Family friendly and conveniently located, Rincon Valley has long been one of the preferred residential areas in Santa Rosa. The schools are excellent and homes are still affordable here.

I have assembled a custom search already centered on Rincon Valley that will let you jump right into your map-based home search. Whether you want an entry level home or a more elaborate, larger move-up residence, Santa Rosa's Rincon Valley is a great place to search.

Once you are on the site you can choose whatever price range you are looking for or simply view all the properties.

I also want to repeat the news that there is a great new iPhone App that supports active MLS listings and has great built in support for the mapping features. As you drive around Rincon Valley or any other area in the BAREIS MLS territory, you can use your iPhone to see the listings nearby. It's a great tool.

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Rincon Valley is a lousy spot to look for REO property in Sonoma County. Strong neighborhoods and a continued demand for housing have kept bank-owned single family homes to a minimum. Still, there are the occasional listings and the map below will show REO properties in and around Rincon Valley. If you want to look around other parts of Santa Rosa, you can either navigate on the map or visit my reo.sonoma.net site for more maps and information on the foreclosed homes market in Sonoma County.

If you have used Zillow.com or Google Maps you have used a GIS sytstem. (GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems) In GIS, it's all about the maps and the data that can be displayed or linked to the map. Your local government might use GIS to track everything from where the water mains run to which traffic lights need replacement with the new LED lights. In the private world, sites like Sonoma County Foreclosed Homes are driven by combining map data with real time real estate information.

Our use of GIS at Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty and our sister company, Artisan Sotheby's International Realty is due to our extensive work with rural, vineyard, and estate properties. Finding a country property when you are a long term local real estate veteran is one thing. Your brain is a part of the world's greatest walking GIS system. For everyone else including agents new to the area and industry, a GIS system is a great way to start learning about different properties and to find the remote parcels that are miles from paved roads.

Our local GIS Chapter is hosting its annual GIS Day (Geographic Information System) today and asked me to speak on a panel about private industry's use of GIS tools. The theme for the day is Do More with Less. As a real estate professioal it's easy to find ways in which GIS lets me do more with less, but one example should ring true for anybody in the audience.

In the good old days, when the MLS consisted of a phone book sized quarterly book with crappy black and white photos, you had to visit any property that you were curious about. There was no way to preview online. There weren't portfolios of color photos available, and it was rare to get enough information in a printed listing to know if the property would be suitable for grapes or horses or logging. You would get written clues, but to know, really know, about a property, you had to visit. Today, thanks to GIS tools, the internet, and high quality digital photography, it's possible to do an online preview of dozens of properties in the time it might take to drive to one.

I don't know how much gas I save by previewing online, but I know that actual in person and on the road search time with my real estate clients is very efficiently used these days. We rarely look at a property that we haven't thoroughly checked out before hand. If I was going to pick just one "Do More with Less" feature of our GIS tools, this would be the one I would highlight.

If you are interested in GIS tools for your office, start by checking out the folks at ESRI who are pioneers and leaders in the field. I'll warn you upfront that getting involved with this software requires technical curiousity and a boss who will be a champion for change. Our broker, Eric Drew, has always been an enthusiast for maps, history, and technology in real estate. His support and encouragement (and check writing) have been the key to implementing GIS in our office.

California has always been the golden state. Your first close look at a dew dappled California Poppy at sunrise will show you the gold.

First time visitors arriving in the summer may think it more brown than gold, but that's a fleeting impression that a stay into the fall and winter will correct.  The slopes of our oak studded hills are beginning to wake from their summer sun slumber. Meadows still shaggy with last year's golden grasses are gleaming green with new growth in the first inch above the soil. The battle for sun favored status is taking place in every random patch of dirt as weeds, wildflowers, grasses, and bird-planted seeds from every garden flower compete for water and sunlight.

It's a foreign time for mid westerners and others accustomed to four seasons. Our Sonoma County vineyards feature a beautiful and familiar fall display along with the liquidambers, Chinese pistachios and other showy queens of color. Underneath the traditional golden autumn hues, however, the awakening greens tell a story not of a season ending, but of life beginning anew. We are spared the dormant emptiness of winter. It may be why we're an optimistic place. While the northern tier of the country battens down for a long, cold winter, we are hitting the nurseries for seedlings and garden supplies. While others prepare with snow tires and chains, we're swapping our marigolds for violas and watching the first of the spring bulbs break the surface.

It's easy for me to understand love of place. Familiar scenes, landscape, flowers and trees, and the sound of a voice like home call to people everywhere. For me, as a 40 year transplant to California, this is the home my wandering feet and eyes had sought. For Arnold, the governator, the same story holds. It may not be for everyone, but California's optimistic people and climate have an irresistible draw for those of us who love beginnings and growth.

My Sonoma County Blog features more information on seasons and the other things that make Northern California and Sonoma County in particular a special place.

Searching with an iPhone for real estate listings in Sonoma County just got personal for me. My IDX vendor, IDXBroker, has released an iPhone app that lets me have my own self-branded iPhone app to search Sonoma real estate listings.

I've always been happy with my IDX vendor's great service but now they have provided me the bragging rights to share my own iPhone app with my clients. According to some of the reviews of this application, clients are happy that the listings are live and local. They compared this very favorably to the Trulia and Zillow applications which don't always have the most current data.

According to market statistics nearly half of all Internet mobile real estate searching is on the iPhone, so whether you have one or not, a lot of your clients might.

Sell it fast or sell it cheaper. Most real estate professionals understand the direct link between "Days on Market" and selling price. Homes that linger on the market for months normally drop their price to attract buyers or else accept a much reduced selling price. This is true in all regions of the country and all price brackets. Homes that have been on the market for more than 90 days rarely sell for full price.

I'm working with some out-of-state buyers who are new to Marin County and the North Bay and wanted to help them calibrate their pricing mindset. I produced this chart of all the single family homes in San Anselmo that have sold this year. The height of the bars indicates how close the sales price is to the original listing price. Most of the bars on the left side of the chart are near the 100% mark. Each bar represents one or more sales. As you read towards the middle (checking the bottom of the chart for the Days on Market) you start to see that many fewer homes are near the 100% mark. After Day 90, the highest value for selling price is only 90% of the original listing price. As you move to the far right of the chart near the six month DOM range, many homes are selling for less than 80% of their original listing price.

Armed with this type of information, my buyers are able to make informed offers that are backed by real market data.

REO Sales in Marin

I've been working through details of a complex property purchase with a couple who are taking a big step into a larger scale transaction than they are used to. They are both careful about paperwork and details, but the husband is particularly steadfast about reading everything put in front of him. He credits the wife's advice, but it's clear that he likes to know what he is going to sign. Over the last week he has found at least three discrepancies in the documentation of title and related documents. I don't think any of them would have changed the essence of the understanding among the parties, but it was great that he was reading carefully enough to find the problems before they became bigger.

The lessons I draw from this are simple. First, I have to slow down enough to find problems before my clients. Even minor issues are my responsibility to find. The second lesson is to never rush a client when they are reading the paperwork. Never. The hassles you save by avoiding errors are worth an extra hour or two to make sure the paperwork is clear.

I was embarked on an ambitious schedule touring homes with clients this weekend. They wanted to see a wide range of different neighborhoods in central and northern Marin County. I put together a list with as many vacant homes as I could find in their price range, but we also had half a dozen occupied homes to visit. I left messages and tentative timing for the occupants, but with a long list of homes, uncertain traffic, and occasional pausing for more thorough inspections, by the middle of the day our schedule was blown.

I got in touch with several of the occupants to reschedule, but a few others had already left their homes for our visit and couldn't be reached. I feel like a jerk for inconveniencing them and making them leave their house when it wasn't necessary.

I'd appreciate feedback from other agents on what's the proper protocol for handling a busy day when schedules fall apart. Is there a recommended "I blew it" Hallmark Card?

I went out on a limb in April and said our local Sonoma County markets had bottomed out in late February. I don't get paid to write these predictions, so I don't have an editor to fire me. On the other hand, anyone who reads my work or listens to my advice should know whether my crystal ball (and spread sheet work) is clear.

I printed this chart and pointed out where the trend lines were bending upwards.

I have this more recent live chart below showing that as of late October of 2009 my earlier prediction about a late February housing bottom in Sonoma County is still showing up as a good predictor of price changes. Still, prognostication success aside, I'm not going to tempt fate and promise continuing improvement going into the slower selling season on both sides of the holidays.

I will mention that prices have moved up between $50K and $100K in this Santa Rosa zicpcode depending on the price range. We're nowhere near the peaks of the market and may not regain those for a very long time, but the smart buyers ( Dick Miller you know who you are) were able to act on my advice and purchase homes for very good values in the spring.

Families looking for good schools and friendly neighborhoods often look at Rohnert Park and Windsor, the two cities that bracket Santa Rosa on the south and north. Both are reasonably recent towns built during the last half of the last century. Windsor is slightly newer, but Rohnert Park has Sonoma State University and better proximity to Marin and San Francisco.

They have each struggled with the crash of the housing bubble and I wanted to look at the numbers to see the state of the market. I pulled all the sold listings from July through September of 2009 for single family homes selling for less than $300,000.

I was surprised most of all by the vitality of Rohnert Park. The transactions at the entry level of the market continue on a torrid pace of overbidding that makes it hard for first time buyers to compete. At the same time, however, it shows a very healthy interest in home ownership and investment.

What you see in this chart is an average overbid of about $13,000 in Rohnert Park, and an average underbid in Windsor of about -$4,000. Even though Windos starts off with a higher average listing price (in the less than $300,000 price range), the average selling price ends up higher in Rohnert Park.  I don't think you can draw a lot of conclusions from this. If I were advising first time buyers on a limited budget where they should be looking at property, I might steer them to Windsor just to avoid getting into as many bidding wars.