I don't know how much I trust Zillow's estimates. But I know our Columbus house is still on the market for less than they paid us for the buyout. The good news is that it's still $20K over what we paid for it in 1999. And we really didn't sink that much into improvements. I'm just glad to be out from under it.

Given that Pushing Daisies doesn't premiere for another few weeks, is there any TV on Wednesday night I need to be watching?

What is it with FOX and putrid liquidation ?

Jesus christ.

My parents' first house cost $18k. But that was 33 years ago. Sold it for a little over twice that 17 years ago. Wonder what it would go for now.

Interesting tidbit: that house originally was a modular house on a base somewhere circa WW2. When they closed it post-war, the landlady bought a whole bunch of them and moved them to LC and that street to rent. I didn't know that until recently. Explains some things about that house (like how easy it was for grass to grow inside the walls- it was basically plunked on a slab, so it wasn't quite sealed to the foundation. And the closets were clearly prefab, in retrospect.) It wasn't really obvious it was a modular. Most of its issues were minor, structurally it was sound and solid.

Ooh, zillow says $116K.

The Zenstimate on my building is laughable - it's only about twice what we paid for our co-op, and there are 12 units in here. But since they don't give the # of bedrooms, I suspect they're looking at the 2-family homes on the rest of the block and extrapolating from the estimated square footage.

Wednesday is Shemar Moore's eyebrows' day.

Someone give me an ETA on my face stopping hurting, will you?

Soon.

I wish I could. I hate not knowing where the end is.

I'm afraid to look at Zillow cause I know what we are trying to sell it for and there are NO TAKERS. We have dropped the price $70k over the last 5 months and there are NO TAKERS.

Zillow doesn't believe in my area. But I did check the county assessor's office website earlier today and discovered two interesting tidbits. First, the valuation on our house (3bdr/2ba, 1600 sq.ft., no garage) is about $141,000, which is pretty much exactly what we paid to build it. Well, actually we paid less, because our $150,000 included the land, which was $28,000. Now, that's tax assessment, not realty appraisal, which was $195,000.

So, then, secondly, our neighbor's house across the street (3bdr/2ba, 1700 sq.ft., two car garage) is valued on the assessor's site at $156,000 only a little more than ours.

I find this encouraging, because our former neighbor the builder sold it to our new neighbor for $256,500 last month. It was on the market about six months, I think. So that's a good indicator for our market even still. We're a vacation area, so we still have a not bad real estate market.

Not that we're going to sell, assuming life continues apace. But it's good to know where the equity sits. We have quite a bit to begin with because of the deals we got and favors we called in. But it looks like the market is holding up and is maybe even a little bit favorable for us. The appraiser when he was here expressed doubt that the neighbor would get his asking price (which I swear was less than he got in the end) so it's good that someone did feel that it was valued appropriately.

The only thing I think can really fuck with the SW market (in non-primary cities, like Phoenix, ABQ and SF, which have a whole bunch of different things driving the market) is water. It's poor enough that even keeping up with the housing bust, it is way behind. LC kinda is still in boom, mainly snowbirds/retirees fleeing the Gulf and CA's markets. But they are mainly buying new construction, and few of the locals can afford that. Seriously, I think 1/3 of the working pop is employed by the public schools, and no way in hell can they afford the new stuff. Hell, even NMSU employees would have issues.

And wells are going dry on the mesas.