Real Estate Blog

Are you remodeling or redecorating? Then you’re probably looking for some inspiration in the color department. One tip: Look no further than fall’s fashion runways. Fashion trends often dictate what’s hot in home decor. So, if you’re looking to get a jump-start on next season’s trends, check out Pantone’s hot colors for fall 2008. Saturated tones of both warm and cool colors dominate the list. But how do they look in actual rooms? I was inspired by this great post on the Material Girls blog to find rooms from Dueling Digs that put these bold colors to use:

This office is from 11754 Treadwell Dr, Poway, CA
See more living space remodeling ideas
See more Poway, CA real estate

This bedroom is from 1955 King Arthur Cir, Maitland, FL
See more bedroom remodeling ideas
See more Maitland, FL real estate

This kitchen is from 5383 E Rockridge Rd, Phoenix, AZ
See more kitchen remodeling ideas
See more Phoenix real estate

This bathroom is from 3667 Gleneagles Dr, Tarzana, CA
See more bathroom remodeling ideas
See more Tarzana, CA real estate

This kitchen is from 4144 Flintlock Rd NW, Atlanta, GA
See more Atlanta real estate

This living room is from 2242 81st Ave SE, Mercer Island, WA
See more living room remodeling ideas
See more Mercer Island, WA real estate

This bathroom is from 814 Sheridan Rd, Wilmette, IL
See more Wilmette, IL real estate

This bedroom is from 16593 Catena Dr, Chino Hills, CA
See more Chino Hills, CA real estate

This bedroom is from 3338 SW Fairmount Ln, Portland, OR
See more Portland, OR real estate

This living room is from 2049 NE 6th Ter, Wilton Manors, FL
See more Wilton Manors, FL real estate

See the rest here:
Home Remodeling: Hot Colors for Fall

Apparently not at Home Depot. The store posted a 24 percent decline in fiscal second-quarter net income, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But according to Zillow’s Q2 Homeowner Confidence Survey, which we released earlier this month, more than half of respondents are planning to do some sort of remodeling in the near future. Fifty-six percent said they were planning some kind of home improvement, either major or minor, in the next six months.

About half of all the respondents (49 percent) said they were going to do minor repairs, like repaint a room or install a garbage disposal. About a fifth (17 percent) said they were going to do major improvements, like replacing the roof or a kitchen remodel. FYI, some people said they are doing both major and minor repairs.

This is the first time we’ve asked this question of homeowners, so we don’t know if the numbers are going up or down. We’ll know more next quarter, when we ask it again.

My hunch is that the number of people planning some kind of home improvement is staying fairly steady. But I think there have probably been changes in the scope of these improvements.

Back in 2005 and 2006 when homes values were going up up up, it wasn’t hard to secure a home equity line of credit, or HELOC, and put in those new granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances. But it was also much easier to sell your home and move to a bigger and better one down the block.

These days, though, if people don’t need to sell, a lot of them aren’t. Even though our Homeowner Confidence Survey showed that most people aren’t exactly in touch with reality when it comes to the value of their homes, it’s no secret that it’s not as easy to unload your house as it once was. So maybe people are nesting, and since it’s not as easy to dig into the equity of their homes (some recent calculations here at Zillow showed that one in seven American homeowners is underwater on their mortgage), maybe they’re making more minor home improvements.

So maybe homeowners are buying their paint at Home Depot, but not as many new kitchen cabinets or hardwood flooring. We’ll find out more next quarter, when we have more data to compare, but what do you think?

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Another one bites the dust. Record producer, actor, writer and founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, Damon Dash, is facing foreclosure, according to the NY Daily News. Allegedly, Dash and his wife, fashion designer Rachel Roy (no - not Rachael Ray), allegedly owe $7.3 million on two Tribeca real estate addresses. If the addresses are correct, the first property at 25 N Moore St., NY, NY, looks to be for sale for $4,795,000 with a “contract signed,” according to the listing description. Dash’s other property at 79 Laight St., NY, NY, doesn’t appear to be on the market.

Just one more celeb to add to the celebrity foreclosure list…

More:
Another Celebrity Foreclosure: Record Producer Damon Dash

When buying a home, one of the most important and most difficult questions to answer is “How much can I afford?” With price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s hard to determine what those prices will equate to on a monthly basis.

To make it easier to answer this question, Zillow recently released a new monthly payment feature at the top of every home details page. This feature shows what the monthly payment would be on that house, if you were to purchase it with a 30-year fixed mortgage with 20% down, using today’s mortgage rates.

If you have more or less than 20% to put down on the house, or you were thinking about getting a different type of mortgage, you can just click the edit button to change the assumptions to fit your criteria, and the payment will automatically recalculate using the most current mortgage rates.

To give you a complete sense of what your total monthly costs will be, the monthly payment includes estimated taxes and insurance. If you want to see the mortgage principle and interest payment only, simply uncheck the box just above the estimated payment amount in the edit screen.

Once you find a home that you can budget into your monthly expenses, you can get a jump start on securing financing for it by visiting Zillow Mortgage Marketplace to get custom loan quotes, anonymously.

How Much Can You Afford?

Season four of the The Hills premiered last night, and for all of us closet Hills fans, it didn’t disappoint.

This season opened with a pool party at LC’s house for Audrina. As I’ve blogged about in the past, this house has been the source of much friendship melodrama. While I didn’t get an invite to the shindig, using Zillow’s Bird’s Eye View functionality, I can at least see the pool where the action went down.

Another Hills party that I didn’t to attend, but can stalk online, went down earlier this week when the crew headed over to the Project Beach House (a sponsored beach house for celebs to hang out at during the summer) for an exclusive party and taping session. You can read about the filming of this “reality” show by this lucky blogger that did get to attend. The home sits on 5 acres of land and overlooks the Pacific Ocean and El Matador State Beach in Malibu. Oh the glamour life those Hills girls lead!

See original here:

Reality TV update: Million Dollar Listing, Season 2, Episode 1 “Sellers From Hell”

Madison, the self-proclaimed “King of Malibu,” used Zillow to prepare for his listing presentation and secure one of the biggest listings of his career during the season premier of his reality TV show Million Dollar Listing, which appears on Bravo.

Madison is a high-end real estate agent in Malibu, CA and has sold more than $80 million in celebrity real estate (and he’s not even 30!). His most recent celebrity listing: Karen Pankow’s Malibu mansion (ex-wife of James Pankow, trombonist from Chicago).

Pankow’s pad is located at 3874 Puerco Canyon, Malibu, CA 90265 and is listed at a cool $4,385,000. (See more Malibu, CA real estate).

Much to our delight, Madison is an active contributor on Zillow (agent screen name “900624lead100457964”) with 6 listings for sale. Hey Madison, thanks for the shout out and for using Zillow!

Million Dollar Listing airs Tuesdays at 10/9C on Bravo.

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I spend a fair amount of time speaking with Web developers around the country, and one thing I have heard numerous times is that they’d like to be able to access data on homes for sale via the Zillow API. I have good news — now you can!

We recently added two new API calls — GetRegionPostings and GetUpdatedPropertyDetails.

The combination of these two new calls provides a way for real estate agents and brokerages to integrate for sale by owner listings directly into their listing search functionality. We’re happy to have Redfin as an early adopter (Redfin blog post) of FSBO listings in the markets it covers. Here’s an example of a FSBO listing from Zillow on Redfin (here’s the same listing on Zillow).

Zillow is a living, growing database of all homes — not just homes for sale (we currently have data on more than 80 million homes). More than 1.3 million owners have claimed their homes on Zillow and many have updated their home facts. While we are storing those updated home facts in our databases, we think it’s only fair that we allow individuals to use the data they input into Zillow on their own Web sites, if they wish. This is where the GetUpdatedPropertyDetails API call comes into play. Have a Make Me Move price on your home and want to easily show it off? Now it’s possible. Or, have a listing that you want to automatically display within your own Web site or blog? That’s possible as well.

The GetRegionPostings API takes a place (ZIP code, neighborhood, or even geo points) as an input and returns a count of listings by type (Make Me Move, for sale by agent, for sale by owner, and reported for sale) in addition to some home facts about each property returned. The attributes of each property that are returned are home type, beds, baths, square footage, lot size, and price — along with a count of how many images are available for that property and a link to the home details page on Zillow. If you’d like to have access to the GetRegionPostings API call, please let us know.

Realius is another innovator that has adopted our postings API in the New York Metro market as part of their Price Me Now game - you can try it out here. For those looking to learn more about adding Zillow content to your site, take a look at our API documentation — and don’t forget those mortgage rate widgets that are highly clickable and addictive!

Here is the original post:
Opening up the Zillow API to Allow Sites in the API Network to Access Homes for Sale

Vanity Fair, which likes to tweak U.S. President George W. Bush any way it can, has started a “George W. Bush Crawford Ranch Sale Countdown.” In doing some quick office math (thanks, Mary!), it looks like this VF countdown will put Bush’s Crawford, TX, home on the market in the middle of June, 2009.

Rumors have been heating up that the prez — love him or hate him — will sell the ranch because his wife,

Laura, wants to live in a town that has more than one traffic light and a public

library. Evidently, reports have placed Laura’s top choice to be Highland Park, which is a suburb of Dallas and about a two-hour drive north of their Crawford ranch. Laura, if you’re interested in Highland Park, TX real estate, you’ll see it’s quite affordable with a Zindex of $90K (at this writing).

Check out some interesting satellite imagery of Bush’s Crawford ranch. Evidently, he did a lot of work to the property, known as the Prairie Creek Ranch, after buying it for $1.3 million from the Engelbrecht family in 1999.

Even Dallas Dirt is speculating that W is looking into a Dallas office. Oh, where will they land?

Read more here:
Bush Countdown: Sale of Crawford Ranch

Last week, we released our Q2 2008 Real Estate Market Reports, in which we reported that, nationwide, 29.1% of homeowners who purchased in the past five years are currently underwater on their mortgages (i.e., owe more on the mortgage than the house is worth). We also reported that almost half (45%) of those that bought at the national market peak of 2006 currently have negative equity. The first chart below shows the number of homes with negative equity as a percentage of homes sold in each of the last five years (broken out by region). As you can see, homeowners buying in the West at the 2006 peak have been hit the hardest with almost 60% of purchasers in that year upside down currently on their mortgage.

After doing a bit more number-crunching, we’re able now to report these numbers as a percentage of all homes, not just homes sold in a given period. The numbers are even more startling than we expected with almost 14% of all single-family homes in the U.S., regardless of when they were bought, currently in negative equity. That’s one in seven single-family homes in the country underwater right now. The second chart below breaks these numbers out by region as well. Here, the impact of significant market declines in California, Las Vegas and Phoenix are evident in negative equity rates in the West which top 18 percent (almost one in five homes underwater). The lowest rates of negative equity are found in the Northeast with only about 6 percent of homes underwater.

In an earlier analysis at the beginning of this year, Moody’s Economy.com reported rates of negative equity at the time of about 10 percent with a projection for rates to near 14 percent by the end of Q2. Indeed, it does appear that we’ve hit those levels as indicated by our own numbers. With negative equity being a factor in foreclosure rates, these numbers are just one more reminder of the severe strain being felt by many homeowners right now.

Go here to read the rest:
Look Around: One in Seven is Underwater

The 104th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is posted at Altos Research. In honor of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Mike Simonsen put together a fantastic carnival with an Olympic theme by highlighting 7 posts — head on over and take a look!

The carnival will make its next appearance on Monday, Aug. 25 on ValleyMarket.com. Please submit your best post by Sunday, Aug. 24, to be considered. Are you a real estate blogger and would you like to host a future edition? If so, get instructions on how to do so here. Please check the complete FAQ list if you have other questions as to how to participate.

Credit:
Carnival of Real Estate #104

If you visit Zillow today using your iPhone Safari, Blackberry, Opera Mobile or other mobile browser, you will notice something different. The mobile homepage. That’s because we just launched a mobile browser version of our popular home search feature making it easier and faster to search properties from your hand held device.

Our goal: To speed things up and improve the mobile user experience. To make this all possible we put together a lightweight search interface that should be easy to use on mobile devices. Built by myself and designer Adam Ebel, we intentionally kept it simple. Just enter the address and press “GO”. If we find an exact match for your search, you’ll see a home details page which will tell you:

• Zestimate
• Number of beds
• Number of baths
• Square footage
• Sale price
• Homes for sale/Recently Sold/Make Me Move status
• Photos
• Seller and owner added facts
• Zestimate history graphs
• An inline static Google Map of the home’s location
• Links to view the home details page on Zillow (and for iPhone users, on the built-in Google Maps)

During your visit, you’ll be able to use links to switch between the mobile site and the main site, so virtually all of Zillow is viewable, and finding homes using the address search feature is a snap.

Feedback and requests for future versions are much appreciated. Feel free to e-mail me at davidgo@zillow.com.

The rest is here:

In a magnanimous act, real estate developer Donald Trump is rescuing Ed McMahon from foreclosure by buying McMahon’s home and leasing it back to him, according to the L.A. Times. As The Donald put it,

“When I was at the Wharton School of Business,” Trump said, “I’d watch him every night. How could this happen?”

Now that Ed is saved from foreclosure, what about other celebrities facing foreclosure?

Read more here:

Swimmer Natalie Coughlin from Vallejo, California (Photo courtesy Al Bello/Getty Images)

Many of us here at Zillow have been cheering on the U.S. team in the Beijing Olympics this week. Which got us thinking, which state do you think has the highest number of Olympians? If you guessed California, you’re right. In fact, California wins by a mile — of the nearly 600 athletes that make up Team USA, 166 have hometowns in California. (The second-highest state, Texas, trails with 43 athletes.) Holy moly, there must be something in the water!

Of course, California also has the highest population of any state, so maybe that’s the difference. But that doesn’t explain why California has almost 4 times the number of athletes as Texas, which has nearly two-thirds the population of California.

Which city has Olympic bragging rights? According to this U.S. Olympians hometown list, that would be sunny San Diego. Seven Olympians call San Diego their hometown, closely followed by Irvine, California, with 6 athletes.

Go here to read the rest:
California Takes the Gold for Most Olympians

McLEAN, VA — Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE) today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey (PMMS) in which the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaged 6.52 percent with an average 0.7 point for the week ending August 14, 2008, unchanged from last week when it averaged 6.52 percent. Last year at this time, the 30-year FRM averaged 6.62 percent.

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Long-Term Mortgage Rates Relatively Unchanged and Mixed Economic and Housing News; ARMs Fall Slightly

If you work in this industry you hear it constantly - like a chant - “Real Estate is local. Real Estate is local.” No two housing markets are alike; trends in home values are local and demand for housing is localized. Even expertise is local; you do not want to hire a Seattle Realtor to sell your Manhattan loft and so it’s logical that advertising in the Real Estate game is most effective when it is - you guessed it - local.

Go Local with Showcase Ads

Zillow just launched Showcase Ads - local advertisements targeted at the ZIP code level. If you have a local business or service to promote this is the ad product for you. Showcase advertisers can purchase 25, 50, 75, or 100 % of ad placements in a given ZIP code.  If you’re a Realtor whose farm spans a few ZIP codes your Showcase Ad can be targeted to buyers and sellers searching for homes in multiple ZIPs (and at a fraction of the cost of sending postcards.)

Pricing

Showcase Ads run for 30 days and are paid for per ZIP code targeted.  Pricing varies from ZIP to ZIP depending on both the popularity of the ZIP code (number of visits on Zillow.com) and the value of the real estate there. For example, 25% of page views in my Seattle ZIP code (98103) gets me 13,000 impressions in 30 days and is priced at $136 whereas the 98244 ZIP (in a remote part of Washington state where I own some land) gets me <500 impressions and  is priced at only $10. It’s simple to figure out what your ZIP code is going for; just create an ad and click through to “Step 2. Pick ZIPs.”

Get Creative

Showcase Ads offer advertisers the chance to get creative with the imagery and the content of their ad. An ad can include an image, a headline, two lines of text and a link. Unlike many ad products online, advertisers are allowed to include their phone number and e-mail address in their Showcase Ad.

An ad’s creative design plays a huge role in the attention it gets - so it’s important to experiment! Advertisers can change the design of their Showcase Ads at any point during the 30-day window and we show you the number of clicks your ad’s getting so you can work out which design has the biggest impact.

Easier than EZ.

Showcase Ads is Zillow’s second generation local ad product. It’s a re-branding and re-tooling of the successful EZ Ads product and so I’ll wrap up by explaining the transition from EZ to Showcase Ads. “Showcase” is more descriptive branding of the ads and it’s more logical branding for Zillow’s newspaper partners who are selling the ads through the phone to the papers’ classified ad customers. But more importantly, Showcase Ads are even easier to use than EZ Ads were. Customers gave us great feedback about EZ Ads and the most common thing we heard was “just make my ad show up on every page!”  In response to that request, we devised the simpler 30-day pricing model of Showcase Ads.

To get started with Showcase Ads click this link.

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