Jamie Boling-Puebla just listed this beautiful property, featuring two homes on one lot, on Center Street in Jackson. Both homes are being updated, and we expect to have more photos as this process gets completed.  Meantime check out the flier below, and call Jamie Boling-Puebla at 209-418-9692 to schedule a personalized advance preview.

John Lockwood | Elite Properties | (877) 735-5657 121 Center Street, Jackson, CA Two homes! 3 Bdrm Single Family House offered at $399,000 Year Built 1890 Sq Footage 1,902 Bedrooms 3 Bathrooms 2 full, 0 partial Floors 1 Parking 1 Car garage Lot Size Unspecified HOA/Maint $0 per month DESCRIPTION Two homes! Guest home or rental…both homes have been or are being updated. Walking distance to downtown Jackson. Quiet neighborhood. New windows, new central heat & air. Home is value range priced at $399,000 to $445,000. see additional photos below ADDITIONAL LINKS Map of property Mortgage calculator ADDITIONAL PHOTOS Seller contact info: John Lockwood Elite Properties (877) 735-5657 For sale by agent/broker Equal Opportunity Housing Posted: Jun 20, 2007, 10:21pm PDT

Bridget’s listing on 314 Marlette Drive, Ione, has just been reduced to $459,900 (formerly $485,000). 

Don’t let the small pictures fool you — this house is huge at 3,330 square feet.  Moreover, the way it’s laid out make it ideal for a daycare, extended family, or perhaps (with a little work) a home with a separate rental?  That’s because this beautiful 5 bedroom 3 bath house is laid out like two homes in one, with three bedrooms and two baths, with living room, formal dining room, and kitchen upstairs.  Downstairs includes 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, kitchenette, den, a large family room, and outside access. 

Buyer should check with county for intended use, but this is definitely a great opportunity, now at an even better price.

Get the full listing details or schedule a showing.

Real estate sales in May of 2007 remained slow compared to last year, with falling prices and rising inventory. Forty-five homes sold this May, down 18% from last year’s 55 units sold in May.

The average home listed for $395,029, and sold for $379,828, or 96% of list. This number is consistent with last year, and as we’ve noted elsewhere, tends to be resilient despite what else the market is doing.

In other indicators, we see a slowing market. This year’s average price was down 5.4% from last year’s average selling price of $401,560. This May’s median was down significantly more, 13.5%, with this year’s median coming in at $345,990 and last year’s being $399,900. The average selling price per square foot was down 5.8%, at $210 per square foot this year versus $223 per square foot last year.

This May a home took longer to sell in Amador County, with the average home being on the market six months (184 days), as opposed to just over four months (127 days) last year. As you might expect, inventory is also high at 15.3 months.

Yesterday I was working on the purchase of a home for a friend in Santa Cruz County, of all places. (I win the Elite Properties “Southernmost Adventure” award this year, I guess). While I was there, my cell phone showed that I’d gotten a call from Bridget Felmley, which I missed because I was in a bad reception area. Can you hear me now? I returned the call and got Bridget’s voice mail in turn, leaving the message that I’d called and I’m sure that whatever it was it was probably good news.

Sure enough, when we touched base today I learned that Bridget had sold another of her listings.

This may not be a big deal to people who don’t know how the market is doing, but as someone who watches it all the time for a living, I was impressed. Many of us who are doing well in this market are working with buyers and selling that 15% or so of the total inventory that sells every month — those homes that are the nicest and best priced. To be honest, this isn’t a great time to be a listing agent no matter how you slice it. But it’s even less of a great time if you’re not Bridget, because her listings are managing to sell.

I ran some quick numbers, and found that Bridget was working on her second listing this year. Not great, right? Well, Bridget would probably agree that she would have liked to do more, but here’s the thing. During the same period that Bridget sold two listings, the average agent in Amador County sold less than one. 0.625, to be exact. Another way to put that is this: In 2007 to date, Bridget Felmley sold three times as many listings in Amador County as the average Amador County real estate agent. Two’s pretty good when you consider that 449 hungry agents were competing for the privilege of selling 281 listings.

But hold on, it gets better. The average agent’s six tenths of a listing took 183 days to sell, on average. The average listing Bridget sold took 136 days, on average (the high was 152, and the low was 120). That means the sellers who used Bridget saved 47 days.

Now bear with me through just a few more statistics, and you’ll see why this is important. The average home sold during that period for $338,877. Let’s make an assumption that the sellers are financing and paying taxes on 50% of the value of their homes, on average, so that works out to about $169,500. We usually estimate carrying costs (Principle, Interest, Tax, and Insurance) at $8.50 per month per thousand borrowed, so if we round off forty-seven days worth of that, the average Amador County seller would have saved $2,257.00 in carrying costs — just by working with Bridget instead of another agent.

Moreover, keep in mind that we’re only talking about the financial carrying cost here. What’s it worth to you to close early and be able to get into that new home you had your heart set on instead of losing it and having to settle for less? Or maybe you’re not doing all that well financially — in that case, what’s it worth to you to get your home sold in time to possibly save your credit, instead of having late payments or maybe even a foreclosure on your record?

Amador County’s numbers for April are a study in contradiction.  Some of the numbers show us clearly in the midst of a clear buyer’s market, while others are little changed from last year.  Of course, maybe this is not that surprising, since we were in a buyer’s market last year as well.

Forty-three residential units sold in Amador County in April, down 10% from last year’s 48 units.  The average home sold for $347,489 in April, down less than 1 per cent from last year’s average of $349,883.  Sold price per square foot only dropped 3.7%, while the median price of $329,000 was only down 1.8% from last year’s median of $335,000.

So far so good, I suppose, but at the same time, the average time a home spent on the market before selling rose 41.7%, from 127 days last year, to 180 days on average this April.  Looking at average monthly sales of Amador County homes for the past year and comparing that to current inventory, we come up with a figure of 15.2 months of inventory.

Turning our attention to active listings, however, once again we do see some more encouraging signs.  First, the average home is listed at $205 per square foot, only about 2.5% over the average sold list price for April, and the average days on market for all active homes is only 116 days.

Today I had the pleasure of living La Vida Amador again, when the prophecy of my visit to the Great Sutter Creek Duck Race was fulfilled.

This is my second Amador Adventure, the first one having been the subject of earlier blog chronicles.

I got lots of good photos.  Well, I think they’re good photos, anyway.  Hopefully Athol Kay doesn’t have a “Bad Sutter Creek Duck Race Photos” series in mind.

	This band, Bobby D. and the Blues Organization, was really good.  They played nice jazz, by which I mean jazz that an un-jazz-sophisticated boor like me could enjoy.
	The other great thing that happened at the great duck race was that I finally got to sign up to become a Bone Marrow Donor, which I asked my readers to do a couple of weeks ago in support of Trevor Kott.  There’s the booth over at the right, and a poster-board featuring the Kott family.  We had fun, those of us in the line, amusing ourselves as we waited to get swabbed.
	I got to make friends with the D.A.R. ladies.  They were really nice. It turns out those historical dresses are made of cotton, so they are comfortable. I’m not sure what prompted me to ask.
	Here’s me with my Duck-Quacker bill, mugging it up for the Camera with Janelle, this lovely lady who sells cotton candy to support the Pine Grove Civic Improvement Club. I had a picture of Margie, too, but it came out somewhat unflattering, so she’d probably prefer it if I didn’t put it up here, or maybe if I went back and took a flattering picture. Margie and Janelle were charming as could be, but eventually I was crowded out by throngs of sugar-crazed cotton candy buyers.
Where are Bridget and Jamie?	Bridget and Jamie from our Amador County office were there, but I didn’t take their pictures.  I got the sense they didn’t want me to impose.

You know, I’ve been at this awhile and I’ve only scratched the surface of the pictures.  This happened during my last Amador adventure as well.

I think Amador County is just too photogenic.

Here’s proof, in case you still need it:

It’s April 27th, and you know what that means…

It’s The Great Sutter Creek Duck Race Eve.

The big event happens tomorrow, April 28th.

Bridget didn’t want me to write about the duck race. She gave me the idea that if I wrote about the duck race, I wouldn’t be respectful enough or something.

Respectful? Heck, I’m jealous. I wish Elite Properties were on the list of local business sponsors where you could get your duck. This is probably a pretty Elite Group of Businesses, so Elite Properties ought to have no trouble getting in-duck-ted into it.

In the meantime, I understand that we do have a little modest company swag — or at least, literature — that Bridget and Jamie will be passing out at the duck race.

I’ll have to talk to our Amador County District Manager about getting maybe some duck shaped key-rings for next year or something. Or ducks with elite crowns on them.

Here’s the other thing: I think if you’re going to have a town named after a creek, you owe it to your residents and visitors to have a duck race. Otherwise you may feel like you’re up Sutter Creek without a paddle. Or rather, without a duck.

Finally, I’m not sure how much respect one is supposed to accord to a duck race. I mean, isn’t a duck race supposed to be pretty fun and tongue in cheek to begin with? I guess the idea was that I would make fun of the rural lifestyle in Amador County or something. Not really. I’m jealous there, too. I wish my dogs had some dirt to run around and chase squirrels on. The dogs wish for that even more than I do.

Heck: I live in El Dorado County. That would be like the pot calling the kettle black, even if we do have such thriving metropolises* as Cameron Park, not to mention Swansboro. *(That’s probably really “metropoles”, but no one would recognize it).

You would think that in Swansboro they would run a Swan race, but as far as I know, they don’t. That’s false advertising, if you ask me.

One last thing: A duck goes into a pharmacy and asks for a tube of lipstick. The clerk says, “That’ll be $3.99″, to which the duck replied, “Just put it on my bill.”

It’s been a while since my fabulous Amador County Adventure (see here, here, and here), but I’m really feeling that old adventure fever again because there are Historical Homes being shown off this Saturday, April 21st, 2007 — just the thing for the Realtor® with a degree in history who feels like walking around in Sutter Creek this weekend). From the Sutter Creek Events Calendar:

“AAUW presents the 35th annual Home Tour, featuring unique and historic homes and Landmark sites in Sutter Creek; itself a California Historic Landmark. Cost:$20; Proceeds provide college scholarships for local women and girls, community projects and educational programs. Contact:Lani Chapman 209 245-6052.”

Twenty bucks? Man, if my last Amador County Adventure is any indication, I’d say this is cheap at twice the price.

Ever wonder how land conservation efforts and real estate development projects are resolved at the County Level? The answer is, the Board of Supervisors is responsible for creating the County general plan document. Assisting the Board of Supervisors is the General Plan Action Committee…

a ten-member group of Amador County residents (with alternates) appointed by the Amador County Board of Supervisors to assist County staff and consultants in preparation of the Draft Amador County General Plan.

If you care about how land is used (or not used) in the county, the meetings of the General Plan Action Committee are open to the public. GPAC meets every other Thursday, and you can check out their tentative meeting schedules to see if they’ll be discussing a topic of interest.

By the way, if you’re looking for some of the reasons we think life in Amador County is so fabulous, check out the General Plan Action Committee’s Vision Statement — I think they sum it up quite nicely.

Tomorrow it’s time for our sales meeting, and I’m working on having an announcement quite soon about a new hire in our Amador County Office.

We’re also hiring in our El Dorado County office, and if our luck holds we may have an announcement there in a few days as well.

I hope our new Amador County hire likes to blog. Lately it seems the day gets completely taken up by working on client files, training, and other things that, taken together, probably mean that my business is on exactly the right track. However I do miss the leisure time I used to enjoy for spinning sense and or nonsense. I can see only one solution: more caffeine.

It’s really great to see the Realtors® in the company doing so well, not only directly with clients, but interacting so smoothly with one another. The dark side of real estate offices is that there sometimes seems to be too much infighting and competitiveness, a la Glengarry Glen Ross. I really don’t get a sense of any of that from anyone on the team, just good friendly cooperation.

I’m also impressed again and again by the level of effort and professionalism everyone puts out, a situation that allows me to be able to say with confidence that we’re offering an excellent service to our clients. Yeah, I know — I’m a salesman, so I’m supposed to say that. But that doesn’t make it any less true.