Boise Real Estate Blog

Oct. Boise, Idaho Real Estate Stats

I finally found time to run October MLS statistics and here’s how things look:

Current active listings = 4,482 (down from a peak of 4,766 a couple of weeks ago)

Closed Units – October 2006 = 669 @ an average sales price of $271,789

This compares to 1,114 closed units during October 2005 @ an average sales price of $247,549, resulting in a 40% decline in closed units for October year-over-year, but with a 9.1% increase in the average sales price.

Obviously, we shouldn’t expect to see our average sales price continue to rise with declining closed units.

It is apparent from these stats that our so-called “correction” is absurdly overdone.

Why is our market off 40% in closed units with an average sales price of $271,789 vs. other higher-priced market such as San Diego, San Joaquin Valley, Bay Area, etc.?

You can still get one helluva nice home here for $300k, we have 3.2% unemployment, very little crime, great weather, etc.

I think we may see a snapback in our market once we work off some of our excess inventory and people come to their senses.

Sure is a good time to be a buyer here ~ pick out half a dozen homes you like and make offers until you find someone who has to sell!

(stats are for single-family homes on lots/acreage in Ada County, taken from Intermountain MLS data)

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400 Albertson’s Jobs Leaving Boise

When SuperValu bought Albertson’s last summer, I wondered why they would need duplicative staff in Boise when their headquarters was in Minnesota.

Now the handwriting is on the wall.

According to an article in the Idaho Statesman, at least 400 Albertson’s jobs will leave Boise in the next 18 months and that may be just the beginning.

All 400 jobs are in the merchandising and marketing departments.

SuperValu officials said last Friday that they will “keep evaluating” which corporate jobs to keep in Boise.

Yeah, right.

The employees are being offered similar positions in Minnesota with relocation benefits, but it remains to be seen how many will accept the company’s “offer” to relocate to balmy Minnesota, known for having mosquitoes with landing lights and wheels (wonder if they have West Nile Virus there??)

Many of the affected employees were relocated to Boise within the past two years, and I can only imagine that they’re a little weary of having their lives continually disrupted by “the company” in order to keep their jobs.

About 2,100 Albertson employees will remain at the Boise location (for now).

How will this affect the Boise real estate market?

Hard to tell.

We certainly don’t need 400 more homes on the market now, but not all of those 400 people will move out of our area.

In the past, layoffs at Micron and Hewlett Packard barely caused a ripple in the market, but that was at a time when the Boise real estate market was stronger.

Boise is a great place to live and most people will do just about anything to stay here.

We’ll get through it.

It could have been much worse.

November 8th, 2006 Posted in About Our Area |

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The Masturbating Monkey

It was my first day in residential real estate, back in 1974.

I had been in real estate a couple of years, having begun my career selling recreational lots at a beautiful subdivision in the Sierras called Pine Mountain Lake.

When we finished selling out Pine Mountain Lake, I decided to learn the residential side of real estate and joined California Realty in Santa Clara.

On my first day in the office, I attended the weekly sales meeting, which included a motivational pep talk, a review of new listings/haves/wants, and then we headed out on the weekly “office tour”.

Office tours are a relic of the past now, but back then it was a way to impress sellers by parading our agents through new listings and telling sellers “you have a lovely home”. It didn’t accomplish much, but it made our sellers feel good.

We toured a couple of typical subdivision tract homes before coming to a property that had an abundance of, shall we say, a “character”, off Capitol Expressway.

The home was down a muddy, potholed dirt road beneath a couple of scraggly old oak trees at the base of a hill.

It was mostly noteworthy because a private pilot had bored his V-tailed Bonanza into the ground nearby on a foggy night while on approach to San Jose airport a couple of weeks earlier.

Some would have said that the property had some “deferred maintenance”, but the blunt truth was that the place was a pit!

Since I was the new kid in the office, I got to lead the other agents through the house, starting with the kitchen, then down the hall to the back of the house.

As I opened the door to a hall bath, I was stunned to see a duck floating in a bathtub full of brackish, black water, cheerfully quacking at his new visitor.

Taken aback, I made my way through the rest of the house and out the back door to check out the back yard.

Our office manager, Jim Ridgeway, was trailing me as we walked out onto a rickety wooden walkway behind the house.

As we rounded the corner, I heard a screeching sound that drew my gaze toward the tree limb above me.

To my amazement, there was a monkey hanging upside down, by his tail, in one of the old oak trees.

And, he was gleefully masturbating.

I must say, the little guy had a big grin on his upside-down face and seemed to be having the time of his life.

I turned to Jim, speechless.

Without showing any emotion, Jim simply smiled and said “Welcome to real estate, Phil!”.

I’ve had many interesting experiences during my real estate career, but none as memorable as that one.

Can any of you top that one?

November 7th, 2006 Posted in Inside Real Estate |

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How ‘Bout Them Website Leads . . .

The internet has forever changed how real estate is done.

But, some agents don’t realize that it has changed again ~ just when they thought they had it all figured out.

For many Realtors^®, it’s a matter of putting up a templated website, forcing visitors to register in order to get their contact information, then hoping they respond and buy a home.

In other words, they have an internet business card that is totally ineffective.

Perhaps a little harsh, but unfortunately true.

Believe it or not, that actually (somewhat) worked a couple of years ago.

But, these days, savvy website visitors have learned how to game the system and get the information they want without revealing themselves and risking (gasp!) talking to an agent.

For example, my website (www.BoiseReal.com) has had an astounding number of visitors with the same name.

How is it that so many people are named Ben Dover, M. Mouse, and I. M. Mee these days ??

And, there have been many visitors with incredible phone numbers like (000)000-0000 and (111)111-1111.

I don’t know about you, but I have never been able to talk the phone company into giving me a rock star phone number like that!

Seriously, the days of attracting naïve, compliant website visitors who will willingly give up their contact information are pretty much behind us.

The average real estate consumer these days is 35, web-savvy, and probably knows more about computers than the average Realtor^®, (which doesn’t take much).

That consumer wants information without having to deal directly with an agent, and most wait until late in the homebuying process to personally communicate with an agent.

I used to require registration to search MLS, but I recently removed that requirement in an effort to establish a more honest, open relationship with my website visitors.

There was no reason to continue requiring registration when most of the registrations were false and useless.

The reality is that we have moved beyond the days when a website was a direct sales tool; it is now a way to build a bridge to prospective clients ~ a way to establish a trust relationship.

Real estate websites are, more and more, becoming educational tools for consumers and a way to demonstrate how we do business to prospective clients.

The old ways no longer work as they once did.

Those who embrace the new way the consumer wishes to do business will prosper; those who don’t will wish they had.

November 6th, 2006 Posted in Inside Real Estate |

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Boise Industrial Real Estate Booming

While Boise area residential real estate catches its breath, the industrial warehouse sector is booming, according to an article in today’s Idaho Statesman.

Companies seeking to expand or establish a new presence in Boise are having difficulty finding existing warehouse space that meets their needs.

Michigan-based Weller Auto & Truck, Inc. envisions Boise as the hub for its expansion into the Western U.S. Market, but had trouble finding available warehouse space with the 20 feet of floor-to-ceiling clearance they needed, so they will be spending $1.1 million to build their 11,000 square feet of expandable warehouse space.

The current vacancy factor for such space stands at 4.8% and local commercial brokers are saying lease rental rates have climbed 10% this year.

October 28th, 2006 Posted in Around Boise |

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