All Forum Posts by: James H.

Thanks, Jeff.  I think you're right.  We changed the pictures last night on Zillow.  This morning, the new pictures and the old ones were on HotPads.  Fortunately, the old ones were pretty good.  :-)

I posted a rental property on Zillow last Thursday.  The pictures showed up fine on Zillow and Trulia.  But, they do not show up at all on Hotpads.

I updated the text of the listing this evening and it immediately showed up on all three sites.  However, Hotpads is still not showing the pictures.

Ideas?  

What other sites should I post on?  I tried posting on Craigslist.  Supposedly, the post is active and I have a link to it.  But, I do not see it in the listing of properties for its zip code nor on the map where I put it.

Jim

I can answer general questions about Plano - although I am more familiar with specifics just South of Plano in Far North Dallas.

The market is red hot in Plano.  18 months ago, you could get fixer-uppers for in the high 100's.  Now, there is nothing under 200.  And almost everything under 300 goes under contract within a couple of days.

The growing part of Plano is the Northwest part.  There is an area there called Legacy where Liberty Mutual, Chase, etc., are building large new buildings and creating thousands of jobs.

Personally, I like The Colony and Frisco - if its in our price range.  

Send me a message offline and I can put you in touch with a Realtor who has helped us tremendously. I believe she specializes in Frisco and Plano.  

Hi Chris,

Thank you for responding.  We are actually working with a Realtor, the same one we bought our home from, in order to purchase investment properties.  She did a broker analysis of our home about a month ago.  She used every home in the subdivision that sold on-market in the last year to do an analysis.  There were only 6 or 8 of them out of around 500 homes.  (We also know of 3 off-market sales.  Obviously, there could have been more.)  She essentially averaged the final sale prices per square foot to arrive at a year over year gain of about 6%.  The homes in the neighborhood are all similar.  The appraiser, on the other hand, used the lowest of the on-market sales in his analysis.  

In addition, all of the homes sold in well under 30 days with the exception of ONE home that is currently on the market.  It is the only home, out of the ~500 homes, that is currently on the market.  It has been on the market for about 60 days now.  The likely reason is because of a weird floorplan whereby you have to walk through some bedrooms to access other bedrooms...  The price has been reduced twice now.  I assume this is why he is comfortable arguing that the market is declining.

The Dallas market in general is at record highs and the majority of homes in the $300's and $400's in Far North Dallas and Plano are on the market for less than  30 days.  Just look at Realtor.com for Plano.  There are 837 properties on the market in Plano now.  293 of those are marked as "Pending".

The market is hot.  I am almost wondering if this was purposely a lowball appraisal...

J 

We bought our home a year ago in Far North Dallas with cash.  In our neighborhood (+/- a mile), I have not seen a single home sit on the market for more than a month since we have been here.  Prices have certainly increased too.

We just applied for a home equity loan.  The appraisal came back stating that the expected time from market to sell in this area of Dallas is 3 to 6 months and that values are declining.  A quick check of Realtor.com or Zillow shows that this cannot be true.

The value came back at 2% more than we purchased the home for a year ago and 10% under the Zillow estimate.

What could be going on here?