Wasilla Real Estate News, Valley Market Real Estate

Global Warming or House Warming? January 4th, 2007

Categories: For Buyers, For Sellers, New Construction, Wasilla Real Estate News

It’s 17 degrees below zero at my house right now, and I’m in Palmer, the banana belt of Alaska.  I just checked  weather underground and the forecast for Fairbanks is a low of -40 tomorrow.  This is coming off about 2 weeks of snow every day.  I think Anchorage currently is ahead of their record snowfall.  At least the sky is clear and the mountains are pretty

At this temperature you don’t need an infrared camera to tell where your house is losing heat.  Just go outside and take a good look.  Do you see collections of frost in different areas?  Those are causes by either air leakage from inside your house, or by warmth leaking out of the house because of insufficient insulation.  Either way you are contributing to global warming by warming the outside rather than the inside of your home. 

Take a good look at those frosty spots.  If they are just under an eave of a cathedral ceiling, or just around the outside of a door or window that means air is leaking at those spots.  You need to seal those areas with insulation, foam, or caulk.  If you use foam around a door or a window make sure it’s not expandable foam or it could cause the frame to deform.  All that warmth going to the outside can be quantified in dollars spent on your heating bills.  Air leakage can also cause moisture to collect inside your walls since it usually starts condensing before actually hitting the cold outside air. 

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Written by Marty Van Diest Please leave a comment.

Neal Fried Is Bullish On The Valley January 3rd, 2007

Categories: For Buyers, For Sellers, Market Trends, Wasilla Real Estate News

• Neal Fried was in Wasilla today giving a great presentation regarding the Mat-Su economy to the Valley Board of Realtors. Neal is an economist for the State of Alaska. He has a talent for making statistics seem interesting.   He is excited about research.  I was excited about his statistics. All the charts are courtesy of Neal Fried, click on them to enlarge.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. The population in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough continues to grow even though other population areas are shrinking.  The chart to the top left illustrates that.  The valley continues to show healthy growth even though Anchorage actually experienced negative growth.  The state as a whole also saw negative growth as the yellow column shows.
2. Job growth in 2006 was slower, but still healthy.  The four years previous to 2006 showed job growth of over 1,000 new jobs per year but 2006 saw only 646 new jobs.  Fried’s guess is that 2007 will be similar to this year in job growth.
3. Housing affordability has decreased. This has been the case nationwide.  Prices of homes have increased to the point that it now takes 1.9 workers at an average Valley income to afford the average home in the valley.  However, since Anchorage wages are higher it only takes 1.4 Anchorage workers to afford that same home.  That is the reason we have so many Anchorage workers living here.  In fact, 35% of our work force commutes to Anchorage.  In addition, another 10% work elsewhere in the state. 

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   Written by Marty Van Diest 3 Comments »

How To Price Your Home To Sell December 29th, 2006

Categories: For Sellers

In a previous article we looked at Five Common Methods To Determine Price. In this post I will discuss how to come up with a price that will actually result in a sale. After all it?s your price, your condition, and your location that determines whether your house will sell at all. You have no control over your location since you are already living there. Condition is important and we will talk about it in the future. Any property will sell if it is priced right. The answer to your marketing time is PRICE.

I mentioned to a group of realtors last week that pricing a home is more of an art than a science. Now, after 15 years of marketing real estate in Wasilla and Palmer I make a myriad of adjustments in determining the correct value of a home. If a home could be priced with strict mathematical adjustments it would be easy to digitize. But computerized valuations will never be able to make accurate value assessments in rural areas where we observe such a variety of properties.

Lets look at a few of the adjustments needed to accurately determine value.

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Written by Marty Van Diest 1 Comment »

Five Common Methods To Determine Price December 28th, 2006

Categories: For Sellers, Market Trends

In a market with ten months or more of inventory it is extremely important to correctly price your home.  If it is even slightly overpriced it will most likely prevent it from selling.  Remember, ten months worth of inventory doesn’t mean that your home will sell in ten months.  It’s not like we will run out of inventory in ten months so that your home will sell because it is the last one on the market. 

What happens is that homes are always entering and leaving the market.  The homes that are priced to sell move fairly quickly and are replaced by others.  The overpriced houses can sit on the shelf forever without a sale.  In Wasilla and Palmer, (not the whole core area), the median sales price for the 1,005 homes sold in 2006 was $225,000.  The median asking price currently is $259,950.  Any home that is priced $35,000 too high is going to be on the market for a long time.  In fact, if a house with a market value of $225,000 is actually put on the market at that price, it will likely sell in 60 days or less.  However if the same house is marketed at $260,000, it will likely take a year or more to sell it if the owner doesn’t lower the price. 

Five common methods to determine the price.

1. Some people choose the price of their home based on the amount of money they want to walk away with.  To them, it doesn’t matter how much the house is worth, they need a certain amount in their pocket and that is how they determine the price.

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Written by Marty Van Diest 4 Comments »