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Saturday, May 9, 2009 Old North St. Louis House & Community Tour

5 May 09

ooo This Saturday is the Old North Saint Louis House Tour. If you have not been to Old North or just have not been to Old North in awhile you should definitely come on up and check it out. This year there will be 10 historic homes on the tour. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 the day of and include a free ice-cream from Crown Candy Kitchen. Much has been going on in Old North since last year’s tour.

Old North was featured on the NRDC website in a write-up by Kaid Benfeild where he called it “one of the country’s best revitalization stories” in its “thoughtful, inclusive, diverse, grasrootsy sort of way”. The April issue of St. Louis Magazine named Old North one of the best places to live in the city and this little urban village also got a spot on KETC, Living St. Louis. See the clip here.

Construction on Crown Square and the 14th Street Mall has been moving forward steadily. This piece from KMOV says that five business have committed to the Square. Crown Village Gallery is almost complete and the new coffee shop on 14th at the Urban Studio should be opening soon.

Sounds like a great place, yes? 35 million dollar retail development, local farmer’s market, arch view, coffee, ice-cream, art gallery and neighborhood gardens and educated and active neighbors. Well, you can live here too!

1412 Hebert is on the market and the residents, reluctant to move, indeed must sell. The home has 3 bedrooms and 2 full baths, a massive yard and yes, an arch view. It’s for sale and open this Saturday from 10AM-4PM!

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Posted in featured, neighborhoods, st. louis

Coming Soon: 4160 Botanical: 4 bed/3 bath for $234,900

24 April 09

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INTERIOR: SPACE, glorious space! Need a big place? This is it. 4 bedrooms, and 3 FULL baths. The first floor is set up perfectly to host out of town guests with one good size bedroom adjacent to a full a bath. The whole house offers ample community areas. Downstairs there is a formal living room and dining room in the front of the house. In the back there’s a breakfast room or office with large picture window off the kitchen. On the second floor there’s a large family room and drawing room along with 2 bedrooms, public bath and MASTER SUITE complete with separate soaking tub, stand up shower with dual fixtures and laundry area.

LOCATION: One block south of 4160 Botanical is Tower Grove Park and one block west is the Missouri Botanical Gardens. From here you can walk to Grand for coffee, ice-cream, Thai or Japanese. Or stroll over the to the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market on Saturday to buy your groceries. Get to SLU campus or Medical Center on your bike. If your driving 44 is just a few blocks away.

VALUE: Shaw neighborhood prices are all over the board. Included in the CMA below you can see that there is currently a home on Flad with about 2700 square feet priced at 199K. It needs a new kitchen and some floor plan modifications and a good amount amount of updates in terms of new systems and windows and basic cosmetics. Alternatively you can see that a home in the 4000 block of Shenandoah with only 2024 square feet sold in under 40 days for 300K. So where does the Botanical home fall in this spectrum? With approximately 2700 square feet Botanical is massive.

Based on the CMA below the average price per square foot for SOLD homes in the Shaw Neighborhood is $101.32. Using that as a yard stick, Botanical should be about 270K, but it is going to be listed at $234,900 which makes it an amazing value. Alternatively if you look at the current actives homes in the Shaw neighborhood, you can see that of all the homes priced below 250K, 4160 Botanical has them beat not just in terms of space but in updates and cosmetics as well. Since 2004 there have been major system updates done to the whole house including HVAC, plumbing, electric and windows. Additionally the kitchen was completely gutted as were all three bathrooms.

4160 Botanical is coming soon and won’t be the on the market until the owner buttons up every last detail. Get your finances in order and clear your afternoon because this home will hit the market on May 1.

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Posted in featured, new listings

Super 8 Footage of an Unfinished Arch and Busch Stadium

8 February 09

Jay’s been going through his family’s old Super 8 footage and found this gem from mid 1960s. A drive down Market street towards a nearly-completed Arch, a drive past the old Busch Stadium construction, then its off to Forest Park.

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Posted in featured, st. louis

Golden Age for First Time Home Buyers

9 December 08

That is what the New York Times is saying. All signs point to the buying opportunity of a lifetime for those who can qualify for a mortgage: housing prices have dropped, mortgage rates are down to 5.5% with talk of going even lower and there is $7500 federal tax credit for eligible first time buyers.

Some Interesting Quotes

Since prices generally soften in the winter, it may make sense to start looking seriously once the mercury bottoms out. “If you look at new developments next spring, you may not have the choice you thought you would have or be in the bargaining position you thought you would be,” Mr. Shepherdson said. Also, if you wait after June 30, you will miss out on a $7,500 federal tax credit for income-eligible first-time home buyers that works like an interest-free loan

“You can never time a bottom. This is a long-term investment for us, and it truly is the best investment we have in our portfolio right now.”

The Big Fear

Loss of equity is the big fear. Many prospective buyers that I have talked with recently are cautious about investing their money into a home because they are afraid that housing prices haven’t hit bottom and that they won’t get back what they paid. The table below comes from a study ( also linked in NY Times article) done by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the National Low Income Housing Coalition called “The Changing Prospects for Building Home Equity” which tries to predict locations where the equity positions of buyers purchasing now would be lower in 2012. The study has identified 33 markets (located in the upper right hand corner) where owners may have negative equity positions by 2012.

What I thought was most interesting about this particular chart was the position of St. Louis. Notice that it is on the lower left hand side in the section called Non-Bubble Markets and that in that it ranks in the middle of that list where the rank represents the size of equity from lowest to highest. What makes me feel particularly optimistic is the quote from the study about Table 1, particularly the last sentence: In comparison, metro areas without housing bubbles will likely accumulate positive equity in a relatively short period of time.