Camillus, NY

The real estate market is moving quite nicely here in the town of Camillus. According to the MLS, 47 listings have accepted offers in the past 30 days, and are presently either at a K or P status (K means an offer has been accepted but there's some type of contingency, for example a home inspection to be performed, and P means all contingencies have been removed). But the real question is what is selling?

Currently, there are only 2 colonials listed under $100k. Leroy St. in the village, and the corner of Melrose and Hudson streets in old Fairmount. They are both listed as active. The rest are mainly capes and ranches. I did see the cute grey cape on Turner (across from the municipal building) pended.

The big activity is $100 - 200,000. 35 of the 47 fall into that range, and of those 23 are priced below $140,000. The ever popular Orchard village claims 7 K or P listings: two on West Way, two on Forrest, and one each on Northfield, Terrace and Pear Tree. Technically Pear Tree isn't Orchard village, but most people think it is. Also the very popular Hidden Knolls is doing well, with two on Flint Path and one on Quartz with accepted offers. Not surprising, the two on Yorkshire also have offers. There are 57 active listings in this price range.

Looking in the MLS at every house listed over $200,000, there are 96 active listings, 36 of which are currently existing (not "to be built"). There are only 2 K status, and two pended that have accepted offers in the past 30 days. Even outside our 30 day snapshot, there are only 16 listings K or P over $200,000.

An interesting comparison is if you look at what's available in the Westhill school district and exclude the town of Camillus, since those listings have already been included above. Priced above $200,000, there are only 5 listings with accepted offers, and 34 active listings. The percentages of listings with accepted offers to total listings run nearly equal: 14% Camillus and 13% Westhill schools.

Again looking between the town of Camillus and Westhill schools, but in the $100 - 200,000 range, the percentages of total listings with accepted offers in Camillus is 38% to Westhill's 43% - a fair comparison. Now I will throw a curve ball into all these numbers - sometimes a property is listed as active when it's really sold. Sometimes a listing hangs out at a K status, when it should be P. The only way I can adjust for those instances is to call every listing agent that shows up in my search, and that' s not happening today. Or tomorrow.

I guess my point is, if you're thinking about selling, and you live in either the town of Camillus or Westhill school district, things are looking pretty darn good if you're in the $100-200k range, particularly if you're priced under $140,000.

FYI - you can track local active and K listings through several websites, but you won't find Pended listings, as they are no longer being marketed. You can also track post closing sales through the Sunday paper, and it will even tell you the sales price.

While on vacation last week, someone asked me this. So I decided to share :-)

A broker's open, quite simply, is an open house for real estate agents. Agents are usually busy hosting open houses on Sundays, and can't get to the other public open houses. Around the greater Syracuse area, the day and time of your neighborhood's broker's opens are generally determined by the board of Realtors. That is to say, they've established a general schedule for agents to follow. For example, on the west side, we have them on Tuesdays. We start in the city, covering the west and south sides earliest, and work our way outward. A Tipp Hill listing might be open 10 - 12, and a Skaneateles listing might be 12 - 2. By following the schedule, it allows agents to see the most number of houses on the least amount of time.

There are several reasons why we have broker's opens - and I have to admit that I've heard that they are not very successful in other areas. From a seller's perspective, the number one reason to agree to hold a broker's open is to let agents preview your home. This will save you time (and cleaning!) if the agent determines your house doesn't meet his buyer's needs. On the flip side, an agent might decide that your home is perfect for his buyer when he wasn't even originally considering it! One of my favorite "tricks" is to offer some type of snack or light meal to agents. If they stay to eat (which most of them do because it's the only way we get lunch that day), then they stay in the house a little longer than just "cruising through". The longer they are in the house, the more they remember it. The more they remember it, the more likely they are to talk about it. The more they talk about it, the more it piques the curiousity of other agents... it is a subtle, yet effective method of network marketing.

Now to throw a curve ball, I have to wonder how much longer broker's opens will remain popular as the price of gas keeps increasing. Syracuse's northern suburbs have been predominately "caravan style", where several agents pile into a few cars, and each listing is only open for a few minutes. It's not uncommon for a few agents within a single office to ride along together for east and west side opens, but the listing is still open for a couple of hours. Personally, I wish I could bike to broker's opens. Sometimes the distance is just too far, but what really stops me is the idea of showing up in biker shorts and shirt with helmet hair. I'm all for business-casual dress, but that seems a little bit toooooo casual. Although, if gas hits $5 a gallon this summer, I'm going to rethink that. In my opinion, the benefits of a broker's open outweighs my vanity.

What a day yesterday! A black bear was spotted in a residential Fairmount neighborhood yesterday around 6:45 AM, and most of the day was uneventful. This neighborhood, for those of you familiar with the Fairmount area, is pretty deep into civilization (and is split between the West Genesee and Westhill school districts). My sophomore son did tell me a number of jokes floating around the high school about the bear, but that apparently was it for excitement until...

The West Genesee school district decided to lockdown all the middle and elementary schools at the end of the day, and not let anyone go home without permission from a parent first. The irony being that either the decision was made to lockdown after the high school students were released as usual, or after someone figured out that high school students are immune to bear attacks. I'm not sure which, but as I look over at my computer gaming addicted son, I think it might be the latter.

Anyhow, parents of every student had to be contacted by a teacher before students could be released to ride the bus home, or parent had to go pick their child up. I can't even imagine what the teachers were thinking when they found this tidbit of information out. Parents had no advance knowledge this was the situation, and I know the chaos it caused in my house for a few hours.

Now, at the middle schools, I don't think this was as much of an issue because so many middle school students have cell phones. My 6th grader called me on her cell phone, and I wouldn't be surprised if she handed her phone around the room for others to use (at my expense, I'm sure, since I pay the cell phone bill). My point being, multiple phone calls could be made simultaneously. But in the elementary schools, hee hee hee hee... I think there are teachers missing clumps of hair today after pulling it out. If there are 25 students per classroom, and 5 classes per grade, through 5 elementary schools (Easthill, Split Rock, Onondaga Road and two at Stonehedge), and if each school has 10 land lines, it's going to take some time to make all those phone calls.

So you're asking why did the school decide to lockdown? Well, you're not the only one asking that question. There were no more sitings after 6:45ish in the morning that were made known to the public, until the thing was caught around 7 last evening - in the same area it was first spotted, about three miles from the high school. They let all students go out and catch the busses to school in the morning without any warnings to parents, and then they let the high school students go home without any issues. soooo.... I'm not sure what prompted the events to cause lockdown. It's nice they were thinking of the students' safety in the afternoon.

All said and done, my 6th grader got home about an hour and 10 minutes later than normal, but my 2nd grader was about an hour and 45 minutes later than normal. He was tired, irritable, and hungry, and acting like a bear himself.

There are many things about the day that I don't know. But thing I know for certain - the day has created a memory that the kids will remember for many years to come.

I got my new tax assessment in the mail last Friday. I had a warning first, when a neighbor called me to complain about his. Turns out he's justified in complaining a bit. Another neighbor called later in the day, and I had to tell him that he can't complain about it. I would happily list his house for $30,000 more than his new assessed value!

I went home, checked the mail, and sure enough "the letter" was there. Our assessment went up 35%. Took me a second. WHAT!!!!! 35%????? Are they nuts??? The town just had a major reassessment two years ago. Last year our house didn't go up at all, and the market grew about 3%. Now here's my thinking: if everyone averaged a 3% increase, how the #*!! did we go up 35%?!?!?! We didn't have any major improvements. Come to think of it, we didn't have any improvements. We live in a modest neighborhood, that is only moderately sought after by home buyers.

It didn't take long and my phone really started ringing. Most of the people I talked to have NOTHING to complain about. They went up about 3%. So far, the next closest jump to ours I've heard of is 9%.

Time to take action. I went to the assessor's office to sign up for an informal review. As I was standing there, the woman in line in front of me asked the assessor if her (the assessor's) son's value had gone up. She said yes it had, and he was complaining too. Then, one of the clerks made a comment about how everyone's value has to go up because the houses keep selling for more than the assessed value (more on this ridiculous statement in a minute). I just couldn't keep my mouth shut, and made a comment about how I was a Realtor, and I hadn't seen anyone in the town sell their house for 35% higher than the assessed value in the past year. That pretty quickly ended the conversation, and the clerk very quietly gave me a May 1st appointment, while the assessor left the room without making eye contact with me.

Now, back to the ridiculous statement about how assessments need to keep going up... this line of thinking ignores a very basic fact: seller concessions. Sometimes (often) buyers need seller concessions, and that "beefs up" the sales price. Is the property worth that extra money? One the one hand you could argue yes, because a bank was willing to finance that much. But you could also argue no, the buyer considered the value to be less, and isn't a property ultimately worth only what someone is willing to pay for it?

In the grand scheme of things, I'm sure there are people in other areas of the country that are dealing with higher assessments combined with decreasing values. I'm glad to say we're still gaining in value. The trade off for us locally is that when everywhere else was seeing huge numbers in appreciation, we saw moderate gains. I still feel better after ranting a bit. I don't want my taxes to go up another $600 per year. From now through May 1st, I will be pulling closed transactions from the MLS, and searching ongov.net for similar assessments. I aim to walk into that meeting fully prepared.

You don't want to call and bother an agent, you just want some basic information about what's available and how prices tend to run in an area. Buyers might be weighing the pros and cons of several different neighborhoods. Potential sellers are wondering what they might be able to sell their houses for. Real estate addicts might just need a little "fix" to hold them over. Whatever your reason, here's the lowdown on the town of Camillus real estate happenings.

As of this writing, there are 149 single family residential active listingsin the MLS, priced from $24,900 all the way up to $1,940,000. They've been in the MLS for as little as a few hours, to as long as 772 days (that's 2 years, 42 days). Five listings are priced at $119,900, another five priced at $199,900, and twenty-one listed at $250,000 (all twenty-one of which are in Starlight Estates).

One listing has 6 bedrooms, three listings have 5 bedrooms, and fifteen listings have 2 bedrooms - which means most have 3 or 4 bedrooms. Three listings are more than 100 years old, built in 1811, 1832 and 1890 (isn't that something?)

There are 50 ranches, 49 colonials, 12 cape cods, 10 contemporary, and 7 patio homes. I realize this doesn't add up, but that's because I didn't list every style of home available, and for a reason. One, it's not uncommon for a home's style to be defined more than one way. For example, a colonial that still looks like a colonial outside, but has been overhauled inside and is very contemporary. A listing agent may decide to list both styles. Second, I've learned over the years that what qualifies as a certain style to one person is called something entirely different by someone else. A good example of this would be the differences between split levels, split ranches and raised ranches. Locally, we almost never use "split ranch", even though there are plenty around. We tend to call them ranches or raised ranches.

On the sale side of single family residential... there are currently 65 contingent and pended listings. 18 of them pended this month. That's a good sign - houses are selling! Another 13 listings have closed in the past 30 days. That's another good sign - houses have sold AND closed!

I understand I might not have given you quite as much information as you were hoping to find, but I'm just getting started! I'll be back with regular updates about Camillus that are more in depth, and will also start talking about Syracuse and other towns in Onondaga County. In the meantime, there are a few places you can check out for more information. For active listings in the area, there's always www.cnyrealtor.com. The real estate section of the Sunday paper lists recent closings. You can also check out www.ongov.net for all kinds of info, including current assessments, tax bills, and even the ability to search out comparable properties. It's a very informative site, and probably under-utilized.

Check back soon, I promise to have more for you. I, myself, would like to know more about what's going on with the land on Hinsdale Road at the bypass. I've heard quite a bit, but want to double check some things before reporting it. Have a good one!

Fun fact: According to www.syracuse.com Syracuse owns the world's largest snowplow. It's out at Hancock International Airport, and the blade is 32' 3" long, 48" high, and can clear up to 8500 cubic yards of snow per hour. Check it out!