Late to the Party: Category Rochester

Note to Subaru Marketing: Part Two

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:33:00 +0000

Dear Subaru Marketing:

Hello again! It's been two weeks since we last spoke, and I miss you already. As I mentioned then, I appreciate your efforts to market your vehicles in my area and your attempts at regional advertisements. Since that time you've introduced a new ad referring to I-95. While I'm no expert on geography, I'm quite sure that I-95 runs by New York City and just barely touches a corner of our state - the opposite corner from where you are advertising. Here, I've provided a helpful illustration:

I-95 is the red winding line. Rochester is located at the tip of the arrow.

Perhaps you are trying to save money by referring to a 1,927 mile long interstate highway that spans the entire east coast and running the ad in all those markets as "local". While this is ingenius, to reach Western New York you would likely want to reference I-90, or as we New Yorkers call it, the Thruway. It has the added bonus of stretching the entire continental US's northern states.

But those are really just semantics, after all you've discovered a way to make "regional" ads that span a huge swath of the country. Maybe you can subdivide the audience into similar niches beyond region by referencing very specific interests. Targetting such a niche would make the listener feel unique and passionate about your product. I suggest using in-jokes about Seinfeld, or maybe sharply dividing the audience and creating passionate responses by professing a love of puppies and babies.

Sincerely,
A member of your target audience

Note to Subaru Marketing

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:42:00 +0000

Dear Subaru Marketing:

I appreciate your efforts to market your vehicles in my area; and I also appreciate your effort in creating regional specific advertisements - it lends a nice local feel to them. Bravo! However, you may want to actually make sure that the region you're airing the commercials within actually makes sense.

There are other cities in New York state besides New York city. Upstate / Western New York is not referred to as the tri-state area. So, your slogan to tell use that we "try everything" and maybe that's why we're the "try-state" area is cute as buttons and puppy dogs - and horribly wrong. The area you're referring to is a 400 mile, 7-hour drive across nowheresville from us. Perhaps you could create one specific for our area: Since we are "Western" New York you may want to mention cowboys and indians. Or perhaps use the title "Finger Lakes region" and talk about rude gestures.

Sincerely,
A member of your target audience

More Real Estate Predictions

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:35:00 +0000

Time for yet more of my completely biased and unresearched opinions on real estate...

The general consensus is that the housing hot streak has ended. I would agree with that sentiment. But as I was alluding to in my earlier real estate predictions, the mainstream media has a myopic view of the market and define it by the hot markets - Vegas, Florida, California. These markets may indeed see a significant slowdown in sales, a rising inventory and likely even depreciation in prices. But the majority of the country will weather this slowing period by sustaining current price levels. Housing has been historically resiliant to downward movements in price, and will continue to do so.

Secondary and tertiary markets will continue to have great undervalued investment properties. Being a landlord isn't for everyone, obviously, but with mortgage rates rising and currently high prices which are unlikely to drop, it's expected that rents will inch higher in the mid-term future. In many of these smaller markets it's easy to find rental properties will will easily generate profit with current rent levels, house prices and tax rates - with a lower barrier to entry due to stagnant/undervalued prices.

Update: Here's to some great timing - The local Rochester newspaper has two articles today which fit nicely with the above: Area homes undervalued and Landlords' costs force likely uptick in rents. (Though I would argue that rents will rise because of more forces than costs, the rising rates will help keep renters from buying their first homes, causing higher demand in the rental market).

[For newer predictions check out Real estate predictions for 1Q 2007. To see my back history, check out Real Estate predictions.]

Google Summer of Code

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 26 May 2006 13:03:00 +0000

Google has again decided to run it's Summer of Code - funding students to work on open source projects. Unfortunately, last year Ruby wasn't able to get in by the deadline, but this year David Black made sure Ruby Central was a participating organization. We had 14 mentors signup and (last count I saw) 84 student proposals.

The proposal review period is over and project allocations have been announced. Ruby Central received funding for 10 proposals, and the successful projects have been announced.

Among those accepted projects is work by Jason Morrison on RDT! He's a student at RIT (my alma mater) who helped start up our local Ruby/Rails group. I'll be his mentor, and he'll be working on trying to improve RDT to do some code resolution and type inferrence in an effort to improve code completion and other features (such as marking occurences of variables) for our project. Hopefully he'll also be releasing some sort of white paper/documentation to benefit the greater Ruby community beyond RDT/JRuby.

Thansk to Jason for the great proposal, and expect to see some more news about his work here in the future.

Local Real Estate Sales Continue to Impress

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 11:46:00 +0000

Yet another impressive report on Rochester area home sales. The article notes striong sales in Monroe County and the city of Rochester. I still firmly believe that the city will continue to pick up in prices and demand this year. As I've stated before, the housing prices in Rochester have been depressed for at least a decade, so the price increases are a natural adjustment. As a city resident, I also strngly believe some of this can be attributed to the new administration. There's been a palpable feeling of excitement and enthusiasm for the region - and people are starting to back that up with their dollars, not just their words. (For example, the closed Genesee Hospital was recently purchased and plans are to demolish and construct apartments, condos and commercial property in the city. The developers stated they wouldn't have considered the purchase unless they believed the city was undergoing a renaissance).

Rochester Real Estate

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 22:19:00 +0000

As a nice follow-up to an earlier article I wrote on the myopic reports of housing bubble bursts approaching, the local Rochester regional paper is reporting strong housing sales in the city of Rochester - even trending against slowing sales in the 11-county region of Western New York. Sales are up 9% over last year's record pace.

Keep in mind, this is an increase over the already high sales numbers from last year. It appears that my predictions were right (and the predictions that actually focused on most of America for CNN). In fact, Rochester is exceeding those numbers so far.

It's not particularly surpising given that interest rates continue to be historically low. The local economy appears to be on the uptrend, so sales should continue to be pretty hot. Suburban sales are slumping a little from last year - mainly because suburban homes are - and have been - priced reasonably well, not significantly undervalued.

The city is still priced quite well below national averages and under their true natural values. Crime and a stagnant economy held prices down in the bargain basement level for much of the city. Given the recent change in city administration, tehre's a palpable feeling of optimism for the city. The sales seem to be a good indicator that the optimism isn't shallow but is being backed up by actual investment by residents. I can only see high sales continuing for the short term - perhaps not at the current record pace, but certainly above the regional and historical rate. The only complications I see are:

The increasing number of upscale luxury apartments - Corn Hill Landing, The Temple Building, and the East Ave apartment complexes. There's been a marked increase of upscale apartments in the city and even closer to downtown. Apparently there's been a pent-up demand though because these complexes are doing a good job of getting tenants. This is something that's been a bit baffling to me - Rochester has a dead downtown and a very hard time retaining 18-30 yr olds. So who is moving into these complexes?
The increase of housing supply. The report didn't break down listings by city/region, but supply seems to be overtaking demand. Interestingly, the median and average home price continue trending up.

I think both fore-tell that sooner or later the simple laws of supply and demand will kick in and housing prices will stand still again. But I'd say that the city will outsell and outpace the region and the house prices we see today are still below true market value. If crime takes a significant drop or the economy really takes off locally, we'll see prices rise regardless of regional supply issues.

Real Estate predictions

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:18:00 +0000

CNN's Money/Business section has been running articles on the "real estate bubble" for quite some time now. Essentially they've been playing up the idea that the housing markets are about to burst and we'll see a long-term slowdown and even deflation in home prices. Here's the problem - their predictions really only apply to the hot, big markets - in California and Florida primarily. It'd be nice if they sprinkled in some optimism about the rest of the country amongst their predictions of housing Armageddon for Las Vegas and L.A. For those of you, who like me reside in Western New York there's a happy report from them in their latest gloomy chart. They expect markets like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo to continue the mild appreciation in home prices around the neighborhood of 6% (which is actually competitive with the current YTD returns of the S&P 500). Of course, if you ever compared our housing market to the true bubble areas like say - Stamford, CT - you already knew that. Our housing market has been relatively undervalued even in the majority of the most sought after areas - You can still find investment properties where the mortgage payments and rental income plus expenses compare nicely. The difference is that we're finally approaching the true house values here - whereas in the past the market tended to be very much undervalued (due to the local economy and crime rate which are finally trending positively again).

[If you're interested in more real estate related news, opinions and predications, please check out: Local Real Estate Sales Continue to Impress, Rochester Real Estate, More Real Estate Predictions, and Real Estate Predictions for 1Q 2007]

First Rochester Rails / Ruby Group Meeting

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 17:25:23 +0000

This past Thursday saw the very first meeting for the Rochester Ruby and Rails group. We met at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT, and had a significant RIT student and alumni contingent. As far as logistics go, it looks like we'll be meeting there regularly on the first and third Thursdays of each month starting up January 19th.

The group seems to be more dominated by those interested in Rails, but I'm hoping as we go along they'll want to learn more about the underlying langauge - after all, to get some of the significant gains in productivity they'll have to exploit language features like blocks and meta-programming. Happily, the format we decided on devotes time to two interactive discussion/presentations per meeting - one Ruby-language focused and the other Rails focused. It was a bit of a strange night - the Rochester area had a nice coating of slick ice (though I won't call it an "ice storm" because of the true Ice Storm when I was a kid. We lost power for two weeks!) - and almost no one brought their laptops. I suppose we all figured it was just our first meeting so it would be a meet and greet.

I'm also proud to say that the Rochester Ruby and Rails group has the entire RadRails development team as members as well as myself from the RDT developers. So we have a nice showing of ruby related eclipse experts ;)

Rochester unveils latest crime-fighting campaign

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 17:52:00 +0000

Rochester has been fighting a recent crime wave with 47 homicides to date, and recent homicides of teenagers. The mayor has promised to unveil a new list of proposals to curb crime, and notable local figures such as the current chief of police and mayoral candidates have begun urging families to take responsibility for their teenagers. Today, the city has unveiled its latest tactic in fighting crime: The Jesus tree.

Buying a Home

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:26:00 +0000

My fiancee and I have (almost) finished the process of buying our first home. I found the process to be long, frustrating and at times emotionally difficult. This article is meant to show what we went through, lessons learned, and hopefully steer others away from some of the troubles we had.

The most important step: Finding a Good Agent

The most important part of the house-buying process is finding the right buyer's agent. A good agent will help you in a number of ways:

Keeping you up to date with property listings matching your criteria (often before the listinsg are available to the general public online).
Keeping your spirits up during the house walkthroughs (more on this below)
Gently dissuading you from buying a sub-par property
Knowing the ins and outs of negotiating with the seller's agent
Knowing the neighborhoods with regards to crime and whether the trend is good or bad
Being able to give a good rough estimate as to a house's true worth
Generally looking out for your interests
Coordinating the sale with the bank, your attorney, and the seller's agent

We met our agent during an open house in the city. He sensed that we were just beginning and didn't have a lot of experience yet and that we weren't quite sure what we wanted. He offered to show us properties and keep us up to date, but we declined and we went our separate ways. After trying it ourselves for a while we quickly came to the conclusion that we should give him a shot. It was the best move we made.

For those of you local to Rochester, we used Mark Siwiec. We were wary of agents, because a truly bad one can just chase the dollars and not work too hard at negotiating the sale price - after all, the agent makes a percentage of the sale. Mark is not just a good agent, he is great. He's polite, patient, helpful, intelligent and when need be: very aggressive. He always had our best interests in mind, and I reccomend him to buyer's and seller's alike without apprehension.

Bad Agents Abound

In the short time that we tried it alone, we continued to attend open houses and call the listing agents for properties that we wanted to see. We quickly learned an important lesson here: half of all the listing agents won't even return your phone calls. I still can't get over this. The agent's job is to sell the house and they will not even return your call.

We took about 4 months to find a house we wanted to buy. During that time and during negotations we found a number of bad agents. We met agents who would show up late, agents who never showed up. Agents who exclusively dealt with properties in such poor condition and disrepair that they should be condemned. For the first house we bid on, the agent intentionally took 2 days longer than the due date in the offer. Why is this bad? He was fishing for another bid so that we'd have to compete and drive up the price.

On the house we just closed on, the agent convinced the seller to replace the faulty furnaces with another set of used furnaces, because our contigency said to replace them, but did not say the word new explicitly. (Read more on our ordeal below.) The agent also lied to us a number of times in person.

My aunt's agent had the gall to ask her to give a private loan to the buyers of her house for the downpayment, despite knowing that she was in need of the money, and that no bank would lend them money.

Needless to say, the real estate industry is filled with very bad agents - from incompetent to unethical. Take your time and ask around to find a good agent for yourself.

Finding a house

What is your idea of a dream home?

The first thing you need to do when buying a house is to start narrowing down the characteristics of your dream home. Since we're young and can afford to, my fiancee and I decided to try to buy a rental property and become owner-occupants. This helped us narrow down the number of houses significantly - only multi-family, and only in a particular section of the city. We needed to have city property if we wanted to be able to get renters, and we knew enough about the city to know which neighborhoods we'd feel safe in and be able to find renters.

Aim high and go down from there. Be as specific as possible. How many square feet? What suburb/neighborhood? How many bedrooms and bathrooms? Do you like old house charm, or newer houses? Fireplaces? Garages?
And remember, there are plenty of houses, don't settle for one you are not in love with. You will eventually find it. Chances are you may find many dream houses.

Price

Price also played a large role. We initially started out looking for houses much cheaper than we ended up going after. This was a big mistake and large waste of time. The market will divide itself into various price points naturally. Talk with your mortgage broker and real estate agent extensively about your finances. I am on the cheap side, so I naturally wanted a cheaper house. You get what you pay for. If you're wary of buying a house and are frugal like me, consider just how much house you can really afford. If you really can afford a $200k house, then look in that price range, not $150k. In Rochester, there is a significant and natural price boundary around $200k. We spent months looking at houses in the $150-180k range. After moving to the $200k+ range - the quality of house, size, quality of neighborhood, and parking options were significantly different.

Obviously if you are the type who tends to have troubles with debt, or tends to overspend fight that urge as well.

What Can go Wrong

So you found a good agent, you've got a property you love and it's in your price range. What could go wrong? A lot.

Always make any offer on a house contingent on at least three things: your lawyer's approval, a walkthrough 24-48 hours before closing, and upon an engineer's inspection. I'll offer up some examples of why we need these things, directly from my experience.

Our mortgage broker told me that she forgot to schedule her walkthrough as a contingency. The lovely oak doors she saw? They were smashed in by the ex-husband (whose house was being sold after the divorce). She had no recourse.

Another aunt of mine recently purchased a house. The owner had actually removed all the nice trim and doors before the house was shown, only to sell it in a garage sale after accepting a bid!

Personal Experience

We found our house, negotiated a price and had it contingent on the three items above. We had a home inspection, chimney inspection and furnace inspection. The property was listed in "perfect condition." Our inspections turned up two furnaces with heat exchangers that wer cracked, two faulty electrical panels, and a need for a new roof - a tear-off. We negotiated for the seller to replace the furnaces and electrical panels. Unfortunately between that time and teh final walkthrough the seller's agent had manged to talk his client into going the cheap, less ethical route and replace the furnaces with another set of used furnaces.

The important thing was not to panic. We still wanted the house, but we had to fight very, very hard to get the seller and his agent to do the right thing. They eventually conceded to a new inspection of the replacement furnaces. They actually wouldn't even work and were rusty and missing parts. The seller's finally conceded us new furnaces with warranties.

What Not to Do

Don't panic over anything. It can ruin your working relationship with the agents or attorneys. It may seem like a very big deal now, but you need to stay calm.
If something looks bad, question it. Don;t cave in to aggressive or underhanded sellers. Make them fulfill their contractual obligations.
Don't get upset if the seller doesn't budge on the price, or a competing bid wins. Yes, it was your dream house. But there's plenty of houses out there and lots of time. A house will likely be the largest purchase of your life. Don't rush into it.