OCR Text |
Show Ta tg, A Homeagain, homeagain, sigh ofrelief Once again I address the condition of the current Utah Valley real estate market. Quick review: the statistics from the Wasatch Front Multiple Listing Service showthe following trends (and I quote): ¢ An increasingly high number of active and under contract listings. nit sales slightly above 1995 levels. ¢ A declining percentage of sales compared to active and under contractlistings. * An increasingly high number oflistings over $250,000 with a very small numberofsales. There has also been a decline in the averagesales price. According to the MLSstatistics, it is still above the figure for last year at this time, but has gone below the figures for the last eight months. When we take all of the list prices for all listed homes, add them together and then divide by the number of homes included in the total, we can arriveat the aver- Take note: agelist price. Average sales price is computed the same way. In January of 1995, the average list price was $169,621. A year later it was $177,835. February shows $175,565 in 1995 compared to $176,885 this year. The prices on the homesthat actually sold average out as follows: January 1995: $122,843, 1996: $131,961; February 1995: $117,905, 1996: $121,501. A median price is the one for which there are the same number of homes priced aboveit as there are priced below it. For this reason, the average and the median prices are not necessarily the same. In January of 1995, the median list price was $133,000. Exactly one year later, the median price crept up to $134, 900. The median sales price in January 1995 was $116,000 and $118,000 in January of 1996. In February of both years, the median figures were as follows: 1995 list: $135,000, sales: $112,000; 1996 up-to- date home inventory, you can get through the clean up and feed wee of a disaster “quickly jimmy Zufelt If you prefer, walk through each room with a microcassette recorder and describe each item in the room. You can transcribe the informationlater. Be sure to note each item ranging from carpet and rugs to furniture to books, clocks and lamps. _ On your a & : and ON Building A Home accurately. According to the Insurance Information Institute, a home inventory can: ¢ Determine the value of your belongings and your personal insurance needs. * Identify exactly what was lost since most people cannot recall items accumulated gradually * Establish the purchase dates andprices of major items. * Settle your home owner's insurance claim quickly and efficiently * Verify losses for incometax deductions. Tocreate your home inventory, start with a looseleaf notebook that you can modify as your possessions change. Use looseleaf paper for your lists and plastic protector sheets to hold receipts, fabric samples and photographs. Forthe invenory itself, go through each » room and list all its.contents. Focus on Real Estate that homes that were listed in the mid-$130s sold in the $112wo talking about different sets of homes. Overall, the statistics of the market showthat people are still buying homes in Utah Valley. As a Realtor, | knowthat many families are moving in from otherareas of the state and from out-of-state. We will always have the clients who are first-time buyers moving up from a rental whenthey can qualify for an investment in their own home,as well as those whoare in need of a larger place to house their growing family When the family is finished growing and beginsto decline in size, the buyers may select a smaller, more manageable home and let the old homestead go to another family and another legacy ofuse. I felt left out when | wasn’t working with any buyers from Micron, but that proved to be to my advantage. My business dida’t fall off with the various announcements from that corporate front. If 1 wasin that situation, you can be sure that many other Realtors were also dealing with buyers out of the Micron spectrum. This means that Utah Valley. This has become one of the most desirable areas to live in this country. Perhaps if we concenirated on the values that made the area a good place to live and stopped worrying so much about how money we can make when we sell our home for a possibly inflated price, we can cause the market to remain stable and favor the buyer as well as the seller The Market is somewhatlike a Marriage. In each, we can’t point our fingers at the "M” catities without pointing to ourselves. In it is the husband and wife who control the outcome, sometimes unevenly, and the same can be true of the buyers’ and sel!ers’ relationship to the real estate Market. ft is the choices and behavior of the people thatare sig- nificant factors that determine the ee of both. some unexpected areas of business was proceeding as usual life“haithead is possible to in the real estate market here in go home NASA mayuseold-time sealant Home: inventory saves time No one expects to lose furniture or other belongings in a fire, a burglary or a storm. But if disaster strikes your home, would you be able to report exactly what you lost? Remembering every single detail about your POssessions is a gargantuan task. By keeping an list: $135,000 again, sales: $119,000. Don't worry, this doesn’t mean list. note the item's mame, a ee nie 1 scription, —,: ae chase date and the purchase price. If the items have serial numbers, list those too. Back up your written inventory with photographs of each wall of each room with closet or cabinet doors open. On the back of each picture, write the date, the general location and the contents shown. You also may want to makea videotape ofyour possessions. In your notebook, organize your lists by room. Attach receipts and photostothelist or put them in a plastic protector behind the list. Once you have compiled all your information, the inventory. photographs and video should be kept in a firesafe place away trom your homesuchasa safe-deposit box at youbank. But be sure to keep a copy in your home soyou can update it as needed. Jimmy Zufelt is the president of Utah Valley Home Builders, By ALAN J, HEAVENS Knight-Ridder Newspapers PHILADELPHIA — There are fewproducts as useful to NASA as they are to homeowners, but Preservation Products of the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pa., sells one of them. The product is AcryMax, the trade name for a series of coatings used to restore and preserve roofi especially galvanized tin. cryMaxalso has been approved, after government festing, as a protective coating for the insulation ‘on the space shuttle’s solid-fuel booster rockets. AcryMax may be new potatoes to the space program,but it’s relatively old hat to roofing. It made its debut in 1979 in Cape May. NJ. where the salty air can chew up metal pretty quickly, according to Scott Bennung, president of Preservation Products and of Chemical Coatings & Engineering Co. in Media, which manufactures AcryMax and other coutings, sealants and adhesives. Since then, it has been used on roots from icy Vermont to the Caribbean, where the intense sunhight can crack anyroofcoating “It’s been 17 years.” he said AcryMax’s record was enough topersuade BruceIrving, producer of PBS-TV’s “This Old House,” to use it on the metal roofs of the 19th-century house in Savannah that was recently restored on the program. Irving said he came across an ad for AcryMax in a trade journal and thought the product might solve a problem with the “hybrid situation we had on the roof” of the house in Georgia. The “situation” involved blending a new standing-seam metal roof with the original roof, which would be coated with” AcryMax. The original roof had replaced with new materials of been coated with a variety of products, including paint and asphalt cement, and parts of the metal had deteriorated as the coatings wore off during normal weathenirg. Some of the old coatings actually encouraged rusting, because they trapped moisture. In general, because the old coatings had failed to expand and contract with the substructure, the roofing cracked. AcryMaxproved to be the perfect solution, Irving said. Best of all, the product met all the historicpreservation requirements of Savannah authorities. AcryMax, which comesin standard colors (custom colors are available at additional cost), looks like latex paint, D’ Angelis said. It can be applied by brush, roller or spray; spraying is most cost-effective Application by roller or brush may require additional coats, he said. Since AcryMax is waterborne, it shouldn't be applied if rain is likely within four hours or if the air temperature will go below 45 degrees Fahrenheit before a coating is dry. Because AcryMax coatings work as adhesives, they musi have a cleansurface to adhereto, Proper roof preparation is important to successful applications of all roof Coatings. This involves removing all loose dirt and debris by vacuum or sweeping. To remove embedded dir, a high-pressure hose can be equal thickness, D’Angelis said. Seams, cracks and flashings should be repaired or reinforced Crackslarger than hairline should be filled. Primers should be used on ov dized asphalt roofs, rusted metal or where proper adhesion is necessary, he said, @ proper coating thickness is essential to how well AcryMax performs, D’ Angelis recommends working: first on 4 10-foot-by-10-foot area to deter mine the correct thickness. (See NASA, Page 8) The Daily Herald 1555 North Freedom Boulewars P.O. Box 717. Provo, Utah 84603. The Home Magizine is published every Friday by The Daity Herald Advertising: To place a classified display ad contact: Scott Murray Rhonda Phare Ingnd Draleau .......... Echo Wright... Deadkne is neon, the Friday pror to pubacation To place news items contact Shaunna Enwin, editor .......344-2565 All necessary repairs also need to be madeto theroof beforehand. ‘To place a classified ed cal! 372-6450 ActyMax can’t be applied over roofing or insulation that is moisture-saturated. To guarantee this Shaunna Ener Eon doesn’t happen, an Inspection ‘Scott Murray, ‘Classiied ad Manage should be made that includes core Rhonda Phare... ClassiiedAccount Execut? cuts and moisture-detection scans Ieget Draloay . _Ghasaited Actount Eaneuve Wer © ‘materials should be * peteWig-__ Deane aia oe use |