Tag: homes

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Hot Properties Real Estate

Simply Timeless

The thrill of a home tour is to see how someone else assembles the everyday items we live with: a sofa and two chairs, art on the walls, a dining table and sideboard.

Some people play to type, filling a Mission-style house with Arts and Crafts oak furniture and rich, earth-toned colors. An equally deft, but more fanciful, hand might arrange discarded school furniture with cutting-edge art that alters how you see the building.

This is yet another bungalow: oak floors, Midtown trim, blah, blah, blah. Stripped bare of the current artist’s furnishings, the house won’t have the same impact that it does at the moment, but the interior treatments prove how distinctively you can live in even the most predictable of floor plans.

The screened door has been planked. Narrow cedar boards left over from building the rear fence have been planed to expose their grain and applied horizontally, making the screen door a very modern shutter, which adds privacy to the interior while allowing air flow. This not only enhances the street appeal but also playfully acknowledges the Craftsman or natural materials.

In typical bungalow style, the living and dining rooms open one behind the other, making a large public space. Most of the windows have white plantation shutters. The walls and trim are painted neutral colors. The ceilings, however, have a little splash of color that suggests we’re not in Kansas anymore.

The kitchen has been updated with white cabinets to the ceiling to maximize storage. Good under-cabinet lighting makes food prep easier. But the zing here is the small black tiles of the countertops played against a large black-and-white checkerboard floor.

There are two bedrooms and a bath on the opposite side of the house. The large pedestal sink and white, one-inch hex-tile floor look perfectly original. A large storage cabinet has been refaced with a single planked door, and an equally large framed mirror was installed over a new white-wood wainscot. Recessed can lights and high-tech dimmers show it off well.

A spacious family room has been added across the rear of the house. It has lots of windows and a great, European wood-burning stove. A laundry closet with extra storage is right by the rear entry.

Out back is a private, fenced yard with a large double carport. Behind that, a deck is partially covered by a triangular sun shade. The backyard has a Zen-like composition of river rock between deck and yard.

Just like inside, the yard is composed simply, but all this elegant artistry makes this classic bungalow feel timeless.

575 S. Holmes

1,344 square feet

2 bedrooms, 1 bath; $172,000

FSBO; will co-op

Michael Carpenter, 230-0888

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News

Memphis Selling For Less

CREDIT: image: venturacountystar.com

From South Memphis to Southwind, Memphis is losing value. Two people who ought to know say so. Both are professionals, and neither is an alarmist or a naysayer.

One of them is Shelby County asssessor Rita Clark, whose job is putting a dollar value on houses, buildings, and land for tax purposes. The other is auctioneer John Roebuck of Roebuck Auctions, one of the leading real estate auction firms in the South.

They calculate value differently. Clark and her staff use computer models, comparables, sales histories, and first-hand “windshield” inspections. Roebuck wields a microphone and a gavel and stands in front of a group of buyers and opens the bidding.

But they’ve come to the same conclusion: Real estate prices are declining, which reverses a long trend of increasing values.

“Memphis is a strange city that does not dip and rise like other parts of the country,” Roebuck said. “Right now, Memphis is down about as far as I can remember in 30 years.”

He said people are leaving the city, demand for housing is low, and there is a surplus of new homes and condos. Even the owners of some million-dollar homes are turning to auctions as a way to unload their property.

“Auctions get a bad rap,” Roebuck said. “An auction typically brings the true market value that day. Appraisals are just one man’s opinion.”

He expects to see “a substantial reduction” in home values in the next countywide reappraisal in 2009, leading to an overall decline in the tax base.

Clark doesn’t disagree with that evaluation.
“Absolutely,” she said, when asked if the tax base in Memphis could be shrinking, although she declined to put a number on it at this time. “We follow the market. We don’t predict the market.”

Clark will leave office next September after serving 10 years. In the 1998, 2001, and 2005 reappraisals, the total value of assessed property in Memphis increased an average of 14 percent each period. The suburbs were up even more, led by Collierville (up 24 percent in 2005) and Lakeland (up 30 percent in 2005).

Higher property appraisals are an indication of a healthy economy and provide a cushion for Memphis and Shelby County governments, which operate primarily on property taxes and sales tax. If housing prices continue to fall, lower appraisals will mean lower tax collections and less money for schools, police and teacher salaries, sports facilities, parks, and debt service.

There is also the prospect of no tax collections at all from some property owners. Memphis is one of the top foreclosure markets in the country. Foreclosures are expected to get worse in 2008 as subprime mortgages are reset at higher rates.

The usual way to balance the budget in Memphis and Shelby County is with a tax increase, but Memphians already pay the highest property tax rate in Tennessee. The smell of scandal is in the air. Houses aren’t selling. Values are declining. Mayor Herenton got only 43 percent of the vote. The 2008 City Council will have nine new members. And they’re going to increase taxes? Don’t think so.

Other signs point to a stagnant city that is getting poorer, not richer. In banking as in real estate, it looks like the big money has been made for a while. This has been an awful year for banks. The stock price of First Horizon, the last of the big Memphis-based banks, is $21 a share compared to $43 a year ago. The share prices of other regional banks with a big presence in Memphis, including Regions, Renasant, Trustmark, and Cadence, are all down at least 30 percent this year and are at or near five-year lows. FedEx, our corporate jewel, is off 15 percent so far this year.

At the risk of piling on, there is an unsettling tone in the public relations campaign to “liberate” the National Civil Rights Museum from “corporate interest domination.” Unsettling because it sounds like the preelection rhetoric of our soon-to-be fifth-term mayor who as much as wrote off the white vote. So much for public-private partnerships.

The $30 dinner entrée, the $570 a night hotel suite, the $140 Grizzlies ticket, the $45,000 SUV, the $40,000 a year college tuition, and a $30 million public boat landing look like relics of a golden age. Let’s hope Memphis can still support them a year from now, but I wonder.

Categories
News The Fly-By

VESTA on Hiatus

In the midst of an uncertain housing market, the Memphis Area Home Builders Association has decided not to hold its biannual Vesta Home Show this fall.

The showcase, held for more than 20 years, has wowed visitors with state-of-the-art homes in posh neighborhoods. Last spring, the show’s seven homes — priced between $500,000 and $650,000 — were sold before the event officially began. It was the first pre-show sell-out in Vesta’s history.

But the builder’s association recently decided that instead of doing Vesta, it would host a 2007 Mid-South Parade of Homes.

“The Vesta show was a success — everything sold — but it was only a success for those builders involved,” says MAHBA executive director Don Glays. “To be honest, there were not a lot of developers coming to the table saying I’m willing to risk the advertising and marketing budget.”

And with a weak housing market, the association wanted to give all of its member builders a boost.

“We’re going through a market correction that is probably a little more severe than it has been in the past,” Glays says. “We decided to carry on by doing a Parade of Homes that would interest all markets, not just the upscale market.”

Glays, who became director in May, has spent 25 years in the home-building industry. He says the association was considering doing a Parade-type event before he was hired. In fact, he was even asked about it during the interview process.

The Parade of Homes, which will be held in conjunction with the North Mississippi Home Builders Association, will run from October 12th to 28th and will feature 161 homes in 40 communities throughout the tri-state area. Seventy builders are involved and have built houses that range from $125,000 to $1.25 million.

Vesta may introduce buyers to top-of-the-line homes, but Glays thinks it offers an inaccessible product for most consumers. He hopes that a showcase aimed at drawing potential homebuyers into the market will work better than one that leaves them dreaming.

“When people go to Vesta, most say this is really nice, but it’s not mine. I’ll never have this,” Glays says. “With Parade of Homes, you can visit homes and say this is what I really want and I can afford this.”

MAHBA plans to hold another Parade of Homes in the spring and then return with the Vesta concept in fall 2008.