Erin Attardi's Blog

I will be working all weekend, however there is a lot going on...being a native Sacramentan, I have been to the County Fair and the Jazz Jubilee. Both are great events, and it appears that the weather will be cooler than the typical 100 degrees that we are used to for these events...

Sacramento County Fair runs from May 22 - May 26 and is at Cal Expo. There are rides, exhibits, concerts, games, etc. Admittance is actually free, but parking is $8.

Sacramento Jazz Jubilee runs from May 23 - May 26 and is in mainly in Old Sacramento, but there are also performances at other locations like Raley Field (Rivercats Stadium), the Crest Theatre, various downtown Sacramento locations, etc. Ticket prices vary from $10 - $100 depending on how old you are and how many days you want to attend.

Also, if you have been listening to my radio show, you will have already heard about the Memorial Day tribute at Mount Vernon Memorial Park in Citrus Heights. Starting at 11am on the 26th, there will be a celebration to honor veterans with live music, jet flyover, giant flag parachute jump, etc. For more information, call 916-929-1251.

The Sacramento Bee published an article yesterday about the increase in the volume of closed real estate transactions...finally! As I have been saying for about the last two months now, there are several micro-markets in Sacramento that are really hot in certain price ranges. I am working with several buyers right now that have been in multiple offer situations...some of them got the property in the end thanks to some create manuevering on my part...and some of them have submitted 6+ offers, all coming up short. It is the wild west right now!

As I mentioned on my radio show on Monday night, the Sacramento County Tax Assessor is lowering the assessed values of 85,000 homes in Sacramento County via Proposition 8. To read the press release, click here.

Residents should start receing notificiations very soon that their 2008-2009 (issued in October) tax bills will reflect anywhere from a 10-30% reduction.  Homes that are assessed via Proposition 13 provisions will not be receiving a reduction.

Not sure if any of ya'll have ever visited a national real estate website called Trulia, but is has some neat research tools...most notably they have a consumer Q&A forum called Trulia Voices. It is a great Q&A forum with about 30,000 members that just celebrated its first year "anniversary." I have been participating in the Q&A (mainly the A) part of the website for almost the entire year, and recently I was named one of about 30 Trulia MVP's for my contributions to their forum. You can view my Trulia Profile here. Pretty cool!

I attended the Sacramento Association of Realtors monthly main meeting this morning. The speaker was the California Association of Realtors Deputy Chief Economist, Robert Kleinhenz. Interesting insights. I wish I could have taped his presentation because he cited so many statistics and graphs. Couple interesting things... The Sacramento market specifically, has one of the highest affordability rates in the entire state - at about 53% (CA rate is 33%, and US rate is 65%). He makes the claim that the majority of the problem our market is suffering from the tightening of lending standards, which limits buyers' ability to purchase, especially for higher priced homes (jumbo lending over $417k). Basically his prediction is that the peak of the foreclosures will occur through the end of this year, and then start to decrease...once the REO inventory starts declining, the market in general will start to get back to a place where there is buyer / seller equilibrium.