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HOUSE SITTING

Keeping an eye on Western New York real estate

 Remember how your parents told you, as you burned the midnight oil finishing a social studies paper due the next day, that waiting until the last minute never pays off? For first-time home buyers in the Buffalo-Niagara region, it’s probably a good thing the lesson never quite stuck. Eight hundred and fourteen of them closed home sales in November 2009, the last month (at one point) one could nab the federal government’s $8,000 refundable tax credit. That was a huge boost from the 714 closings the previous November, according to the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors’ figures. More than that, the median sales price rose seven percent—to $112,500—far better than the twelve percent decline seen across the Northeast region. Now that the tax credit has been extended until April and expanded to include repeat buyers, home sales may continue to prop up the market, but Linda Mallia, president of Hunt Real Estate Corp.’s Hunt Mortgage unit, was quoted in the Buffalo News as stating this would be buyers’ “last opportunity” to get the credit. Praying for a snow day presumably won’t help, either.

Everybody who’s bought—or just thought about buying—a home recently has probably heard of Zillow.com. Zillow is a real estate search site that pulls together data (in a way the site won’t reveal) to come up with “Zestimates” for every house on the block—even those that haven’t changed ownership in decades. Taking a Zestimate run through your neighborhood can be informative, and very addictive, but Colleen Kulikowski, a RealtyUSA agent with an active blog and Twitter presence, suggests taking a deep breath before basing any purchase or selling decisions on easy-to-grab data.

“Just look at the data for your home—do they calculate the bedrooms, baths, and square footage correctly? “ she asks. “Sometimes they are pulling data from a year ago, where sixty days prior is as far as you should go in many areas.” Sure, Kulikowski and her colleagues have reason to distrust Zillow, but she also points out Zillow’s own caveat, which advises users to use market analyses and on-site visits with real estate agents to supplement its Zestimates. Not as fun as finding your secretly undervalued dream home while surfing from your couch, mind you, but worth keeping in mind.

Want to know whether the visitors to an open house are serious buyers? Hold it during a Bills game—no matter how poorly they’ve been playing lately. That’s not actual advice from Hunt Real Estate Corp. broker Ron Remollino, but it was one of many bits of insider knowledge given to James Fink, a Buffalo Business First reporter who profiled the entire sales process of one Cheektowaga house, from first agent contact to check passing. A showing for the South Huxley Drive home was scheduled from one to three p.m., smack in the middle of a Bills-New England matchup, until a last-minute re-scheduling moved the game to eight p.m. That was good for foot traffic, but not necessarily for intent. “Someone who comes to an open house during a Bills game tends to be a serious buyer and not a tire-kicker,” says Remollino. “They are motivated and that’s a good sign.”

Ellicottville may push its year-round attractions, but the nearly at-par Canadian dollar and skiing seem responsible for its last two record-setting sales. A 6,000-square-foot home on Greer Hill Road, set next to a popular run at HoliMont Ski Resort, sold for more than $1.5 million earlier this year to a Canadian buyer; another Greer Hill Road home held the previous record of $1.24 million. The just-sold property originally listed for $1.64 million, in a town where the average sale price was $386,143 in early January, and the median sales price $173,750 as of November 2009.

Another month, another national real estate survey that touts the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro area’s “stability” in housing markets. It’s easy to get ho-hum about the standard “No boom, no bust” storyline, but a recent report by Local Market Monitor, a real estate forecasting company in North Carolina, is actually based on the upcoming year’s home prices, not yesterday’s terrible headlines out of Nevada, Florida, and other former hot spots.

The good news is that Buffalo-Niagara Falls and the Rochester region both make the list. The bad news is that Rochester’s home prices are cited as staying the same, while Buffalo-Niagara Falls will see a one percent decrease. In 2010, though, that qualifies as one of the twenty best performances by housing markets. That mirrors Forbes magazine’s own predictions—and praise—for the region’s home sales.

Got an iPhone or a new-fangled Android-based smartphone? Feel free to replace e-mail checking with real estate fantasizing at the checkout lane. Realtor.com just recently released a free iPhone app that lets you search and sort the National Association of Realtors’ four million listings. With your phone’s GPS capabilities, it can also pull down nearby listings. Find one you like? You can send it along to spouses, friends, your agent, or, if you’re feeling ridiculously conspicuous, Facebook or Twitter. HotPads.com’s application for Android phones, such as the Verizon Droid, can do the same kind of search and location-based searching, but adds in turn-by-turn directions to whatever open house or listing you pick. Depending on how your house hunt is going, this is either the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the worst thing since telemarketing.

Kevin Purdy is a freelance writer and senior editor at Lifehacker.com. He lives in Buffalo.