Chris Elrod Properties-Connecting Buyers & Sellers Of Real Estate

Top 100 Places to Live

In the top 100 - Brentwood, TN & Nashville, TN!!!!
Welcome to Relocate America's 100 Top Places To Live! 2007 marks our tenth year compiling our list of the best places to live in the United States. This is the only list that is determined by statistics and feedback of the people who live, work & play in these communities. We're proud of our list of best places to live in 2007, and we're showing that by honoring each and every community listed here.

Throughout the calendar year, we accept nominations for cities & towns throughout the country to be considered as a "great place to live". The nominating parties must include their own reasons why they feel their city should make the list. The nominations, along with key data regarding education, employment, economy, crime, parks, recreation and housing are reviewed, rated & judged by our editorial team. Special consideration is taken on the Top 10 Cities as they are listed in a ranked order of America's Top 10 Places to Live.

Why shouldn't I just post my home on some Internet sites?

"Sellers think all they have to do is place their home on the internet, ands some nameless, faceless person" completes the sale, says Carla Cross, CRB,GRI , president of Carla Cross Seminars Inc. (www.carlacross.com) in Tssaquah, Wash. "They assume practitioners are of little importance, and what's important in technology."
"I and the other associates within my company work with buyers every day. Listing with me, then, is the equivalent of target marketing versus a shot in the dark. By listing with me, you also receive exposure, through the MLS, to all the other real estate brokerages in the market, whose agents are working with buyers every day."

Lots of square footage for the price!

2723 Banks Ct.
Thompson's Station, TN 37179
JUST LISTED!
4 Bedrooms
3 Full Baths
Bonus Room
Office
HUGE yard!

Private cul-de-sac lot surrounded by bubbling brook.Well maintained with a new roof, new carpet, fresh paint.This home features a wrap-around porch, concrete driveway, a water softener&filter, tons of storage.Office could be 5th BR.
For More Information Click HERE MLS #853702

*Check out our PHOTO ALBUM for more pics.

Price Reduced!!

2661 Churchill Drive
$349,900
Welcome home to a beautiful like new custom built home featuring extra trim and moldings, rounded corners, slate fireplace, central vacuum system, irrigation system and many more amenities.

This home is located in the Campbell's Station Development convenient to groceries, pharmacies and restaurants. The local schools are only a few miles away.
The oversized master suite is on the main level with a view of the community lake.
Another bedroom and full bath is also on the main level.
The great room opens up to a screened in back porch.
In the kitchen you'll find  all stainless appliances including a side by side refrigerator and a gas cooktop with downdraft.
Upstairs is a huge bonus room that could easily accommodate furniture as well as game tables & pool tables.
A loft provides an area for reading or computers and overlooks the great room below.
Two more bedrooms and a full bath are also on this level.
The sellers are offering $3000 toward the buyer's closing cost.

For more information, please visit www.realtracs.com  MLS # 832718

NEW PRICE!!!

2005 Cedarmont Drive

What a find! This one level ranch has 4 large bedrooms a formal dining room, parlor/study, great room, Jack and Jill baths.
Enjoy breakfast in the newly redone eat-in kitchen looking over the fenced in backyard complete with an English garden.
Many light and plumbing fixtures have been updated in this home and all the hardwood floors have been refinished.
The great room has a Tuscan theme with a fireplace.
The oversized master is just off the great room and the other 3 bedrooms are zoned on the other side of the home.
The laundry room is conveniently located near the three bedrooms on this side of the home.
The best part of this home is the basement, it is 90% finished with a gas fireplace, carpeting and lighting.
Most importantly this home has a new roof that was put on in the summer of 2006. This home comes with a one year AHS warranty.

For more info, please visit: www.realtracs.com and enter MLS#: 822277

Real Estate Market on the Rise

By Lauren Stalder

A growing number of people are buying houses and buildings to make a profit by selling or renting them to others. Michael Hudson., economist and research professor, spoke March 1 about the rising real-estate market.
Hudson's lecture, "The Real Estate Bubble and the Coming Economic Collapse," was held in Royall Hall.
The price of housing has sharply increased over the past decades. A loft Hudson purchased in New York in 1980 for $20,000 could now sell for more than $1,000,000. This is a significant jump in housing prices for a 20-year time span.
Many Americans take out loans to buy property and make a profit off the rent they charge. Absentee owners accounted for 14 percent of the mortgage market last year, according to Hudson.

For More info go  HERE

Heat Maps Offer a Visual View of House Prices

By Lauren Baier Kim

Note: This is the first installment of "The Smart Surfer," a feature that reviews real-estate Web sites and tools available online for home buyers/sellers and real-estate investors.

Tool/Web site: Trulia.com Heat Maps. Trulia.com, a competitor to Zillow.com, is a residential real-estate search engine that aims to provide consumers with real-estate information, including homes for sale, listing prices, sale prices and regional market trends.

Function: Trulia.com's Heat Maps offer a visual view of home-price trends that allows users to quickly compare areas that are hot or not. The site's national heat map offers street, satellite or hybrid views and is color-shaded by state to indicate three different data sets: average listing prices, median sales prices or Trulia.com popularity. The last category is based on the number of search inquiries from site visitors. Users can toggle between the heat maps of average listing price, median sales price or popularity by clicking on the column headers below. Somewhat surprisingly, for the week ending Jan. 31, Washington, D.C., had the highest median sales price ($720,000), while Hawaii had the highest listing price (approximately $1 million), and California ranked as the most-popular state. Kansas had the lowest median sales price ($59,044 ), and North Dakota  had the lowest listing price ($168,028) and ranked as the least-popular state. (Hint: to view Hawaii or Alaska on the map, just click and drag the map into place.)

Pluses: The heat maps offer a quick view of pricing trends both across the country and within more local areas. The maps are especially useful for home buyers looking to relocate -- whether within their state or county or across the country. One quick glance at a selected geographical area shows which areas or neighborhoods are priciest (or perhaps out of a buyer's price range) and which are within budget, or more affordable. Home sellers can use the maps to get home asking and selling prices for their neighborhood and gauge its popularity with buyers.

Drawbacks: While the heat maps offers data down to the neighborhood or ZIP code level for large metro areas, the maps aren't local enough for smaller cities or areas outside large urban centers. For smaller towns or ZIP codes, consumers won't get a visual view of what neighborhoods are hot and those that are not. For suburban areas, the heat maps may be regulated to the county level. Also, the maps rely on data that is somewhat limited in that it comes from participating brokerages only for listing prices and on preferences by Trulia.com visitors to measure an area's overall popularity rating with home buyers.

Insider tips: To view data for areas not covered by a heat map, the best bet is to go to the Trulia.com home page and type the name of the city and state into the search box, e.g., "Brookline, Massachusetts" and click on the "Real Estate Guides" tab before hitting "Search." Such a search will pull up a page for the city, including a map pinpointing real-estate listings, and charts with price and sales statistics, local school information and the location's ranking. (Brookline is a "hot city," according to Trulia.) Visitors to the site should note that the charts that accompany the heat maps are sortable -- e.g., for a heat-map search on San Francisco, http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/San_Francisco-heat_map/, neighborhoods can be listed from highest to lowest median price by clicking on "Median Sales Price" and by clicking on "Amount" to get the down arrow -- which shows that Saint Francis Wood had the highest median price ($2.2 million) between October and December of last year, a year-over-year increase of 26.1%.

               

A Heat Map from Trulia.com showing median sales prices by county in California.

 

How Good Are Zillow's Price Estimates?

By James R. Hagerty
From The Wall Street Journal Online

In the year since its launch, Zillow Inc. has made millions of Americans familiar with computer-generated estimates of home values, created a new online addiction and become a staple of dinner-party chatter.

But just how accurate is it? A Wall Street Journal analysis of 1,000 recent home sales shows that Zillow's "Zestimates" often are very good, frequently within a few percentage points of the actual price paid. But when Zillow is bad, it can be terrible -- off the mark by more than 25% on one in 10 homes. In one case it was off by $2 million.

Zillow, based in Seattle, operates a Web site that offers free estimates and other online tools for real-estate buyers and sellers. It draws revenue from online advertising.

The Journal looked at transaction prices recorded for 1,000 recent home sales in seven states, using data from First American Real Estate Solutions, a data provider in Santa Ana, Calif., and compared those prices with Zillow estimates, which didn't yet reflect the sales. The median difference between the Zillow estimate and the actual price was 7.8%. (That was close to the 7.2% median "margin of error" reported by Zillow itself on all transactions involving homes whose value it has estimated.)

The estimates were about equally split between ones that were too high and those below the mark.

               

A four-bedroom, five-bath house in Fall City, Wash. Zillow estimate: $661,756 Sold for: $2,690,000

Zillow came within 5% of the price in a third of the transactions studied by The Journal. It was more than 25% off target on 11% of them. In 34 of the 1,000 transactions, Zillow was off by more than 50%.

Zillow had estimated that a four-bedroom, 7,600-square-foot home in Fall City, Wash., was valued at $661,756. The home, built last year, sold in early January for $2.7 million. "If you don't visit the property, you're never going to know that it's in an exclusive, gated part of the neighborhood," says Maria Danieli, who represented the sellers. Ms. Danieli says Zillow may be fine for "cookie-cutter" neighborhoods but "they can't compute" the values of the luxury homes she sells.

Zillow executives acknowledge that the estimates can be way off in some cases. The estimate "is a starting point" for people trying to figure out how much a home should cost, says Amy Bohutinsky, a spokeswoman for the company. "We don't recommend it as the final word."

Sometimes the estimates take big lurches in brief periods as Zillow's computer analyzes the latest home-sales data, updated weekly. "My God!" said Jonathan Miller after he looked up his own house in Darien, Conn., on Zillow last week. "My value has dropped 25% in six months. There's no way -- that would be the market collapsing!" Zillow has the house pegged at $1,442,851, down from about $2.1 million last July. Mr. Miller, chief executive officer of Miller Samuel, an appraisal firm based in New York, watches his local market closely and figures his home is valued at around $1.9 million.

Zillow can be quite accurate in some markets, Mr. Miller says, but he argues that the estimates are hit or miss. He suggests that Zillow should produce only an estimated price range rather than an exact figure: "When you go down to the $1 level, you're implying precision." Ms. Bohutinsky, the Zillow spokeswoman, notes that Zillow produces both a range and a precise estimate and says users like both.

Zillow also missed the target for Josh Benton, a management consultant at Kurt Salmon Associates in Atlanta. He sold a home last fall for about 15% more than Zillow's estimate. Still, Mr. Benton says he found Zillow

               

El Cerrito, Calif. Zillow estimate: $544,361 Sold for: $80,000

useful for getting a sense of the relative value of houses in a neighborhood. And he liked the site's aerial views of neighborhoods as a research aid. "Overall, it's an excellent site," he says.

Zillow's estimates come from a proprietary computer program that takes into account sale prices for nearby homes that appear comparable, the size and other physical attributes of the home, its past sales history and tax-assessment data, says Stan Humphries, vice president of data and analytics.

Zillow tends to work best for midrange homes in areas where there are a lot of comparable houses, he says. It is less accurate for low- and high-end homes because there are fewer of those and thus less data available from comparable sales, known as "comps." Values of rural homes are hard to gauge for the same reason. Partly for that reason, none of the Web sites can offer 100% coverage of U.S. homes; Zillow says it has estimates on about 57% of all homes.

Even where there are numerous apparent "comps," computer programs like Zillow's can stumble when vital information is missing. Data fed into the computer, for instance, may not reflect the fact that a house has just been remodeled, destroyed by fire or put into foreclosure. Reported prices can be misleading, too. Sometimes homes are sold between family members for a token price, or sellers offer incentives to buyers, such as help with closing costs, that aren't reflected in the recorded price.

Zillow isn't the only site offering such free estimates. Others include RealEstate.com, RealEstateABC.com and Reply.com. But Zillow's site gets more traffic than those rivals. All of these sites appear to have overestimated the value of a house on Olivant Street in a tough area of Pittsburgh that sold for $700 last year in an auction of foreclosed homes. As of early this month, Zillow estimated the value at about $33,000, RealEstate.com at $57,000, Reply.com at $69,000 and RealEstateABC.com at $86,000. Several nearby houses are abandoned or boarded up, blighting the block -- something computer models don't take into account.

               

Northbrook, Ill. Zillow estimate: $450,565 Sold for: $970,000

Zillow lets users try to correct for things computers might miss. For instance, people can use Zillow's "my estimator" tool to account for the value of remodeling or to choose what they regard as the most relevant "comps," screening out those that aren't really similar homes.

Making estimates is particularly difficult in some areas. Some states, including Texas, don't provide public records showing housing transaction prices. To improve its performance in Texas, Zillow last month began tapping sales data from multiple-listing services, databases of property for sale through real-estate brokers.

New York City also is a difficult area for Zillow and other estimate providers because of the large number of cooperative buildings. Tax assessments are made on the co-op buildings rather than individual units, removing one indicator of value. And there is less public information on such things as square footage in individual homes, Zillow says, though the company is finding alternative sources for such data.

Real-estate agents and appraisers tend to sneer at Web site valuations and insist that consumers still need their local expertise to get a true idea of values. Masood Samereie, an agent at Century 21 Hartford Properties in San Francisco, says one of his clients last year lost his chance to buy an attractive home because, relying on Zillow, he made an unrealistically low offer.

 

-- Alison Van Camp contributed to this article.

No Cause for Alarm!

Should you be concerned about lower rcoup values in this year's Cost vs. Value Report? The unusually strong housing market over the past few years has boosted both remodeling and new construction activity. For many homeowners, the appreciation in house prices significantly added to their net worth. Similarly, home improvement projects often paid for themselves through a comparable increase in the home's value. But every good thing must come to an end. Eventually, things return to normal. Luckily, today's "normal" is grat news for home owners and real estate practitioners: When you consider its value at resale, a home improvement project costs only 20 cents to 25 cents on the dollar. The other 75 cents to 80 cents spent on a project goes directly back into the home through increased value-not to mention increased owner enjoyment.
-By Kermit Baker, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
Remodels                Job Cost          Resale Value           Cost Recouped
Attic bedroom          $39,119          $33,370                     85.3%            
Basement                 $51,071         $43,113                     84.4%            
Bathroom                 $11,874         $11,559                     97.3%             
Home office             $18,753         $12,923                     69.0%             
Kitchen (major)        $51,304         $40,041                     78.0%            
Kitchen (minor)        $17,179         $14,357                     83.6%             


            

Tennessee Cities Show Economic Strength!

A recent national ranking of Metropolitan Statistical Areas across the country ranked each city/area-all 369 of them-by its economic strength. The highest-ranked areas have had rapid, consistent growth in both size and quality for an extended period of time, while the lowest-ranked areas have been volatile decline for an extended period of time. The study was done by POLICOM Corporation, an independent economic research firm headquartered in Florida.
Tennessee did VERY well!
The Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro MSA ranked number 2 in the U.S., and the Memphis TN-MS-AR MSA ranked number 12 in the country! Other Tennessee cities also did well: the Knoxville MSA (58th), and the Chattanooga TN-GA MSA (71st).

To see complete rankings, go to: www.policom.com/metrorank.htm