2011

Fish Balls the iPhone Game is now in the app store!

December 11, 2011 by Spencer Barron Leave a Comment

I just released my first casual strategy game for the iPhone and I need your help!

Fish Balls was just accepted for distribution in Apple’s app store Friday and I need some feedback from people! If you have an iPhone or iPad, please take a moment to download my free game. It’s a FREE casual strategy game that is a billiards style brick breaker designed to be simple to learn but challenging to master.

You can find out more about my game at the new website for Fish Balls or simply download it. It’s currently available for the iPhone and I have an Android version in the works. Best part about it is that it’s a non stressful, refreshing game designed to be challenging while not aggrevating. I designed it to not be random at all. It simply react to your touch. Enjoy.

****UPDATE**** Here’s the trailer video.

Filed Under: Featured

Buying a condo? Financing issues that tank deals.

March 21, 2011 by Spencer Barron

There is only one valid reason to purchase a condo. You purchase a condo to fit your lifestyle. Low maintenance, no exterior work and often, these homes let you live in expensive areas for much less than a single family home. One of my favorites is The Spire in downtown Denver. The Spire covers all the lifestyle bases to validate a condo purchase.

If you love the home, plan to live there and enjoy the amenities, then great, it’s the home for you. If you think you have another reason, you should remember that they can become a real estate nightmare for many, many different reasons. Here’s one of them, financing.

Lately condo financing has become much more difficult. On a recent transaction for a new construction condo conversion down in Littleton, I ran across a couple financing issues that I now know to check out early in the buying/selling process to make sure the property is salable.

Legal Actions A legal action taken by(or against) the HOA may make financing the unit impossible leaving only cash/owner financing as an option. This is a very bad thing if you own one of those units or don’t have cash.

Investor concentration. To high and the investor concentration in the condominium complex may tank your deal! This often information comes over on the HOA certification letter that is usually required for conventional financing. While the ratio may change and loosen up a bit in the future for conventional financing it is still important to find out what this ratio is as soon as possible. Sometimes a simple phone call to the home owners association may be enough, other times, it’s a little more formal. Anything over 30% should be enough to bring it up with your mortgage broker. Sometimes for conventional financing, that in itself is a deal killer. FHA financing allows the investor concentration to be up to 50% but the buyer should know about the issue as it could impact the future resale if the situation doesn’t chance. If you feel this could be a a concern, be proactive so that there are no surprises later.

HOA Default Rate. This is another piece of info from the HOA. Greater than 15% could be mean trouble. The lender would be concerned that the default in the HOA payments may suggest future deficiency in the HOA accounts and perhaps deeper problems. If the lender would be worried, so should your buyer. At the least, he should be informed of the potential issue.

HOA Financial Reserves This should be greater than 10%.

Now there is a home purchasing program that will finance these properties. FNMA (Fannie Mae) sells some homes with HomePath financing. That means that they’ll finance the property. They usually don’t require the HOA certification. The downside is still this, if the buyer wants to sell later, FNMA won’t be there to offer financing.

There are many more reasons to be concerned about the financing for a condo, especially these days.
Check out RealEstateUndressed for another possible issue.

Filed Under: Buying a home, Denver Real Estate

How do you value your time?

February 23, 2011 by Spencer Barron

Do you value your time? Harlan Ellison, a Hollywood writer, had this incredibily irreverent rant that resonated with me. It resonates with me because people often ask me to give my work away for free.

Plumbers and electricians often get paid just to show up. Appraisers get paid to show up. Inspectors get paid when they show up. Real estate agents on the other hand, are often expected to give their opinions for free before they have even been hired. An experienced agents opinion could be worth thousands of dollars to the homeowner by the time the home sale reaches fruitition. So why do agents give away their best ‘stuff’ for free?

I can’t help but wonder if the National Association of REALTORS and large brokerages have effectively homogenized the value of agents. It’s in all of their marketing. Claims that working with a paticular brokerage or working with a REALTOR alone is what will guarantee great results. I wonder if people believe that.

I would recommend to any agent to reconsider how they go about their business. How they handle listing appointments and what advice they give potential buyers when discussing a paticular property, especially before getting something in writing.

Do you view yourself as a commodity? Are you really that easily replaced? If you have a unique knowledge and can offer advice that will help people make thousands more on their homes and save them countless headaches, shouldn’t you act like it? Do you communicate your value proposition effectively? Do you prove it in the service you offer?

It’s all about how you are going about your business each day. Chances are, if you don’t value your time, no one else will either.

Filed Under: commissions, Denver Real Estate, Denver Real Estate, Marketing

Does price per square foot matter?

February 4, 2011 by Spencer Barron

Only to the lender. I should qualify that a bit. In a true apples to apples neighborhood in the suberbs, the price per square foot (PSF) of the comparable sold homes matter. Especially to the lender who will be lending on it. They need metrics like this in order to explain to shareholders why they lent the money.

Builders use price per square foot for an area to help project their potential profits compared to their cost to build.

Investors can screen neighborhoods for homes that are significantly below the average price per square foot for the neighborhood.

For you and I. We need to be more specific. One way is a comparative market analysis or CMA.

There is one certainy though, to determine the value of a property, you can’t simply take the square footage and multiply it by the area’s PSF or even the comparable home’s PSF. It’s just not going to get you where you want to go.

As an example, I once met a man that built a massive addition on the back of his house. He added over 2000 square feet (SF) to his home. He then did the calculation; my home is 3400SF X $200 PSF = $680,000. Unfortunately, he simply added massive rooms without any appeal to them. He added only one jack and jill style bathroom for the 2000 SF he added. That was supposed to be a shared master bath. Needless to say, buyers didn’t see it and had a 100 other options for under $680,000 that were superior.

He ended up selling for $385,000 or $113 per SF. For him, using price per square foot to determine his value sent him down the wrong path by more than 40%.

Filed Under: Denver Real Estate, Marketing, value

Ten ways to use QR-Codes (bar codes) for your real estate business.

February 3, 2011 by Spencer Barron

QR-Codes, those cute little square bar codes, seem to be popping up everywhere. Businesses can use them to link real world places and objects to online content. You can communicate all sorts of information in the codes which allow for a wide variety of creative uses. I recently started putting together a plan to incorporate these into my business. Here’s my top ten ways to use QR-codes for real estate.

1. Put contact details in a code on the back of a business card. This will make it easy for people to add you to their phone contacts.
2. Put it in your craigslist ads. Techy and bored, your target audience might just use their phone. This is probably the best way an online to online link might be effective.
3. Place it in the last slide in a video upload, where a normal link wouldn’t work.
4. Have the code start a text message to you requesting more information about your service or a property.
5. Put QR-codes on your flyers that link to a specific landing page for that property for more info.
6. Link to a youtube video tour of the property…put it on your sign or box flyer.
6. Use a QR-code to drive traffic to a specific neighborhood IDX search on your website.
7. Yard signs to peek the interest of the tech savvy.
8. Create a “send this home to a friend” email straight from the yard sign.
9. For farming with postcards, link to a neighborhood report with specific sales information for your farm area.
10….umm… I ran out of ideas, feel free to put your number 10 in the comments.

Why should you do one of these? Because it’s cool, it’s free, it calls for immediate (easy) action from the client and it’s another way you can track your results.

Here’s a cool site to check out what QR-codes can do. —> QRStuff.com

Filed Under: Denver Real Estate, Featured, Marketing, Technology

Denver adopts a new Denver Zoning Code

January 7, 2011 by Spencer Barron

Denver just adopted a new zoning code. For next six months, both the old and new code will overlap so if you have something in the works, you should check to see if the changes affect your property. The new code brings together the ideas from Denver’s comprehensive plan, BluePrint Denver and feedback from neighborhood meetings. The code itself looks good. It can seem a little cumbersome but it’s actually pretty simple. Built around the concepts of zoning appropriate for the context of the neighborhood, the new code is much more concise than the previous code.
If you live in Denver and want to check out your new zoning, click here.
My two biggest concerns are that many properties have been down-zoned in a way that will decrease investor interest and second, there continues to be a buffering issue in some neighborhoods.
Down zoning is an issue for investors or homeowners that had plans in the next 5-10 years to sell or develop a lot that was/is a scrape candidate. The new zoning code turned many triplex lots into duplex lots and duplex lots into single family home lots. This makes sense in some areas. In others, not so much.
Just as a reminder, investors don’t scrape nice homes. They scrape small inefficient properties that they can pick up cheaply in order to build something that will make a profit. This down zoning was done mostly in ‘nice’ areas where some loud mouth residents were concerned about the redevelopment going on in their neighborhoods. Decreasing what a developer can build means they can’t make a profit.
Eventually this will reach an equilibrium. But there is an immediate effect on the current values of the land effect by the changes. Eventually though, the surrounding homes will simply become more expensive. Downside of that is that less people can live in nice homes in Denver thus contributing to sprawl.
Some residents were concerned that the character of some 1930′s neighborhood’s were being harmed. What a shame, in 30 more years will we be clamoring to save the 1950′s ranch neighborhoods from being scraped because the are a great examples of post war modernism? NO..of course not. So why would planning cave in to demands from a few home owners that want to save a few knock-off versions of craftsman homes, inefficient and drafty in order to make a few people happy.
I have also noticed that the way the Denver zoning code has been applied thus far has been in a blanket manner that doesn’t buffer single family residences from nearby businesses. This is especially surprising in looking at the zoning around planned transit oriented developments.
The streets one block in from major arterials share the same zoning as properties 5 or 6 blocks into the neighborhood. That makes sense in the suburbs but in a blocked city, it doesn’t.
Cities, much like ogres, are like onions, they need layers. Business/Industrial/Arterial Roads, followed by higher density residential, then single family residential. If you skip a layer, the properties caught in the middle will never achieve their highest and best use.
Developers don’t want to get tied up in the red tape of trying to get a property rezoned. They really shouldn’t have to if planning does their job. Hopefully, the current zoning map will continue to evolve to meet these need.

Filed Under: Denver Real Estate, Featured