There’s a lot of furious activity now. I assume it’s because people are trying to slip in under the Nov 30th deadline and get that eight grand from Uncle Sugar.

Most of the homes we saw had little or no interest for us, so I’m planning to write about those homes sometime soon. Right now, I’m also working on the July Sold Homes post. There were ten homes listed as being sold in July 2009 in Babylon Village, so it’s going to be a long post. I should be able to push it out this weekend.

This is an open discussion thread, so I invite any and all readers to pipe up and say something. Feel free to leave a comment and ask a question, make an observation, tell us what you’re up to or just introduce yourself and say hi.

I’m very interested in hearing fellow home shoppers, especially their impressions of any open houses that they’ve seen, but I’d also like to hear from any sellers and their experiences and observations.

I’m posting this “sticky”, which means that it will stay at the top of the page over the weekend even if I post new stuff afterward. If you’re accustomed to stopping by and glancing at the top of the page to see if there’s new stuff, scroll on down a bit before you click away.

Enojy your weekend, everyone. Happy hunting.

Homes in Babylon

We seemed to be hovering in the low to mid 90′s for total home in Babylon over the summer, but now the inventory is creeping up. 106 is as I as I’ve seen it in some time, maybe since last summer.

Unfortunately, the pickings are pretty slim at the lower end of the market. We’ve edged up our max price a bit to try and tried to look at a few more homes, but not much really appeals to us.

My feeling is that there’s a lot of “shadow inventory”, sellers waiting in the wings for a real estate recovery. My subjective observation is that there seems to be a higher percentage of estate sales, retirement sales and divorce sales in the mix than there was a couple years back. The recently purchased, nicely renovated homes on MLS have — to a certain extent — given way to the “charming” houses that have kitchens and baths from the Age of Aquarius and need “a little TLC”. In other words, the people who are selling now are the people who need to sell. Those who think they can hang on are hoping to ride out the bad real estate market.

Unfortunately, I’m looking to buy now…right now…and the possibility of better homes being available at lower prices some time next year isn’t helping me out here. For those of you who are still on the sidelines waiting, this coming spring could bring some serious deals.

The owner of 18 Annuskemunnica Rd decides to use their MLS listing as a Flickr account. I’ve seen MLS pictures that have dogs (or kids!) in the shot, but this is the first one I’ve seen that’s just the dogs, unless it’s supposed to be a tight closeup of the tile floor.

Personally, I’d like to see more pictures of the bedrooms, but that’s just me.

About two weeks ago they upgraded the look to what you see now in the screen shot. It’s not a bad design, although it looks a lot like web sites I designed back in 2002. The design isn’t very visually interesting, but it’s functional and doesn’t look something from before the dotcom crash, so at least that’s something.

Something else I’d like you to note in the screen shot is the white box in the middle of the map that says “searching”. It’s a little hard to make out, but trust me, it’s there. I’ve seen the searching box a lot lately in the last two weeks because ever since they changed the design I haven’t been able to get results from the Sold Properties search tool.

The availability of the Sold Properties search has always been intermittent, but intermittent is much better than nonexistent or nonfunctional, which is what it is now. I sent a complaint in via their contact form, but I still haven’t heard back. I was looking forward to doing a September sold homes post, but I’m going to have to wait until either they bring the tool back online or I find another way to get the data.

One more complaint, as long as I’m off on a rant here. While I like the search by map feature of the Sold Properties tool, it would be nice if we could have a regular search form without the map so that I could drill down by zip code or number of bedrooms or price or whatever. With the map search I’m constantly trying to get the zoom and pan on the map just right so that I can get all of Babylon in without getting too much of West Islip or West Babylon.