And you thought anything more than $200,000 was too much to pay!

I just read about this house in the Sacramento Bee this morning and I must say – WOW! The virtual tour is worth taking a look at, if just to see opulence translated into real estate.

The Tuscan Villa is considered one of the most expensive listings ever to hit the Sacramento real estate market with 10 bedrooms, 10 baths and a total of 15,000 square feet of living space. My personal favorites are the “Great Room” and the gourmet kitchen. (Any home that has anything called “a great room,” I want to buy.)

It’s beautiful. Just beautiful.

Anyone with approximately $9,000,000 to spare on a house? Call me to see it!

I’ve fixed a few bugs and added data to support more community pages.

We now have basic community information and active and sold listing maps in place for:

• Sacramento County
• El Dorado County
• Placer County

There’s still a long way to go on the bug fixing and improving the look of the pages.  I was learning how to do map mash ups at the time, and at the same time sometimes being too clever with the fonts, so it’s none too pretty, but I can clean that as we go.

Okay, fellow Sacramento Realtors® – what is with pricing a home at 199,999? I understand you want to stay under the $200,000 mark, but seriously! At least refrain yourself and set the listing price at 199,900. The buyer gets the idea.

Even Metrolist has started to add a home at $200,000 on both sides of the $200,000 price.

A smart fellow Realtor® looks for a certain amount above and below what his buyer wants anyway – the amount varies with the market. But if my client says she’ll buy a home up to $300,000 I will usually search between the parameters of $240,000 to $320,000. Who knows? The sellers might be motivated!

So instead of letting this drive me nuts, I did some research. Turns out there is a reason behind the 99 cent pricing (Thank God the MLS doesn’t have cents!) and the roots are economic. Go here for the entire story.

But feel free to call and scold me if I ever add too many 9s. Unless it’s a million dollar home. I’d make an exception there -wouldn’t you? But then, I’m the last Realtor® in Sacramento not impressed by 9s.

Sacramento real estate investors are (finally!) standing up and taking notice. The Handyman’s Special might be sold pretty soon. Now, with this being a short sale, it still has to go through all the right channels with the lender (Countrywide) to be approved, but since it had been approved earlier at $239,000 without knowledge of the pest report, this one should be a pretty simple “yes” or “no” based on price.

In a short sale, the lender is usually willing to look at only one offer at a time, so of the ones that come along, I’m hoping we get a decent enough offer to submit to Countrywide. That being said, there has been genuine interest. Yesterday and Monday felt like a hearkening back to the real estate boom market we had in 2004, what with the number of Realtors® and others interested.

Want a closer look at the property? I plan on showing it Sunday between 9:30 and 10:00am. Feel free to come!

At the risk of disappointing my throng of fan (singular intended, and don’t think I don’t appreciate it, Jeff), my map output has been a little off lately. However, the good news is that with all the distractions from software development (like really getting paid to be a real estate broker, which kind of sucks up my time being my “day job” and all), I’ve managed to do a fairly decent update to the listings database that underlies most of the content here (and on two or three other web sites).

Granted this is all underneath the hood, but you might find that some of the pages are showing a lot more listings than they were. Of course, the down side is that now that we’re starting to have a non-trivial amount of data in the database, I need to put on my MySQL database admin hat to get the speed back up to what it was. Do I have a MySQL database admin hat? I guess I do now. Indexes are your friend. Or to be pedantic about it, indices are your friend.

The good news is that I now have about three months of recent active listing data, along with about a year, for Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado, and Yolo Counties. That’s about where I wanted to be as a baseline, so now I can just do an update every few days to stay current. That means I can focus a bit over the several weeks on some other tasks, to the extent that work doesn’t cut a whole in my whole day.

Does My Development To Do List Really Belong on the So-Called Internet?

Yep.

Some of the other tasks ahead include:

• Fixing up the neighborhood pages, like this one, so they’re not in a cheesy development state. Break out the actives from the solds and show more of everything, while at the same time adding some listing maps.
• Creating a UI where users can add points of interest for Sacramento, and to jump start that, begin by inviting local bloggers / webmasters to add their blogs.
• Advertise (or “feature”) your listing would be a nice touch. Who has time?
• Get some better front ends going for pages like our main city page. A zip code map for the whole county is fairly trivial but also likely to be somewhat fat. If it is fat, that could be solved by just mapping centers instead of outlines.
• Before or after fixing what a main city list looks like, wire El Dorado, Yolo, and Placer County as well. I’m thinking that rather than spinning off most of these to existing county web sites, we might put it all up here, and do a sort of hyperglobalmeganet deal on it. And then of course…
• Flesh out the neighborhood database for those counties as well, and add more for Sacramento.
• Clean up the CSS all over. The look and feel so far is pretty amateurish.
• If I get the writer new hire I’m hoping for, work with her on how the neighborhood or city level content all fits in. If you get the UI right for the user adding points of interest feature, that’ll help.

So far this project reads more like a wish list and is seriously in need of some project management. Darn it — project manager hat. Granted, 2,000+ pages or so of long-tail search content probably works pretty well even if it’s cheesy, but having a killer Web 2.0 app running at the root or in a directory somewhere wouldn’t hurt a bit.