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June 2007 |
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Dear Friends and Clients, Inventory Soars, Fewer Sales, Prices Up More of the same pretty much sums up current
real estate market. Pending
sales (offers accepted but not closed) are down 13% for the four
county area over the same month last year. The inventory of available homes for sale is
up 53% over the same time last year. That’s a lot! Median prices are also
up compared to last year, generally about 10% depending on the
exact area on which you focus. We are in a period of transition and are returning to a more normal market. Not all homes sell. Buyers are more conservative. Days on market continues to stretch out… in some areas to 4 times what it was last year at the same time. Foreclosure Headlines Misleading There’s little evidence the sub-prime
mortgage problem is affecting us to any significant degree
locally. I just checked the HUD website (www.hud.gov) and found only a
single mobile home located in neighboring communities available
for sale (on the HUD foreclosure list.) You want to be a little suspicious of the foreclosure numbers you hear on the news. The company compiling the stats is in the business of selling foreclosure lists. Their numbers can count the same home 3 times because of the way they report (they include foreclosure notices as well as actual foreclosures). It’s in their best interest to inflate the numbers, although I understand they are going to ‘tighten up’ the way they report. First Harvest We’ve been eating radishes and onions out
of the garden already. Nothing
beats fresh veggies out of the garden. But our fruit trees look like the bees were
on holiday this year. Seems
like when we get wet cold weather when they bloom, fruit
production really plunges. So did you think about my musings about
advertising last month? Did
you reach any conclusions?
I did. I’m a student of advertising, and I’ve
always heard (and been taught) that people buy on emotion and
justify their purchase with logic. Being in sales, I’ve
heard it often. But until now I didn’t really understand it… especially since I was schooled as an engineer. Now I get it… It’s How Human Beings are Wired! It’s not that logic goes out the window… it isn’t there to
start with. It only
comes into play later. It’s
like falling in love. Logic
isn’t part of the process. A couple of months back I strained my back
when loading sheep for market.
Although I laid off strenuous stuff for a while, I kept
re-injuring it just a little.
I was kind of irked because I though I was in reasonable
shape from my bicycle riding Then it happened… The Sciatic Nerve. Big surprise… with lots of pain. Other than being a large nerve running through your
leg, I didn’t know much more about the sciatic nerve. I do now. If you aren’t doing exercises to keep your back in shape and your spinal cord well supported, you’re at risk of developing sciatica – and, trust me on this - lots of prolonged intense pain. Prevention takes only a few minutes a day. If you’re doing yoga,
you’re already set. A
Goggle search on “sciatic nerve” will return some 6 simple
exercises you can do to strengthen your back. Of course from an advertising standpoint, selling prevention is hard -- really hard. But it’s easy to sell a cure. I guess I learned that firsthand too. Recently I received a post card from the
Washington Department of Highways. They wanted to let me
and other Edgewood residents know they’re holding an open
house. The topic is
the expansion of Meridian from two to four lanes from 8th
St to 36th Street. I read the postcard. At first I thought it
was a misprint; construction is going to occur in two phases –
with final completion scheduled for sometime in 2023! That’s 16 years to add two lanes for 24 blocks. Naturally I got all fired up ready to charge into the open house and loudly express my outrage at the incompetence of the highway department – until my friend John gently explained it to me: The self-defined purpose of government is to grow a bureaucracy. Once the money is spent on a project, that money and that project are gone. There’s no longer justification for continuing to employ people to oversee it. But if the project is kept going and allowed to stretch out, a lot of people can be employed for a long time. And if it takes more money to complete the
project, the bureaucrats can always go back to the taxpayers and
say, “if we don’t complete the project, we’ll have wasted
all that money we’ve already spent.” Maybe it’s cynical, but it pretty much
explains to me why we have so many ongoing projects, and so
relatively few ever seem to be completed. Now, tell me again when the SR-167 extension going to be completed?
Lee R. Mason
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