Realtors’ median gross income dropped 14 percent in 2008, to $36,700, forcing many less experienced Realtors to leave the business, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors.

NAR’s 2009 Member Profile showed the median age of Realtors rising from 52 to 54 and average years of experience increasing from eight to 10.

The survey revealed the extent to which experience is tied to earnings: Those with two or fewer years in the business had a median gross income of $8,600 before taxes and expenses; those in the business at least 16 years had a median gross income of $53,900.

Sales agents had the lowest median net income ($18,700), followed by associate brokers ($27,000), broker-owners ($31,700), appraisers ($39,600), and managers and broker-owners not engaged in sales ($44,400).

Most of the Realtors surveyed — 60 percent — were licensed as sales agents, while 24 percent had broker’s licenses, 16 percent were licensed as broker associates, and 3 percent as appraisers.

Credits: Inman News

TRE Daily’s team of agents are experienced, and we are having no issues finding and serving new clients. It must be the way that we market ourselves and how we are positioned in this industry. You may be looking to purchase a home through a foreclosure or a short sale, but just remember that you want to find a Realtor who is knowledgeable and skilled at that matter. We are. This year of 2009, those are the kinds of deals we’ve been handling by the majority. Give us a call at 1 (800) 536-7480.

If you bought a home in Arizona five years ago, you’ll probably be able to get only slightly more than you paid for it if you try to sell it now.

New figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency show that the average purchase price of a home in Arizona dropped almost 20 percent in the last year. On average, that means a house that was selling for $200,000 in the first quarter of 2008 now is worth about $39,000 less.

Longer term, the agency figures the sales price of an average Arizona home in the first quarter of this year is about 14 percent higher than what it was five years ago.

The picture is a little less bleak when looking at a broader index the agency uses, which computes not only the price of homes but also the value of other homes as measured by appraisals done for refinancing. There, the combined year-over-year index is down only 13.6 percent, or a loss of $27,200 on that same $200,000 home.

And the value now is about 55 percent higher than in 2002.

The figures, prepared quarterly, may be somewhat more precise than some other indexes that look at the median sales prices of all homes sold in a given quarter. That is because the Federal Housing Finance Agency uses figures that compare only the same homes over and over, both in terms of actual sales and appraisals.

The decline in values, using both sales and appraisal figures, is not uniform around the state.

In the Phoenix metro area, which includes both Maricopa and Pinal counties, home values were down about 17.3 percent. But the numbers suggest the bottom may be near: The difference between the first quarter of 2009 and the last quarter of 2008 was just 1.3 percent.

Tucson showed a similar pattern, where the quarter-over-quarter decline was just a hair less than 1 percent. The one-year change was down 9.8 percent.

The Prescott area actually managed a small increase in home values in the last quarter.

“Our latest data are consistent with growing evidence that housing market conditions may be stabilizing in some parts of the country,” Federal Housing Finance Agency Director James Lockhart said in a prepared statement. He said future numbers may be brighter as people are able to take advantage of new stimulus programs, including a tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

While the situation may be easing in Arizona, the state still finds itself near the bottom of the chart.

Nationally, the average purchase price of a home dropped only about 7.1 percent in the last year. And only three states had sharper declines than Arizona: Florida, California and Nevada.

At the other extreme, only four states showed year-over-year increases in home sale prices: Alaska, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Credits: East Valley Tribune

During the 1970s, many Downtown Tucson buildings, including the 1917 Santa Rita addition, were covered with layers of stucco and new facades, obscuring their original designs.

Today, many of these buildings are being “excavated” and restored to their earlier glory. For example, many of the original details of the Compass Bank at 120 N. Stone were revealed after a concrete covering was removed. The Roy Place (Walgreens) Building at the corner of Stone and Pennington is now being restored.
Regrettably, buildings such as the Thrifty Drugstore on Congress Street were torn down before it was known that the original building was well-preserved beneath the false facade. In that case, a beautiful concrete art deco building was lost.
Irreplaceable landmark buildings like the Santa Rita addition are invaluable to the future of Downtown. They create a unique sense of place and shape the character of our city.

If the Santa Rita Hotel has the possibility of being restored, this is an extraordinary opportunity for economic revitalization and celebration of the city’s individuality.
This project has the power to define the future of Downtown redevelopment. Restored and integrated into a new project, it can set a higher architectural standard and demonstrate our community’s commitment to preserving our shared past.

If this building is demolished without serious conversations and honest evaluations of its reuse, a gloomy message is delivered to all potential Downtown investors.
Any citizen can stand on Scott Avenue and discern the clues to the original Santa Rita Hotel. Through the cracking plaster of the Santa Rita’s western facade, the original window configuration just below the surface can be seen. The design concepts of 1917 are still available to be recovered.

The Santa Rita Hotel also represents a tremendous quantity of embedded energy that can be conserved if the building is restored. In our energy-dependent economy, the greenest building is the one that is already built.

The irony is that the current plan for the property calls for a new Tucson Electric Power Co. headquarters built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum standards, but the plan does not include the re-use of the existing 1917 Santa Rita building.

Preserving and restoring the Santa Rita Hotel and other early Tucson buildings is not an argument for stopping or limiting economic reinvestment in Downtown. Actually, it focuses investment in the architectural heritage that makes Tucson special.

It is a myth that economic reinvestment and historic preservation are mutually exclusive. The only Downtown reinvestment projects that have succeeded are rooted in historic preservation, including the Hotel Congress, the Rialto Theater, the Temple of Music and Art and the Historic Depot. If TEP can come to the conclusion that preservation is a community need, everyone wins.

It always seems so easy to find reasons why a building needs to be torn down. Instead, we should be looking at all the reasons why it should be saved. We all observe that the “revitalization” of the 1960s and 1970s was a catastrophic mistake. It is an enormous irony that those mistakes — the literal covering up of the facades — are today being used to justify demolition.

We will lose the distinctive quality of our Downtown if we perpetuate the mistakes of the 1970s. Let’s invest in Downtown, minimize our energy expenditures through green revitalization and restoration, maximize the return on our investment dollars, and preserve our heritage for future generations.

If you share my view, please visit www.ci.tucson.az.us/mcc.html or write or call your City Council member.

Credits: Demion Cinco

Foreclosures, short sales, HUD homes, and seller carrybacks

This is a Buyer’s market in Tucson and homes near the U of A bring in between $400 and $500 per month per bedroom. If you want to invest but are nervous about it, the U of A area is a captive market. The only living quarters through the university itself for students are small, cramped quarters and all students eventually expand into 2, 3, 4 or 5 person groups in condos or single family homes with backyards.  A typical 3 bedroom, 2 bath home rents to students for between $1200 and $1500 per month, especially if biking distance. We know all the preferred areas of student living.

More often than not parents take responsibility for the rent and lease. Security is taken up front in case of damage. We know a number of rental management companies that handle student rentals if you are not local and don’t want to bring in the students yourself. Management companies typically take 10% per month.  So, do the math and you will see that even in this market, depending upon how much you can put down, when the mortgage is lower than the rent you receive monthly you have cash flow and can calmly wait for the equity to increase.  There are 3 bedrooms in good condition near the U of A starting at $100,000.

Contact us to find out more about University investment properties. And to learn more about financing, proceed to our Tucson Mortgage page.

An initiative drive launched Friday could give Arizonans a chance to cut their property taxes.

Dubbed Prop 13 Arizona, the measure would roll back the assessed value of homes and businesses to what they were in 2003, before speculators helped spike prices. Those rising sales prices, in turn, boosted the tax assessments of everyone else in the neighborhood.

The initiative also has a provision designed to keep local governments from making up the difference by hiking the tax rate — the figure that, multiplied by assessed value, determines the actual taxes. It would limit annual taxes on homes to no more than one-half of 1 percent of their value. So the owner of a house valued at $200,000, at 2003 prices, would pay no more than $1,000 a year.
Taxes for commercial, industrial and agricultural property would be capped at 1 percent of their 2003 values.

If the measure gets on the ballot and is approved, it would permit future assessment increases of only 2 percent per year.

Not everyone will necessarily benefit.

Anyone who bought a home or business since the beginning of 2004 would have the values set at the actual purchase price. Lynne Weaver, who crafted the initiative, acknowledged it means those who bought at the top of the housing market would be paying higher taxes than their neighbors who have been there longer, even if the homes were identical.

She said, though, there’s nothing inherently unfair about that.

First, she argued, there is nothing fair about the current system, calling the valuations placed on homes by county assessors “random and arbitrary.” Beyond that, she said, it makes up for past inequities.

“Is it fair that I’m sitting here in my house and someone down the street decides to sell their house like mine . . . and some fool, somebody comes along and pays an astronomical amount for the house?” she asked. “Now everybody in the neighborhood is penalized with higher taxes because of that person’s decision.”
But, Weaver said, even those who bought their homes in 2006 and find their assessed values locked in at that level should want to support this measure. She said it provides them with predictability of what their taxes will be in future years, no matter what happens to the housing market.

That absolute limit on total taxes, if approved, creates a new problem for lawmakers.

Right now, each level of government, like cities, counties, fire districts, library districts and community colleges, gets to set its own tax rate and get its own resources.

This initiative would, in essence, turn all property tax proceeds over to the state. The Legislature would then decide who gets what.

“It couldn’t be any worse than it is now,” Weaver said.

The initiative, if approved, also would eliminate the option for voters to approve overrides, bond issues or exceptions to the tax limits even if they want additional spending, whether for schools or additional police protection.

Weaver said override elections often are abused and held on days when most people do not realize something is on the ballot.

Weaver tried to get the same measure on the 2008 ballot, only to fall short on signatures.

This time, however, Weaver said she is getting an earlier start on the July 1, 2010, deadline for submitting the necessary 230,047 signatures. Weaver said she also will have financial backing to hire paid circulators, though she declined to say at this point who has promised money.

One factor that may have kept Weaver’s measure off the 2008 ballot was that Arizonans were being asked at the same time to sign a competing initiative.
That one, crafted by Marc Goldstone, also would have reset property taxes to prior levels. But it would have allowed voters to decide if they wanted to tax themselves more for additional services like improved fire protection.

Goldstone said Friday he is hoping the Legislature puts a measure like his on the 2010 ballot, eliminating the need for him to get signatures. But Goldstone said if not, he will start his own petition drive.

Weaver’s proposal got its name because it is modeled in part on California’s Proposition 13. That 1978 initiative was the first of a series of voter-approved limits on government spending.

Weaver became a California resident in 1983, after that state’s Prop. 13 took effect, and said it worked well there. She moved to Arizona in 2001.