Welcome back Kotter…

Nice little spread John Travolta’s got for himself!  Yes, that’s a Boeing 707 parked in the driveway. (and a Gulfstream on the other side).  I’m not sure where the helicopter is, maybe taking this photo?

The only news link I could find has been “archived” and I’m not paying to access it.  It’s been mentioned in a couple of places in the Blogosphere.

I found it here, and here.

Below is what I believe to be the text of the original Herald Tribune Article.

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A lot of neighborhoods don’t allow the owners to park Boeing 707s outside their homes, which is why actor John Travolta moved to Jumbolair, near Ocala.

OCALA — It’s not just another housing development, as you can tell by the 1.4-mile airstrip and the Boeing 707 parked next to one of the houses.

Located in the Central Florida town of Anthony, just north of Ocala, it’s called Jumbolair, and it’s the new home of John Travolta — ’70s TV phenom, film superstar,Oscar-nominated actor, sex symbol, accomplished pilot, doting husband and father.

After several years of whispers about his building a house here, the 49-year-old actor has taken up residence in his nearly completed mansion. Travolta is flying daily from Ocala to Tampa to shoot “The Punisher,” an action movie based on the comic book, set to be released next summer. A lifelong love of aviation holds the key to Travolta’s decision to
build at Jumbolair.

Travolta owns at least two jets, a Gulfstream and a huge Boeing 707B. Simply put, there aren’t very many non-commercial airstrips where planes of  that size can take off and land. Jumbolair, with its long landing strip and massive jet wash berms at either end, is one of them.

About a decade ago, Travolta had a home in a fly-in community near Daytona, but was sued by neighbors who claimed his jet airplanes were too big and noisy for their facility.

The very layout of his new house is testament to Travolta’s love of flying. It’s located immediately off the main airstrip, and is designed so his jets can taxi right up to two outbuildings connected to the main structure, which is shaped like a squat air-control tower. Travolta literally can walk out his door, under a canopied walkway and into the cockpit, open the long mechanized gate and be airborne in a matter of minutes.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration pilot database, Travolta is qualified in several types of single- and multi-engine aircraft, and has the highest pilot medical certification possible.

 ”We know that Travolta’s an accomplished pilot. ….. A lot of people fly for the pleasure of it, and he’s one of them,” said John Clabes, an FAA spokesman. “If you have this many ratings on these types of high-performance aircraft, you’re obviously a good pilot.”

In layman’s terms, Travolta has enough experience flying large multi-engine jets that he could easily switch to piloting commercial airliners for a living.

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And a Hat Tip goes out to Todd Tarson. This post was created with Windows Live Writer which I first found out about on Todd’s Blog. Was a bit painful to initially set up, but it appears to be a pretty nice WYSIWYG editor.

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Builder’s incentives to agents. I’ve blogged about it here. And yes, it irritates the crap out of me that builders slammed agents a year ago and now bend over backwards to kiss our chisled behinds.

BUT when I see a statement like this in an article, it pisses me off to no end:

“Some agents are avoiding new subdivisions unless clients ask to see homes there. They say it’s payback for greedy builders who raised prices with impunity and slashed commissions.”

The problem with this quote is it’s true. SOME agents do avoid new subdivisions. SOME agents even talk their clients out of looking in certain areas just because they hold a grudge against a builder.

This, oh avid reader, is a load of baloney. It’s hooey, it’s horsehocky, it’s bunk.

SOME agents apparently forget how to do their job. Not only do we have a legal fiduciary responsibility to our clients, we are supposed to help our buyer clients find a home that meets THEIR needs, not ours! We are not in any postion to exercise “payback for greedy builders”, especially not at our clients expense.

It’s the same thing as refusing to show buyers homes with lower co-brokes than “standard” (whatever the heck that means). That’s just plain wrong. And why do some sellers feel compelled to throw in a “buyer’s agent bonus” when they list their home? No buyer’s agent should be more motivated to sell a home with a bonus over one without.

But SOME agents do!

SOME agents should be ashamed of themselves. It’s bozos like this that give the entire lot of agents a bad name.

“Greedy builders”? What about greedy agents?

If you let your clients needs motivate you to help them find a home, the commission checks will follow. It’s called customer service.

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This article in today’s Arizona Republic is what inspired this blog entry:

Once spurned real estate agents now wooed by builders

Or read it here… » Read the rest of the entry..

90 days ago, D.Challener Roe set out to enlist 2,996 bloggers to each write a tribute to an individual victim of 9/11. With the help of many and God only knows how many hours of dedicated work, he did it. Sleep well tonight my friend.

Link

On August 28, 11:19 PM EDT the 2,996th name was assigned.

Howard (Barry) Kirschbaum, age 53, a resident of New York, N.Y., will be honored by El Rider at the blog Flying Debris.

There will be more to come. But every name will be honored. It took exactly 90 days, and more hours than I’d care to count–and not just from me.

But for tonight I’ll take this victory and sleep well.

For more, read here.

On 9/11 I will be honoring Harry Ramos who died in the World Trade Center while comforting a complete stranger.

Here’s the second one in a row out of Pennsylvania. What’s the deal with weird houses in PA? This one is in New Hope, PA. A little artsy-fartsy kind of town from what I can read… Anyone seen it?

I never jumped on the Zillow posting bandwagon. For those not familiar with it, Zillow.com is a site that estimates the value of property using a bunch of publically available data and some proprietary algorithms to come up with approximate valuations. Sometimes it does OK, sometimes not. But it’s getting better.

Zillow scares the crap out of some real estate agents. I don’t understand why. I think they are afraid that Zillow is going to replace them. That’s absurd. Here’s a couple of facts:

Zillow can’t sell anyone a home. Zillow can’t show a home. Zillow can’t look inside a home and evaluate it from the inside out. Zillow can’t talk to people, and people will never be able to talk and interact with Zillow like they can another human being (at least not in our lifetimes, I think.)

Zillow themselves have this to say about their property “zestimates”: Remember, the Zestimate is a starting point and does not consider all the market intricacies that can determine the actual price a house will sell for, such as entertaining offers, negotiating, closing costs, timing, etc. They say they feel they are within 10% of true market value. So that means price your $500,000 home using a “zestimate” and you may just cheat yourself out of 50 grand. But it’s still a great starting point for home value research.

Zillow provides data. Some of it’s OK, some is questionable, but some of it’s fabulous. And that’s the case with most data sources. Anyone that blindly accepts data from ANY source without analyzing it with a critical eye is asking for trouble. But do that, and you may find some interesting things.

They recently released a report on the Phoenix area market. It’s quite interesting and is worth looking at. Here’s a couple of charts from the report:

The full report is available in PDF format here. Check it out and let me know what you think!