Roof Life

I spotted a guy driving a pickup truck weaving through traffic, sticking his head out the window, looking up.

The pickup truck looked like it had been splattered randomly with buckets of black tar and dented by hammers and other blunt objects, which it had, because it was a roofing truck. The guy driving was John James Miskella, and he was looking up because he was looking at roofs. Half of the roofs around town had been installed by John James or his father before him, and he kept his eye on them like a dad watching over his kids.

I had called John James in behalf of my first-time buyers, Dion and Alma Sarafino, to provide a roof report for the house they were buying.

“A report?” he said on the phone. “I can tell you right now the doggone place needs a new roof. When they built that subdivision they hired out-of- towners who slapped those roofs on with cheap materials and hit the road. The ridge shingles are warped and cracked, and the valley flashings are rusted through. Those roofs are dying prematurely.”      

I now stood in front of the house when John James pulled up. He slid the ladder out of the truck, leaned it against the rafters and lunged up to the roof like a panther. I lumbered up behind him.

He kneeled at the peak of the roof and moved his hands lightly along the shingles as if he were gauging the health of a sick beast.

“What a shame,” he said. “Like I said, it needs a new roof. And I would feel better about the whole doggone thing if that separate patio roof got replaced, too. They used cheap roll roofing on it instead of hot tar.”

I wrote up a repair request. The seller agreed to replace the main roof but not the separate patio roof. Dion and Alma were disappointed.

“The patio roof will cost as much as three house payments,” said Dion,” but let’s move ahead.”

A week later I met at the house with Dion and Alma as John James was finishing up his job.

“Now that’s a good roof,” said John James.

“Wait a minute,” said Alma, isn’t that a new patio roof?”

John James nodded.

“But that’s not being paid for,” she said.

“I know,” said John James Miskella, “but now I feel better about the whole doggone thing.”

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Doug Love is Sales Manager at Century 21 Jeffries Lydon. Email escrowgo@aol.com, or call 530-680-0817.

Play Ball

Business over pleasure is understandable, but for me, business over baseball is unacceptable when the San Francisco Giants make the playoffs. A season when the Giants make the playoffs is as rare as hen’s teeth, to quote a saying by my Old Grand-Dad. If you were to recite all the sayings by my Old Grand-Dad it would take a month of Sundays. The list would be as long as your arm and I’m not pulling your leg.

The Giants were as hot as blue blazes and won their division for the first time in 16 years, so I was as happy as a dog with two tails. But like all long-suffering Giants fans, I was also as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.

  

Right now I was as mad as a wet hen as I drove toward the country property to be sold by Jack and Ethel Birdson. I had been as dumb as a box of rocks for booking my appointment the same time as the opening playoff game between the Giants and the Cubs. I could at least, I thought, catch the first couple of innings on the car radio. But alas, as I left the valley behind, the radio reception faded until it was just as clear as mud.

The road was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg as I approached the mountain dale that was the Birdson homestead. It was as pretty as a picture and I would dearly love to list the place. But on my previous visit Jack had been as cool as a cucumber toward me, so I felt my chances were as slim as a broomstick. I wondered: How can I butter him up and make our relationship as warm as toast?

“Jack, you come down here, right now,” Ethel yelled. “Mr. Love is here!” She turned to me. “Jack’s as crazy as a loon about those Giants. He’s up in that big pine tree trying to get radio reception.”

Quick as a flash I was up that pine tree. “What inning?” I asked.

An hour later Ethel brought out a couple more beers for us.

“You guys are like two peas in a pod,” she said.

Yes we were, and we stayed that way as sure as the day is long.

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No Bull

Spring sunshine floated down through the sycamores and oaks and splashed upon the country lane, spreading dappled shades of yellow and green across the graveled surface. In the fields on either side, cows munched new spring grass, and calves hopped and bucked about the pasture.

My passengers, buyer clients Mark and Janice, sat smiling in a dreamy way. Janice said softly, “This place has good vibes.”

We rolled to a stop, stepped out of the car and drank in the air, a heady fragrance of almond blossoms, tilled earth, and a light bovine bouquet from barns and pastures. Janice took Mark’s hand and they strolled onto the long covered porch of the 1930’s ranch house. From its front-door oval window and glass door knob, to its stone hearth and hardwood floors, the place inspired confidence in its stability and structure.

“They kept it in good shape,” said Mark.

“It’s beautiful,” said Janice.

Sensing a sale, I felt the urge to recite the list of amenities included, like the new forced air system, the R-30 attic insulation and the updated electrical panel. But the voice of my wise old mentor KDV came to mind: “Never miss a chance to shut up, my brother. Give your buyer some room. Let the magic happen, babe.”

I meandered into the neighboring pasture alone to give Mark and Janice some space. They eventually joined me, smiling hand-in-hand. Mark said, “We've decided we want to make an off…….” He froze. The ground rumbled. I turned around and caught sight of a streaking mountain of quivering bull-flesh thundering toward us. Mark and Janice went one way, and I went the other, each of us diving through strands of barbed wire as the bull stomped and spun in our tracks, cross-eyed and crazy.

In the sanctuary of the car, Janice said, “That was a bad sign. I can’t raise my kids in vibes like that.”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Mark.

Back at the office, KDV said, “Did you make the sale, bro?”

I shook my head slowly.

“I’m surprised,” he said. “It sounded perfect for your people, and the write-up on the place was impressive.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it turned out to be a whole lot of bull.”

_________________________________________________________________________________Questions or comments? I’d like to hear from you. Call 530-680-0817 or email escrowgo@aol.com. Doug Love is Sales Manager at Century 21 Jeffries Lydon.

Tiny

“Tiny House” has become part of the conversation for people looking for affordable real estate, people looking for a scaled-down lifestyle.

A Tiny House is smaller than a shotgun house, a cabin, or a guest house. It’s smaller than your garage. A Tiny House is so small, as my old mentor KDV would say, you have to go outside to change your mind.

A Tiny House is the size of a shed, typically 250 square feet or less. But it has everything. The kitchen is there, the bathroom, the bedroom, the living area. Tiny House owners tend to pour their hearts and souls and creative flair into their design, construction, and decor. You have your Cape Cod, your Victorian, and your California Craftsman styles. You have your high ceilings, your natural lighting, and your energy efficiency. You have your low, low, low, utility costs.

Tiny House owners tend to say things like, “Living small emphasizes home life over home maintenance.”  And “We need to recognize what fills a home when the excess is cut away. Living small can free up your mind, your wallet and your spirit.”

Logan and Tammy Strobel built a to-go version of the Tiny House, 128 square feet, built on an 8’x16’ trailer with wheels. It’s a tall, cedar-sided beauty, fully self-contained, with an alcohol-burning stove, composting toilet, and walls insulated with natural wool. “We designed our home”, says Logan, “and it fits us like tailored clothes.”

Good thing their Tiny House is a to-go version, because it went. The Logans towed it from a city lot in Portland, Oregon to country property near Mt. Shasta in Northern California. A garden hose and an electrical cord from their pump house did the trick for utilities.

The simpler life, the less expensive life, and the smaller impact lifestyle are all part of the Tiny House phenomenon. If you’re ready to give up the man-cave and the lady-lair, the maintenance and the bills, the entertainment theater, the bonus rooms and frills, you too can leave a smaller footprint. You could make it Tiny.

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Doug Love is Sales Manager at Century 21 Jeffries Lydon. Email escrowgo@aol.com, or call 530-680-0817.

Fan Base

I met a Realtor at a convention luncheon in the Bay Area who seemed to think I would be impressed by hearing she did all of her business with celebrities. I was half-listening when she said something about specializing in a certain type of celebrity.

“My first clients were Will Clark and Vida Blue,” she said. “Ever heard of them?”  I froze, with my sandwich in hand, mid-way from the table to my face. She was referring to my two favorite players from my all-time favorite team, the San Francisco Giants, late 1980’s version. The sweet-swinging lefty Will the Thrill, and the fire-balling southpaw pitcher Vida Blue. Oh, I’d heard of them alright. They were baseball gods.

I looked at her and nodded slowly, my mouth hanging open.

“This one time at Candlestick Park,” she chortled, “I was in the clubhouse during the seventh inning of a game, getting papers signed by both of them for their separate deals. They kept running back and forth from the what- do-you-call-it, the dugout, like a couple of kids sneaking out of class. What a hoot!”

She looked at me for a moment and said, “Are you okay? You’re drooling on your sandwich.”

I was imagining myself as the Realtor for those Giants players. I would ask Will about his famous inside-out swing; how he managed to always get the sweet spot of his bat on the ball. I would get Vida to show me his two-seam fastball grip and his change-up that buckled the knees of the best hitters in the game.

 “You’re a Giants fan, aren’t you?” the Realtor asked me.

“How can you tell?”

“Oh, just the Giants pen in your shirt pocket, the Giants logo on your jacket, and the fact that you’re wearing a full-on Giants uniform at a real estate convention.”

“Good call,” I said.

She told me she couldn’t care less about baseball; that working with Giants players was just like working with anyone else.

“So what if they’re good at baseball?” she said. “They’re like a bunch of overgrown kids.”

She’s not worthy!  She’s not even a fan!  I thought.  

“But that’s probably why they like me as their Realtor,” she said. “I don’t think they would want me blathering on incessantly about baseball. Celebrities need a Realtor, not a fan.”
 

If that’s the case, I guess I would make a great Realtor for Miley Cyrus.

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Questions or comments? I’d like to hear from you. Call 530-680-0817 or email escrowgo@aol.com. Doug Love is Sales Manager at Century 21 Jeffries Lydon.

The Stakes

“Here’s one for you,” said my old friend TW, the surveyor. “A few years back I got a call from a lady who was going to build a fence. She wanted a survey to make sure she put the fence in the right place.”

When TW says “Here’s one for you” you better listen up. More than likely, you’re about to learn something. TW has done more surveying than anyone you know. He’s climbed like a billy goat, slithered on his belly like a reptile, and crawled through brambles where a rabbit wouldn’t go. He’s driven corner pins and property line stakes that have never been seen by another human being. He’s mapped more real estate than Christopher Columbus.

“So I spent some time on this lady’s property, checking and re-checking the corners and lines; I scratched my head a little bit, and drove stakes along the property line.”

TW knocked on the lady’s door and motioned her out to take a look. She twisted her head and stared questioningly at TW’s row of stakes. The stakes began at the front corner of the property and marched at an angle across the lady’s front yard and stopped in the flower-bed under the window of her master bedroom. Her house, as it turned out, straddled the property line.

The lady turned her head toward TW, her mouth hanging open.

“There’s your property line,” said TW.

The lady shook her head as if to say “This can’t be right!”

TW nodded his head as if to say “Oh, but it is.”

TW told me the contractor who built the lady’s house had purchased a block of four lots and built on them all, one of which was the lady’s.

“The only problem,” said TW, “is the guy assumed the lot lines were perpendicular to the road, when in fact they went off on an angle.”

Therefore, all four of the houses straddled their property lines.

“I believe they’re still trying to sort it out,” said TW. “The contractor skipped town, and the homeowners aren’t happy campers.”

I asked TW if there was a solution.

“Yeah,” he said, “all you Realtors need to tell your buyers to get a survey! How else will they know what they’re buying?”

I agreed, and TW said, “Here’s another one for you….”

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Green for Green

Are “green” homes worth more? Two egg-head professors did a study to find out. Egg-head professors are the people we want doing these studies, but their scientific language can be tough to take, such as: “To empirically test this hypothesis, we relate the logarithm of the transaction price to the hedonic characteristics of single-family homes, controlling precisely for the variations in the measured and unmeasured characteristics of rated buildings and the nearby control dwellings…..”

Translation: the answer is yes. Green homes sell for 9% more than regular homes in California. “Green” means a home labeled as LEED, Energy Star, or GreenPoint Rated.

The study is a 29-page report titled “The Value of Green Labels in the California Housing Market.” The high-brow professors are Nils Kok of UC Berkeley and The Netherlands, and Matthew E. Kahn of UCLA. Both have degrees, accolades, and credentials as long as your arm.

Green homes have benefits beyond energy cost savings, they report, such as more comfortable and stable indoor temperatures and healthier indoor air quality. LEED and GreenPoint Rated homes also feature efficient water use, sustainable non-toxic building materials, and other attributes that reduce impact on the environment.

After the good professors determined green homes are indeed worth more, they asked themselves: What factors influence the value homeowners place on green or energy efficient homes? Hotter climate? Higher electricity prices? Environmental ideology?

The professors found that the premium paid for a home with a green label varies from region to region in California, and is highest in the areas with hotter climates, because the green label means big cost savings in the cooling of a home, more so than the cost savings of efficiently heating a home.

The price premium is also “positively correlated to the environmental ideology of the region.” In other words, the more Prius drivers you see in a given region, the higher the premium you’ll find paid for a green home.

Our region certainly has a hotter climate, but are we seeing a price premium “positively correlated to the environmental ideology” of our region?

Answer: Count the Prius drivers. Then call in the egg-head professors.

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Doug Love is Sales Manager at Century 21 Jeffries Lydon. Email escrowgo@aol.com, or call 530-680-0817.

The Flop

A misunderstood and little recognized facet of real estate is the athletic event. One such event is called the Real Estate Yard-Dash. Not to be confused with standard athletic events known as the 50-yard dash or the 100-yard dash, the Real Estate Yard-Dash differentiates itself as not a race of yards, but as a race through yards.  Yards, in real estate terminology refers to front yards and back yards. The Real Estate Yard-Dash is typically motivated by an animal of some sort, most commonly a dog. Snakes, bees, and bulls are also proven motivators. The event often involves a certain amount of panic for the performer, and sometimes laughter for the audience.

      
I can count in my career at least 50 yard-dashes, and I know of Realtors who have performed or witnessed more than 100 yard-dashes. Back yards are most challenging, because they are usually surrounded by a fence, which adds the potential necessity of executing a high-jump at the conclusion of the yard-dash, in effect, creating a double-event.

      
I’m sorry to say that a certain number of the yard-dashes in my career were performed by my clients, one of which I’ll cite here, a double-event as mentioned above.

My buyer, Johnny Gomes, must have grown impatient as I struggled with the lock-box attached to the hose-bib behind the bushes in the front yard of the ‘50’s ranch house fixer-upper, for he unlatched the side-gate and made his way around to the back yard.

     
     “It’s vacant, right?” he called out.

      “Yep, vacant,” I said.

Gomes is a contractor, and infinitely more importantly, has long legs.

I walked through the front door, past the tables, chairs, and rugs, and out the back slider, sticky note attached to the glass: “Dog Bites”.

     
Gomes shot past me like an Olympic sprinter leading a race. In second place and gaining was a German Shepherd lunging at Johnny’s backside.

     
At the conclusion of his yard-dash, Gomes high-jumped and the shepherd snapped just short of the high-point between Johnny’s legs. Gomes sailed over the fence backwards, thereby executing an admirable Fosbury Flop, as made famous by high-jumper gold-medalist  Dick Fosbury in the 1968 Summer Olympics.

     “Vacant, huh?” said Gomes, pulling grass and gravel from his scalp.

     “Sorry, my mistake,” I said. I felt really bad.

But I was really envious of that Fosbury Flop.

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The Neighbor

I got a call from an angry guy.

“I got burned!” he said. “An appraiser came to my house and low-balled me.” The angry guy said he’d done a lot of work on his place, and the appraiser had given it no credit.

“I’m surprised he could find his way around here at all,” said the angry guy, “because he must have been blind as a bat!”

I drove up to the angry guy’s house. The outside paint was fresh; the roof appeared to be in good shape; the grass was mowed.

He swung open the front door. “Welcome to the meat and potatoes of the American Dream!” he said.

“Ha! Good one,” I said. His neighborhood was built shortly after World War Two, and many of the homes were originally sold to returning veterans, so his line about “the meat and potatoes of the American Dream” made some sense.

Unfortunately for the angry guy, appraisers not only analyze the meat and potatoes, they analyze the side dishes, too. In other words, appraisers don’t just look at the house they are appraising. They also look at the neighbors.

The guy had a bad neighbor.  That gave me an idea as to what went wrong.

I called an acquaintance at the National Appraisal Institute. “How much effect on value is a bad neighbor?” I asked.

“We refer to that as External Obsolescence, he said.

He told me he’d seen situations where External Obsolescence such as a bad neighbor lowered a property’s value by more than ten per cent.

“Does this particular neighbor demonstrate anything like an unkempt yard, annoying pets, unpleasant odors, loud music, dangerous trees, or poorly maintained exterior?” he asked.

“All of that.”

“Oh my,” he said.

I relayed this new information to the angry guy.

“You forgot one thing,” the angry guy said. “My neighbor is also a jerk!”

He wondered what he should do.

I told him the National Appraisal Institute recommends looking into possible code violations by a bad neighbor, and if necessary, hiring an attorney.

Or he could take my grandmother’s advice: “If you want a good neighbor, bake ‘em a pie.”

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Doug Love is Sales Manager at Century 21 Jeffries Lydon. Email escrowgo@aol.com, or call 530-680-0817.