There is a city ordinance that requires trains to go slowly.  I can't find it on the city web site but as I recall they can't go any faster than about 10 miles an hour. I guess that cuts down on noise.  I know they are not supposed to toot their horns at the crossings either. There is a downside to the slow trains. The intersection of Chestnut street and Shepard road has been a challenge for years.  When a train comes through no one goes anywhere for a long time.  The trains are long and slow.

On Saturday I was walking near the science museum and waited for a very long train.  When there were about five cars left to cross the tracks it just stopped.  I guess we like things slow here in St. Paul.It seems to me that we were promised a pedestrian bridge but it never materialized.  There will never be any kind of a bridge over the tracks for cars because the immediate neighbors don't want one. Shepard Road and Chestnut would be a great place for a hot dog vendor to hang out.

We still have plenty of townhouses and condos on the market in St. Paul, and they are still selling at a slower pace than all other types of single family home.  On average they take 36% longer to sell.

Some of the sellers have given up for now and are renting their units, others try to rent them out while they are on the market.  As a Realtor who has been through this more than a few times there are some pitfalls to having renters in the unit while it is on the market.

1.  There is the messy renter, the place is never in good shape for showings.

2.  The uncooperative renter.  There is never a good time to show the place.  I understand this and I know I wouldn't want to pay rent and then have to have people traipsing through the place and disturbing my day.

3.  The surly renter.  I won't even explain that one, but sometimes renters get involved when there are people seeing the home and they say all sorts of things.

The up side to renting out a condo is that the seller has a way of making the mortgage payment and can move on and wait awhile to sell it.

There is another issue with renting out condos or townhouses and that is that in some buildings and developments the percentage of owner occupied units is so low that units no longer qualify for FHA financing.  This is becoming a big problem  These days FHA financing is very popular for first time home buyers and units that can not be financed through FHA are hard to sell.
There are no easy answers and it is a vicious circle. Would be sellers end up renting because it takes so long to sell or they owe more on the unit than they can get for it, and can not afford to sell it.  Rented units are harder to sell and your rental unit may be killing your neighbors chance of selling their unit to the growing number of buyers who are using FHA.  

By Erik Hare

You drive on the street in front of your house every day, but how often have you looked at it?  Perhaps on a sticky hot day a crew comes through, spreading the scent of tar low and wide across the street.  Beyond those days, you might rarely the street where you live anywhere near as much though as the people and houses that live along it. No matter what, though, your taxes paid for what the Public Works Department has given you.  What did you get?

Most of the streets in Saint Paul are not, technically “paved”.  That term refers to streets that have been set with asphalt curb to curb, and in Saint Paul that only happens on major streets (on the left in the composite picture).  The neighborhood streets are done with “chip and seal”, or crushed rock that has some oil applied to keep it together (on the right).  You can see in the picture that on the right it is mostly rock but on the left it is mostly not-rock – pavement is mostly tar, not stone.  What’s the difference?

It all goes back to the first paved streets in about 1820.  John McAdam discovered that if you seal the water from below a road, you didn’t have frost heaving and other things that break up the surface.  His method of sealing the road was to put down sharp crushed rock that was compressed to make a “macadam” surface.  It worked.  Our neighborhood streets are a simple variation on macadam where the stone is put down, compressed by cars running over it for a few days, and then sprayed with an oil that seals it all up. 

If you ran this kind of surface with tar, you’d have a “tarmac”.  That’s what many of the main roads are in Saint Paul, and what is pictured.  You can also make a surface that is as smooth as glass with nothing but tar, but it doesn’t wear as well as a tarmac paving.  Our Public Works Department prefers the tarmac type of paving just for the durability. Since they spend $28 million a year on "right  of way maintenance", every small savings adds up. 

There are problems with the “chip and seal” or sealed macadam kind of paving we use on our neighborhood streets.  For one thing, they do require maintenance every few years to keep cracks like the one I pictured from forming.  When cracks do develop, they often widen and spread much quicker, as you can see in the composite photo.  But this kind of surface is still much cheaper in a place where there isn’t a ton of traffic forcing high maintenance, so it’s the choice for our neighborhood streets.

The way our streets are made is easy to ignore, if you choose to.  That’s by design.  We have a good Public Works Department that does its best to stay on top of things.  It’s good to know what they are up to if, for no other reason, than we’re paying for it.  I think we’re getting a pretty good deal in Saint Paul, too.

I stopped by Trader Joe's grand opening yesterday mostly because I have never seen a Trader Joe's.  It was fun to take the photos because it is so colorful. It was a bit crowded, too crowded for shopping but great for people watching. It is in a controversial location, it will be interesting to see how it works out. 

It is Friday and Fridays are for fun.  This post was supposed to have a photo of my keyboard on it but my keyboard is a mess and I guess I can't just put it in the dishwasher like I do with most everything else . . except the cat and the dog.

The letters in the graphics represent the letters that are missing from my keyboard.  The keys are still there but they don't have letters on them any more because I wore them off writing this blog.  It doesn't matter because I don't look at the keyboard when I type.  I don't need to look at the screen either and would rather not but it is right in front of me.

I used to write posts when this blog reached certain mile stones like when I had one hundred posts and then when it was a year old, and then when I hit 1000 posts, and when I hit the two year mark.  I skipped year three and post number 1500 was written a few weeks back.   Wearing the letters off of a keyboard is as good of a milestone as any.

People start blogs every day and there are like a zillion of them but most people don't stick with it very long, Certainly not long enough to wear the letters off of a keyboard.  They get all discouraged because no one reads the blog.  When I started I used to refer to my readers as "both of my readers".  When more people started reading it that really bothered me. It was much easier to write when I knew that no one was actually reading it. I think that is when I stated using more photos. Now I tell myself that they are just looking at the pictures and that takes the stress out of writing.

Letters are not really needed on keyboards so I think I will hang onto mine for a while and maybe I can figure out how to get all of the strawberry jam off of  the "ift" key so that it isn't so sticky and get the sesame seeds out of the number pad. They really should make keyboards that are dishwasher safe. I suppose if they get put in the dishwasher the letters get washed off of the keys.

Have a great weekend and thanks for stopping by.

It has been in the news that the number of homes sold is up and that more homes have sold this year than last year. I suppose that is a good thing especially for those who have homes to sell and for those of us who sell those homes.

I ran some numbers using the data in our Regional Multiple Listings Service for St. Paul, MN.  The data is deemed reliable but not guaranteed. I looked at total closed sales for 2008 in the city of St. Paul for all types of single family homes, which includes condos and town houses for the first half of the year and compared those numbers to the numbers for the first half of this year.

In the first 6th months of 2008 there were 1071 homes sales in St. Paul, buyers paid an average of $65.37 per square foot. The homes were on the market for an average of 145.6 days.  The total amount of money for those homes adds up to $185,441,972

In the first 6th months of 2009 there were 1372 home sales in St. Paul and buyers paid an average of 117.93 per square foot.  The homes were on the market for an average of 145.6 days and the total amount of money for the sales of those homes adds up to $168,844,322

Foreclosures are the reason for the lower dollar volume. There were times during the first half of this year when 50 to 60% of all sales in St. Paul were foreclosures. The average home has dropped in value in most neighborhoods but not by as much as the homes that were sold after they were bank owned.

Some see the increase in sales as a sign that the housing market is on the rebound. I don't see it that way. I think the numbers mean that a bunch of foreclosures sold because the prices were so low and the tax incentive helped fuel the buying.

The big change between this year and last year is that the inventory of homes on the market was much lower during the first hafl of 2009 than in 2008.

by G. Sax

What's it like out there?

The photo answers that question, at least of late. The weather's always a topic of conversation around these parts because the weather's constantly changing. I feel compelled to write about the local weather, because I was away from the area long enough to realize us Minnesotans are not like everywhere else.

Oh, sure, people talk up the humidity in the mid-Atlantic or the dry heat in Phoenix. Lake effect snow comes up in the Great Lakes, and you can't ignore tornado season in the Great Plains or hurricane season on the Gulf Coast. But I haven't experienced the year-round fascination with temperature and precipitation and heat index and wind chill and barometric pressure and cold snaps and warm-ups as much as I have right here in the Twin Cities.

In California, it's hard to get too excited about the weather when most everyday is the same as yesterday. You just put on your shoes in the morning and go back out into another beautiful day. You might bring an umbrella in winter, but even then it's mostly to accessorize.

We're so lucky to have four (or more) distinct seasons here. Not only does it give us an excuse to have more clothes in bigger closets; not only does it allow us to express our whinery at the first drop of sweat or first hint of numbness; not only does it give us a reason to reach out and talk to our neighbor; not only does it stir us to do wacky things like snowmobile to our favorite lunch spot, dig for hidden medallions in the snow, or leave our comfortable homes for the pleasures of rustic cabins and tents around campfires; but I think it helps us live a little bit longer.

And that completes my weather trilogy. I didn't intend to give it so much Internet ink, but the oppressive heat of the last few days caught my attention and forced me to act. Like the weather.

As a personal aside, I'd like to thank all my real estate friends and colleagues for their support while I was training for my first marathon.

I'm back and intact from Duluth. I finished Grandma's Marathon in 4:50:33 in what many veterans said was the hottest race-day run they had ever been a part of. It was 80 degrees before 8 a.m.

I loved every minute of it.