I have a love hate relationship with charts. I love them...everybody else hates them. Unfortunately, there is no better way to convey a huge amount of information as quickly as you can graphically so I will continue to make occasional charts when the results can illuminate a story.

A lot of people are on the sidelines of real estate today. Interest rates are as low as we're likely to see them. The affordability index for my area is the best it has been in decades, so homes are as affordable as they have been in a long time. However, in spite of low rates and reasonable prices, many potential buyers fear the market may still have a long way to fall. So, in the same way that you might coax young children into swimming by being in the water to support them, a graphical presentation can reassure wannabe buyers that they aren't going to drown in today's market.

First things first: a giant chart and then a discussion beneath it.

The first thing to note here is not the bursting housing bubble. That's a fascinating story of loss and grand delusion on a national scale, but it's not the story this chart or I want to tell. My story is the right hand side of the chart that I have captioned as "More or Less Stable Market". There is definitely volatility in these numbers. I can see where the first time buyer tax credit bumped up prices in early 2010. I can see where worries about Europe helped slow down the market in the summer of 2010. What I can't see is anything that should scare a potential buyer out of the market.

We have had a run of nearly three years of relative stability in the housing market that has followed the worst recession to hit the United States since the Great Depression. As we creep into recovery there are still plenty of hardships. Lots of people remain unemployed and underemployed. But we have had those things for the last three years and the housing market has survived. People looking for fast appreciation don't see much to like in a flat market performance, but people looking for a house to call home can be reassured that a house bought in today's market is unlikely to suffer the fate of a home purchased in the summer of 2007. There just isn't that much excess value baked into the real estate cake.

I did a quartile analysis to see if the median price figures I normally look at might have been skewing the results. Instead, I am reassured that the median is still a useful shorthand for talking about the market as a whole. We can see that the 75th percentile has performed better than the median and is acctually up about $25,000 since the low point three years ago. I think that's telling us as much about the job market as it is about housing. The good jobs that can support a home priced in the $450,000 price range are still here. The big change for that tier of the market is the reduction from over $750,000 that buyers would have paid to be at the 75th percentile. It's a heck of a lot easier to make payments on $450K than $750K.

At the 25th percentile, the change is large in percentage terms even if they aren't saving quite as much as their more affluent peers. Here, the price change is over 50% with a dollar savings from pre-bubble of around $250K per home. People in the market know that much of the demand we are seeing in this price range is from investors buying single family homes. That was unheard of ten years ago when prices for any rentable home vastly exceeded the rent that could be charged.

It's all good, ladies and gentlemen. In April of 2009 I called March 2009 as the bottom of the bubble's deflation right her on ActiveRain. I may still eat crow if prices edge down through the lows from that time, but I don't see any cataclysm on the horizon that will take ten or fifteen percent off today's prices. So if you're a renter thinking of buying, get out there and stake your modest, affordable claim to a piece of the American dream. The money you save over the next 30 years will be your own.

I've shown some rugged coastal views in recent posts. I wanted to balance those rough images with a true sense of the coast as a life-affirming place. This photo from a few days ago shows the coast at Jenner where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean.  You can see the right side beach covered with birds. In the water on the right is a small cluster of seals who are just hanging out. More seals are visible offshore. 

My last posted image about the Sonoma coast inspired some commenters to think that waterfront living might not be as dangerous as an imminent collapse of a house into the lovely Pacific Ocean. I had another opportunity yesterday (taken whenever I can) for a drive past a notoriously collapsing section of coastal property and wanted to share a few of the more dire images of what can happen to coastal homes.

After showing Bodega Bay property last week I took a leisurely drive up the coast. There are a few homes facing the risk certainty of falling into the ocean. This image shows the residue of former waterfront land now existing as rocks off the shore. Coastal property that fronts the ocean is beautiful and valuable, but just on loan from nature. 

I've never had a dog sign a contract or write the check for an earnest money deposit. That doesn't mean they can't be integral to a property search. Puck has been helping my clients identify the perfect wine country retreat. Dog tasks include hiking with us, checking on interesting looking vegetation, but most of all, checking the stick inventory to see if it will be sufficient. This lucky property apparently had the winning stick resource since the humans were persuaded to write an offer.

Usability Testing

Throw some spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. Fine for cooking, Messy for web site development and improvement. How many of us have added widgets, links, graphics, and other elements to our sites in search of more traffic, more email sign-ups, or more stickiness without any real idea what works or not? I'm a big fan of the utility of usability testing, but always thought it was beyond the financial reach of a small real estate firm.

I was researching other topics this morning and came across the website of a usability company called usabilla. They offered a free trial for a ten-user usability test. I signed up. I'm asking for my readers here on ActiveRain to take my usability test and see if this kind of usability testing might be useful for you to start experimenting with as well. My test was dead simple to set up, but I'm sure I could have created a lot more functionality if I had spent more time planning. This was sort of spur-of-the-moment, kind of like real estate floor calls.

My offer to you is that if you participate in the usability test for my site, I'll do the same for yours. After all, it's free, so there's no reason not to at least see if this might be worth exploring further. So, if you are game for a quick usability test, just click the sonoma.net test. My fondest hope is that we can all learn how to make our web sites better.

Once again, if you participate for me, I'll participate for you.

http://participate.usabilla.com/11965849294ed00e0cd42d9

Northern California is blessed with an abundance of turkeys, both wild and domestic. These road crossers look peaceful and orderly enough to be domestic, but they're classic wild turkeys. Ben Franklin much preferred turkeys to bald eagles as the national bird. From a culinary point of view, I have to agree. These birds are safe now, but they're probably going to be on somebody's dinner menu in the not too distant future. Either mine, or mr. coyote's.

Correction. The beautiful fall foliage just for you is now waiting on my computer since this internal server error ate my uploaded version...Updated with photo.

California may not have four seasons, but our brief interlude between dry summer and wet winter features some flashy bit of deciduous display. A variety of trees and vines give up their green for the yellows, oranges, and reds the colder parts of the country call fall. These gingko trees line the sidewalk in front of our Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty office.

The phrase "Under all is the land" is the first sentence of the Realtor's Preamble to the Code of Ethics. The land is what keeps me inspired to show country property whenever I can. I find my pleasure in hiking the woods, meadows, and hills of Sonoma County. The plants and animals that live on top give us changing scenery and scampering, fleeting glimpses of another world, but under all is the land.

I have a couple of clients I have been walking with who found what they were looking for this weekend. The couples are very different from each other, but they share an appreciation for solitude, nature, sunlight, trees... and a location that lets them jet into town for coffee or milk if they have been derelict in their shopping list duties. What they share, as well, is a willingness to look at the long term and to enjoy the process of shaping one tiny spot of the earth to their liking. Most buyers are looking for a turnkey house. My special buyers are looking for a project.

We don't always have a large selection of properties for buyers. Sunday, one couple found a property that has been on and off the market for ages. In the case of this market lingering property, it took wise eyes to see the hidden qualities that the buyer's hard work and smart designs will reveal. In five years everyone will be asking the buyers how they ever found such a fantastic property. The simple answer is that it won't be fantastic until they have added their human touch and shaping skills to the land.

The other buyers found a two day old listing and wrote an offer that night. By the next morning three offers had already stacked up. To someone from out of the area, raw land for half a million bucks or a million bucks may seem extravagant, but you don't get multiple offers in a few days for a property priced too high. What we are seeing instead, is rational market actors competing for a desirable property. Whether you find a dream property that buyers will fight over or a long-overlooked gem that nobody seems to want, under all is the land.

Not everyone is privileged to have a veteran in their family. As we pause today to remember all those who have served and sacrificed on our behalf I wanted to take a moment to thank two of the most important men in my life, my dad and son. They are both Navy veterans, my dad from the World War II era, and my son from the time of the first Gulf War. 

My dad, William Lee Roberts, enlisted after high school in the middle of World War II. He left his high school sweetheart behind and served safely. The GI bill helped put him through school, helped him buy his first home, and even provided a few jobs for him along the way at Veteran's Administration hospitals. He still gets great care from the VA. More importantly from my point of view, he also reunited with his highschool sweetheart, my mom, and they are still happily married after 63 years.

My son, Keif Roberts, also enlisted after high school. He was too restless for college and bored by the jobs available to him locally. He wanted to see the world, and boy, the Navy is really, really good at seeing the world. After boot camp he was stationed in Japan on the USS Independence, a storied aircraft carrier that is no longer part of our fleet. He got to visit with relatives in Australia, my wife and I in Hawaii, and dozens of other ports from the Middle East and throughout Asia. 

He grew up in the Navy. They have a way of turning boys into men that worked well for him. He learned discipline, steadfastness, and the abililty to make any job assigned to him both important and worth doing right. 

His main job now is being father to his own child and husband to his sweet wife, Corin. They are doing a great job with my grandchild who may not end up in the Navy, but will undoubtedly hear all about the value of service.

So, thanks Dad. Thanks Keif. Today is your day to be honored for your service on behalf of all of us.