The Scottsdale Real Estate Files: Arizona

Oh, but that little house was turned out the day it landed on the multiple listing service! The hardwood floors all scrubbed and polished. The smell of freshly cut lawn and bougainvillea greeting new arrivals as they stepped out of Mazda Miatas and Chevy Tahoes and Ford Fusions.  The windows so crystal clear that the rogue speck of dirt eventually capitulated and moseyed along to a less lonesome locale.  Everything was just so as you wooed prospective new owners.

You sold your home that very first weekend.  Enchanted the buyers through your concerted efforts to distinguish a well-loved home from the abandoned dreams that haunt the competing bank-owned and short sale properties, you did.  Bent on purchasing the best bargain on the block when their plane touched down at Sky Harbor, the nice relocating couple from South Dakota instead rationalized the higher price tag of your owner-occupied home against the great unknowns that plagued the lower cost, distressed property options.  After several celebratory glasses of wine, they mentally recast the entire episode with your home starring as the greatest value proposition on the market.

It is now day 14 of the escrow period.  The home inspection, a week in the rearview, couldn’t have gone any better.  You were never all that concerned about it.  You change the A/C filters regularly and have the units serviced semi-annually.  You resealed the foam roof with elastomeric last May.  You even placed a home warranty policy on the property prior to hitting the market to fend off any unexpected eventualities, you clever fella, you.  Now, having agreed to correct the double tab at the main breaker box (damn landscapers), replace the faulty GFCI outlet at the pool equipment and fix the malfunctioning shower diverter valve in the hall bathroom, you let out a well-deserved sigh of relief.  Knowing that you have an honest to goodness sale firmly in place, you turn your attention to other pressing matters that had been relegated to the back burner.

And the lawn grows a little taller as the mower doesn’t make it out of the shed this week.  The carpet in the hall gets a little matted down from the higher than normal traffic and a missed date with the vacuum cleaner.  Aside from little Johnny’s peanut butter fingerprints on the lower third of the living room picture window and the fogged up corner of the breakfast nook window by the doggy door, the glass is still pretty passable.  The contents of your cabinets and drawers are strewn about the den and family room, but you have to break a few eggs to make a moving omelet, right?  Besides, you already found your buyer.  No more agents calling to pop in for a showing with ten minutes notice.

Thus begins the great unraveling of your sale.  You see, in 2010, you do not just stage your home for potential buyers.  Matter of fact, buyers don’t even possess the most discerning eyes that will take in your abode during the sale process.  Nope, those hawkish peepers belong to a black-hatted professional who holds the fate of your transaction in his number-crunching hands.

Once you strike a deal, you better keep the joint gussied up for the appraisal, Jack.

Besieged by stringent regulations and menaced by fire-breathing underwriters, appraisers are no longer encouraged to hunt for validation of the accord reached on the open market by a willing buyer and seller.  That’s so 2006.  These days, the poor SOBs have more incentive to impugn a home’s value than defend it.  This is not a knock on their collective competence, but an indictment of the constraints by which appraisers are currently bound.  You counter this institutional bias with the same measures you employed to overcome the price objections of your buyer.

You have to resell the house.

Do not discount the human element in a supposedly objective endeavor.  Consider the properties that most Real Estate appraisers spelunk on a daily basis.  Bank repo after bank repo, the job should come with a snorkel and a mobile decontamination unit.  Given the wide disparity in property condition in the market, the silver lining to cloudy times is an ability to add value to your home though no greater expense than meticulous housekeeping.  It’s your agent’s job the sell the objective proof (most viable comparable sales, list of upgrades / features, comparisons between the subject property and comps, etc), and it’s your job to sell the mom, baseball and apple pie.

Clean and “not-jacked-up” is the new granite counter tops and travertine floors.

There may not be an input column in a uniform residential appraisal report for “not infested with hobos,” but latitude is given for affixing additional value based on conditional comparisons to the properties selected for the analysis.  The dialed-in condition of your home will stand out in full bas relief against the tired housing din.  It is especially critical if you don’t have all of the snazzy upgrades.  You are relying on the impression of value for lack of more readily quantifiable measures.

Don’t give in to inertia prior to what has become the penultimate part of the escrow process.  Treat the appraisal as a showing appointment instead of the contractual procedure that it is and you give yourself considerably better odds at a soft landing at the closing table with the same purchase price with which you began.

Scented candles, they aren’t just for buyers and third dates anymore.

Originally posted at the Scottsdale Property Shop

Just about anyone who has spent any time at all in Scottsdale is familiar with the planned community of McCormick Ranch.  A community which includes some 23,000+ residents, many are less familiar with the approximately 50 individual subdivisions that fall under its umbrella.  With radical differences in architecture, amenities, pricing, etc from one subdivision to the next, a prospective home buyer will need to drill down further than general awareness of the McCormick Ranch community at large to find the specific pocket that best suits his/her needs.  With this in mind, we launched our McCormick Ranch Subdivision Series.

Featuring individual spotlights for the various subdivisions that compose McCormick Ranch, you now have a one-stop resource shop for everything you want to know about Scottsdale's first master planned community.  Builder overviews, subdivision statistics, editorial opinion, neighborhood values, homes for sale, amenities, school info, new listing feeds, photos, maps, street views, floor plans ... this is as comprehensive as McCormick Ranch Real Estate gets.

This page serves as an overview to the subdivision spotlights.  Peruse the subdivision map of McCormick Ranch, or choose a subdivision link by name from the tables below.

For a detailed review of the community on a macro level, visit our McCormick Ranch in Scottsdale AZ page.

You can also skip directly to our McCormick Ranch Home Floor Plans page if you know the subdivision/builder you seek.

North McCormick Ranch (Chaparral High School District)

South McCormick Ranch (Saguaro High School District)

Ready to buy, sell or rent in McCormick Ranch?  Give Ray & Paul a call.  We're the agents that other agents Google for McCormick Ranch Real Estate information.

(480) 220-2337 | paul@scottsdalepropertyshop.com

[WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS NO GRAPHICS]

So you have 20% to put down for a single family home in Scottsdale AZ.  You have been gainfully employed in the same W2 position with the same company for years.  The American Express card with a $124 balance and the 2002 Honda Accord with the $112 monthy payment make up the sum total of your earthly debt.  Your FICO scores are higher than Willie Nelson on Bob Marley Day in Montego Bay.  Congratulations, you are one of the few buyers in today’s market in a position to call your own shots.

You are mired that age old Scottsdale Real Estate quandary:  You want a central location in an established community, but you don't want the older construction that typically attends such preferred locales.  

You love the walking paths, lakes, nearby shops, schools, mature landscaping with honest to goodness trees (In the desert?  Who knew?).  You could do without the brass fixtures and 4x4 inch porcelain tile that look like holdovers from the set of the Partridge Family, however.

At some point in every Scottsdale home buyer's journey, a choice must be made.  Will location and community amenities win out, or will the tug of newer construction pull the intrepid Real Estate explorer further off the beaten path (and into the desert reaches of the McDowell Mountain foothills north of the Loop 101 freeway corridor).  There is no right choice.  Both options boast strong resale potential (yes, I am aware of the irony that attends the notion of resale value in the modern foreclosure jungle) for the very criteria that make such a choice an excruciating one to make.

What if I were to tell you that you didn't have to compromise, however?  Amongst the renowned planned communities that lie within the bounds of central Scottsdale, there are a few pocket niches of infill and newer semi-custom homes that defy neighborhood norms.  

For example, the McCormick Ranch subdivision of Estate Los Arboles (in the Paseo Village area of Southern McCormick Ranch) includes a handful of semi-custom Hancock homes that were built in the 1990s to round out a neighborhood that was originally developed between 1979-1980.  Such homes do not come on the market often, but are one mere example of newer construction that you can find in the planned community stalwart.

Read more about Estate Los Arboles in McCormick Ranch>>>

Or explore the McCormick Ranch overview for information on neighboring subdivisions, floor plans, homes currently for sale (or rent) and more.