Perrysburg Blog

The Toledo Blade just ran a story here.

About March 2011 City of Toledo numbers.

And their rather precipitous drop.  *(Which I have written on/predicted/sang like a canary in a coal mine about)*

They say:

Just wondering.

I was an intern once for the City of Toledo.   Just like this guy.

And believe me . . . you never want to work in the sausage plant if you go in loving the product.

You are going to have your eyes OPENED.

That links to a great read in today’s Toledo Blade.

About Stephen Leggett.

Just about every homeowner gets tagged with special taxes on their property tax statement: sewer improvements, water improvements, ditch maintenance, mosquito control, on and on and on . . . oh, and often you get a special ding for “street lighting”.

This poor legislative intern did a terrible thing.

He used his mind.

He told the truth.

He stood his ground.

Homeowners who are faithfully and obediently paying ALL their property taxes are not only not getting what they pay for, they are now aware that the public servants paid to be good stewards of the public trust are complicit in a cover up.

How sad.

I wonder if a group of homeowners in Toledo would sue the City of Toledo -  what would happen?

****(I did about 10 seconds of research, since I used to be a research intern – and trust me it is REALLY easy to do research now in the internet age – and guess what I found?  Lots of people sue about special assessments that are unfair or broken or false!)

I wonder if a homeowner whose street had inoperative street lighting refused to pay for their streetlight assessment – or maybe paid 65% of it – what would happen?

It’s probably good they fired him.

It’s easier than listening to him and coming up with a plan to make sure the lights are really on.

Because I am always ready and willing to try to give an answer or a quote.

This weekend they did a story about the dangers of missing one mortgage payment.

Let’s just put it this way – you do NOT want to miss “just one mortgage payment”.

Read about it here:  Missed Payment Portends Crisis.

What is happening – happening right now in Perrysburg – not in a magazine article or a newspaper story – but actually happening to good people in Perrysburg right now is shameful.   It is wrong.  It is a sign of how out of kilter our nation is right now.

Our local paper was kind enough to interview me for a comment on their story about the recent NAR housing price numbers - which show that Toledo is now a very, very affordable town to buy a home in.

One number that I shared with them was the huge price drop in one zip code in Toledo.  A 75% price drop in January 2009 vs. 2007.

How can that be?

75%???

The answer is that over 50% of the sales in the City of Toledo in January were distressed sales.

So these numbers – these horrible numbers are skewed.

Because of WHO is selling and WHY they are selling.

After all, it’s not “regular owners” who are selling.

It’s the banks that they now own!

Median prices of homes in Toledo – which depending on how you measure them – can actually NOT indicate their current value.    These numbers represent the average disposal prices that it takes to clear them in this market in view of their status as assets that need to be disposed of by financial owners.

A better measure of value is the Case-Shiller index of RESOLD HOUSES.

More on that later . . .

Sellers need not despair.  Not now.

I love the press.

I just wish it was on a better and happier subject.  Like flowers blooming in the Spring or pennies from heaven.

But the Toledo Blade was kind enough to interview and quote me in their latest real estate article.

And it was on short sales.  Which is when the seller does not have enough money from a real estate sale to pay off the combination of mortgage debt and closing costs when a property sells for market value.

An indicator short sales is the number of homes in “preforeclosure”.   One database that I subscribe to has over 900 houses in Perrysburg listed as being “in distress”.

Now, it’s not a short sale unless you have to sell/move.

Then it might be – and there are options.  Plenty of them.   Hence the CDPE training that I procured for my agents.   It’s specialized training to get Realtors qualified to deal with short sales and distressed sellers.  And it was needed.

But 900 homeowners?  In potential distress in Perrysburg?

Hard to imagine but I believe that number is accurate.

If it is – there will perhaps be many more empty ghost houses – like this one I have on the market:

Because distressed homeowners can become short selling homeowners.

And if they are not successful they can become foreclosed homeowners.

And those houses become “HAUNTED”.  Empty.  Full of expense-causing gremlins that wreck monetary damage and hurt everyone’s neighborhood and the value of everyones house.

I have no answers or solutions (Steve Forbes does – and it’s the best I have read.)

But there is hope for any homeowner.   There are solutions.  There are options.  You just have to know where to look and what to do.

If you are focused like a laser beam on Perrysburg, which I am trained to be when I have to (which is when I am listing and selling and consulting on Perrysburg real estate and for Perrysburg real estate clients, although this was a typical day in that I had to list a house in Toledo, list a house in Rossford, secure/list a house in Holland for a bank, and then list a house in Perrysburg all while my team was showing houses in and around Maumee, Perrysburg, and Toledo . . . but I digress)

IF you are focused on Perrysburg the number that arrests your attention today is -9%.

Because the Toledo Blade ran a story yesterday (www.ToledoBlade.com) about housing values in Toledo being off by 5.2%.

I was quoted in the story by John Chavez, the Blade’s excellent Business reporter.

But, you know, when you are quoted, you can never really get the whole story out.   John was working with the national numbers that the National Association of Realtors was using in a press release for all of Ohio.

But there is no “Ohio” real estate market.

If I had my own place to write – Oh, I do, right here! – I would say that ALL real estate is local.   All of the big national statistics have to be brought right down to the local level.

You want the truth about the Perrysburg market?  Then you had better use the right metrics and numbers and data to get it.

And the numbers have indeed flattened out – but if you look back to just one year ago, which is a time frame that most of us are very comfortable using, the median price in Perrysburg of sold homes is down by -9%.

$197,500 in July of 2007 to $179,750 in July of 2008.

That’s a BIG drop.

Are we done?  I don’t think we are going to see another $17,750 drop in Perrysburg over the next 12 months.

I do not see it.

Not in Perrysburg.

You can track what is happening with homes on the market anytime you want by looking at www.OnlyPerrysburg.com (shameless plug – it’s one of my websites, a pretty neat one I think – one button gets you every house for sale in Perrysburg!).

What will our market look like in July 2009 if it drops another 9 or 10%?

You and I most likely don’t want to know . . .