Ten Years – a happy anniversary! We began writing this column in 1998 (Dave wrote the column for a couple of years prior to 1998) and it appears a twice a month in the Coloradoan Sunday Real Estate section plus a couple of extra times for a total of twenty-six columns per year. For the last few years we have also written regularly for the Saturday Real Estate insert. Ten years doesn’t seem like that long ago until we remember that in 1998 gas was $1.20 a gallon, crude oil was less than $20 a barrel and gold was under $300 an ounce. In real estate, the average home selling price in the Fort Collins area was $160,621 and there were 3,828 homes sold for a total market of $600 million.

Obviously a lot has changed since 1998; gas is approaching $4 a gallon, crude oil is up $100 a barrel and gold has more than tripled in value. Locally, the average selling price of a home increased 58% to $253,545 at the end of 2007 but sales actually declined to 3,615 homes. During this ten year period, home sales peaked in 2004 at 4,100 units and have dropped more than 10% to the current level. As for the average price, it went up 30% between 1998 and 2001 and has increased just 21% in the six years since.

Writing the column has been a challenge and an opportunity. We devote a lot of the space to the real estate market tracking housing sales and inventory, locally, regionally and nationally and we do our best to keep up to date with the market and provide you with the data and our comments and feelings about where we are and where we are headed. In addition, we try to provide tips and information about marketing and buying and selling homes. Our colleague, Laura Olive, who writes the other twenty six annual columns, does a wonderful job of providing you with her comments about the business of real estate and together we thank the Coloradoan for providing this vehicle for us to share this local perspective.

You will note that in the sign off to the column we state that we are available to answer your questions on real estate and we thank you for your multitude of comments, questions, suggestions and criticism. Obviously we do not have the answers to all of your questions but be assured that we will do our best to get you the information you need. We are also well aware that we have a responsibility to represent the local real estate community and the thousand real estate professionals who provide an invaluable service to home buyers and sellers in this market. Your input is vitally important and we value your support.

You might have noticed Robert Moore’s column in the May 15, 2008 Coloradoan writing about the new and improved ‘interactive’ Coloradoan web site and the Guide to the new Coloradoan.com. Our columns are posted to this web site under Voices and Views / Columnists and we encourage you to register and provide us with your feedback. We have an archive of all of our columns on our web site at www.FortCollinsRelocation.com. This site also provides links to an abundance of community information as well as free access to all of the property listings in northern Colorado. Hopefully you will find the site very user friendly and again, we try to make it simple to contact us.

We are eager to continue the column and to provide you with real estate information and ask for your participation to make it as useful as possible

This is an ‘off’ year for property tax assessments. The Larimer County Tax Assessor is required to provide a Notice of Value (NOV) for all properties every two years and the last one was issued in May of 2007 setting the value for the 2007 and 2008 tax years. This last NOV used four years of transaction data ending June 30, 2006.

In the off year only those properties with a change of ownership or an increase in value due to property improvements will receive a Notice of Value. This notice was mailed the first week of May and covers approximately 10%, or 15,000, of all the properties in Larimer County. Most of these notices will not show any increase in value unless there were improvements, for example a permit for basement finish or tenant finish. If you received an increase in the NOV for a property you own and you wish to protest this increase, you may do so by completing the protest form and presenting it in person or by faxing or mailing it to the Assessors office. This year for the first time you also have the option of filing the protest on line at www.larimer.org/assessor/protest.

For senior citizens who turned 65 prior to January 1, 2008 and qualify for the senior citizen tax exemption and have not filed the application form, you need to complete this and submit it prior to the July 15, 2008 deadline. Note that there is no make up provision if you miss filing by the deadline.

The next NOV for all property owners will be mailed in May of 2009 and the data used will be for the five year period prior to June 2008. This value will be used for the 2009 and 2010 tax years. Collecting this data is a full time job for the County Assessors office and their records are updated on a regular basis.

All of this information is available to you at the web site www.larimer.org/assessor. This web site has a wealth of detail including a ‘Property Explorer’ feature. You can search for individual properties by parcel number, address, owner, etc. and then you can find comparable residential sales by subdivision or neighborhood. The lists show the most recent sales date and price, a ‘time adjusted sales price’, style of home, square feet of home above grade, below grade, garage, lot size, year built and the most recent valuation. The data can be sorted by sales date, sales price, address, etc. and the results can by printed or exported to Excel. You can determine the ownership, assessed value and property tax bill for any property in the county, in addition to the sales price history and each buyer and seller. There is a Yahoo map link showing the location as well as a color aerial map to locate any property and a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ which provides detailed information on many subjects. If you are looking for information, doing research, just killing time or want to play ‘Big Brother’ it is all there on this site.

There is also a link to the House Price Index as calculated by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) which we report quarterly. And finally there is a link to Zillow.com which tracks housing prices on a local basis. This site appears to be more and more accurate and is one of the tools used by our County Tax Assessor in setting property values.

Congratulations to Steve Miller, the Larimer County Assessor and his staff for an excellent web site and a very user friendly presentation of information. The availability should be very helpful and eliminate much of the confusion come property tax assessment protest time.

We have been upbeat throughout this real estate downturn proclaiming that “the sky is not falling” and better times are just around the corner but some of the air is beginning to leak out of the balloon. Local home sales were down again in April, a streak that has now reached eight months with a total decline of 15.8% over that period of time. More importantly, April also brought the largest average selling price drop that we can find going back in thirty years of records. It was only 4.6% and we still have a modest 1.7% increase compared to the first four months of last year but the median price also declined 4.8% and now shows a drop of 1.8% for the year to date. Without being to maudlin about it, these are historic numbers. The biggest year to year decrease in home sales ever was 21% in 1982 and only twice since then have we even had a 7% drop (2003 and 2006). On top of that we have never experienced a year to year decline in average selling price. But with some pretty heavy sales numbers that were recorded during the May to September period last year, it now seems like it will be a tall order to match those sales and prices. This means we could head into the fall with a double digit decrease in sales and perhaps even a decrease in average selling price.

In the last three years, the average selling price in Fort Collins is up just 5.2% and the median price is up3.2%. This is razor thin and given these averages there have to be lots of homes that have actually declined in value. And it is much worse in our neighboring communities. The median selling price in Loveland and south Larimer County is down 8.2% compared to last year and while they show a very slight 1.0% improvement in the average selling price since 2005, the median price has declined 6.9%. In Greeley and Weld County, the average selling price is down 5.9% for the year to date and has dropped 7.1% since 2005. The median price shows a similar drop of 6.8%.

And now for the good news – at least for home sellers! Marketing times are shorter. Homes sold in April averaged 113 days on the market compared to 137 days last year. For the year to date, the average is 120 days, down from 136 last year. The inventory of homes for sale continues well below last year with 2,044 active listings at the end of April, down 12.1% from last year and up just 3.8% from the end of March. Based on sales over the last twelve months this is equivalent to a 7.1 month supply, close to a balanced market of supply and demand.

For sellers, if you are motivated – and we have to assume that you are if you have your home on the market at this time – be assured that there are qualified buyers – who are looking for homes that are competitively priced and in move in condition. They will not look at homes deemed to be overpriced or homes that are in poor showing condition or with deferred maintenance. If they do you can expect an offering price that could be discounted 10% or more from your asking price.

For buyers, you have the best of all worlds. Flat selling prices that have increased just 1% to 2% per year for the last few years, a good selection of homes offered by motivated sellers and mortgage interest rates that are about as low as they have ever been. If you are an investor or a speculator, you might have reason to be nervous about the direction of the market and the sidelines would seem to be a good place to be, but if you intend to live in your home for a few years, now is the time to buy and start enjoying it.