as Luther Burbank did, I can’t imagine that any of the other counties is better for growing things either. I’ll provide some statistical basis for my arguments in another post.

One of the programs I learned about at the Inman conference was RealEstateShows.com, a service that lets you build presentations. Jeff Tucker and his team have done a great job creating an easy to use tool that creates the pan and zoom animation effect perfected by Ken Burns in his Civil War series. Immediately below is my first one. And here’s one of my sweet wife singing

I spent two days this week at the Inman real estate technology conference in San Francisco. The biggest buzz was about blogs and social networks as the next big thing in real estate. Being both a pack animal and a geek, I had to rush right out and start fooling around with this new technology.

I’m sure the real estate uses of social networking are going to take off fast. Sites like MySpace and FaceBook connect and inform today’s users in powerful ways… So don’t be surprised if you start getting real estate updates on your iphone and social networks soon. The most talked about site at the conference was Active Rain. They are an interesting mix of professional and conusmer real estate information. Another popular site is Technorati, a blog rating service. Check My Technorati Profile on their site.