300 miles to Tooele, but only 30 miles back. This was the (approximate) tagline used by Steadman's Recreation (the greatest motorcycle, snowmobile, 4-wheeler retailer anywhere!) for a long time to let people along the Wasatch Front know that Tooele wasn't actually that far away from the big city. It was very effective in getting the message out that all the best deals could be found off the Wasatch Front, a mere 30 minutes away.
The reason I bring this up, is that I was reminded just yesterday that we often really are off the beaten track, at least in the consciousness of those that are along the Wasatch Front. It took a Super Bowl commercial to remind me that I need to remind you about the joy that is Tooele County! You see, the Utah Association of Realtors did a great ad yesterday extolling the virtues of buying a home along the Wasatch Front, including Salt Lake and Davis County. They also did ads for Northern Utah, Wasatch back, and Southern Utah. So, as a County sharing a border with Salt Lake County, but with a mountain range in between us, where do we fit in?
Tooele County sits south and west of Salt Lake County, directly south of the Great Salt Lake. We're very large in land mass, but fairly sparcely populated, with the largest concentration of our 58,000 residents in a traiangle of roughly 10 miles on a side made up of Tooele City, Grantsville and Stansbury Park. Here in Tooele where I live, I can be in either of those areas in no more than 10 minutes. That makes it easy and fun to work in the Real Estate business, as I can show a 1700 square foot rambler in Tooele on a quarter acre lot, a 5 acre ranchette in Erda or Stockton, a 1 acre horse property in Grantsville and a home on the lake in Stansbury Park, all in the space of about an hour!
The other undiscovered benefit to Tooele County living is the 'commute' to the Salt Lake Valley. I did the 'quote' thing because I need to emphasize a very real difference to the laid back, relaxed pace of Tooele County versus the big city issues you get with living and travel along the Wasatch Front. If you work in downtown Salt Lake City, and live in Utah County to the south, or Weber or Northern Davis County to the north, I'm betting you are looking at 45 minutes to an hour to get to work. And what an hour it is! Stop and go traffic on I-15, and all the stress that goes with it. Friday morning, I drove to the Capital in downtown SLC at the busiest part of 'rush hour'. 35 minutes from my garage to my favorite parking space. The speed limit for most of my trip is 75 mph, and it's an easy one to maintain, as the traffic is nothing like what I described on I-15.
The only other benefit I'd like to mention is an important one, especially for those looking for a home. It's price. The average sales price out here is significantly leass than it is along the Wasatch Front. 3000 square feet and a quarter acre for 150k? Even the 5 acre ranchette in Erda or Stockton witha custom home can be had for less than 350k!!
So, for those of my colleagues on the other side of the Oquirrh Mountains that laughed at the exclusion of Tooele County from a commercial, albeit a Super Bowl one, I'll simply remind you that we'll be laughing last out here. Because, Steadman's had it right all those years ago. It worked for them, as they are one of the highest volume recreational vehicle retailers in the State. 300 miles out here, but only 30 miles back! Come see us!
USDA Rural loans are still alive and well in Tooele County! It was thought that the 2010 Cencus was going to take away our 'bread and butter' loan program out here. After all, Tooele, with it's 33k population can't be considered really rural anymore. However, the expectation was that the rest of Tooele County would still be able to use the program, including Grantsville and Stansbury Park.
So, imagine our surprise to find out that we'll be able to continue to use this great program for at least the rest of this year. Very pleasant news considering that we've been using that product more than any other over the past three years, even more than FHA.
For those of you 'urban' people, the USDA Rural loan program is a Zero down program with one distinct advantage over some of our other 100% programs. Namely, no private mortgage insurance. It also has some realistic income ceilings, especially for those of us with large families. Remember, this is Utah! Thanks to Braidi Fox with Graystone Mortgage for PROACTIVELY sending us the latest income guidlines! Tooele County income limits for Rural Housing is now 1 to 4 Family at $79,200 and 5 to 8 Family at $104,544.
In addition there are some other cool things about this product. For example, did you know if a client is just slightly over the limit there are additional things that Rural will allow the clients to count to lower their income to qualify.
It occurred to me yesterday that in Tooele UT we may be relying on too much technology.
As is so often the case with me, it can take a whole series of seemingly non-related events to get one blog post to formulate in my mind. This morning was one of those times.
In this case, a combination of a weekend manning the phones while Berna deals with a sinus infection and one of the first decent snowstorms of the year combined in the weird abyss that is my mind. As an aside, there's probably a reason why Berna doesn't let me near the phones very often. Or Real Estate clients either, for that matter.
It started with several calls I received from Real Estate agents over the weekend regarding our house listings.
We live in a semi-rural area 30 miles away from the Wasatch Front, or as those from outside the area might know it, Salt Lake City. With nearly 7000 agents in the Salt Lake Board, nearly half of our transaction sides involve what I would call an 'out of area' agent. It's not that they aren't capable. It's simply that they don't know our market or our geography, which is significantly different from theirs.
So, what does this have to do with technology? Very simple. One call was from an agent that was simply lost. For those of you from outside Utah, we are set up with a fairly simple (I think!) grid system of streets in most of our cities. You pick a central spot in town, often the intersection of a 'Main' type and 'Center' type street, and the grid goes in the four directions, North, south, east and west. Our MLS has a spot to fill in those 'coordinates' in the event a street has a name. As a Realtor, we have to get used to knowing how this works. Or, we did, before GPS systems. This street type of street numbering system is in plat in Tooele.
So, even though the address was something simple like '100 East, 400 North' (not the real address), this agent was lost, although she actually told me that 'the house is in the wrong place'. I laughingly asked her how that could be, and she replied that her GPS said so. Well, how can I argue with that? In actuality, she had transposed the direction coordinates, and she was right, the home for sale was NOT where her GPS said it should be! However, it was where the address said it should be.
The second call was regarding feedback I had left with an agent regarding a home Berna and I had showed to a client the previous day in Grantsville. I told her it was a beautiful home that showed very well, but likely wouldn't work for our client. She was somewhat offended when I suggested that it was priced significantly higher than I felt was realistic. She told me that she had priced it accurately because she'd used the CMA program in our MLS.
In reality, this is a very cool system, and we use it ourselves. However, like many 'systems' it can only account for things like neighborhoods, high traffic streets, etc. only if we manually add them, because the machine doesn't know any better. Is it a beautiful home that's overbuilt for the area? Is the house bordered on two sides by mobile home parks? Bus stop in front of it? High truck traffic? The list could go on and on, and if you don't know the property, and the area it sits in, then you can't blame the machine!
What actually got me putting this all together in my mind was the trip I took this morning to meet with some of Berna's clients at a design center for a builder, that although builds new homes in Tooele has a showroom in Sandy, a city some 50 miles from where we live. Around 6am, we started getting some serious snow to go with the serious wind we've had in Tooele the last day or two, so I left some 30 minutes earlier than I usually would. As I passed Stansbury Park, the roads became snow covered and visibility went down to virtually nothing. After I saw the third or fourth slide-off, I started paying attention to what kind of vehicles were having the most trouble with the conditions.
Out of the eight vehicles that I saw from that point in the ditch, six of them were sport utility vehicles or trucks that could be reasonably expected to have 4-wheel drive. The other two were very new vehicles that I would expect to have some sort of traction control and ABS brakes. As I passed them in my 25 year old Porsche, equipped with neither high tech system, only a set of very good snow tires, it occurred to me that those drivers, in addition to not using the sense God gave a goose, were obviously relying much too heavily on the technology that the car companies have given us, ostensibly to make us safer.Their 'skills' (if they'd ever had them!) had eroded from non-use.
So, what's the lesson here? Like in any other endeavor, our success can't be achieved solely with gadgets and technology. They are excellent tools, but they are only that. Without knowledge and good sense applied as well, they may just be expensive paperweights. I hope that we will all use a combination of 'old school' skills and tech wizardry, or we may all be in the ditch, literally and figuratively!
That's when I realized, In Tooele UT, we may be relying too much on technology
You've all heard the term 'long, cold winter'. Well, for those of us in the Real Estate industry, that winter has gone on a for a few years now. I should say, those of us STILL in the industry, as more than a few of us have left to pursue other interests. Interests like making a living, putting food on the table, etc.
Here in Tooele County, that comes to something above 40% of our agents have moved on in one way or another. That doesn't take into account the builders, subcontractors and other folks involved in the building business. All in all, this industry accounts for somewhere between 25-30% of the economy of our State. Fairly important, don't you think?
However, we're starting to see signs of spring, and more than just an isolated instance. Having spent the first decade of my Real Estate life in new construction, I'm always very sensitive to trends in building. My position on the Tooele City Planning and Zoning Commission makes me more aware of these things as well. It's been a long time since we've had any subdivisions to approve!
But, in the last 30 days, I've started to get a bit of hope. We've actually seen builders come back to Tooele County, in a fairly substantial way. Building permits for Grantsville and Stansbury Park are up significantly over the last year, and I see signs that this trend will likely follow in Tooele City as well. Several builders are already at work here, and I'm hearing of another that will be taking over an abandoned subdivision to complete it, as well as purchasing more ground. However, much of that stuff is future. How about right now?
Right now is huge for us. We currently are working with three different clients on build jobs, after a couple of years with none! We have clients interested in building on 5 acre horse property in Stockton, half acres in Grantsville and quarter acre stuff in Tooele City. That pretty much covers all the different markets here in Tooele County. In addition, our existing inventory is down significantly over the last year, with an absorbtion rate at a less scary 5-7 months, vs the 24 month supply we've seen in the not so distant past.
I know that real estate is local, but even our good friend Jay Thompson, from Gilbert, AZ is blogging about some life in new construction in his neck of the woods, and you know how hard the Phoenix area has been hit.
The fact is, the phone is ringing. Interest rates are insanely low. Our prices seem to have reached the bottom. We're even seeing increases in some segments. And anytime we get to work with buyers that are wanting to build homes, I get excited! I truly believe spring is in the air. It's been a long, cold winter!
Greetings, and welcome to 2012! This is the time of year of making resolutions, breaking resolutions and all kinds of other monumental decisions. But, perhaps most importantly, it’s the end of the college football “bowl season”, culminating with tonight’s BCS Championship between LSU and Alabama.
However, as much as I love college football and hate the wholly corrupt BCS system (that will likely be my only shot at them!), this post will have little to do with the games and will instead be focused on one of the “extracurricular” activities that go with them. And yes, although I haven’t mentioned it in the first two paragraphs, this is about Tooele County!
Tooele High School has a long storied tradition of excellence when it comes to their marching band. In many years, the activities of the band are followed more closely than those of the football team itself, for many reasons. This is one of those years.
To give you an idea of how popular this band is here in Tooele, this is a band that has practiced at six in the morning during the football season, marching up and down the residential streets of Tooele for decades. Yes, I said 6am, with no complaints from late risers! Well, there was one complaint this year from someone who had just moved here. She complained that 6am violated the Tooele City Noise ordinance that doesn’t allow loud noise before 7am. The Tooele City Council simply changed the ordinance to 6am. That’s what tradition is all about, in its best form.
So what does this have to do with college football? Very simple. The Tooele High School Band was selected to participate in the activities surrounding the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. 60 bandmembers participated in a parade, some competition and the halftime activities with 9 other bands from around the Country.
The band raised some $7500 in fundraisers, but each member still had to come up with another $580 to cover the cost of the trip, one that was called a once in a lifetime opportunity by many members of the band.
So, how did they do? Well, they rocked, returning home with over a dozen awards, including two first place awards in field marching and street marching. They also took awards for best drum major, best color guard, best marching, best percussion and best general effect. They also returned home to a City full of honking horns, blasting sirens and supportive businesses. Well done THS! You’ve done us proud.
On a similar note, I spoke with one of the County Commissioners this morning. It seems that there has been some complaining in Stansbury Park about the Stansbury High Band doing outdoor practice at 6am. I don’t know what the Commissioners will do, but based on the THS results, can an ordinance change be far behind?
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