columbusbestblog.com

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.

Real Living Loves Zillow….

I think this notice on our intranet is from today, Valentine’s Day. I am pretty good about reading things from Real Living and Real Living HER (the Columbus region) on our internal company website.

“As was previously announced, Real Living has partnered with Zillow.com, which attracts nearly 4 million users per month. And now, Real Living listings are now officially up on Zillow’s site. Check them out today!”

It is not dated… but if it was up yesterday humor me… I want it to have been posted to us on Valentines Day… because I have written about Zillow and Real Living a time or two and I just love the phrase “Loves Z, Loves Z Not…”

Real Living Loves Z.  I mean Zillow.

I think Zillow had a birthday recently… Zillow was born on February 6, 2006? February 7 , 2006? or maybe it was February 8, 2006…? Zillow just had it’s second birthday if I am not mistaken… Happy Belated Birthday Zillow… entering the terrible twos…

All of Real Living’s listing are on Zillow, Trulia, Oodle…

Zillow Zindex for Columbus

Zillow values $8.5 - $9 million home at $1.5 million?

that’s a Central Ohio home too…

Real Living Loves Zillow…

I listened to a conference call about 4th Quarter Home Values from Zillow Tuesday. Dr. Stan Humphries (”Zillow’s chief Zestimator” according to Spencer Rascoff at Zillow but the press release refers to Humphries as “Zillow vice president of data and analytics.”)  Humphries ran through a lot of numbers and a lot of slides (that I could not see during the conference call…) slides are on the Zillow site…

Zillow 4th Quarter Report

“Home Values Continued Decline in Fourth Quarter, Leaving Approximately One in Three New Homeowners With Negative Equity”

If you look at the national map…(on the Zillow site) there are colored diamonds to represent the increase and decrease in value for a market (MSA.) The red (mango) color is the highest appreciation in value and the darkest blue is the most depreciation in value.

On the national map, Central Ohio (Columbus) is a yellow diamond meaning the value is even. California and Florida communitues have the most markets with the values that have declined, lots of blue, deep, deep blue.

Zoom in closer and you can see Central Ohio cities, Delaware, Dublin, Gahanna, Galena, Powell, Sunbury, Upper Arlington, Westerville, Worthington…

The diamonds look like confetti to me… they are red (good, value up) to Navy (bad value down) on the map.

Mango the red of this spectrum Home Values are Up 9%+

Powell + 11.6%
Sunbury + 9.7%

Tangerine Home Values are Up 4% to 8%

Galena +4.3%
Delaware +5.5%
Westerville +4.9%

Squash (or maybe the color of orange juice if it is natural..) Home Values are Up 1% to 3%

Grove City + 2.3%

Yellow Home Values are Unchanged

Upper Arlington +.1
Worthington -.2
Gahanna -.8

Chartreuse Home Values are Down 1% to 2 %

Columbus -1.2%
Dublin - 1.7 %

Green Home Values are Down 5%-6%

New Albany -4.1%

Aqua Home Values are Down 7 to 9%

Turquoise* Home Values are Down 7% to 9%

Reynoldsburg - 7.1%

Blue Home Values are Down 10% to 12%

Bluer Home Values are Down 13% to 16%

Bluer than blud Home Values are Down 16-19%

The Deepest Darkest Navy Blue or is it Maybe Blue…maybe blue maybe black - Home Values are Down 20% +

The Zillow map shows Ostrander… but does not show Grandview Heights, Hilliard, Lewis Center… I don’t get that..

Not areas that I work… but on the map and possibly of interest to you…Hebron, Heath and Newark are in the green to aqua spectrum…. there is nothing real blue in Central Ohio… in the whole state.

I don’t know if I understood before listening to the conference call that the Zillow looks at ALL home values (not just closed sales… as most stats do.) Duh! Of course it does… that’s what Zillow is all about.

“The Zindex home value indicator is the median Zestimate valuation for a given geographic area on a given day, and includes the value of all homes, not just those that sold in a given period. Exactly half the Zestimates for a region are below this number, and half the Zestimates are above it. It is expressed in dollars and is for a particular geographic region.”

Previously on ColumbusBestBlog.com about Zillow:

Zillow values $8.5 - $9 million home at $1.5 million?

Real Living Loves Zillow…

I found this Trulia.com widget on a friend’s blog… MiOaklandCounty.com from Maureen Francis. Actually the widget the other Maureen created for her blog had to do with her market, Metro Detroit. She did a Trulia.com widget for communities in her market…

I wish I could make a Trulia.com widget with the a graph that compares a bunch of areas… it would be a lot of little lines on a graph…. I wish I could but I can’t. Trulia will only compare two areas (two neighborhoods, or two cities, or a city vs. a neighborhood.)

The Grandview Heights community on Trulia.com has always intrigued me. The widget shows Grandview Heights as a city of Columbus neighborhood and Grandview Heights as a city. Grandview Heights is a city. The ZIP code that Grandview Heights is in includes other cities.

All of our Real Living HER listings are advertised on Trulia.com but the properties on Trulia.com are not all the properties on the market.

You can use Trulia.com to look at homes in Grandview Heights (on the bottom of the widget.) Today (2-12-2008) Trulia.com has 10 Grandview Heights listings.  Trulia.com has 41 homes today listed as in the City of Columbus in the Grandview Heights neighborhood.  You can compare pricing and inventory on the widget.

Real Living HER’s (or most any local real estate brokerages) search should be more comprehensive than Trulia.com but I certainly like the Trulia.com widget…

Searching on the Real Living HER search on my website for Grandview Heights Homes:

Search Results - 15 Properties (City listed as GH)

Search Results - 18 Properties (City listed as G or GH)

Search Results - 148 Properties Found (ZIP code that GH is in)

Search Results - 58 Properties Found (searching for “Grandview” School District)

Search Results - 33 Properties Found (houses listed as Columbus for city with GH as school district)

Search Results - 30 Properties Found (listed as G or GH as the city and G as the school district.)

Search Results - No Properties Found (homes listed as G or GH in the Columbus School District.)

Grandview Heights

Grandview Heights City School District

Village of Marble Cliff (it’s in the Grandview Heights City School District too)

Real Living HER did a video about Grandview Heights and more. The “and more” in the video is the University area, Clintonville and I suppose Marble Cliff. To see the video or videos on other Central Ohio communities go to Watch