About Lakewood Ranch's Lakewood Ranch

People are all more or less territorial. It is a painful thought that strangers have the run of our most precious territory: our home! I even have nightmares on the subject. So I understand when sellers make many excuses for hanging around when their homes are being shown to prospective buyers. Excuses abound, but the real reason is the primal feeling, "This place is my place. Do tell me it's beautiful, but don't violate my space! You are my guest here, but you need to be ready to leave when I say so."

Using very plausible excuses a seller will often insist on staying for the whole showing. If outmaneuvered on that front, he will dawdle around, leaving only after he has met and sized up the prospective invader, or he may lurk around the corner and show up at the end of the showing so as to strike up a conversation with the rival for his space.

Irrational, you say? Of course it is. But who called us rational? Let's see if we can't try to understand.

· Do you become uncomfortable when, in a wide open space, someone stands too close to you during a conversation, say about a foot from your face?

· Do you resent it when a dinner partner takes an unvited taste of something on your plate? Or talks and gestures across to you to the person on your other side?

· Does it bother you when a casual acquaintance rearranges your hair or clothing?

If your answer to any of these is affirmative (as mine were to all), you are beginning to understand how a seller feels when his agent suggests he not be present for a showing of "his territory."

But the buyer is also territorial. The buyer is stalking his next territory. Because he is looking for an ideal new place for himself, he resents the person who, allegedly hoping to move, sticks around seeming to insist on holding onto it. As he walks up to the door he whispers with dread, "Is the seller going to be home?" He isn't planning to steal something. He just wants a chance to envision himself at home there, find fault, contemplate changes, search out features to fall in love with. He can't do that while the sellers lurk around the corner listening for compliments or thinking up "yes buts."

Before we Realtors can hope to mediate this controversy, we will have to deal with the excuses sellers frequently use for contriving to be present. These are ones I have told myself in the past because I wanted to hear praise for my superb decorating ideas exhibited in my home. Tell me a new one I haven't used.

· I want to be here to protect my valuables.

o Pocketable valuables have no place in a home that is being marketed. If you can, put them under lock and key. If not, photo and inventory them and check for missing items immediately upon your return. If you seem to be keeping an eye on the prospective buyer, he will leave as soon as possible, missing that oak tree and those squirrels. Furthermore, a real thief can pocket something while you are holding him be the lapel. So stop kidding yourself. You just want to stand there signaling "mine, mine, mine." Keep it up and it will be yours, yours, yours for a long, long, long time, time, time.

· I want the buyer to feel welcome.

o The buyer does not want a host! He wants to "try on" a new home. You are not welcome to try it on with him! There is not room there for you both. You even emphasize that he is settling for your hand-me-down.

· Agents don't know my home as well as they should. I want to be sure Mr. Buyer knows about all the features of my home.

o Your home? Features? While you are taking advantage of his good manners as a "guest" in your home to tell him about the extra insulation in the ceiling, he is missing the fact that his new office has room for his vibrating chair and has a killer view of an oak tree with a family of squirrels frisking on its lower branch putting on a show for him. His wife stands there smiling, wishing she had her umbrella to smack you with, thinking, "George, get me the hell out of here.!"

· I want to tell him I love this place and explain why I am moving.

o Yeah, right! You want to tell him you are moving to a house with a three car garage because you need more storage and are tired of carrying groceries in from a windy carport. That gets the buyer thinking that he wants the same comfort and wouldn't it be nice to have a place to park his golf cart? Or you tell him you need a place that requires less work! Who doesn't? "So do I," he decides! Samson killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass. I remember once killing the sale of my own home with the same weapon!

· Agents who show my condo just stand there and hardly say a word.

o My answer to that objection is "Good! I'm glad to hear it," for that means the agent has been trained to listen, not to kill your sale with that famous jawbone. Show me a "good talker" and I'll show you a poor-to-average real estate salesman. A good listener is the one who will sell your home-- unless your home sells itself. Either way the sale will happen only if the buyer can hear himself think. All distractions are detrimental to your net worth.

There are more excuses without end. But none is the true reason. You, Mr. Seller, want the buyer's money, but in your heart of hearts want to keep a grip on your place, too, your territory. Believe me, I understand because I have been there, have made the same mistakes. It is human nature to defend your cave. I understand. Don't be ashamed. There are a million of us. Just get over it.

Take your choice: the money or the cave. You are not going to get both.

If you are smart, and if you truly want to sell, not just proudly "show" your home, you will meet your buyer for the first time at the closing table, collect his money, and move on. He assuredly has no interest in moving in with you: so clear out. Only then will he unclench his fist on his gold, making it yours. He will paint over the colors you chose, tear down that knee wall you installed, change the kitchen counters you were so proud of, and donate the light fixtures to Goodwill. But you will have his money. Sorry, but that's just the way this old world wags.

The charts below are for the Lakewood Ranch real estate market. Do you think this market has bottom?

Here is the chart of homes for sale, pending and sold for the the last 5 years.

In October of 2006 there were 1,773 homes for sale in the Lakewood Ranch area. In April of 2011 there are 270 homes for sale. Quite a difference eh?

Absorption Rates

Here are the absorption rates % for the 5 years of Lakewood Ranch homes. In April of 2006 the absorption rate was 2.6%. In April of 2011 the absorption rate is 18.5%.

Months of Inventory

The above chart are months of inventory based on closed sales. In April of 2006 Lakewood Ranch had 39 months of inventory. In April of 2011 there is a 5.4 month supply of homes for sale.

Has this market bottomed?

Economy's crystal ball: real estate

Mortgage rates are back in the 4 percent range, taken there by the 10-year Treasury note's drop to 3.42 percent, which has wiped out the whole early-February spike. We have Libya, oil, stocks, housing and the economy to thank, but how those pieces interact is not obvious.

Arriving economic data is obscured by incessant "recovery" cheerleading among business media. Some news is pretty good: both consumer-confidence surveys found three-year highs, which may indicate some hiring.

New claims for unemployment insurance are holding down near 400,000. Every measure of manufacturing is doing well, although scratching in at 15 percent of our economy.

The "wait-a-minutes" are led by today's downward revision in supposedly corner-turning fourth-quarter 2010 U.S. gross domestic product (from 3.2 percent to 2.8 percent).

Growth? Sure. Self-sustaining, accelerating ... not so much.

Wal-Mart's sales in the last 90-days fell 1.8 percent. Orders for durable goods in January (excluding super-volatile transportation and defense) tanked 6.9 percent. The Chicago Federal Reserve's January national index rolled to a minus sign.

If you're in doubt, consider housing. New-home sales dumped 12.6 percent in January. But, the National Association of REALTORS® says sales of existing homes rose 2.7 percent. Hmmm.

A story cooking for months: NAR may have overreported those sales for 10 years or more, high by perhaps a half-million each year vs. CoreLogic (its parent is a title company using real data), and since 2008 resulting in as many as 1.5 million imaginary sales each year.

Nothing intentional, of course -- I first joined the National Association of REALTORS® in 1978 and quickly learned not to trust the association to count to 10 on its toes and get the same answer twice in a row.

If existing-home sales are running below 4 million annually instead of above 5 million, then we have rather more trouble with distressed-inventory absorption than we thought. And market buyers and sellers have left the field or been elbowed from it.

On that subject, NAR said only 37 percent of January sales were distressed ("only" ... sheesh). CampbellSurveys.com, meanwhile, says the distressed fraction was 44 percent in November, and shot up to 49.6 percent in January (California at 66 percent, Florida at 63 percent, Arizona and Nevada at a whopping 72 percent).

Now two things not to worry about: inflation and the Middle East.

Inflation comes in a few well-defined forms. The deadly one is the wage-price spiral, which plagued us in the 1970s and can be stopped only by recession.

The U.S. today is impervious to such a spiral because we have near-zero wage growth. In fact, rising oil prices will slow this economy by crowding out other spending. Note that commodity prices have fallen -- not following oil, instead anticipating slowdown. Same for stocks.

Other inflation forms include the classic money-printing of Zimbabwe and Weimar. The Fed's "quantitative easing" (QE) program does print monetary electrons, but the money cannot make it into wallets because the credit system is still broken. No credit, no money.

The last form, cost-pushed inflation, is temporary -- it is not a structural ramp-up in general prices. That's what this is. Oil is driven by speculators, just as it was in 2008, and all should be reassured that this spike has stopped far short of that run to $150 per barrel.

Middle East ... it takes some serious chutzpah to be relaxed about the place. But, concept No. 1: the Middle East nations need to sell oil worse than we need to buy it, no matter who is in charge over there.

Non-oil economies in the Middle East have never developed, and 10-fold growth in population has made '70s-style embargoes impossible today.

No. 2: Despite U.S. bejabbers about radical Islam, these brave Tunisians, Egyptians, and Libyans are in their streets waving their national flags, not pictures of Osama.

No. 3: Post-revolutionary peoples' governments, no matter how they may roil and rock, are steadier by far than rotten autocracies, especially in dealings with neighbors. Some go sour (Iran), some are in doubt (Iraq), but dictatorships breed anger and extremism, and dictators need to pick external fights with pretend enemies.

Refounded nations, even while struggling to establish representative government, have stabilizing advantages. The greatest of these: pride at self-liberation won hard.

We live in one of those places.

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Homeowners Willing to Tackle Remodeling Projects

By Kathleen Lynn

RISMEDIA, February 25, 2011-(MCT)-Homeowners who put off renovations during the recession are thinking about spending money on their properties again. Take Barbara Moreno and Robert Ptaszynski of Washington Township, N.J., who delayed plans to add a second story to their ranch house when the recession hit their industries-automobiles and title insurance-hard. Now they're ready to move forward, because they feel more confident about the economy. "Things seem to be-knock on wood-settling down a little bit," Ptaszynski said this week at the Home Show in Secaucus, N.J. Contractors said that customers seem willing to spend again-but cautiously. "People have been procrastinating for almost three years now," said Joe Tighe of Complete Roof Systems in Dumont, N.J. During the recent economic hard times, homeowners were more likely to ask about patching and repairing, rather than replacing, their roofs. But now, they seem more willing to tackle the big jobs, he said. "The general mood I get from people is that they're ready to spend money again," Tighe said. After homeowners slashed their spending during the recession, housing analysts say the remodeling industry is poised for a bit of a revival. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, spending on remodeling is expected to rise 4-6% this year, as long as the job market and economy continue to recover. "We don't expect spending to rebound to the heights that we saw during the housing boom; that was unsustainable," said Abbe Will, an analyst at the Harvard center. "But we're in a better place now than we were a year ago. As long as the economy continues to improve, homeowners will have more confidence and be more willing to use their savings to make improvements that they've likely been putting off for a couple of years." Tax credits for energy-efficient improvements will also help buoy the market, said Will. And buyers who move into foreclosed properties over the next several years will probably have to spend significant amounts on home improvements, because those properties are typically neglected. Ray Engel of Sierra Landscape Design and Garden Center in Wanaque said he was approached at the home show by several people who said they had bought foreclosed homes and need to update the landscaping. But it's clear that homeowners continue to watch their budgets. "Everybody's looking for a better deal," said Gary Townsend of The Kitchen Guy in Little Falls. Homeowners interviewed at the at the home show, which ran for three days at the Meadowlands Exposition Center, want to make sure their homes work right, not spend tens of thousands on luxury upgrades. Janice Campbell of Cliffside Park, for example, wants to renovate her bathroom because the tub is leaking. "It needs to be done, but it doesn't mean I go overboard," said Campbell, who is retired. "It has to fit within the budget." Similarly, Sharon and David Berger of Teaneck are considering a renovation of their main bathroom, which is original to their 1950s split level, because the shower isn't working properly. "What I'm doing now is getting an idea of what things cost," said Sharon, who runs a promotional advertising business. Several of the contractors at the show said they are benefiting from homeowners' thrift. Lucia Portali Waters of Fabu Designs by Lucia in Hasbrouck Heights said that when times were good, affluent homeowners hired her to paint murals and apply decorative wall and ceiling finishes. Recently, however, she's been painting and refinishing furniture and kitchen cabinets for customers who want to be practical and save money. "They don't want to rip out their cabinets," she said. "They're not replacing; they're refinishing." James Saluzzi of Emerson Construction Corp. in Emerson said he's seen the same thing. He worked recently on updating a kitchen in Old Tappan, where the homeowner had the walls painted, the cabinets refinished and a new backsplash installed. "Five years ago, he would have ripped the whole thing out," Saluzzi said.

Main Street at Lakewood Ranch

Music on Main Street March 4th

Bring your chair and sit and listen to the evening music. Maybe even dance. From 6 to 9 pm you will be able to relax, shop or dine if you choose to. This is a free event to the public. Every month there is a different band to enjoy. This will benefit a local non-profit organization.

Your dogs are welcome. Management prefers all dogs on a short lease. Need a place to park. The Lakewood Ranch Medical Center is directly across the street.

It is sure to be a great time.

I'll see you on the ranch...

Jim Soda

www.jimsoda.com

sodasells@gmail.com / donnasoda@gmail.com

941.809.7759 / 941.961.5857