Well, my Hunger Blogathon 2006 Fever is growing to a fever pitch. Lucky for me I skipped the flu shot this year.

The PDF fliers and a few paper copies are ready, and I’m off to one of the local MLS tours tomorrow to see what sorts of pledges I can draw. Meantime my invitation to the Invited Famous People is all set up in email, just waiting for me to say something intelligent. The blogathon starts the day after tomorrow, and I have to get my daughter Helen some help so she can pitch in and participate, and I have to put my thinking cap on, because Bridget (also known as “Lucky Bridget”) is in Disneyland for a few days getting a well earned rest. So she may not weigh in until she returns, but then may be able to regale us with her Matterhorn adventures.

What it’s about:

The Blogathon is a benefit for the El Dorado County and Amador County food banks. That’s our local focus area for this blog, and it’s also where our intrepid band of blogger participants all live. 100% of your pledges will be donated to these two food banks, on a 50/50 basis.

How to Pledge:

We’ve tried to make pledging pretty easy to do, at the risk of constantly saying “Operators are Standing By.”

You can call (877) 735-5657 and either talk to me or Bridget or leave a voice mail, or you can fax us the Pledge Flier (PDF). Sorry there’s no online form for it yet — I should try to get one together in time for next year’s Blogathon.

So I hope that many people locally and in the blogging community will participate. So far the flier’s assumption is that you can only sponsor the local blogging team, but as an incentive for the wider community of bloggers who wishes to participate, let’s do the following:

• To the $200 that is earmarked already in matching funds, I will add $10.00 in matching funds for each blogger from another blog who participates either by an external link or by an in-line comment on the “Famous People Weigh In” (or any other post), up to an additional $100.
• Though unfortunately we can only offer good links and not prize money for the following portion, we’ll announce winners in the following categories:
• Most people invited to participate by a non-sponsored blogger.
• Best suggestion for making the blogathon better either this year or in the future.
• Funniest related post.
• Most heartwarming / sincere related post.Winners in the above category will be announced here and on my two other blogs.

Well, that’s all I have for now, but hopefully that piques some small amount of interest.

Yes, on some level this blogathon helps us to kick-start the visibility of a new blog, but it’s also for a worthy cause, so I hope it we’re at least able to raise a modest amount of funds and have a little fun doing so. In any case it’s a decent first attempt, and perhaps next year we can do even better if it works out.

Well, as I was promoting this year’s blogathon on another site, it occurred to me that I should invite a bunch of famous real estate bloggers to participate. So I’ll be sending out a bunch of email invitations as well, but for now I thought I’d just put together a list of famous people to invite. There’ll be a post entitled “Famous People Weigh In” that I’ll publish between December 1st and December 15th, the official blogathon dates. To participate, please comment / link back briefly to this article with the words “I’m In” or whatever else you might want to say, then look for that post “Famous People Weigh In” and please comment / link to that and write a longer comment or article on whatever you feel like.

So here’s my list of Famous People who are cordially invited to participate in this year’s Blogathon for Hunger. For more details, see the Stealable Flier and the Background Info.

This list will be built in real time. If you’re not on it, please accept my apologies and post an “I want in” comment, and chances are if you’re not a splogger I’ll add you in.

On To The List

Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide.

Kris and Steve Berg at the San Diego Home Blog.

Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato.

Jay Thompson, aka The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and (also from the toasty state), John L. Wake from the Arizona Real Estate Notebook.

Gary and Laury Woods at Beautiful Santa Barbara.

Fraser Beach at Toronto Real Estate Blog.

Rowena and More Likely Fran at The Real Estate Blog.

Fran Bailey in Windy City’s Chicago Metro Area Real Estate.

The especially famous Hanin Levin at Growabrain.

Don’t forget to Ask Merv (Forney in Northern Virginia).

The easy to pronounce Keith Byrd in the somewhat tongue twisting San Luis Obispo.

All you guys over at ActiveRain.

Peter Scott, the King of Carmichael.

Julie and Mike Jalone at Keep it Real.

Doug Lindstrom, owner operator of The Purple Cow, who recently was kind enough to associate me.

Dmitry and Maureen.

Based on Dataquick data, The Mountain Democrat recently reported a 2.7% rise in median prices for El Dorado County in October compared to a year ago.  Painting a somewhat rosey picture, the article begins:

El Dorado County continues to defy the regional trend of declining home prices. In their October report, DataQuick Information Systems found year-over-year median price declines in existing single-family homes for Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba Counties. The drop in home values ranged from five percent in Sacramento to 11 percent in Placer County. El Dorado County, however, posted a slight 2.7 percent increase, finishing the month with a $445,000 median price, the second highest in the eight county region.

I myself have noted the same thing about El Dorado County in my own work.  Seemingly defying gravity, El Dorado County’s prices continue to post modest gains even as every other county in the area shows a loss.  I’ve been at something of a loss to explain this, especially in light of the huge losses in Placer County, a market that one might expect to perform somewhat similarly to El Dorado County.

As I read further in the article, one possible explanation came to mind, the dampening effect on the supply side that’s been created by El Dorado County’s traffic mitigation fees.  I have to wonder to what extent calling this slowdown in land sales “the desired effect” is meant to be tongue in cheek or how much it’s meant to be provocative:

The new Traffic Impact Mitigation Fees are having their desired effect. Vacant land sales have nearly stopped. With over 700 vacant land parcels listed for sale in the county, only 13 monthly sales were reported. It was the slowest month for land sales in recent history. Building and impact fees now easily total $80,000 for an average size house in some parts of the county, forcing many to look for lots and acreage elsewhere.

Well, I’m sure some of us already here who are thinking along solid Republican principles of “I got mine” may have desired that effect, but builders don’t, buyers don’t — certainly no one with land to sell thinks it’s a very good idea.  Thirteen monthly sales and 700 units in inventory works out to be some four and a half years of land inventory.  Ouch.

When we compare the market to the year before, Amador County’s real estate market in October showed a pattern of slowing similar to what we’ve seen in other parts of Northern California.  Average home prices and average sold price per square foot both dropped during the period — however the median sale price was higher this year than last, suggesting that most buyers this year are opting for “more home” than last — possibly because falling prices enable them to buy more.

The median sale price was up 7.5% from October to October, from $339,000 last year to $364,500 this year.  At the same time, the average sold price dropped some 7.2%, from $397,445 last year to $368,942 this year.  The average sold price per square foot dropped 6.9%, from $231 per square foot last October to $215 per square foot this October.

The average time a sold home that did sell in October spent 137 days on the market before selling, as opposed to 111 days on the market on average last October.  Fewer units sold this year than last year (38 versus 53, a 28.3% drop in unit volume), and inventory is fairly high currently at 13.3 months.

I mentioned in an earlier post that it can be difficult to generalize about a market that’s very small in size. The reason is that as the number of houses you’re talking about gets very small, it’s possible that you can misinterpret an artifact of the small sample size as some kind of trend.

Having said that, please take my Ione numbers with a large grain of salt. Only seven homes sold there last October, and four homes this October, so our sample size is a small one indeed. Based on that small sample, however, the average sale price is up 12.2% from year to year, from $340,128 last year to $381,750 this year. At the same time, the median sale price rose from $310,000 to $387,000, a 24.8% increase.

Bloggers, this year we’re promoting a 2006 Blogathon for Hunger in our local communities, and here is a draft version of the flier in Word Format and PDF Format.  You can help us out by sponsoring us or linking to us to spread the word, but you are also welcome to steal this flier and use it to host a local blogathon for hunger this holiday season in your own area.  All we ask is that you make sure you don’t leave in our company information and especially not our fax number on the flier — we don’t want to administer your pledges for you.  Other than that, a link is always friendly but we don’t insist on it.

Earlier this year on my Oakland site, I tried my hand at doing a little fundraiser called “Blogathon for Hunger 2006“. This was inspired by the official 2006 Blogathon, which I thought was a really clever and well-meaning idea but whose entry date I missed.

My own Oakland Blogathon for Hunger was a lot of fun, and it got me to do two things that are important to me that I don’t always do:

1. Write a bunch of stuff on one of my web sites in a very short time.
2. Help some people who are less fortunate than myself.

This Fall as this El Dorado and Amador County site took off a few things became apparent to me all at once, leading me to think it would be a good idea to resurrect the Blogathon for Hunger for a December run in El Dorado and Amador County.

1. My daughter Helen was several hours behind on her community service obligation for Shenandoah High School. I thought the Blogathon would be a good way to catch her up and get her a chance to participate in the family business at the same time.
2. Thanksgiving was almost upon us — no wait, Thanksgiving just happened. There we were in the Winter holiday season, and the El Dorado County Association of Realtors® was no doubt in full swing on its yearly CanTree effort (See the PDF file, The Other Side of EDCAR for more information).
3. This web site was just starting to take off, and I needed to start getting as much published here as I could.
4. Our inventory of homes was getting fairly high, so I thought some of my colleagues might like an opportunity to contribute to the cause of hunger relief while at the same time getting some free exposure for their sellers’ listings.

So anyway, that’s how I ended up here, rather early in the morning on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, talking about the background of this year’s Fall and Winter edition of the Blogathon for Hunger, which I envision as being:

1. Better publicized than the summer effort, both online and through fliers distributed locally.
2. Lasting from December 1st to December 15th, 2006.
3. Having proceeds be equally and fully distributed to the El Dorado County Food Bank and the Amador County Food Bank. (See these and other members of the California Association of Food Banks.)
4. Having more bloggers (and more sponsors!) than just me.

So anyway, that’s a first post to kick things off.  Now to go make it happen…

Interested in coming to Amador County and having a great, relaxing stay in between visits to several fine properties? I came across this interesting Amador County Inns site here recently and thought it was a wonderful idea.

My wife and I spent Christmas in New England at a bed and breakfast run by a friend of my sister, and it was pretty fun — certainly a lot different from a hotel. It was less restful in some respects but more relaxing.

We should do that again some time — a blogging holiday.

Well, today I found my invoice from the good people at the Amador County Association of Realtors®, and sure enough, I can get into the MLS fine now. The MLS is running using Paragon’s web site interface, the same software the East Bay Association of Realtors® uses, so there wasn’t much of a learning curve.

Before I dive headlong into publishing some statistics about Amador County, let me begin with a general cautionary tale.

The first thing that’s apparent is that overall volume is not that high, compared, let’s say, to Sacramento County. Well, gee, of course that would be true — there are fewer homes and less people. So what? Well, just keep in mind as you read the Amador County data that a smaller sample size generally means less statistical significance. But if four houses sold last month in Ione (for example), there’s no other way to write about the inventory of 57 homes available now than to say there are 14.25 months. It’s no use wishing there were four hundred sold versus 5,700 in inventory. The numbers are what they are, but as the sample size goes down, concepts like “median sale price” become especially difficult to interpret.

Anyway, having made everyone feel less than overconfident about the whole enterprise, let’s forge ahead boldly and undertake it anyway.

It was nice to run across Diane Cipa’s Title Insurance Blog here recently. Diane’s a Pennsylvania title insurance provider who maintains that consumer blog and another blog I enjoyed for industry insiders (hey, that’s me — I feel like a real decoder ring owner now), Radical Title Talk. There’s some good stuff on both of these blogs about the differences in costs between title companies, and the fact that title companies tend to market themselves to Realtors® and lenders only, relying on these professionals to market them to the public at large.

The neatest thing about Diane’s blog that I can think of is that someone in the title industry even has a blog. Realtors® were notoriously slow to adopt the Internet as a means for reaching customers. (Thank you very much, by the way — that’s the basis of my business model). Yet compared to other segments of our industry, my broker and agent colleagues actually represent the technological vanguard.
It also encourages me, because one of my goals for this blog when I get a minute (ha ha) is to start inviting some local tradespeople who are my partners in the real estate sales process to contribute their opinions and articles here. I’ve had good response to my tentative queries, but so far lacked the time to organize it more formally.