Menlo Park Ca Open House Sat & Sun 1:30-4:30: A Green Home You CAN Afford

YOU CAN AFFORD TO BUY A GREEN HOME IN MENLO PARK

501 Sandlewood St, Menlo Park, CA 94025

VERY ATTRACTIVELY PRICED AT $598,000.00

Open House This Weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 1:30-4:30.

ALL GUESTS ARE ENTERED TO WIN A $100 GIFT CERTIFICATE FOR TIFFANY'S

Welcome to 501 Sandlewood St, a Green Home in an enclave of 3 year young Green Homes in Menlo Park.Conveniently located near the Dumbarton Bridge, gorgeous new office buildings, Mid Peninsula High School, and even a new Starbucks. You owe it to yourself to see how the city of Menlo Park has done a spectacular job on this re-development area, and to see what a wonderful home Clarum has built.

Some of the fantastic features include photoelectric roof panels which keep the PG&E bill to under $500 a year, tankless water heater so you never run out of hot water, tiles made from recycled glass, a lawn that looks gorgeous but never needs watering, granite counter tops in the kitchen and baths, solid surface tub surrounds, a huge master bath with a soaking tub, double paned windows and tons of natural light, walk in closet, and a bonus landing that is great for an extra office or playroom. There is aneighborhood park and a great community surrounding you. All this for under $600,000!

Seems almost too good to be true, but it is real. Don’t miss this incredible opportunity!

GREAT features include:

3 Bedrooms including a large master suite

2 ½ bathrooms with granite topped vanities, solid surface bath surrounds, and tiled floors

A wonderful U shaped kitchen with a gas stove, microwave, granite counters, maple cabinets, tiled floors, and a large pantry

Large, doubled paned windows

No water lawn

Attached 2 car garage

Re-circulating water heater pump

1,640 square feet of living space (per assessor)

3464 square foot lot (per assessor)

Marcy Moyer
Keller Williams
650-619-9285
marcy@marcymoyer.com
Follow Me, Marcyagent, on Twitter!

DRE # 01191194

Mountain View Ca Open House Sat & Sun 1:30-4:30: Experience the Light in Whisman Station!

148 Holly Court, Mountain View, CA

EXPERIENCE THE LIGHT.

$599,000

DON'T MISS THE OPEN HOUSE THIS WEEKEND, June 19th & 20th. 

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY FROM 1:30-4:30

Welcome to this striking townhome in the popular Whisman Station Development. 

You will delight in the modern amenities, convenient location, and wonderful life style options available to you if you live here.

Some of the lovely features include a fenced yard, central heat and air, new carpet and paint, attached 2 car garage, kitchen with granite counters, a center island, and gas stove, family room/kitchen, high ceilings, and, and rich cherry laminate floors.

Add to that wonderful Mountain View Schools and a great community with pools, parks, and easy access to light rail, freways, and major emplyment centers. Don't miss this wonderful home buying opportunity!

Marcy Moyer
Keller Williams
650-619-9285
marcy@marcymoyer.com
https://twitter.com/marcyagent
DRE # 01191194

Palo Alto CA Market Update, June 15th: With a Neighborhood Twist!

Here's the latest update on the single family home market in Palo Alto, with a neighborhood twist! 

Active Listings: 98

Pending Sales: 50

The market seems to be holding pretty steady, with a ratio of one pending sale for every 2 active listings. So this time, instead of breaking the numbers up by price range I did a neighborhood breakdown. 

Are some neighborhoods more popular than others? If so, which ones? 

So here's what I found when I crunched the numbers by neighborhood: 

Downtown:  5 Active  3 Pending

Professorville:  3 Active  2 Pending

Community Center:  3 Active  4 Pending

Crescent Park:  5 Active   3 Pending

Green Gables:  8 Active  9 Pending

Old Palo Alto:  11 Active   2 Pending

College Terrace:  Active 10  Pending 4

Ventura:  4 Active  2 Pending

Midtown:  9 Active  3 pending

South Palo Alto: 19 Active  13 Pending

Barron Park:  Active  9   Pending   1

Green Acres:  6 Active  2 Pending

Palo Alto Hills:  4 Active  1 Pending

So what does this mean?  Well, after a year and a half of looking at PA by price range it is very interesting for me to look at things from a different angle.  Intuitively it has felt to me like the Community Center has become the “it" place to be, and this week’s stats definitely support that.  It is one of only two neighborhood with more pending sales than active listings. The other is Green Gables.   

What I find most fascinating is the Barron Park stat. 9 active listings to 1 pending sale is the worst neighborhood in Palo Alto.  Why? I have some theories.  It was the most popular for a while and perhaps was more over inflated than others so needs a bigger adjustment.  Or is it the 900 pound gorilla in the room that no one wants to discuss:  suicide. Did the rash of Gunn suicides send buyers to the northern end of Palo Alto?  If you look at the active to pending ratios of all the neighborhoods they are uniformly better in north Palo Alto than south Palo Alto.  

Now, this is only my first look, and the numbers for each neighborhood are small, but it is definitely a trend I want to follow.

Marcy Moyer

Keller Williams Realty

marcy@marcymoyer.com

www.marcymoyer.com

D.R.E. 01191194

650-619-9285

MOUNTAIN VIEW OPEN HOUSE THIS WEEKEND (June 12 & 13, 1:30-4:30: EXPERIENCE THE LIGHT

148 Holly Court, Mountain View, CA

EXPERIENCE THE LIGHT.

$599,000

DON'T MISS THE OPEN HOUSE THIS WEEKEND, June 12th & 13th.

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY FROM 1:30-4:30

Welcome to this striking townhome in the popular Whisman Station Development. 
You will delight in the modern amenities, convenient location, and wonderful life style options available to you if you live here.

Some of the lovely features include a fenced yard, central heat and air, new carpet and paint, attached 2 car garage, kitchen with granite counters, a center island, and gas stove, family room/kitchen, high ceilings, and, and rich cherry laminate floors.

Add to that wonderful Mountain View Schools and a great community with pools, parks, and easy access to light rail, freways, and major emplyment centers. Don't miss this wonderful home buying opportunity!

Marcy Moyer
Keller Williams
650-619-9285
marcy@marcymoyer.com
https://twitter.com/marcyagent
DRE # 01191194

MENLO PARK OPEN HOUSE THIS WEEKEND (June 12 & 13, 1:30-4:30: A GREEN HOME YOU CAN AFFORD

YOU CAN AFFORD TO BUY A GREEN HOME IN MENLO PARK

501 Sandlewood St, Menlo Park, CA 94025

VERY ATTRACTIVELY PRICED AT $598,000.00

Open House This Weekend, Saturday and Sunday from 1:30-4:30.

ALL GUESTS ARE ENTERED TO WIN A $100 GIFT CERTIFICATE FOR TIFFANY'S

Welcome to 501 Sandlewood St, a Green Home in an enclave of 3 year young Green Homes in Menlo Park.Conveniently located near the Dumbarton Bridge, gorgeous new office buildings, Mid Peninsula High School, and even a new Starbucks. You owe it to yourself to see how the city of Menlo Park has done a spectacular job on this re-development area, and to see what a wonderful home Clarum has built.

Some of the fantastic features include photoelectric roof panels which keep the PG&E bill to under $500 a year, tankless water heater so you never run out of hot water, tiles made from recycled glass, a lawn that looks gorgeous but never needs watering, granite counter tops in the kitchen and baths, solid surface tub surrounds, a huge master bath with a soaking tub, double paned windows and tons of natural light, walk in closet, and a bonus landing that is great for an extra office or playroom. There is aneighborhood park and a great community surrounding you. All this for under $600,000!

Seems almost too good to be true, but it is real. Don’t miss this incredible opportunity!

GREAT features include:

3 Bedrooms including a large master suite

2 ½ bathrooms with granite topped vanities, solid surface bath surrounds, and tiled floors

A wonderful U shaped kitchen with a gas stove, microwave, granite counters, maple cabinets, tiled floors, and a large pantry

Large, doubled paned windows

No water lawn

Attached 2 car garage

Re-circulating water heater pump

1,640 square feet of living space (per assessor)

3464 square foot lot (per assessor)

Marcy Moyer
Keller Williams
650-619-9285
marcy@marcymoyer.com
https://twitter.com/marcyagent
DRE # 01191194

The Facts About Palo Alto Short Sales and Foreclosures

There's a lot of chatter on real estate blogs about the steep increase in foreclosures and short sales in Palo Alto. Unfortunately many sites post stats from a company called Realty Trac which tracts everything from a Notice of Default through a listed bank owned property.  Many things can happen before a home with a Notice of Default actually gets to be sold by the bank, but unless you read the fine print carefully it is easy to confuse a house that is behind a few months in payments with an actual bank owned property on the market for sale.

Most bank owned homes as well as short sales (where the seller owes more than the home is worth and the lender/lenders have agreed to accept less than the amount of the mortgage to release the debt) are sold through the MLS.  So to see how many of these distressed sales have hit the market in the last year I went to the MLS and looked.  

Here is what I found for single family homes:

Bank owned properties sold in last year:              4

Current Pending sales of Bank owned:                 2

Short Sales sold in last year:                               3

Current Pending Short Sales                               1

Current Active Short Sales                                 1

For condo/townhomes the numbers are:

Bank owned sold:                                             2

Bank owned pending sales:                               1

Short Sales sold:                                              3

Short sales pending:                                         4

Short sales active:                                            2

As you can see this is not a huge number, especially since the total number of homes sold in Palo Alto in the last year is 369, making distressed sales account for less than 2%.  There have been 97 condo/townhomes sold in the same period making the distressed sales about 5% of that market.  These numbers are not enough to have any impact on the price of homes in Palo Alto at this point.  The percentage would have to increase several fold before Palo Alto prices are affected by distressed properties.  I am not saying that this is or is not going to happen, that is a discussion for a future post, just that it has not happened yet.

Marcy Moyer

Keller Williams Realty

D.R.E.  01191194

marcy@marcymoyer.com

www.marcymoyer.com

*Photo Credit: found this hilarious picture at the website for The Sacramento Bee. 

Palo Alto CA Market Update, June 6th: Single Family Homes

   As of today this is the snapshot of the Palo Alto single family home market:

103  Active listings

50  Pending sales

Breakdown of Price Points:

Under 1 million: 14 Active Listings / 10 Pending Sales

1 to 2 Mil:  48 Active Listings/ 28 Pending Sales

2-3 Million 27 Active listings/ 9 Pending Sales

3+ mil: 14 Active Listings/ 3 Pending Sales

What does mean? There is a pretty good jump in inventory for 89 to 103 active listings. Active to pending ratio is starting to increase in the under 1 million and 1-2 million dollar price points. It had already increased in the 2-3 million a few weeks ago.  Over 3 million is pretty much the same.  I am not saying the sky is falling, and there is always a increase in inventory right after Memorial week-end, but I think that there was a little appreciation in March-May, but I would be surprised to see more price increases this year. I do not expect a drop in values, I just do not conditions ripe for more appreciation until the job market and the stock market do better.

If you need anything else please feel free to contact me. I am here to help you. 

Marcy Moyer Keller Williams Realty

marcy@marcymoyer.com

650-619-9285

www.marcymoyer.com

DRE 01191194

American Spoon Foods Has a Blog!

Remember my last blog post, about the Palo Alto farmers' market, where I promised to speak at greater length about the amazingness that is American Spoon Foods and everything that comes out of their kitchen?

Well, I'm moved to speak sooner than I thought, because I just discovered something ridiculously cool---American Spoon Foods has a blog. A detailed, adorable blog, complete with pictures of the chefs at work and hunger-pang inducing close-ups of fruit in various stages of the canning (is that the right word? maybe preserving?) process.

It's called Spoon Blog. SPOON BLOG. Love it (as only a truly obsessive blogger could).

I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let me pause my rapture to explain to those of you who haven't yet tasted American Spoon's products what exactly this company does, and why it's so good.

American Spoon runs of out mid-sized kitchen in Petoskey, Michigan (a very small town in the northern reaches of the state). Their mission is (as stated on their website, which you must visit, credit card in hand):"to produce the finest fruit preserves in the world from Michigan fruit.

And that's exactly what they do, and have done, for going on thirty years.

Every year they harvest fruit from Northern Michigan farms and transform it into luscious, spoon-able preserves, with flavor so fresh local pie-makers refuse to use anything else as filling.

American Spoon's fruit alchemy results in an abundance of unique products. The most popular are the spoon fruits (my favorite flavor is Sour Cherries, an opinion shared by novelist Ann Patchett in a recently published article about Petoskey and American Spoon in the New York Times). You can also try fruit mustards, butters, relishes, and BBQ sauces.

I first learned about American Spoon when I received a sampler box as a gift from a friend who lives in Petoskey. I've been ordering them ever since, and would definitely recommend their boxes and baskets to anyone shopping for someone hard to please.

But even if you detest fruit preserves and have no interest in local farming or cooking/food in general, Spoon Blog is worth checking out. The blog is exemplary, a perfect manifestation of many of the techniques and tips talked about in blogging webinars on active rain and other guides for real estate marketing online. It uses pictures to tell a story and capture a reader's attention, is updated regularly, and presents information in an accessible and approachable manner. The blog's voice is clear and friendly--it's not selling, it's SHARING, and that gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling that's definitely more conducive to placing an online order than a stark list of products.

Here are some links backing up my rave review of American Spoon--

Ann Patchett's NY TIMES Article "As American as Cherry Pie"

A list of highlighted reviews from the Spoon website--even VOGUE loves this place.

A cherry shout-out in the the Washington Post!