Better Know a Neighborhood

I need people.
I spent much of yesterday with my head buried in statistics and faced with an ongoing technical dilemma. Admittedly, this kind of work is not very sexy, but then I don’t have “people.” (And, I mean no offense to Cyber-Steve, Master of the Crashed Hard Drive. He just has different skill sets.) Since the breached birth of our new MLS system in May, I have been struggling with a way to easily import market statistics given that they (the perpetrators of Tempo 5) robbed me of my right-click capabilities. So, I started Thursday morning on a mission to right the wrongs, the “wrongs” being my data living under lock and key and a website which has consequently been displaying very outdated real estate numbers for a couple of months.

Skip this part if embedding stuff in web sites doesn’t turn you on.
If you don’t care about the nuts and bolts of my solution, scroll down a paragraph or two; the braver may soldier on. My first thought was to import the data in PDF format. In response to my question of how to embed a PDF on my web site, my bloggy buddies on Twitter quickly responded with the Docstoc and Scribd solutions. These turned out to be the right answers to the wrong question. I quickly remembered that the MLS reports include too many fields which are of no value to my readers, plus they offer the added bonus of getting truncated about halfway across the page when printed to file.

The ease with which I can post and update statistics is of paramount importance. (See “I don’t have people” above.) For this reason, I have always loved the Altos charts for listing activity because, once embedded, they are perpetually updated, kind of like magic. If at some point, I get hit by a truck, or a burning brick for that matter, consumers will have the comfort of at least knowing what the median listing price is for homes in their community. So, my solution for providing homes sales data comes about as close to being magically self-sustaining and worry free as I can get it, with the help of EditGrid.

Here comes the cool part.
Using EditGrid, I created a spreadsheet of homes sold, thirty-days back, for each of six San Diego I-15 Corridor communities. I embedded the spreadsheets in our web site and now, future updates require simply that I update the data on the EditGrid site. This is an example of my handywork:

All of these statistics currently live under the Market Stats button on our web site. I intend to update the data every two weeks or so, which should be quite manageable. Time permitting, I also hope to branch out and add some coastal communities to our list. Maybe this isn’t quite as exciting as, say, doing a load of laundry, but it’s all I’ve got for the moment — until I get me some of those “people.”

The Case-Shiller Home Price Indices are out for May, and San Diego saw a 23.2% decline in prices year over year. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you are looking to buy a home in Scripps Ranch, you now know who your management company will be.

It’s been quite a little project, but our interactive companion map to the table of Scripps Ranch Homeowners Associations (brought to you by EditGrid) is mostly complete. I say mostly, because I know of one subdivision for which we are missing information and another four which I somehow failed to include in the map, but at this point, finding the missing data is like a little game of “Where’s Waldo?”

This little labor of love was created using Google mapping. Ultimately, my goal is to include a photo for each subdivision. Of course, we have created a monster which we will have to continually update, but it beats the heck out of spending my time obsessing over those wacky Case-Shiller dudes.

View Larger Map

We have long been acquiring and posting floor plans on our web site for the various Scripps Ranch neighborhoods. Our newest creation represents our latest installment in our information overload series. This will permanently reside on our web site under the “Scripps Ranch ‘Hoods” tab, and now that we have more or less answered the question of who does or doesn’t pay Mello Roos, I am off to figure out what other useful neighborhood information I can provide that people don’t know they need or want.

Okay, this is way-cool. My favorite geek, Drew Meyers, shared his latest tech toy on the Geek Estate Blog.

It wasn’t immediately obvious to me how I might apply the embeddable spreadsheet feature of Google’s EditGrid, but I have this primal need to try everything at least once. Drew, being the good company man he is, would much rather I share Zillow’s first quarter market report for San Diego. I just may do that soon, but today I will instead share a little project in which we have been knee-deep for the past month.

At a recent Scripps Ranch Community Planning Group meeting, the chair suggested that it would be nice to have a comprehensive list of homeowners associations (HOAs) and management companies for the many neighborhoods comprising Scripps Ranch. His thought was that in the event of future emergencies (think fires), a single go-to resource for contact information would be helpful. So, with the help of our underpaid (as in, “not paid”) high school intern, Jeremy Haywood, we set about compiling the information. The result is the following spreadsheet, presented in two pages. The first indicates whether or not each neighborhood has an HOA and/or Mello Roos assessment, and the second lists the HOA management companies and phone numbers.

We (that would be the “royal we,” think “Jeremy”) are almost finished mapping this information using GoogleMaps. Knowing that you are all now tingly with anticipation, rest assured we will be sharing the visual version of our spreadsheet when it is finished. In the meantime, I am off to think up something else I can put in an embeddable spreadsheet that is not Zillow’s first quarter market report. I just love messin’ with Drew.

Tomorrow, more real estate chatter. But, today, the mainstream media gives us a nod.

Bloggers wield a heavy hammer indeed.

Ann Brenoff writes this morning about bloggers in the Los Angeles Times.  In her article, she mentions a bevy of real estate blogs, and it appears I just made the cut. Page two, last paragraph - I’m the closer. Either I’m Trevor Hoffman or an afterthought. Let’s go with the baseball analogy.

Even some agents have caught the “amuse them and they will come” fever. Kris Berg’s San Diego Home Blog is a “must read” because of her Erma Bombeck-like voice.

Erma Bombeck? How funny that our little “educate and get educated project” has found this voice. My children, however, aren’t laughing.

If blogs had been around 18 years ago when I spawned my first tax deduction, I would have been a much more effective parent. Where over the years I had come to rely on tired parenting tricks to shame my children into submission, such as singing “I’m Too Sexy” very loudly in the produce aisle or threatening to wear their clothes to Back to School Night, now I just play the blog card. “Clean your room, or I will post about it!” “No, Mom, Puleeeease!”

The power is intoxicating.

Yet, as cool as the Los Angeles Times thinks I am, my own IRA-siphons think I am yesterday’s newspaper. When I proudly announced that I had finally signed up for Facebook, one daughter (with a quizzical look similar to the one she flashed when I suggested she get one of those job-thingies) wondered aloud, “Why?” When I sent my two satellites-in-perpetual-orbit-around-the-dinner-table the recent invitation to be my GoogleTalk friends, they ignored me. That is, once they had quit howling with riotous laughter.

Who needs a rubber chicken? Unless, of course, it’s the entree.

“Realtor blogs help reel in clients, boost sales” is the title of the LA Times piece. Clients? Boost sales? Now, there’s an interesting angle I hadn’t thought of!

Call me for all of your real estate needs… or I might blog about it.

Yeah - That works. (Just kidding!)

As amateurish as our debut foray into the exciting world of video is, I have seen worse. That’s only part of the good news. I am also proud to say that we can only improve from this point forward. And, having been through it once, we have a better idea of how to improve, plus we have put a large chunk of the learning curve behind us.

I’ll share a couple of observations and one plea.

Observations:

• No matter how I tried, walking through a home while shooting video is all but impossible for one of limited talents and equipment. (That would be me.) The resulting shakiness made me seasick. Therefore, I concluded that the best solution would be to use a combination of stills and video to get the message across.
• Five minutes is too long, but I really had a hard time editing out my beloved Scripps Ranch footage, so I didn’t.
• I have absolutely NO future in film WHATSOEVER, and by this I mean neither from behind nor in front of the camera.
• I had a tendency to be too far away, which is good from an ego standpoint but bad from the perspective of viewing experience.
• The audio sucks, which brings me to the…

Plea:

Can anyone recommend a good microphone and where I might purchase said microphone? A sound studio is definitely not in my future, and while having the home videos professionally produced would address this issue, we are going to have to crank out a half-dozen of these a month, which makes that route both time and cost prohibitive.

Now, on with the show.

Since Kris spent so much time putting together the new and very cool mash-up Google map on our www.sandiegocastles.com website, I now feel obligated to push ahead with the latest installment of our ever-popular ”Better Know a Neighborhood” series.

Autumn Ridge is one of the more sought after neighborhoods in Scripps Ranch. Why? The combination of higher end product types and the location. It offers four fabulous floor plans, including the increasingly rare one-story home. It is also in a prime location, smack in the middle of Scripps Ranch Villages. It’s in close proximity to both Dingeman Elementary School and the soon to be new Ellen Browning Scripps (formerly Marshall Middle School) Elementary school, both designated as California Distinguished Schools, as well as the Scripps Ranch Community Park and Recreation Center with an abundance of sport, recreation and family friendly facilities. This park is the location of the largest annual event in Scripps Ranch, the Community Fair. 

Built in the late 1990’s by McMillin Homes, Autumn Ridge features Mediterranean-style homes offering volume ceilings, gourmet kitchens, large master suites and 3-car garages, among many other upgrades. Many of these homes are located on larger lots and some have fantastic views.  Plan 1 is the popular single story, 2,400 approximate square foot home containing 4 BR’s and 2.5 BA’s. Plan 2, at approximately 3,123 square feet, contains 4 or 5 BR’s (builder option) and 3 BA’s. Plan 3 is even more flexible with a choice of either 3,326 or 3,566 sq. ft., again depending upon which builder option was selected and 4 or 5 BR’s with 3BA’s, plus an optional bonus room or 6th BR (including a 4th BA). Plan 4 contains approx. 3,519 sq. ft. and 4 BR’s, 3BA’s with a bonus room (or an optional 5th BR and 4th BA).

Over the past year the low and high price sales for Autumn Ridge was $845,000 and $1,157,000, respectively.

Enjoy the convenience of being close to everything including shopping, award winning schools, fabulous recreation facilities, parks, sports fields and more. Come home to Autumn Ridge.