Jeff Craig Broker, CSP

Festivale Italiano 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009 from 12:00pm - 6:00pm

The goal of Festivale Italiano is to embrace the entire Greensboro community and to provide food, activities, education, art, and atmosphere that is truly Italian. This is our opportunity to step forward to celebrate a wonderful culture and a very important segment of our community! Authentic food, drink, music, art, education, bike ride, games - everything Italian will be celebrated.

Downtown residents will certainly want to open their windows to catch the wonderful aroma as local restaurants prepare food for the day, listen to the traditional Italian music and entertainment, and to feel the excitement as hundreds of families fill the streets of downtown Greensboro on this Sunday afternoon!

It's time for a change. Who knows what it will bring for me.

After three years as a sales and marketing manager for a custom builder, I'll be leaving the company this week. It's really a mutual decision, that we both regret, but know is necessary. Hopefully it will help the company survive and become stronger and provide new directions for me.

I don't care how much the President and those in power in Washington claim the recession is over, it just aint so! Unemployment is still rising in my area and builders are still going under despite their best efforts to stay afloat. But, I truly believe the next year will be better for home sales.

I will likely get back into general brokerage and try to represent several builders. With so many leaving real estate over the last year, I think it's actually a good time to get back into it. I also believe all the people who have put off buying new homes over the last year or so, will feel more confident about the economy and decide it's time to make that big move.

So, I'm a little sad at leaving a company I enjoyed working for, but look forward to new opportunites and a brighter future for all of us.

There are some local builders in my area that have been building custom homes for years. When I moved here twenty years ago, they already had reputations as the best builders in town. Fast forward twenty years and they are still here and still have the reputations and high brand recognition.

Well, it's not always deserved. One of these builders still gets a big chunk of the local business, based mainly on reputation. That would be great if he deserved it. Now please don't go thinking I just have a case of sour grapes because I'm not getting that business. OK, maybe just a little :-) But, time after time, especially during the annual Parade of Homes, I have people going through our spec homes telling me how much better the quality of our construction is and how our attention to detail is so much better. Frequently the other builder's homes are priced several hundred thousand dollars higher than ours.

So, the general perception is that they are still the best builder in town, yet it just may not be the case any more. I would never bad mouth another builder when dealing with a potential client. But, how does one change those perceptions? I suppose that good marketing comes strongly into play here. How does any business get the word out that they are just as good , if not better at what they do. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Keep an eye on your garbage! You never know where who's looking at it.

My wife and I have been feverishly cleaning out all the junk we've accumulated over ten years. We are staging for our listing next week. So we had about a dozen large bags filled with garbage, which I placed out in front of our home last night, for pick up today.

Around ten last night, my wife called me to the window in our dining room. There was a truck pulled over in front of my home. Two people were going through the garbage bags. It was dark, so i couldn't make out all that was going on. I didn't think too much of it. I just assumed they were looking for anything salvageable. After they were done, they moved on to my neighbors garbage.

This morning on my way out to work, I went to put some newspapers in the recycling bin. I also wanted to make sure the "treasure hunters" had not made a mess out front. Well, they had indeed made a mess and about half of the bags were gone. I started to clean up the mess and saw an envelope sitting on the street. I picked it up to find an unopened bank statement for my wife. Yikes!!! I can only hope it was the only one there. Who knows what they were really looking for. Who knows if they picked up another bank statement.

We are normally extremely careful about shredding anything that may have personal information in it. I honestly don't know how that slipped by us. But, it just goes to show, you can't be too careful. So, I will carefully monitor our bank accounts and credit card statements for a while. I have personally been through identity theft before and it was not fun. It took several years to get everything straightened out.

So, keep any eye on your garbage. Make sure thete's nothing in it to get you in financial hot water.

From a blog by Regis Skeehan, President of Piedmont Personal Builders.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) was quoted in Investor's Business Daily yesterday that there is now a deal in place among top democrats to extend the home buyer tax credit.

This follows on recent statement on October 26, 2009 from Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) reported by Bloomberg that the program would be extended "Later this week." Senator Nelson made the

President Barack Obama

statement while travelling on Air Force One with President Barack Obama to attend a speech in Jacksonville. President Obama has previously said that he will sign the home buyer tax credit extension if it reaches his desk.

We previously expressed doubt that the tax credit would get extended before its November 30, 2009 expiration date. Looks like we may be wrong.

Rumors are that the program extension would eliminate the first-time buyer restriction and allow "Step-Up" buyers who have lived in their current homes for at least 5 years to participate. The new tax credit would be for 10% of the home's purchase price with a cap of $7,290. Income limits for first-time buyers would remain at $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for couples. Step Up buyers would have income limits of $125,000 and $250,000, respectively. The credit would be limited to homes costing under $800,000. Homes must be under contract by April 30, 2010 and closed by June 30, 2010.

Exactly how this bizarre bucket of terms and conditions will play out is yet to be known. However, at best it's another half measure. Her are some potential problems with it:

1. What if you only owned a previous home for 2 years, or 4 years? Does that mean you don't qualify for the credit?

2. What if you owned a home for over 5 years, but just sold it to move to, say, Houston to take a new job. Now you no longer own a home and you are not a first-time buyer. Does your new home in Houston qualify for the credit?

3. What if you already wrote a contract to have a new home built before passage of the law, but it won't be completed till, maybe, February. Does your new home qualify?

Also, because of the short expiration date on the new program, this program will almost completely exclude the purchase of a new, custom-built, single-family home to be built to order for a buyer.

While there are a few Sun-Belt locations where a small, SF home can be built quickly, typically, a new custom home in most of the country takes about 8-to-9 months to complete from the date of contract.

How to fix that? Allow 2 months after contract to close on an existing home or completed builder's spec home, but allow, perhaps, 9 months to complete a home to be built.

Without such a provision, this extension will only help increase the sale of existing homes and builders' specs. This will create few new housing starts. Dont get me wrong, something is better than nothing. But it's another half measure.

Building New Homes Creates Jobs

Why worry about new homes to be built? Because that's where the jobs are. Very few jobs are created when an existing home or a builder's is sold. Amost all of the labor to build it was already incurred and paid for long ago.

But a new home has to be built, creating jobs today.