See?

Today was the day of my big Amador County adventure.

It was fabulous!

Right now I’m a bit tired by all the fun I had, but very soon I’ll be sharing some photos and some audio (or transcripts of audio — not sure what’s better).

The short answer conclusion is that Amador County is a really neat place — a lot like El Dorado County before it got overcrowded and busy.  If you don’t live there already, you probably should.

This is Helen. Eep… I’m not that good of a blogger, so go easy on me. 0o

I am going to talk about the sales price last year and this year, but I’m not sure about what the heck was going on so I’ll just give you the rough facts. My dad, who’s a broker, actually published it so it’s all legal. [But as always, information is based on multiple sources and is believed accurate but has not been verified.]

Turning now to eastern Sacramento County for a moment, in Folsom for November, the average list price increased by 1.6% from last year. Last year’s average list price was $530,257, while this year the average was $538,525. At the same time, the average selling price dropped by 1.3%, as it was $524,496 last year and is now $517,550. The median selling price dropped by 3.7%, as it was exactly $500,000 last year and is now $481,750. The average square feet increased by 8.3%; 1997 last year and 2162 this year. The days on market increased by 74.2%, which was 31 last year and 54 this year. The number of houses sold dropped by 25.4%, 67 last year and 50 this year. The number that expired this year was 41. The number of houses for sale right now is 393.

Well, it’s that time of year again. You know, the time where my Christmas shopping isn’t done, and the universe has run out of light, and I seem to want to spend my time hibernating, no doubt a biological legacy left to me by my ursine ancestors.

How often do you get to work “ursine” into a blog? Hardly ever.

This has been an extremely interesting year in my real estate career. I started the year as a leader of a real estate team, then quit to become an individual agent, did that successfully for a time, then came dangerously close to quitting and getting a less invigorating job, and finally ended up opening a brokerage of my own. Whew. No wonder I’m tired.

The market has been changing, as a result of which I’m having to do more direct sales myself to keep my income the same. At the same time, however, it’s exciting to me that I’m starting to drum up some enthusiasm for team selling, or Social Media Marketing, or whatever it is you call it when you get other strong sales personalities in on the joy of typing. So looking forward I want to really build on that, and continue to refine the business and technical mechanics of maintaining and extending my company’s market dominance. Already my blogs are more of a team effort than they ever were in the past, with Bridget making excellent contributions to this blog and with two lenders beginning to pitch in. The enthusiam, expertise, and keyboard fingers and brains are all there — now with some more organizing and planning I’ll bet we can achieve some interesting and profitable results.

Another current area of growth for me is in leadership in the technical and administrative aspects of the brokerage. This is actually working out well now that I’m not especially busy. It’s all legal — just a bit disorganized.  All that is a bit on the boring side so I’ll have no more to say about it.

In fact, this whole post makes me want to go back to the cave and sleep.  Let me just have a bit more honey first…

Let’s get this straight, Bridget’s the Amador County Expert, not me.  Bridget probably knew where Lake Camanche was off the top of her head.  She probably takes her family swimming there, and has many happy memories of Lake Camanche.

I’ve been led to the lake largely by inference and the MLS.  The MLS tells me that the area we call Lake Camanche is in Ione.

Live and learn.

I’m also assuming it’s a body of water, what with being named “Lake Camanche” and all.  But wait, my research skills coming into their own in full force, I was able to discover that this is a great place to go Bass Fishing, if you’re not a vegetarian, anyway.  If you are a vegetarian like me, you probably shouldn’t go bass fishing.  But when I was younger, I wasn’t a vegetarian, and I used to like to go bass fishing, so I get it about how you probably don’t want some stupid vegetarian telling you what to do.

There aren’t a lot of houses out in Lake Camanche.  Actually there probably are few if any “in” the lake — they’d get wet.  But there aren’t a lot around Lake Camanche, is what I’m trying to say.  Only four sold last November.  Only one sold this November.  No, I’m not even going to tell you what the median price of one house is.  That would be silly.  However, I will say that in addition to knowing intuitively that Lake Camanche probably had water in it, I can tell you that the average home sold for the same price as the median home, and that the high and low prices likewise didn’t vary, when that one home was sold.

Oh what the heck, I can’t resist:  $323,000.

I may be visiting Lake Camanche in my fabulous Amador County adventure, which is any day now.

Well, as the joke handed down from my French Canadian ancestors goes, yesterday you looked, “and there we were, gone.”

No one was being vebose yesterday because we were all out selling. Actually Helen and Kathy were hard at work being verbose all day while Bridget and I were out working, each with our respective clients, in the rain, showing homes both distressed and not, and perhaps selling a couple that weren’t so distressed.

What a team.

It’s invigorating, that’s what it is. Yep, that’s right, I’m going with “invigorating”. I’m working my way through Martin Seligman’s excellent book, Learned Optimism, and even though I’m only on chapter two or so, I think it’s safe to say “invigorating” will prove a better word choice for this weekend’s activity than “exhausting”. Seligman’s book, if I’m reading it correctly, is about the scientific basis underlying the idea that optimism leads to greater success for most organisms than pessimism (duh). More profoundly, Seligman’s book puts forth the thesis suggested by the title: there is a scientific basis and framework for the idea that one can teach pessimists to be optimists.

That works for me. I’m basically a pessimist undergoing directed self study in optimism. Optimism is an essential career skill for Realtors®, insofar as our job involves subjecting ourselves to as much potential failure as we can in order to be successful.

That’s invigorating.  Trust me.

Kathy and Helen went out and played with DOD (that’s dear old Dad as he likes to be called) Saturday instead of researching statistics. But that’s not going to keep us from our blogging duties. If we’re going to blog about Amador County, then it’s high time we learned where it is. So we did a little Internet search and we discovered that there is a Wikipedia entry for it, complete with a map!

For those of you non-native Californians (and/or the geographically clueless) it turns out that Amador is located due South of El Dorado County. We’ve even been there and it is a quite lovely rural area well steeped in colorful California history. We’re talking Gold country.

We will continue our research tomorrow and I am sure we’ll have more to tell you.

     I just wanted to say THANX to John! I am so glad that we are working together, how could I get depressed when everytime I read one of your blogs or e-mails I laugh until I am near tears? Just think how successful our blog-a-thon for hunger will be next year, we will make an impact at the El Dorado and Amador County Food Banks. I am looking forward to your visit to Amador county this week for your Grand Tour! Thanx again!

     I spent some time looking over the stats of residential sales in Plymouth and it seems that our sales are close to the same as last year, but our market time has more than doubled! We are still selling, its just taking much more time than what sellers and realtors have experienced recently. Hang in there sellers and realtors!

Well, we’re at the halfway point of the blogathon. A lot of people have asked how they can help out.

I wish the answer were more verbose, more a propos, more au courant, de rigeur, je ne sais quoi. I wish it had something to do with how scared you are of some new web site, and how we’re all going to be fine, because consumers still need someone to hold the lockbox key and their hands.

But the answer is about the same as it was in the beginning of the blogathon. You can best help out by downloading the flier. Fill it out. Follow the instructions. If you want to sponsor someone, the smart money is on either me, because I’m longwinded and not afraid of my own unintelligibility, or the whole team. But Bridget and the Helen/Kathy combo are also chiming in and helping to move things along. In fact, the most successful aspect of the whole thing has been seeing others take their first tentative steps into efforts that will help keep me from needing a hunger blogathon. We have about 200% more bloggers than sponsors! Fortunately Bridget put her finger on it with “Blog Blog Blog“, because we’re not doing all that well at “thon thon thon.”

How much have we raised so far? Well, I’d have to go back, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve already hit or am close to hitting the twenty posts that Judy Onorato, El Dorado County’s most Courageous and Beloved Title Company Rep, sponsored us for. So that’s forty bucks, when you throw in the matching funds. And the Helen / Kathy team are up to about four bucks. So by the end of next week, blah blah blah.

You know, this is viewer supported Internet. We depend on folks like you for this great programming.

Now I know how PBS feels. Does that stand for “Post Blogathon Syndrome?”

I won’t say I know how Sally Struthers feels, but Rob Reiner does. Lucky guy.

Well, Helen has still some funds to raise off of my sponsorship.  Go Helen!  And you guys, don’t ignore Bridget.  She’s an accomplished agent, equestrian, and bingo something-card vendor, so please don’t let her tailspin into a depression.  Let’s make this our most successful Winter 2006 Blogathon ever.

Operators are standing by.

Kathy here, posting my first blog of the blogathon. Helen is with me, observing. She’s already learned how to do the market research. Now she’s learning how to post her results in a blog. I did a little research on our glamorous neighbor to the west, El Dorado Hills.

So here is what we’ve learned about El Dorado Hills. The average list price for November 2005 was $704,820. This year the number has gone up 4%, making the Average list price for November 2006 $733,128. That was a surprise to us since we thought that the market was going down. But that was only the list price. Sellers, of course do not want the market to go down. The average Selling price stayed pretty close to the same as last year for the same time period. The selling price for November 2005 was $694,661. This year the number is up 1.5%, making the Average selling price for November 2006 $705,164. Interestingly enough the average list price last November is virtually the same as the average selling price this November. And the average number of days on market has risen 21.6% But the most significant figure we saw was the drop in unit sales. For November 2005 the number of houses sold was 53. This November there were only 27 sold, making a drop of 49.1%. So by raising the list price while there are fewer buyers, sellers are getting the result you would expect — fewer sales.
So there you have it folks. And tomorrow, Helen will tell you about what’s happening in Folsom