mpbro

Well, I'm idle at work and thought I'd give a comical update. We moved into our rental in Mountain View and one week and a 5x10 storage unit later, we're still trying to get all the crap we brought unpacked. When you move from a 2100 sqft house with 2 car garage, into an 1100 sqft duplex with no garage, it's a recipe for fun. There's a similar duplex down the street on the market for $1.2M! I can't help but laugh when I think of the relative standard of living of someone in Houston who buys a $1.2M house, versus Mountain View. Really, someone in Mountain View is only "rich" if they move somewhere like Houston! But, I don't think the temperature has risen above 82 since we've been here. And when the temps are 80, the dewpoints are in the 30's. Ahhh...

Very cool. They make me think of a Calder sketch. Can you imagine an entire bathroom with those?! BTW, I voted "never". I've liked Calder since I was a kid, and that spans 30 years.

Just a note for non-realtors out there: 2006 sales data have been released by HCAD. I do not know the "cleanliness" of these data. Likely they are MLS sales, which may be verified by HCAD via the Harris County recorder. These data, as well as 2007 assessment data, are available at voxproperty.com. You can get raw data at pdata.hcad.org (not user-friendly). Before I managed to update the database and move to California, I really screwed things up. The long and short of it: most user-generated content is gone forever. But at least the data are current.

Is your new bungalow in good shape, or is it a "tear down"? West U is nice. We live across Kirby from West U, in the Southgate neighborhood. Whenever I go for a walk in West U, I'm envious of the good streets and sidewalks. It's frustrating to pay all that property tax, but get crappy City of Houston services. You probably get a 5-minute response time on police/fire calls in West U, versus 3 hours in Houston!

We'll live in Mountain View, and I'll work in Santa Clara. I finished graduate school (geophysics) in 2004 and came to work at an oil company in Houston. Last year I switched to a service company which has an office here, but is headquartered in Santa Clara. Northern California is hardly a bastion of the oil & gas business, so I seized this opportunity. I got into a "quality of life" argument with some other guy on here, and boy, what a pointless and intractable argument it is! For us, "quality of life" primarily centers around outdoor activities (hiking, skiing, climbing, running). With nearly perfect weather and fantastic outdoor attractions, we love California. But everyone has his or her definition of quality of life, and Houston offers a lot of things. The thing I'll miss most about Houston is the nice people. I always tell my wife that California would be perfect...if all the people moved to Nevada!

I didn't see anyone mention Timbergrove Manor. It's adjacent to the Heights, and quite a hot neighborhood. It has all the modern conveniences, like sidewalks and drainage culverts, not open ditches like parts of the Heights. It is more "homogeneous" than the Heights, with predominantly 50's-60's ranch-style homes. Though the mega-mansions have recently broken up this homogeneity. A downside is a proclivity to flood in certain portions of the nbhd. Make sure to check the flood plains.

This is my goodbye, too. We're moving back to California on May 31. I don't have 2100 posts to my name like the topic starter, but hopefully I did not piss off too many people here. I found the board to be very useful and the people (usually!) courteous. Regards, Morgan

Good move on not going for a new shower pan. Everything I've heard is that it's a serious job, and not one you want to screw up. You might get the hang of it after a few jobs, but you only have one shot. There is a company called Tile-Redi which makes pre-formed composite shower pans that you can tile over. It's not the low-cost provider, but 1) you can tile it yourself and save money, and 2) you have confidence that it's not going to leak. If you get one of the common sizes, cost shouldn't be too bad.

Danke. Heh-heh, I guess so... ;-) And unfortunately, we never got down to the price point where the builders started sniffing around. This was a lowball from some motivated buyers, and we had to converge. So I certainly can't say that you're wrong and I'm right! We're off to Mountain View, CA (Bay Area). In a week, we'll be stuffed into a 1100 sqft duplex. I'm really not in a huge rush to take a plunge into that market. Surprisingly, that part of the Bay Area is still quite strong. Silicon Valley is hot for the first time in years. The rent-to-mortgage ratio is way out of whack (1:2), so I think that rents are probably going to come up considerably, rather than house prices falling. Makes me think of buying a duplex myself.

Well, we close on May 31 for $515K. Quite a bit lower than the original ask of $599K, but this was not unexpected. Still a very good PSF number ($244) for this neighborhood, though. And a nice premium over lot value, which I estimate at $450-475K. The buyers apparently plan to gut the kitchen and bathrooms, and possibly add a bathroom+bedroom.

Heh-heh, I've heard the guy who runs it has an MLS feed... There really is no "law" governing disclosure of MLS sales. If a realtor tells me (non-realtor) a sales price, and I go and publish it somewhere else, all HAR can do is censure the realtor. There is a disclosure bill in the state senate, and I've heard that it passed and is on to the house, but I don't know the details.

And just think--in Houston we have it good. My parents live in western Colorado (Montrose), and there, bottom-of-the-barrel tract homes are running over $100/sqft. Everyone's gotten squeezed by material costs, but the cheap labor here sure helps.

Texas is a non-disclosure state, so sales prices of homes in private-party sales are not disclosed to the public. Foreclosure sales prices are. The sales you see on zillow are all foreclosures. So it makes sense that they'd be considerably lower than the "zestimate". For an MLS feed, ask a realtor--they can give you this information. The Houston association of realtors actually does release MLS sales to HCAD annually. Until recently, you could download bulk sales from pdata.hcad.org. VoxProperty.com displays these data up to 2005.

Heh-heh, are you planning to paint the paneling?

Zillow displays foreclosure data for Houston. For instance, enter your address on fixfliprent.com's zillow tool and you get a bunch of "comps". These are all foreclosures... Not real useful for normal comps, but it's a free interface to the data.

I was able to find two exact matches in my neighborhood... There was only one 5 bedroom house that sold in the month given, and it sold (MLS) for $398, and that was what HCAD noted. But I have no idea where HCAD gets its data; direct MLS feed or something else.

Interesting. What effect does the distinction between non-core and core employment industries have on RE? Is it primarily an income issue? The energy industry itself has undergone quite a transformation since the last energy boom. 30 years ago, there was a lot more direct operational activity in Houston. East Texas field and other now-marginal onshore fields were much more important to the majors. International operations are more important these days, so much of the grunt work is outsourced to non-Americans. During the cost-cutting years of the 1980's and 90's, companies consolidated field offices to Houston, primarily to cut costs. But in the last 10 years, Houston has really reached a critical mass as a Silicon Valley-like entity. More than the sum of its parts, in other words. Some firms have moved headquarters here (COP), and those that haven't have pretty much moved everything except for senior management and pure finance functions. In other words, the demographic of the energy industry's employee base in Houston has changed a lot, and to the benefit of Houston! More white collar, more educated, more money.

I guess Professor Smith can't see the Med Center from his office at UH! Just an unscientific observation, but doctors are driving the market around here as much or more than energy. In 1982, there were over 1M geoscientists employed in the industry. Today, we make do with somewhere north of 100K. Sure, the locus of the industy is here, and people from around the world are moving here, but it's just not as manpower intensive as it used to be. Now medical...THAT's manpower intensive! Maybe he was also discussing commercial RE, which sure is strong on the westside. An amazing pace of building along I-10.

HCAD now has a neighborhood sales feature, including some fairly recent sales. They don't list addresses, but they list sqft and exact sales price, which is something new. Click on "neighborhood sales" from any property detail page.

No, you misunderstood -- "pedestrian friendly" in Houston means that you park your car and have a sidewalk from your car to your destination. It does NOT imply that you'll actually cross a street. ;-) We live within walking distance of the Pillage, but avoid it after 11 am on the weekends. Seems like the only time we go is when OTL friends want to meet. I knew that the Village had officially entered suckdom when you started getting towed away when you visited the G-man. Oh, and Di Falco's Brewing Supply leaving didn't help.

HAR seems to release sales data to HCAD once a year, in a flaky and unreliable way. Year-old comps are pretty stale in such a dynamic market. But, this is certainly better than nothing, since by law they have to release nothing. We need a TX disclosure law! Anecdotally, I'd say that the best agents really don't mind putting information in the hands of clients. It saves them work. Even sales data. Your average client has neither the aptitude nor the inclination to actually use comps to make an informed property valuation.

The biggest problem in TX is the lack of a sales disclosure law. A non-Realtor property valuation site is much more interesting if you have access to recent sales. Once we get disclosure, you'll see lots of interesting competition to HAR.com. In the San Francisco Bay Area, you have a million sites that show listings, etc. The local realtor assn hasn't even bothered to build anything as good as Har.com.

I agree. I don't actually know any of their administrators, but as you pointed out before, a data-entry error allowed you to see the SELECT that pulls data out of their database, and thus to see the structure of the database. It is very hard to find reliable IT talent in Houston. The oil business has drawn many away, at large salaries. But to be fair, they (HAR) give more access to the MLS than almost any other local Realtor associations. Showing contract status is very helpful for us non-agents. The database is not large, but they service a large number of users simultaneously, and speed is rarely an issue.

Seems that if you're after a doubling in land value (as you alluded), it's somewhat of a crapshoot. To transform an entire neighborhood in a short period of time, you've got to be riding the crest of a wave of concerted development. Once the little guy knows where the big money is moving, it's usually too late. Perhaps a safer, if less lucrative, approach is to find pockets of value in an already established desirable neighborhood. For instance, you see considerable variations in land value within the Heights, even when there is no obvious barrier, such as a busy street, school district boundary, or differences in deed restrictions. Given a high-demand, liquid market, you'd expect over the long term for values to equilibrate within a given neighborhood. (assuming lots of things, like similar prevailing lotsize, similar construction, etc.) It's the $64K question, isn't it! Good topic.

Sometimes the location of the leak can be obscured by gravity. We had some leaky flashing around our chimney. It leaked "up roof", then dribbled along a roof joist and eventually onto the ceiling near the edge of the roof. Prob doesn't apply to you since your roof is flat.