Located on a beautiful street in west Los Gatos, 247 Prince Street is a tastefully remodeled home which is sure to please, inside and out.  The front and back yards have been landscaped like something out of a designer magazine!  Inside will not disappoint!  With remodeled kitchen and baths, dual pane windows and plantation shutters, fans, hardwood floors, air conditioning and so much more, this is not just a house but a very comfortable home.

I invite you to have a look at the slideshow introduction, below.  If you are interested, read more with the MLS information on this lovely home posted below it. (The MLS information will be removed once the house is under contract with no contingencies.)   Silicon Valley home buyers, call your Realtor to set up a private showing! (No open houses planned.) Pre-approved buyers only, please.

247 Prince Street, Los Gatos, CA

For more information, please continue reading the MLS information, below!

247 Prince St, Los Gatos, CA 95032 (MLS # 81219289)

(all data current as of 5/24/2012)

Price	$935,000
Beds	3
Baths	2 full
Home size	1,456 sq ft
Lot Size	8,316 sq ft

Fabulously remodeled home & yard on beautiful street! Kitchen with maple & granite, Viking range & oven, GE Profile fridge. Entire house features dual pane windows, plantation shutters & hardwood floors (except baths).Central A/C. Gorgeous baths! Yard are extensively remodeled & upgraded with incredible hardscape: fire pit, built in seating, water fountain, more. Beautiful driveway & landscaping!

Property Type(s): Residential, Detached Single Family

Last Updated	5/22/2012	Tract	n/a
Year Built	1961	Community	Los Gatos/Monte Sereno
Garage Spaces	n/a	County	n/a
Total Parking	n/a	Walk Score ®	42

Additional Details

Baths Half	0	Zoning	R18
Baths Full	2

Features

Additional Info	Not Applicable
Amenities	220 Volts in Laundry Area, Cable TV Available, Ceiling Fan(s), Gas Hookup in Kitchen, Gas Water Heater
Bedroom Description	1 Master Bedroom Suite
Cooling	Central Air Conditioning
Exterior Features	Brick Exterior, Stucco Exterior, Wood Exterior
Family Room	Dining Area in Family Room, Separate Family Room
Fire Place_Details	Wood Burning Fireplace
Fireplace Location	Fireplace in Living Room
Floor Covering	Hardwood, Tile
Formal Dining Room	No Formal Dining Area
Foundation	Concrete Perimeter
Garage Parking	2 Car Garage, Attached
Has Fireplaces	Fireplace
Has Pool	No Pool
Heating	Central Forced Air Heat
Horse Property	No
In Formal Dining Room	Breakfast Nook
Levels	1 Story
Listing Status	Active
Listing Status_Code	Active
Listing Type	Exclusive Right to Sell(ER)
Lot Description	Lot Sloped Up from Street
Lot Size Range	000+ Sq Ft to .25 Acre, Lot: 8
Other Areas	Laundry Area - Garage
Property Style	Ranch
Property Type	Detached Single Family
Property_Hot Tub	Spa or Hot Tub
Property_Inclusions	1 Dishwasher, 1 Refrigerator, Built-In Oven/Range Combo, Window Coverings
Roof	Shake Roof
Sewer Septic	Sewer in & Connected
Shower	1 Stall Shower
Shower Tub	1 Shower over Tub
Tub	1 Tub
View	Neighborhood View
Warranty Info	Home Warranty Provided by Seller
Water	City/Public Water
Yard Grounds	Automatic Sprinkler(s), Fenced Yard, Patio, Patio or Deck Covered, Sprinklers - Front, Sprinklers - Rear

Location

Listing information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Read full disclaimer.

Listing provided by Mary Pope-Handy, Sereno Group

(view all details for MLS #81219289)

How is the Monte Sereno real estate market? Because the city is small, with just about 4000 residents, there usually are few homes listed for sale or selling, and with small numbers we can get seeming volatility.  Here are the quick statistics for the closed sales in the last 4-7 weeks to give a sense of how things are going. Sales data for April comes from my Monte Sereno Real Estate Report  and data for the last 30 days comes from me via the MLS (I crunched them this morning).

Median sales price of houses sold in Monte Sereno in April was $1,415,000.  For the last 30 days, it was $2,169,857.

Average Days on Market of houses sold in April was 97.  But for the last 30 days, it’s 78.

The sales price to list price ratio in April was 95%.  The last 30 days it’s up to 97%.

The market is better all around for home sales in Monte Sereno than it was just a couple of months ago. Next, let’s look at the live charts from Altos to see how active listings reflect the market as seen from viewing the solds.

Live Altos Charts for the Monte Sereno Real Estate Market

The median list price of all homes listed on the MLS in Monte Sereno and in San Jose – an interesting comparison!  San Jose has far fewer dips and jumps than Monte Sereno….Good improvement showing recently, though.

(more…)

Please stop by a Sereno Group office in Los Gatos, Los Altos or Santa Cruz to take part in a FREE e-waste, e-recycling
collection event on   Sunday April 22    9:30AM- 3:30- PM.

Metech Recycling has an incredible 95% success rate with getting these items securely recycled for manufacture!

Items accepted:
Monitors/TVs
Computers/Laptops
Cell phones/Telecom Equipment
Wire/Cable/PC Boards/Scrap Metal
Video tapes
Mice/Keyboards
Printers/Fax/Copy Machines
Stereo Equipment, Speakers
DVD/CD/MP3 Players
Microwave Ovens

Please, No Household Appliances:
Vacuum Cleaners, Toasters, Ovens, Etc.
Also no lights of any kind, no batteries

Where to go to drop off the approved items?

Los Gatos/Saratoga
214 Los Gatos-Saratoga Rd.
Los Gatos 408-335-1400

Los Altos/Palo Alto
369 S. San Antonio Rd.
Los Altos 650-947-2900

Santa Cruz
2407 Porter St. #150
Soquel 831-460-1100

Service Provided by
GreenMouse, Inc. a CA State Approved Col lector , CEW ID# 103153
442 Reynolds Ci rcle, San Jose, CA 95112
(408) 464-9999
www.greenmouse.com

How common are “all cash” transactions for Silicon Valley real estate right now?  Throughout Santa Clara County, they were 25% of all sales, up from 20% in October 2011,  among houses, duet homes, condominiums and townhouses (class 1 and class 2, does not include mobile homes, 2-4plex or apartment buildings or raw land).   What’s trending? Lots, including more cash offers.

Some areas and some types of sales are more frequently all cash than others.  Here are a few quick stats for the last month (last 30 days from today – numbers from MLSListings, crunched by me – disclaimer on good intentions but no guarantee). Also, please note that this is for CLOSED SALES. As of this writing, we are seeing a huge uptick in multiple offers in all price ranges in many parts of the valley, and it seems that many are all cash or very large cash downpayments.

• Santa Clara County: 25% all cash
• San Jose (entire city): 27% all cash
• San Jose short sales: 27% all cash (down from 33% in Oct 2011)
• San Jose bank owned or REO sales: 39% all cash (38% Oct 2011)
• Short sales & REOs were 52% of all sales in San Jose in last 30 days (was 48% Oct 2011)
• Of SJ homes listed at $300,000 or less: 44% all cash (was 48% Oct 2011)
• Of SJ homes listed at/under $500,000: 33% were all cash (didn’t track in October 2011)
• Los Gatos: 9% all cash
• Saratoga: 8% all cash
• Almaden Valley area of San Jose: 10% all cash

Some of these sales will have no financing and the new owners will occupy the home.  Particularly in lower priced homes, though, these are investor buyers who will be renting out the property.  This is often the case with the lower price distressed properties in particular.  In higher priced homes, some new owners will put financing on the property after close of escrow.

With the crazy new demands that keep coming at us from banks and new requirements being imposed on appraisers, now more than ever, cash is king.  That doesn’t mean that the cash buyer will get a deep discount, but there will be a slight one in most cases and certainly preferential treatment that will create a great advantage in multiple offer situations.

Learn more about buying and selling Silicon Valley real estate with cash offers:

Cash offers: what do you need to know if buying “all cash”?

Q & A: Making an Offer

What’s My Silicon Valley Home Worth? Estimating the Probable Buyer’s Value  (financing impacts market value)

Today we’ll have a look at the most recent closed residential realty sales numbers and then also view “live charts” which are updated weekly for Los Gatos real estate.  This segment of Silicon Valley real estate can be viewed from many angles: zip code, school district, sale type, view or no view, acreage, luxury home or basic home type…. This post will serve as a brief overview only. For information on YOUR Los Gatos subdivision or neighborhood, please contact me!

February 2012 sales numbers for Los Gatos real estate are in via my Real Estate Report.  Have a look:

(1) Houses and Duet Homes

Trends At a Glance	Feb 2012	Previous Month	Year-over Year
Median Price	$1,442,500	$1,129,500 (+27.7%)	$1,265,000 (+14.0%)
Average Price	$2,320,030	$1,248,000 (+85.9%)	$1,217,470 (+90.6%)
No. of Sales	16	16 (0.0%)	15 (+6.7%)
Pending Properties	45	30 (+50.0%)	48 (-6.3%)
Active	74	63 (+17.5%)	57 (+29.8%)
Sale vs. List Price	94.8%	96.6% (-1.9%)	98.1% (-3.4%)
Days on Market	70	82 (-14.2%)	92 (-23.0%)

Prices are going way, way up!  And yet the market is cooler – more homes are on the market, the list price to sales price ratio shrank a little.  The rest of the west valley areas are seeing multiple offers, overbids and rising prices – and we are hearing of them here, also.  That may not be reflected in the stats for another 30 days or so.

 

(2) Condos and Townhouses

Trends At a Glance	Feb 2012	Previous Month	Year-over Year
Median Price	$601,000	$338,000 (+77.8%)	$480,000 (+25.2%)
Average Price	$562,675	$358,800 (+56.8%)	$490,350 (+14.7%)
No. of Sales	8	5 (+60.0%)	5 (+60.0%)
Pending Properties	22	14 (+57.1%)	16 (+37.5%)
Active	16	24 (-33.3%)	31 (-48.4%)
Sale vs. List Price	96.1%	99.0% (-2.9%)	99.4% (-3.3%)
Days on Market	63	101 (-38.0%)	54 (+15.6%)

More skyrocketing prices!  The LG condo market has been very challenged – but now there seems to be a great turnaround. Have a look at the chart below! (more…)

The annual market report is out at popehandy.REReport.com and we can now learn how 2011 compared to 2010.  The median sales price for houses in Santa Clara County was off 5.3% overall.  But from one part of the valley to the next it varied wildly with 6 cities or areas finding themselves in positive territory while others were off by double digits.

In the image to the left, I’ve put into bold the cities where the median sales price of houses which sold and closed escrow in 2011 were ahead of 2010′s pricing.

What is it that makes Gilroy, Los Altos Hills, Los Gatos, Mountain View and Palo Alto “in the black”?

Most of these cities/towns are upscale, west valley communities.  But so are Saratoga, Cupertino, and Monte Sereno.

Gilroy was especially hard-hit with the housing downturn so perhaps in that case, it’s just coming back into more of a balance. (Then again, so was Morgan Hill and it’s still off by 12%.)

The LinkedIn IPO and others in the Palo Alto area drove prices up for some parts of the housing market nearby and it’s likely that this explains the positive growth for Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Los Altos Hills.  That said, it would seem that Los Altos, and perhaps even Sunnyvale would have seen stronger numbers on the same account.  Perhaps school scores are the key driver here.

Los Gatos, Saratoga and Monte Sereno often behave somewhat similarly as they are adjacent to one another and often attract similar home buyers who want good schools, a nice downtown area nearby and scenic beauty with the hills.  The annual numbers show Monte Sereno down 6.7%, Saratoga down 2% but Los Gatos up 6.4%.  With Monte Sereno, there are very few sales each month and each year (only about 4,000 residents), so there can be a wider swing without it necessarily being accurate. Saratoga and Los Gatos each have about 30,000 people who call these areas home, though, so the data is much more helpful.  Saratoga and Los Gatos both have multiple school districts, views, homes with better proximity to “downtown” and more variables – I think we’d have to dig a lot deeper to learn why these two neighboring markets are so diverse.  We might also have to look at multiple years of data to see if Saratoga spiked while LG slumped to explain the difference. (more…)

Recently I was speaking with a neighbor of mine in Los Gatos who’s a high powered lender with decades of experience all over Santa Clara County.  In the last year or two she’s been doing many more FHA backed loans, rather than conventional ones, as smart home buyers, especially first time home buyers, try to get into a house while both home prices and interest rates are at record lows.  This makes a lot of sense as it can take a long time to save 20% or more and in that time, both interest rates and real estate prices in Silicon Valley could go through the roof.  (If my kids were out of college and working, I’d be encouraging them to buy a home using FHA backed financing too.)

FHA backed mortgages do require a lot more work, though, so I extended my sympathy that she’s having to jump through so many hoops and that they are for much smaller sales prices (many areas of San Jose have dropped 35 – 40% since the market collapse).  Mortgage brokers often make about 1% of the value of the loan as their compensation, so I imagined this great loan officer spending twice as much time with FHA paperwork as on a normal loan, on a smaller priced property, resulting in “half the pay for twice the work”.

Apparently that’s not the case with FHA loans!

“It’s better for me when the buyer uses FHA”, she assured me.  Really?  “Instead of getting 1 point, we are often paid 2.5 points when we close an FHA loan.”   That didn’t seem unfair to me since there’s a lot more paperwork involved.  But consumers probably don’t realize that their banker or mortgage broker will be paid much more if the loan is FHA backed rather than conventional.

If you have saved enough money for a conventional loan product but your lender is pushing FHA, be doubly careful before deciding what to do. There are pros and cons to each loan product you buy (you are “buying” or “paying for” a loan).  Make sure that you aren’t getting FHA financing only because it is more profitable for your lender.