Sometimes public property records are wrong or have missing information.  How do you go about correcting these kinds of issues?

In Santa Clara County (San Jose, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Campbell etc.), you must go through the county tax assessor’s office to address these errors. Here’s what you need to do:

1. First, find your APN or assessor’s parcel number and keep it handy, as you will need it (also paper & pen).  You will find it on your property tax bill.  You can also find your APN online via the Santa Clara County website.
2. Phone the Real Property & Appraiser Department (408) 299-5300.  Someone there will ask you for your APN so that the correct appraiser can be contacted – I was surprised to learn that there are several dozen appraisers on staff!
3. From there, you’ll need to talk with your assigned appraiser and see what needs to be done.  He or she may need some documentation, may ask you some questions – just call and find out.

Why are the public records on real property sometimes wrong?

(more…)

How’s the inventory?  This is key to both home buyers and sellers in Santa Clara County. Too little inventory of homes for sale pushes prices up, too much housing inventory pushes them down.  Today we’ll have a look at the county level for the general Silicon Valley trends.  Please understand that smaller areas (zip codes or even subdivisions) can be vastly different from the larger trends.

Our MLS no longer provides much historical data – it only goes back a couple or three years.  My I have a subscription to the Real Estate Report, which stretches back a decade.  The most current report covers January 2011 (February’s numbers will be there by the 10th of March) so I pulled these numbers plus those of the same month for prior years.

So what is really a “normal” level of inventory for Santa Clara County houses & duet homes on the market?  I would say that anything in the 2000 to 3000 range is fairly normal.  More than that is overheated, less than that is constricted.  (In the early 90s it was many thousands of homes – if I recall correctly, it was over 8,000.)

Right now is not an extreme market in terms of the availability of homes to purchase in the South Bay.  It feels tough because lending standards are stricter, as are appraisals, and because we are all jittery from the market crash and touch-and-go recovery. Sellers feel beat up over pricing and the new “requirement” that homes need to be about perfect to sell (or have the price slashed to an extreme, as they see it).

But the numbers are really not so bad, when you view them statistically.  The inventory is a little low, but still within fairly normal ranges, historically.

The Williamson Act, also known as the California Land Conservation Act, was passed by our California Legislature in 1965 in order to encourage rural & agricultural lands to remain undeveloped longer. When land owners enter into a contract under the act, they benefit from lower property taxes, which are based on the property’s current use, rather than paying market value based tax rates.  In exchange, the property is to remain undeveloped and continue to function the same way for the duration of that contract.  The contracts run for 10 years and are automatically renewed unless the farmer or rancher cancels it.

Why does the Williamson Act matter?

According to the Committee for Green Foothills, there are 362,000 acres of land in Santa Clara County under the Williamson Act (that article appears to have been written in 2003, so the numbers may have changed a little since then).  Much of it is in the east foothills of east San Jose and the south county areas near Morgan Hill and Gilroy, but there are patches of it in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Cupertino, Almaden Valley, Blossom Valley and throughout Silicon Valley. The tax breaks make it possible for many farmers and ranchers to stay in business and not feel forced to sell their land for development.  If they were paying “market rate” taxes, it would not be long before most or all of our rural and agricultural uses gave way to housing and other development.

(more…)

The schedule for when property taxes are due in Santa Clara County is not intuitive and confuses most people, at least initially.  The tax calendar is as follows:

• Beginning of fiscal year: July 1st
• First installment of taxes due covers July 1 – December 31st
• Second installment of taxes due covers Jan 1 – June 30

Although you might expect the two bills to be due & payable 6 months apart, that’s not how it works!

Installment # 1 is due November 1 and is delinquent December 10th

Installment # 2 is due February 1 and is delinquent April 10th

Please note that the April deadline is very, very close to that for personal income taxes (April 15) and many homeowners accidentally send in their property taxes on the latter day.  This results in a costly penalty, so don’t be confused!!    (Also, do not count on mailing your payments by 11:59pm on the deadlines either – the tax assessor’s office does not work like the IRS! Payments are due by 5pm that day!)  Make sure you don’t cut it too close or you’ll find yourself paying 10% plus $20 more than necessary.

It is possible to pay your property taxes online, but the cost is significantly more than a postage stamp, so I don’t recommend it unless you are out of the area and cannot make your payment the normal way. (It’s 2.5% via credit card and $15 per electronic check.)

How are the sales of condos and townhouses in the San Jose, Santa Clara County or Silicon Valley area? Just as with houses, the market is getting more active… things are picking up.  The trend is for increasing sales – pending condo sales in Santa Clara County are rising each week.

Nov 1 – Nov 7 = 116 newly sold (sale pending) condominiums and townhouses
Nov 8 – Nov 14 = 123
Nov 15 – Nov 21 = 129

Year over year, it’s up dramatically too.  Nov 1 – 22 2009 = 234 newly pending sales and Nov 1 – 22, 2010 = 366 newly pending sales (that’s a 64% increase).  That is a very huge increase!

Looking at closed sales and comparing it to two or three weeks ago, we see improvement.  Here’s a graph showing the months of inventory for condominiums and townhouses in Santa Clara County, San Jose, Sunnyvale and Los Gatos (as samples). Below please find the months of inventory for all sale types (REOs, short sales and regular sales) and just short sales.  Countywide and in most places, it remains much harder to sell a “short sale listing” than a regular one.

(more…)

Last month we heard that residential real estate sales were off about 25% nationwide year over year (closed sales) and it was just as bad for home sales in San Jose (statistics show that sales were off 34.8% for closed sales of houses but up 5% for pending sales) and in Silicon Valley generally (closed house sales in Santa Clara County down 28.5% and pending sales up 5.3%).  Pending sales were up around 10% month over month.

Houses in Silicon Valley are Selling Faster and Faster

Pending house sales are on the rise and it’s  now dramatic.  At first I thought it was just me: in the last 30 days, I’ve put five sales together of houses and townhouses (one in Livermore, one in Foster City, one in Campbell and two in San Jose – both in the Almaden Winery neighborhood on the Cambrian/Almaden border).   But it’s not just this faithful blogger who’s seeing a surge in selling activity and accepted offers.  These are clearly trends in the local south bay market.

I just spent a little time on MLSListings.com and checked the numbers of newly pending sales in the city of San Jose:

• Nov 1 to Nov 7, 2010:  159 new pending sales in San Jose
• Nov 8 to Nov 14, 2010: 163 new pending sales in San Jose
• Nov 15 to Nov 21, 2010: 198 new under contract or pending sales in San Jose

If I check sales from 11-1-2010 through 11-22-2010 there were 566 this year but just 386 for the same period last year in San Jose.

Ditto that for all of Santa Clara County: from Nov 1 – 22, 2009 there were 666 pending sales but Nov 1 – 22, 2010 it was 954!  (more…)

People often ask me, “how’s the market?”  The answer is, it depends.  It depends on whether it’s a short sale, REO or regular sale, the schools, view, condition, etc. The Silicon Valley real estate market really isn’t “one market“. It’s a bunch of smaller markets woven together. So the answer depends on what you’re looking at.

Today we’ll focus on the sale type and take a broad view of regular sales vs short sales with Silicon Valley houses/duet homes and condos/townhouses.  The data comes from MLSListings.com, our local multiple listing service, of which I am a member.  I crunched the numbers today. I have made every effort to provide accurate info, but can’t guarantee it.

To arrive at the months of inventory, I get the number of active listings (not pending, but available, or “status 1″ for my local Realtor readers) and the number of closed listings for the same area/home type which have closed in the last month.  Divide the first number by the second and you get months of inventory or MOI.  Below please find the numbers for Santa Clara County as a whole, San Jose as a whole, and various cities or areas of San Jose.

(more…)