This is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  Today, I thought I would talk to you about evaluating what happens when you have a blip on your credit score or what changes your credit scores. And I’m going to give you a few illustrations and you’ll look from this chart what happens when you start with a credit of 680, 720, or 780. The higher the credit score, the better your credit is.

But I’m going to just stay with the consumer one at the 680. If you have a 30-day late on your mortgage payment or probably even a credit card payment, your credit score drops from 680 down to 600 to 620. If you have a 90-day late on your mortgage, it also is just the same. Kind of surprising I thought.

The next one to look at is where you have a short sale or a deed in lieu of foreclosure where you give a deed back to your mortgage company and just say I don’t want foreclosure or you settle with no deficiency on your mortgage, your credit score gets hit by 610 to 630, which is really pretty good compared to what some of these other 60- and 90-day lates are.

The ones where you really get hit is where you have a short sale with a deficiency. That’s where the bank agrees to a partial short sale but then wants you to pay something back or you have a foreclosure where you go into total foreclosure. That drops you down to a 575 to 595, and then the bottom one shows you what happens if you go through bankruptcy. That drops you down to a 530 to 550.

In a former video I had in a credit repair expert, and I’d encourage you to go to my website and look at how do you go through credit repair to improve your credit so you can go out and get a mortgage in the future.

Well, thanks so much for watching my video this week. I hope it was very informative for you and the very best to you. Make it a great day. Bye.

STEVE: Hi. This is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty. Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week. I thought I’d introduce you to our new real estate office that we’ve just moved into on February 1st. The location of our office is right at the corner of Highway 7 and Highway 101 in Minnetonka. We went from a 25,000-car traffic count to a 125,000 traffic count.

Have great signage out there, and we have this building that is being refurbished, redone, and we have the whole first floor on this marvelous building. Now as you see here, we’re in the reception area of our office building and we have a reception desk. To the back of it, we’ve got all the agent workspaces and things that are going on back there. Plus the coffee area. And we have all the technology of the things that were put together for us.

And then we have another space that we’re excited about. Well, this area is our Triple C or our Counselor Consumer Café. As you’ll see, we have coffee. We have refreshments. We also have flat screen TV where we rotate houses that are for sale, and we just have a nice sitting area where you can come in and just sit down. We also have free WiFi for people to use, so if you bring in your computer or iPad or whatever, you just go on and you can be looking at different things while you’re waiting to meet either with your agent or loan officer, whoever you would meet.

Well, come on in to our conference room. It’s a great area for you to either meet to close on your house where we bring our closer in, or we meet with you to talk about the pricing of your property, or we meet with our buyers to go over things that are on the computer screen and talk about houses and what fits them and how we can go through the different things, whether it be on demographics or all the different technologies that we have that’s available. But it’s a great conference room for us to meet with you, and we can’t wait until you come in and meet with us.

Well, and last and not least, they even gave me an office space that I can work in, so I’d like to show that off to you. The first area I’m going to show you is I have a flat screen and a nice conference area that I can meet with my customers and clients and friends that want to come in and talk about their real estate needs. And then it was fun putting together the technology in my office where I could have the flat screens that allow me to work with today’s technology and being able to see the different things and make my phone calls.

I’ve got a couple of phones in here and just great stuff that will really help me be effective and efficient for my customers and clients in day to day. Well, thanks so much for watching my video. We’re really excited about our real estate office. Look forward to inviting you as the weather warms up to our grand opening coming sometime either May or June. Thanks and have a great day. Bye.

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty. Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week. I brought in a mover today, Brandon Hedburg of Hedburg Moving Solutions. Welcome, Brandon, and we look forward to hearing some of the input you’re going to give us.

BRANDON: Thank you for having me today, Steve.

STEVE: Well, Brandon was really helpful in moving our office from Highway 101 down to Highway 7, very helpful in us learning how to efficiently and effectively and keep our cost down. So Brandon, as you help people in trying to move one house to another, how do you help them keep their costs down and direct them in those areas?

BRANDON: First, we try to start off with a pre-moving plan, and with that preplan, we try to talk to the customers about packing themselves, making sure their boxes are taped, making sure that there are no obstructions in the path of the movers once they get there so that they can lay out their flow protection, and just being ready for the move.

STEVE: Another big thing in moving is protecting of the house you’re in and also protecting the house that you’re moving into. How do you help people in the protection of these valuable assets?

BRANDON: Well, we start out by believing in protecting the wood floors. We lay pads on the floor, and then we lay cardboard on the pads to soak up any sand or any little rocks that you can’t see with the naked eye. And then what we do is for the stairs, if they’re carpet, we lay carpet shield up the stairs, and then on all our straightaways we have rug runners, which are neoprene softened so they can go on carpet or on wood.

STEVE: I think many times a big concern that a client has is will I get an estimate and if I get an estimate, will I then be surprised in the end. How do you help people through estimates and what’s the best way to do that?

BRANDON: Well, Steve, one of the things we believe in here is a free onsite estimate. Too many of the companies nowadays are doing everything over the phone based on a sheet by how big the house or the apartment is by how many rooms that are in it. And each house and each apartment are different sizes. The hallways are different. Elevators…so we believe in doing an onsite estimate to try to get it as accurate and in the right ballpark as we can.

STEVE: I know a lot of times people wonder is there such a thing as a full-service move if I don’t want to really do anything. Can you do all those things or what kind of menu of services can you give people?

BRANDON: Well, we start off with a free onsite estimate, and from that point we figure out exactly what you want. We can come in, do full packing. We can provide the packing, all the materials. We can move you from one place to the other, and then we also have companies from cleaning companies to flooring companies that can come and help do anything else that you may need for your move to be successful.

STEVE: Well, I can really commend Brandon and his company. He’s got great people, and Brandon’s onsite to help out as the move’s going on. Brandon, what’s the best way for people to get quotes and to contact you?

BRANDON: The best way if through our website, www.hedburgmoving.com or they can always reach us as 763-434-6683.

STEVE: Thanks for coming in.

BRANDON: Thank you very much.

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty. Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week. Well, the stats are coming in from the first month of 2013, and it’s very interesting how our marketplace is changing, especially because we can look at three different years of what has been going on and you can see the significant change that’s happened in our marketplace.

The first thing I’m going to show you is what’s going on in the pending sales. In the past years, we’re showing how things were increasing. Well, this year we’re going to see over the last 90 days we’ve had about a 7 to 8% increase in unit sales, but it’s kind of following what happened in 2012. So as we came out of 2011, it was a much weaker marketplace, but 2013 was strong, and you’ll see that we’re continuing to see about the same number of sales in pending sales going on in 2013.

The next chart I’m going to show you is what’s going on with the inventory of homes. As I’ve reported in past years or in past videos of the last few months is that our inventory continues to drop. We in fact right now are at an inventory way below where we were in 2004.  In fact, you’ll see from the chart that we have on here is that we’re sitting at about 2012 properties that were on the market, and a year ago, we were at 17,000. And at the peak of our marketplace where inventory was so big, we were at 35,000 properties for sale in inventory.

So what’s happened now is you’ll see we’re at about a 2.9-month inventory of real estate properties on the market, which is causing multiple offers to be coming in on properties because our inventory is so low. The next few charts I want to show you is what’s going on from our short sale and foreclosure report area. What you’re going to see is that in the traditional home sales that in 2011 39% of the sales were traditional and then it increased in 2012 to 45%, to now in 2013 in January 57%.

So what changed is that our lender-owned properties back in 2011 were at 45% and now it’s dropped to only 32%. And in the short sale area where we were at 15 to 16% for 2011 and 2012, this year, we’re down to 10%. So you’re going to see that more traditional sellers are able to sell. We’re having less bank-owned properties in the market.

The next chart shows what’s happened because of the changes of our inventory in the market, that in fact, our inventory for the traditional homes are down at about a 3-month supply. In the bank-owned inventory, we’re down under a 2-month supply, which is why there’s so many multiple offers going on on the bank-owned because we have many buyers but much shorter supply and our inventory even in short sales is significantly dropped from two years ago where we were at a 14-month inventory to today we’re right about a 5-month inventory.

The last chart I’m going to show you is what’s gone on in median values in housing. In 2011, we were at 207,000 for traditional. Then we dropped again in 2012, but now we’re seeing a rebound of about a 3% increase in the traditional sales right around 200,000. The same thing has happened in lender-mediated sales where the lender-owned sales were at 110, dropped to 102, and now we’ve seen a significant increase even in lender sales of over 20% since last year at this time up to 124,900.

And then you can look at the short sale area of where in 2011 we were at 140, dropped to 122, and now it’s come back to 125. Overall, our marketplace is low inventory, a good number of buyers buying in the market, and seeing interest rates running right in the 3% rate and even for 15-year in the 2s. So it’s a great time for buyers to be buying, but our inventory is smaller and prices are beginning to increase.

If you as a buyer are looking to buy, now is the time to jump in before we see even greater increases in prices. And sellers, those that were sitting on the sidelines wondering are prices going to increase, we’ve seen an increase in 2012 and it’s continued in 2013. Hope you enjoyed the information I gave you, and we look forward to talking to you about it in the market update when the February statistics come in. Thanks a lot and make it a great day. Bye.

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STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  This is going to be an update of our report that we’ll put online that’s the 2012 Annual Report for the Twin Cities Marketplace.  It’s 26 pages of detail, and I think you’ll find it very, very interesting.  I’m going to go over some of the highlights of the report of the front part with graphs, but what I want to tell you a little bit about is what’s in the back of the report.  They have over 120 communities that you can look in.

So if you live in the community of Tonka Bay or you live in Minnetrista or Waconia or whatever city you live in in the Twin City area, it gives information on what has been the overview in your area.  Then it also has in there 17 counties of the region around the Twin Cities that you can see what’s going on with an overview in the counties.  Then, they also have another area where it shows the over 120 communities of what’s happened in the median sale price over the last five, six years.

So you can look specifically in your community and see what’s going on with the sale prices.  And the same also goes with the counties, all 17 counties.  It gives that type of information also.  A very, very comprehensive report.  But next what I’m going to do is show you some of the graphs of what has generally happened overall in 2012.  The graphs I’m going to show you right now are about six or eight graphs that have gone on over the region and over the vast number of years that they’ve shown here.

So each one of these graphs goes back to 2008, and you can see the trends of what has been going on since 2008.  The first one is the new listing area.  In 2008, we had over 93,000 listings that came on the market, and that’s when our inventory kept growing and growing and growing.  And you’ll see that it’s continued to drop each year both a 9, 10, 11 and now in 2012 right around 66,000 listings coming on the market.

The next graph you’re going to see is the pending sales.  And so you’ll see in 2008 we were at 39,000 sales.  We had a bump up in 2009 because of the tax credit of 46,000 sales.  Then we dropped down again in 2011; 2012 though had an 18% increase in sales to 49,000 sales.  That type of number goes back to the kind of sales we’re seeing in about 2003 and 2004.  The next graph that you’re going to look at is the closed sales.  And once again, it follows the pending sales, but these are the ones that closed and got all the way to closing for the seller and the buyer where they exchanged keys and they moved on.

And you’ll see in 2008 there were 39,600, and now in 2012 it’s 48,641 sales.  That also is about a 17% increase in sales over 2011.  The next one that is huge is the inventory of homes.  As you saw over the years, the amount of listings coming on the market has kept getting smaller and smaller.  And today, we see that our inventory right now at the end of 2012 was under 12,000 listings or 11,875.  In 2008, we were at over 25,000 listings that were on the market at the end of December.

So we have a much lower inventory going into 2013.  The next two graphs I’m going to show you are what has been happening in our pricing.  You’ll see that in 2008 the median sale price in the Twin Cities was at 195,000.  Then we kind of kept dropping down where we bottomed in 2011 to 150,000.  And this year, we finally turned the corner, and you’ll see that we have an 11.9% increase in the median sale price.  In the average sale price, you’ll also see where in 2008 we were at 236,570. 

In fact, if you go back to 2006, we had an average sale price of 275,000.  And now today after bottoming at 193,000 for an average sale price in 2011, we saw a 9% increase in our sales prices of average sale prices to $210,787.  These are all very interesting trends, but probably the two biggest trends that you’ll see is that our prices are beginning to go up by about 10% and that our inventory has dropped to significant levels down to under a 4-month supply or less, which means we are now moving back into what we call a seller’s market and the pricing beginning to increase.

Well, thanks for watching my video blog this week, and be sure to click on our website to see this full 2012 real estate report.  Thanks.

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  Well, the statistics for the Twin Cities real estate market have come in for December and ending up 2012.  And we can kind of give you an overview of a comparison of December of this year versus December of last year.  Over last year’s numbers, our pending sales were up by 6.7% to 2,900.  So the next slide I’m going to show you is where the closed sales are only up by less than 1%.

So we’re seeing in comparison to last year at this time where we had a continued increase, we may be going into 2013 with about the same statistical growth or maybe we’ll have more of a flattening though we have a good number of buyers still buying in the marketplace.  The next slide I’m going to show you is the price per square foot.  What that shows is when you take all the sales and their square footage divided by the total square footage what are the houses getting per square foot.

And you can see back in 2010 we were at $94 a foot.  We ended 2011 in December at $90 a square foot, and this year, we’re at $103 a square foot, which is about a 14% increase.  So we are seeing some increases that are going on throughout the marketplace in our dollar per square foot.  The next two slides are some pretty major things that we’re going to see as a change going into 2013, and that has to do with the inventory of homes.  In 2010 in December, we had 22,600 homes for sale, and today at the end of December, we’re at 11,875.  

That’s over a 50% decrease in the amount of properties for buyers to look at in the marketplace.  In the next slide, we’ll show you the months’ supply of inventory on the market.  When the marketplace was the softest, we had nearly a 12-month supply.  In 2010, we were at a 7-month supply.  In 2011, we were at a 5-month supply.  And right now, we’re at 2.9 months’ supply or a 3-month supply of homes on the market.

Statistically on a national basis, they tell us that if you have a 4-month supply or less, you’re more in a seller’s market.  If you’re in a 4- to 6-month supply, you’re in a balanced market.  And if you’re above a 6-month supply, you’re in a buyer’s market.  The last sheet I’m going to show you if the affordability of housing, and you can see we’ve kind of been bumping up and down in the affordability.  And let me just explain what’s happened, that last year it was more affordable to buy a house because the prices were lower.

If you remember the dollar per square foot that I shared earlier being 14% higher, that means that our prices of our homes are higher.  We did have low interest rates at this time last year, but not as low as they are today.  So now what we’ve seen is our affordability of housing has dropped slightly, though it’s still very, very affordable.  And in fact, you can own for less than it cost to rent, but we have a little bit higher prices in the marketplace with pressures on the market for prices to increase and an excellent low interest rate of around 3 and a quarter percent to get a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage.

I hope you enjoyed these statistics.  Be sure to call me if you have any questions on how this can help you as a buyer or a seller in the marketplace and use it to your advantage in 2013.  Thanks so much for watching.  Make it a great day.  Bye.

Hi.  This is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  I thought I’d announce the moving of our office that’s going to happen around February 1, 2013.  We’ve been at our offices over on Highway 101 since 1986, and on February 1, 2013, we’re moving to 17601 Highway 7.  If you’re wondering where that is, it’s right at the corner of Highway 7 and County Road 101. 

We’re going from a 25,000 traffic count to 125,000 traffic count.  We’re really excited as an office and partners to be going and getting in this new office, having everything redone for us, bringing new technology—all kinds of wonderful things to it.  we look forward to you coming to our open house that we plan on having in March sometime. 

Plus, we’re going to have a shred it day and all kinds of stuff for you to come and enjoy.  But just thought I’d let you know.  We’re really excited, and it’ll be kind of our new year present to our whole partners of Counselor Realty.  Well, make it a great day and Happy New Year.  Thanks!  Bye.

Hi.  This is Steve Westmark.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  Well, Christmas is in the air.  The season of giving is upon us.  We just got our stats in for the month of November, and here are all of the positive things that are happening in our marketplace.  Number one, the sales both pending and closed are up around 17 to 18% for the year of 2012 over 2011. 

These type of units are going back to almost what we were doing back in 2006.  So it’s a real strong indicator of what’s going on in the marketplace.  The next thing that you’re going to see on this graph that I have here is further down is the inventory of homes.  Last year at this time, we had over 19,000 homes on the market, and today, we’re under 14,000 homes.  That’s a 30% drop in the amount of properties on the market.  How that changes our marketplace with higher demand, economics 101, lower supply, you then have an increase in value.

And so you’ll see throughout our marketplace that either the dollar per square foot has gone up by about 7.6% or what we call our 10K housing value is up by 9.1%.  So those values continue to increase.  If you haven’t heard, interest rates continue to be excellent, in the low 3 percents for a 30-year fixed; in the 2s for a 15-year fixed mortgage.  Great time for buyers to be out buying.  If you are waiting for the bottom on the market, as I had mentioned earlier, in the year we’ve already hit the bottom and the values continue to grow.

I met with a gentleman called Dr. Ted Jones, and he talked about as the economy grows—and he’s the chief economist for Stewart Title—that he expects another 5% increase in housing prices in 2013.  Well, thanks so much for watching my video.  You can see I’ve got my warm little hat on today, and you enjoy your Christmas.  Merry Christmas and have a very happy 2013.  Bye.

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  I just got back from the National Association of Realtors Conference that was in Orlando, FL.  Got to hear the national economist for the Realtor Association, Dr. Yun.  And he gave an hour and a half talk on some of the things that are going on and the economics of the country and what’s going to be going on in 2013.

And so I’m just going to share with you a few ideas of what you can see going on in 2013.  The first thing that Dr. Yun pointed out is we’re at an all-time low for interest rates in our marketplace, and he predicts that in fact in the next six months that the rates are going to continue to be low.  But at some point in the 2013 year we’re going to begin to increase.  But he doesn’t seen interest rates going up significantly until about 2015.  So that is really good for the homebuyers that are out there who can purchase with lower interest rates.

The second thing that he pointed out is in fact to get back to a stronger economy, our economy needs to build about 250,000 net jobs over the next eight years to get back to where we’re at.  So we need to in fact have a Congress and a president that will roll their sleeves up and go out and figure out how are we going to get our people back to work in the United States.  So it’s really important for the strength of the economics of the country for us to be creating a quarter of a million jobs each year.

The third trend that he saw going in the marketplace is that the lender-mediated sales over the country have been decreasing.  Now a lender-mediated sale is either a foreclosure where it’s bank owned or where I’ve talked in the past about short sales where people are upside down in their properties.  Well, if you go back to 2011, this past year, 33% of our sales in the United States were a lender-mediated sale.

In 2012, he’s predicting with most of the data that’s in that we’ll be around 25%.  And he predicts in 2013 we’re going to be dropping to 20%.  Now going back to national norms going back to the early 2000s, those numbers were around 2 to 3%.  So we still have a long way to go, but that is a very, very positive thing in our economic indicators.  And the last thing that he talked about in the area of forecasting was dealing with the fiscal cliff that has been talked about in the national press.

What he tells us as consumers to do is we need to spend wisely.  We have to know what do I have to have before you decide what you’re going to go buy.  You need to as a person have a strategic plan as you move into things.  So strategically deciding what are the right things because we’re still in a very, very difficult thing.  And then third, he talked about your partnerships, the partnerships that you have with relationships into your banks, with different people that you work with in your own tax planning, whether it be your tax advisors, both in attorneys and CPAs. 

That as you move on into the future and the changes that are more than likely going to be happening in the next Congress, that this is very important to your economic stability in 2013 and beyond.  Well, thanks so much for watching.  Make it a great day.  Bye.

Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  I got back recently from the national convention of the National Association of Realtors and I got to hear two columnists from the National Journal.  One’s name was Charlie Cook and the other one was Major Garrett.  Very interesting gentlemen, and they talked on the 2012 Election, which obviously is an amazing thing that all of us caught.

But I found them to be nonpolitical in just giving of information.  So I thought I’d just hit a few highlights as we look into the 2013 year and what is going to happen.  The first thing that they mention is that some people thought that Obama was a fluke.  Some people thought that the Tea Party was a fluke.  This election proved that neither are flukes and the big question for 2013 with the Congress and Obama is will they learn to act together.

They felt that that is a big thing, that the answers that have come back to our country from that election as you can see were a different country with some very interesting ideas that are going on.  The next thing that they pointed out was the makeup of our vote.  And of course, there’s all kinds of things that I know you’re watching on political shows, and this video does not hit anywhere near the amount of data, but there were a few things that I thought were really interesting.

That was the makeup of the vote and where it came from.  And they talked about that people over 45, and I happen to be over 45, that are white went 60% for Romney and 40% for Obama.  The other side that they talked about is the under 45 vote went the reverse, that in fact it was 60% for Obama and 40% for Romney.  What they also pointed out in that is the over 45 has a tendency to be much more white, like 90%, where now we have such a multiracial, multicultural nation that the 45 and under is closer to 30% minority or multi-cultural people that are going on.

They also pointed out that 38% of the people in the United States call themselves democrat; 32% call themselves republican.  So that means that 70% are in one camp and 30% are out there just looking and listening to the ideas.  I found that to be really, really interesting in the election.  The last thing that they said from the election that was interesting was that Romney underperformed McCain, but also Obama underperformed what he did the past year.  So our voting public did not vote as much as they did in the prior election.

Now we’re going to have all kinds of political pundits looking into the future, but I think our biggest thing that we need to encourage to our politicians and wherever you stand is please roll up your sleeves, listen to the problems that we have, try to come up with some solutions, learn how to compromise, and let’s make it a better United States in 2013 and beyond.  Thanks for listening.  Make it a great day.  Bye.

Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my weekly blog this week.  I’m going to give you an update on what’s been going on in the real estate market basically through this year of 2012 through the month of October.  But instead of graphs, I’m going to really encourage you to go to the Twin Cities website minneapolisrealtor.com to look at all these different statistics.

But I want to kind of keep it real simple and simple economics of what’s been going on in this market, which is so positive.  Number one, the inventories in our marketplace have considerably dropped.  If you go back and you research and you look at some of the graphs, our amount of properties on the market are now lower than where they were in 2004.  And if you remember, going back to 2003-2004, the marketplace was crazy.  It was going nuts. 

Well, we’re not quite that kind of a nuts market, but with the inventories down, which is supply, that means that buyers have fewer homes to pick from.  Well, the other part is is that this marketplace because of the low interest rates and kind of a strong employment market in the Twin Cities realizing that we’re under 6% for unemployment in the Twin Cities.  We’ve seen a 20% increase in the number of buyers this year over last year.

Now last year was probably the worst of this decline we went through.  Starting in 2005, it just got worse. And 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 11 was the bottom.  And I think I had told you earlier that the bottom, we had turned and we’re going around and we have bottomed, and we have turned around.  And so now with this 20+ increase in the amount of units that are selling, we’ve seen the next part is that housing prices finally are beginning to increase.

It’s a positive thing for many people who have wanted to sell their house and move on to another home but were upside down and were not in what we call a hardship that would put them into a short sale.  Now people are able to sell their homes, some, where their prices have now come up and over their mortgage amount that they bought it for and they’re able to go out and buy another property.

The prices, even though they’re going up at about 10%, realize that in the Twin City marketplace we saw about a 30 to 40% drop in prices.  So we have a long way to go.  We’re going to crawl out of this.  It’s getting better, and I just think that the statistics and all the wonderful things that are going on are so strong and so positive.  The last note I want to point out is that interest rates are in the low 3s.  And as I listen to other national economists and other people, they say that over the six to nine months that the interest rates are going to remain in that same range, somewhere between 3 and 3.5%.

So it’s a great time to be out buying in the market.  We’ve turned the corner.  Interest rates are low, so your affordability is great.  But we’re coming around the corner and we’re into a much better marketplace than what we’ve seen for seven years.  Well, make it a great day and thanks for watching.  Bye, now.

STEVE:  Hi, this is Steve Westmark.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  This week, I brought in a gentleman who has been doing winterization of houses for over 30 years, and it’s Don Houlding of United Real Estate Services.

DON:  Good morning.

STEVE:  Don, I’m going to ask you questions about winterizing of a home because homes with plumbing can have problems.  Why should a person have a home winterized as they leave for a period of time?

DON:  Steve, I’ve learned over the years as a licensed plumber that homes can freeze up in Minnesota’s cold weather without ever even having the heat fail.  I do recommend to my customers even when they call and say, “You’re not going to do the job” have somebody winterize the property.  They need to be protected in case that damage occurs because when a pipe bursts in a home and the water’s on, the damage can be catastrophic.

STEVE:  Houses that aren’t winterized and have a problem like that, sometimes you’ve told me that people should really check their houses for insurance.  What are the things that they look for in their insurance or they need to ask their insurance agent?

DON:  Absolutely, it’s critical to call an insurance agent and find out if the home is vacant for more than 30 days will their homeowner’s insurance remain in force.  If the home is vacated for more than 30 days, it’s very common that the homeowner’s insurance actually cancels, and there’s no advance notice of that.  So people leave thinking that even if there is a problem they’re covered when in fact, they’re not.

STEVE:  So Don, I know you’ve run into some problems in the past where a house wasn’t winterized.  What have you found as far as some of the costs that have happened and the downsides that could occur?

DON:  Well, Steve, in the 30 years I’ve been doing this, the most difficult thing I still run into is to walk into a home where the pipes have broken and the water was left on.  The damage can be to hardwood floors, to carpeting, to floor joists.  Sheetrock becomes soaked.  I’ve seen it fall off of basement ceilings.  Windows become frozen solid, and it takes weeks, sometimes months to dry the home out.  The expenses run into the tens of thousands of dollars to put all of that back together again.  And then it’s difficult to say that everything is back 100%.

STEVE:  So in a nutshell, Don, what happens when you go to winterize a house?  What are the things that you do that helps the house get winterized?

DON:  Well, the first thing we do is turn the water off at the source.  If there’s a water heater, we remove it.  If there’s a well, we turn the power off to it.  All of the plumbing is drained down, hot and cold water.  We do add non-toxic antifreeze into places where water would collect, usually things like toilet bowls, traps, drains, dishwashers.  That way there’s a little bit of water left, but they do have antifreeze in it, so it won’t freeze if the heat does fail.

I do install a temperature alarm in the houses that I winterize so if the heat fails, we still want to get in there and get it fixed even though the plumbing’s protected.  It’s structurally hard on a home to let it freeze.  So we need to get out there and take care of that furnace and get it going, and we don’t frost on the walls and ceiling.  That’s pretty much in a nutshell it.

STEVE:  Well, thanks so much, Don, for coming in today.  And what’s the best way for them to get a hold of you to get work done?

DON:  I can be reached in my office.  Phone 651-452-5261 or I’m happy to be e-mailed at urescodon@aol.com.

STEVE:  Great.  Thanks, Don.

Hi, this is Steve Westmark of Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  Well, today I have my rod and reel, have my tackle box, and I’m going to talk to you a little bit about fishing.  Most of my friends know I’m not a great fisherman.  When I go fishing, I go with people that really know what they’re doing.  But I’m going to give you an illustration of how fishing and selling your house makes sense.

You know, in today’s marketplace, you have to find where the school of fish is.  You can have a good rod and reel.  You can have the bait and the stuff, but you can cast into an area and never find a fish at all.  And that could be because there are just no fish there.  And what we learn in our real estate market when I meet with people, we find out where do fish bite that are the kind of fish that you want to have buy your house. 

And so when we go to position your house, we hope that we’re going to help you understand that by positioning your house at a certain number, that will bring about a sale.  To give you a quick illustration of that, he started a house maybe six months ago, he wanted to try a little bit higher in price and he went out at 134,900.  Then he went to 229,900.  Then he went to 224,900.  Then he finally said, “Well, what is it going to take to sell the house?”  He went to 216,900 and it sold within several weeks.

It’s finding where the fish are biting, and that’s the key that we try to help you understand when we go out to fish for your buyer.  We want to find the best pool of buyers who will pay you the fair value on your property, the most value you can get.  But make sure that you’re not just sitting there on the market and not selling and no fish is nibbling.  Well, make it a great day.  Thanks for listening.

Hi, this is Steve Westmark, Counselor Realty.  Thanks so much for watching my video blog this week.  I just got back from the National Association of Realtors Conference that was in Orlando, FL.  Got to hear the national economist for the Realtor Association, Dr. Yun.  And he gave an hour and a half talk on some of the things that are going on and the economics of the country and what’s going to be going on in 2013.

And so I’m just going to share with you a few ideas of what you can see going on in 2013.  The first thing that Dr. Yun pointed out is we’re at an all-time low for interest rates in our marketplace, and he predicts that in fact in the next six months that the rates are going to continue to be low.  But at some point in the 2013 year we’re going to begin to increase.  But he doesn’t seen interest rates going up significantly until about 2015.  So that is really good for the homebuyers that are out there who can purchase with lower interest rates.

The second thing that he pointed out is in fact to get back to a stronger economy, our economy needs to build about 250,000 net jobs over the next eight years to get back to where we’re at.  So we need to in fact have a Congress and a president that will roll their sleeves up and go out and figure out how are we going to get our people back to work in the United States.  So it’s really important for the strength of the economics of the country for us to be creating a quarter of a million jobs each year.

The third trend that he saw going in the marketplace is that the lender-mediated sales over the country have been decreasing.  Now a lender-mediated sale is either a foreclosure where it’s bank owned or where I’ve talked in the past about short sales where people are upside down in their properties.  Well, if you go back to 2011, this past year, 33% of our sales in the United States were a lender-mediated sale.

In 2012, he’s predicting with most of the data that’s in that we’ll be around 25%.  And he predicts in 2013 we’re going to be dropping to 20%.  Now going back to national norms going back to the early 2000s, those numbers were around 2 to 3%.  So we still have a long way to go, but that is a very, very positive thing in our economic indicators.  And the last thing that he talked about in the area of forecasting was dealing with the fiscal cliff that has been talked about in the national press.

What he tells us as consumers to do is we need to spend wisely.  We have to know what do I have to have before you decide what you’re going to go buy.  You need to as a person have a strategic plan as you move into things.  So strategically deciding what are the right things because we’re still in a very, very difficult thing.  And then third, he talked about your partnerships, the partnerships that you have with relationships into your banks, with different people that you work with in your own tax planning, whether it be your tax advisors, both in attorneys and CPAs. 

That as you move on into the future and the changes that are more than likely going to be happening in the next Congress, that this is very important to your economic stability in 2013 and beyond.  Well, thanks so much for watching.  Make it a great day.  Bye.