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The best foreclosure bargains are not local. Relocating out of Central Ohio? There could be opportunities for you in this buyers market.   In “Where the Suprime Mess Has Created Buying Opportunities” Yahoo names five areas nationally where the unemployment rate is below 5% and according to RealtyTrac there’s a boatload of foreclosure properties available for home buyers…

Relocating out of Central Ohio and to sunnier climes? This may be the time to relocate to Phoenix or one of these Florida cites…

Want to know more about the real estate market in the five best foreclosure bargain markets, here’s some local blogs I suggest:

1. Denver /Aurora, Colorado

Kristal Kraft’s Denver Dwellings

Bob Schenkenberger’s Denver Real Estate

2. Fort Lauderdale, Florida 

Jeannetten Neerpat’s JNeerpat Weblog

3. Miami, Florida - I suggest

Maggie Dokic’s The blog that ate Miam.com

Ines Hegedas-Garcia’s Miamism

4. Orlando Florida

Marc Grossman’s Orlando Homes  blog

5. Phoenix, Arizona 

Jonathan Dalton’s Phoenix Arizona Real Estate

Jay Thompson’s The Phoenix Real Estate Guy

In “Where the Suprime Mess Has Created Buying Opportunities” Yahoo says of median home prices in these markets:

“DENVER/AURORA (COLO.) MEDIAN HOME PRICE: $245,400

FORT LAUDERDALE (FLA) MEDIAN HOME PRICE: $365,500

MIAMI (FLA) MEDIAN HOME PRICE: $365,000

ORLANDO (FLA) MEDIAN HOME PRICE: $261,300

PHOENIX/MESA (ARIZ) MEDIAN HOME PRICE: $257,400″

The Yahoo article used 2007 median prices they found via the National Association of Realtors but it is US government info… Remember those are median home prices not average home prices.  We don’t usually talk median prices here in Central Ohio because the average prices are so good.  Or they don’t talk average prices in markets where the average price is scary.  It is all relative of course.

Median price of a home in Columbus $147,400 (MSA.)

Click your heels together and repeat after me:

There’s no place like home.

There’s no place like home.

There’s no place like home.

WOSU writes: Potential Homeowners Look For Deals AP article, Columbus Board of Realtors press release of January inventory level….

… yet cautions “buyers beware”

“But buyers beware:
Loans are harder to get nowadays, and some lenders will expect at least six months’ worth of payments upfront.”

Upfront? Or are they saying lenders are requiring buyers to have six months reserves? pssst qualified buyers talk to a lender about FHA no six month reserves requirement…

Continuing the wet basement series this very wet Central Ohio morning. Flash flood warnings in Central Ohio. Heavy rains all night. Super Dry Basement guy’s (he wrote the book on Super Dry Basements) Wet Basement Quiz that he e-mail spammed me with says:

“Question #10: I’ve heard about a lot of scare tactics and High pressure sales being used by Waterproofing companies. Is there an honest contractor that can be trusted? ”

No answer? There was no answer to that question on the email spam. I looked at his website and there’s no answer to question 10 there either.

I think the quiz itself sounds like scare tactics.

Scare tactics?

I met a Central Ohio basement water proofing celebrity once, Norm,  Ron the Basement Doctor of JD Basement Systems . We had a couple of offices in the Worthington Real Living HER office that flooded in heavy rains. My office was one of them… the company kept trying different things to fix it and finally (after years of the problem) brought in JD Basement Systems to get it fixed.

Norm Ron is pictured in the link above at the top of their website.  Norm Ron is on their TV commercials.

When I met Norm Ron did I ask for his autograph?

No.

I gave him a piece of my mind over the one employee of his company I’d ever met. The guy from JD Basements was one of four contractors called in to give an estimate on a repair to a crawl space on a “little old ladies” house… the representative tried to sell a big job rather than give an estimate on the repair an engineer had outlined based on the home inspection.

Their estimate for the repair fifteen times the cost of the repair that was requested by the buyer and outlined by a home inspector (an engineer.) Fifteen times the cost of the repair that was estimated by the other contractors who gave the seller estimates. Fifteen times the cost of the repair that was completed. Why was the estimate so much higher? The representative of JD Basement Systems got creative. He did not think the home inspector had suggested the best repair. He went into a big “what if” scenario based on ??? He put on quite a show for the audience of a little old lady home seller, her listing agent and the buyers agent.

When I met Norm  Ron, he apologized and asked me who the representative of his company was. This salesman was no longer with the company (I called in looking for him to verify it.) JD Basement Systems call their people inspectors on their website:

“The Basement Doctor”®, J&D Basement Systems has some of the finest individuals out in the field serving our customers. Our inspectors would be happy to visit your home to complete your FREE Estimate. Please select names from the following drop-down menu to view our inspector biographies. “

Do representatives of water proofing companies sell a job? Use scare tactics? Some do. Some of the best do. If I had to use someone I would use a company like Norm’s Ron’s. I would still be wary of the “inspectors” selling a job.

Wet Basement Quiz Question #8

Wet Basement Quiz Question 7

Wet Basement Quiz Questions 5 & 6

Wet Basement Quiz Question 4

Wet Basement Quiz Question 3

Wet Basement Quiz Question 2

Central Ohio Wet Basement Quiz…

What happened to question number 9?

A comment on another blog (not my blog) about the Demographia Survey  from Jack:

“New housing in C-bus is affordable, and when affordable, is also bad.

I work for a company that supplies several essentials to finish new houses.

Our company services a wide range of home builders from 150K to 2m+.

New homes and the profits made from them are in the worst shape in over 20 years. Might be good for buyers who have the jack and actually know what kind of houses they are buying, but bad for the builders and the jobs they provide.

The majority of “affordable” homes (and I realize that term means diff things to diff people) are basic expletive built on expletive treeless farmland turned into mudfields with below average services and cookie cutter Dominion/MI/Ryland/Westport/Rockford/Centex/expletive, expletive, expletive. “

I edited Jack’s comment to remove a racial remark. And naughty words… I think it’s an expletive.  His vulgar word could be translated to “refuse; rubbish; junk; litter;” according to Dictionary.com

Did you buy a Dominion, MI, Ryland (no they’ve been gone for years), Rockford or Centex home in Central Ohio in the past 5 to 10 years? Jack thinks you should have been denied that right.You should have had to continue to rent until you were able to buy a home that met with Jack’s discerning taste for quality. Or you should have bought a resale home, no new home for you! And the owner of that treeless farmland should have been restrained from selling that land to builders who would build a home YOU could afford.

Jack must be selling to these builders he’s bad mouthing if he’s selling from 150,00 dollars on up.

MI, Ryland (Do I know Westport?) and Centex sell in lots of markets that are much less affordable than Columbus…

No comments bad mouthing a particular builders will be published…

No comments bad mouthing cornfields will be published… Maybe that’s going too far. No comments saying “cornfields suck.” Unless you can do it with style and flair, no picking on the topography of Central Ohio. We all know cornfields are flat. We all know once the corn is gone cornfields are very, very bare…

There’s a poll about builders in the sidebar. Who is the best lower priced builder in Central Ohio?

Looking at Columbus among cities world wide… Columbus housing is affordable.

It’s a long survey, lots of it is redundant. It is a pdf (I hate pdf’s) but it was worth skimming. Columbus is among the affordable cities based on housing and income… in six western English speaking countries. The 4th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey by Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavlitech. Page 7. Page 27 and Page 34 show how affordable Columbus is. Many Ohio cities are on the list of the most affordable cites, Youngstown is the number two most affordable city in all those countries behind Thunder Bay in Canada. Toledo is on the affordable list, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Akron, Canton and Dayton are there…

I skimmed for something, anything about how and why Columbus is different than some of the other markets on the list of cities with affordable housing. If it’s there I can’t find it. Columbus is not a depressed market. Some of the markets on the affordable list are there because of a depressed economy… rust belt… manufacturing moved south or out of the country.

Not the case in Columbus. Geographically maybe. Economically? No.

Why is Columbus affordable? In part because of urban sprawl… because we can build out into the cornfields and have for years. Low cost land on the fringes is part of what has made Columbus affordable. Land has not been rationed in Central Ohio.

“That’s just not right!”

“Says who?”

It may not be politically correct. It is certainly not “green” to suggest there is anything positive about urban sprawl… and the price of gas is going up….

Thanks to former Ohioan and real estate blogger Jeff Royce in Fairfax VA for the heads up about the survey.