Lisa Heindel, New Orleans West Bank Real Estate

It’s pretty hard to impress a New Orleans native with boiled seafood. After all, we learn to peel crawfish and shrimp and pick crabs as soon as we are big enough to sit at the table – mostly because our parents quickly got tired of doing it for us. So while I had heard good things about Perino’s from friends, I didn’t have any really high expectations when we pulled into the parking lot on the West Bank Expressway.

The front of the building is very plain and when you enter there is a to-go counter and a large, open dining room jam packed with cafeteria like tables and chairs for family style seating along with a few arcade games and a claw machine for the kids, big or small. Very 1970s, right down to the neon beer signs and stuffed animals hanging on the walls. Topping each table is a big roll of paper towels, a basket of crackers and butter and a rack of condiments including a huge squeeze bottle of cocktail sauce – the only thing missing is the newspaper covering the tables.

The menu is pretty simple and straightforward. Seasonal boiled and fried seafood and traditional sides such as potatoes, corn and sausage. The specials when we visited were the fried crawfish tails and fried alligator, served in a basket with fries. Since the whole reason we came was because we heard how good the boiled seafood was, we promptly ordered crabs and shrimp and decided to try the crawfish tail basket as well instead of sides.

Thank goodness we ordered the crawfish, because each basket came with a bowl of some of the best gumbo I’ve ever eaten. Filled with shrimp and crab claw meat and perfectly spiced, I think hubby and I set a record for the fastest gumbo eating. We weren’t the only ones impressed, as I heard other diners complimenting it as well. It’s only served by the cup or the bowl, but I’d gladly pay for a gallon of it to serve for dinner at home.

Dear hubby jumped into the crawfish tails (which were pretty darn good) before I could take a picture, but the blue crabs and shrimp were out of this world. Well seasoned and juicy, I knew it was a good meal by the number of paper towels we went through! The wait staff was very friendly, the big screen TV was playing a college football game and there was just a comfortable, old New Orleans feel to the place.

It’s not fancy by any means, but if you are looking for casual, family friendly dining and delicious food, take a drive to Harvey and check out Perino’s Boiling Pot. You won’t be sorry.

Perino’s Boiling Pot is located at 3754 West Bank Expressway in Harvey LA. Open Sunday through Thursday from 11:30 am – 10 pm and until 11 pm on Friday and Saturday. Need more information? Give them a call at (504) 340-5539.

Current real estate activity in Belle Chasse LA:

53 homes for sale

High list price $1,700,000

Low list price $127,000

Average list price $416,343

Median list price $320,000

10 pending home sales, priced from $125,000 to $375,000

Based on the number of homes sold in July (3), there is a 17.6 month supply of homes for sale in Belle Chasse

Belle Chasse LA | Number of Homes Sold | July 2009

Belle Chasse ended July with 3 homes sold, bringing the year to date total to 36 homes sold in 2009 (down from 50 sales at the same time last year).

Conventional financing ruled July – all of the sales were to buyers using conventional loans, which means they had to have at least a 10% down payment.  These are strong buyers that are choosing homes in the $300-$400k price range which currently accounts for about 21% of the Belle Chasse real estate market.

The drop in the number of sales pushed the absorption rate up from 7 months to 17 months, showing what a delicate balance there is between supply and demand in today’s market.

Belle Chasse LA | Average Home Sale Prices | July 2009

The average Belle Chasse home sale in July was for $330,833, while the 2009 year to date average is $269,336, down almost 19% from the 2008 average.  While the average list price is skewed by that one listing for $1.7 million, the median list price (half of the homes are priced lower, half are priced higher) is still higher than what the average Belle Chasse home buyer is spending.

What sold in July?

It’s interesting to note that every sale in July was a home between 4 and 6 years old.  If you are selling an older Belle Chasse home, be prepared to have either already done your updates and renovations or to settle for a lower sales price.  Read: Home Selling Tips

All data is provided by GSREIN and is deemed reliable, but not guaranteed

Related Reading:
Belle Chasse Real Estate Market Reports
Home Buying Tips

Find a Home:
Belle Chasse LA homes for sale
New Orleans West Bank Homes for Sale

We are full time agents. This is our job, our career, our livelihood, our chosen profession. As we make our way through listing appointments, showings and phone calls, we sometimes run across those agents that make us say “What the…??”

So in the interest of the public good (or maybe just to blow off a little steam), we conducted a poll of professional Realtors across the country, asking them to finish the statement “You might need a new REALTOR if…”. Here are the responses we compiled during our completely unscientific survey. These are all real life examples of why you need to do a little research before choosing your REALTOR.

You Might Need a New Agent If….

Your agent doesn’t have a lockbox key to actually get you into the homes you want to see. That’s OK, you don’t mind working your appointments around the schedules of the 12 different listing agents that have to meet you and let you into the houses while secretly rolling their eyes at your agent, do you?

Your agent thinks using email is “high tech” or they only check it once a week. That whole email thing is just a passing fad anyway, right?

Your agent doesn’t have a website or blog that provides you with good, local information about buying or selling a home. See email explanation above.

Your current agent answers every single question with “I don’t know…”. There is a reason they are wearing that giant name tag on their lapel.

Your agent doesn’t know how to fill out the standard real estate forms without asking for help…from the agent on the other side of the sale. However, I’m sure that other agent has only your best interests at heart when advising them how to structure your counter offer. You’ll be fine. Really.

Your agent forgot to send your accepted contract to the lender or title company resulting in a delay of the closing. What do you mean you already hired the movers?

Your agent doesn’t keep up on changing regulations and is surprised that they can’t do something the way they’ve been doing it for years. They are busy setting appointments with all of those listing agents...they can’t be expected to keep up with ALL of those changes, can they?

There are no photos of your house online, or there is just that one of the front. Truly, your house looks great in that picture that was taken from their car…at dusk…in the rain. Based on that one grainy shot, I’m sure the buyers will be beating a path to your door that is hidden behind the tree in it.

Your listing in the MLS is full of errors. You mean you don’t actually have 6 bedrooms and a pool for $99,000?

You find yourself looking at kitchens when you can’t even afford a toaster. But I’m sure it’s a ton of fun spending all of your spare time looking at beautiful homes that you can’t buy. Didn't your mom tell you that disappointment builds character?

Your agent doesn’t own a fax machine, a camera or any of the other tools of the trade. Fred Flintstone called and he wants his stone tablet back.

You are always calling other agents about properties because yours is busy. Remember, their motto is “You Are Number 1 #184”

Your agent doesn’t answer their cell phone or only returns calls at specific times of day. If 10 or 2 doesn’t work for you, there’s always tomorrow. It wasn’t important, was it?

Your current agent has a “real” full time job and can only show you houses on their lunch hour and after work. Psst….this IS a real job.

You are emailing other agents asking if your agent’s behavior is normal. Now that’s just scary.

Your old agent is now the WalMart greeter. But they are still handing out business cards with that 15 year old glamour shot on them.

Thanks to Paul Slaybaugh, John MacArthur, Heather Rankin, Julie Branum, Ray Nellum, Kristina Cusick, Kristin Esparza, Melina Tomson, and Heather Goodwin for contributing to the list.

That’s the question on the minds of both buyers and sellers. There was a great, in-depth report on the metro area real estate market in a recent issue of the Times-Picayune (Read the entire article here) touting the stabilization of the housing market in the New Orleans area.

…..Ragas and area Realtors believe that the housing market is bottoming out because the backlog of homes for sale is declining and about the same number of home sales closed in the first half of 2009 as in the second half of 2008.

While that may be true when the market is looked at as a whole, it can be misleading for an individual seller who is trying to figure out why their house has not sold.

If you’ve been following along at West Bank Living, you’re already keyed into the market for your area. If not, here is a quick recap for the time frame referenced in the article:

My initial thought was that there is a seasonal difference between the number of home sales in the first half of any year and the second half of the year. But, although April through July are usually the busiest months of the year for home sales, the division between the 2 halves of the year is mostly balanced.

In my opinion, the real answer to the question about market stabilization is “It depends”. Clearly, it depends on the location of your home (right down to the subdivision within a zip code). But it also depends on the condition and price of your home when measured against comparable properties.

“Realtors say that houses on the West Bank of New Orleans suddenly look outdated to potential homebuyers compared with gleaming, newly rebuilt properties in eastern New Orleans, and people are flocking back to the East Bank of the city because they can find better value.”

Advice for sellers

As noted in the article, sellers are competing with homes that had hurricane damage and have now been renovated and updated. If all other things are equal, buyers will choose the updated, ready to move in home over the dated or not-quite-as-nice house 99.9% of the time.

This should serve as a wake up call to sellers to know what your competition is and either bring your house up to snuff or reduce the price to attract the bargain hunters that are sniffing around the edges of the market, waiting for the next great deal.

Having a house hanging out on the market for an extended period of time is not fun for anyone, whether it has stabilized or not.

Advice for buyers

Rarely do buyers have the good fortune of low interest rates combined with lower housing prices. If you are considering buying a home, now really is the time to do it. While getting past the more stringent lending criteria can be a challenge, it will be worth the time and effort invested when you can look around and say “I’m home”.

Related Reading:
Home selling tips
Home buying tips
West Bank real estate market reports

Find a Home:
West Bank homes for sale

Originally published at West Bank Living

Do you have questions about the West Bank real estate market? Are you considering buying or selling a home? The West Bank Living Team provides local, professional real estate services to home buyers and sellers on the West Bank of New Orleans and military personnel relocating to and from NAS JRB New Orleans. It would be our pleasure to assist you with all of your real estate needs.

I live in a house that was originally built in the 1950s. Over the years, the original owners added on (and added on and added on) as their family outgrew the existing space. Lucky for me, by the time they were ready to sell the house, it clocked in at well over 2,500 square feet of living area.

Not so lucky for me, they weren’t as concerned with energy efficiency during their expansion spree.

When we originally bought the house, we knew it would need work. It was definitely what a Realtor would call a “handy man special”, a “fixer upper” or a “diamond in the rough”. But we were captivated by two huge living spaces, a larger than average lot size and a location with family and friends all in the same block.

So, we bought it and embarked on our own spree – this time of updating and renovating. We updated electrical systems, painted, changed floors, painted, renovated bathrooms, painted, changed out a broken air conditioner, painted, replaced the roof and painted some more. After several months of work, we were finally able to move into our home and begin to really make it our own.

After we occupied the house, we were disappointed to find that running 2 air conditioners and cooling a large single story house in the New Orleans heat was a little harder on the budget than we planned for. Even with the addition of insulation, we were being hit with summer time electric bills that were running over $400-$500 per month. But then winter came and the bills settled back down to normal. As summer approached each year, we kept saying that we needed to change out all of the old windows in the house. Like so many other projects that cost more than a couple of hundred dollars, it kept getting pushed to the back burner.

This year, we decided that there would be no more procrastination. As we were painting and replacing flooring in one of the bedrooms, I decided to get a price on having the windows replaced at the same time.

I called my favorite contractor and he sent the window guy out to measure and prepare a quote. Thankfully, it wasn’t as expensive as I was afraid it would be, so we bit the bullet and ordered the windows.

After waiting for a couple of weeks for delivery, the day finally came when the sounds of construction filled my house and those old, crank out, casement monstrosities were removed to make way for double insulated, low E, energy credit at tax time windows.

Within a couple of days, all of the windows were installed and caulked, windowsills and casings were retro-fitted and the appearance of the front of our house took a giant leap into the 21st century. We had just paid an enormous electric bill, so we couldn’t wait to see what the next billing cycle would bring.

Finally, that Entergy envelope arrived in the mail. What we usually viewed with dread, we were excited to see…hoping for any reduction in our bill, but assuming that the recent hot, hot weather would mean another sky high bill. The envelope please…I ripped into the bill…scanning the date to be sure that it was for the time since the windows had been installed…looking for that heart stopping number that meant another big deduction from the checking account…

To find that our bill had been cut by more than 50%!! Yep – and that’s for a month when we had record heat and no rain. I can only imagine how small they will be during the winter months when we use very little electricity beyond our appliances.

If you are looking for an easy way to reduce your monthly utility expenses and make your home more energy efficient, changing your windows is definitely an improvement that will pay for itself over time.

Related Reading:

• Rebates and Tax Credits for Windows, Doors, and Skylights
• Federal Tax Credits for Energy Efficiency
• Tax Credit FAQs

This article originally published at West Bank Living

Are you considering buying or selling a home and need some help getting ready? The West Bank Living Team provides local, professional real estate services to home buyers and sellers on the West Bank of New Orleans and military personnel relocating to and from NAS JRB New Orleans. It would be our pleasure to assist you with all of your real estate needs.