Holly Barr, Your Favorite Realtor | Holly Barr, Your Favorite Realtor

Buzz of construction at Alma and Minnesota Ave.

Holly Barr — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:26:07 +0000

I dropped off my dry cleaning at the eco friendly dry cleaners at Willow Glen’s Cleaning and Alteration shop at 571 W Alma Ave. (cheap plug for them) and I met the owner of the strip mall, Bob Vlahopoulioti. He is also the father of Maria Vlahopoulioti the owner of the new greek restaurant, Souvlaki. Bob told me that the restaurant was so busy its first week that they had to take the day off today to catch up! His other daughter,Karen Cepetes, is opening a fruit stand at the corner closest to Arco. The fruit stand will have a lot of organics and should be open within two months.

The construction at the corner has been a long time coming! He is building it to suit, so if you know of anyone looking for a new Willow Glen location, touch base.

Build to Suit!

Holly Barr, Your Favorite Realtor, joined Sereno Group!

Holly Barr — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 03:17:20 +0000

Holly and Sereno founder Chris Trapani in front of the new Willow Glen Town Square, opening this spring.

I just joined Sereno Group (here is a picture with me and Sereno founder Chris Trapani). Sereno focuses on hiring experienced agents and is extremely polished yet not corporate. In 2011 the collective 200 agents did $1.2 billion in sales.
Sereno has strong roots in Willow Glen that date back to the early 1900′s. There was Trapani Realty back in the 1950′s at what is now the Comerica Building 1191 Lincoln Ave. By April of this year Sereno will be in the new Village Town Square building where I will be in the thick of what is happening in Willow Glen and be able to CHARM about it!

Improve your property value!

Holly Barr — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:46:25 +0000

Improve your property value through supporting your local schools!

Checkbooks ready??? Budget cuts in public schools

Holly Barr — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:47:14 +0000

Today is the first day of school for SJUSD and with all the cutbacks, everyone has to be extra generous with our time and resources! Helping schools only helps the future, our communities and in turn helps your property values (better schools better values!). Basically, I am strongly suggesting that you buy that roll of wrapping paper or cookie dough! It does come back to you!

Also, if you have an ITEM or SERVICE to donate for a silent auction for Booksin Elementary’s annual walk a thon happening 10/10/09 PLEASE let me know!

Here I am at the Kindergarten Ice Cream Social- movin and shakin’ love it!

Open House Hot Dog Style

Holly Barr — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:52:53 +0000

HOT DOG OPEN HOUSE Sat. 8/8/09

1086 Byerley Ave. San Jose, CA 95125

beautiful house in Willow Glen that is in the higher price bracket at $1,349,000. This weekend 8/8/09 I am hosting an open house and my husband will be grilling up free hot dogs and soda. I am doing a voice mail blast to 2000 neighbors inviting them. I hate to get voice mail blasts yet, it is free to me and I need to do all I can to get EYES into this house to get it sold! There are several houses that are pending sale and when they close escrow they are going to hurt the value. Should be interesting to see the turn out this weekend.

LOW Willow Glen Inventory is it Gonna Raise Prices?!

Holly Barr — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:37:03 +0000

I have a short sale at 1924 Hicks Av. Great house on a slightly busy street 3 bed 2 bath 1840 sq ft for $599,000 I got multiple offers on it for well over asking. Granted the house is not finished, however I had 70+ groups through the house on Saturday!

Lower end buyers are ready to buy and there is just not much inventory out there for them to buy. It will be interesting to see what this does to pricing. Seems a simple supply and demand issue and it will drive prices up a bit…although we have all be surprised before.

Willow Glen Home Sale Stats 5/10/09

Holly Barr — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:42:11 +0000

Well, I gotta say on my blog as I say to all my clients… the market is CHANGING! I have buyers that refuse to believe me and still want to wait until prices go down further. I am seeing multiple offers 35 offers in some cases!!

There were 23 sales in the last week for Willow Glen. The week before was only 13! Price ranged from $1.6M on Dry Creek to $199,500 on Hull Ave. I just spoke to a builder who sold a house (before being on market) for close to $4million!!

Gotta love real estate… I do!

San Jose Guide

Holly Barr — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:17:17 +0000

My marketing guru husband Greg just put together a very cool guide to San Jose, CA that includes Campbell, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Cambrian and Willow Glen (neighborhoods within San Jose). There is information about schools, shopping and up to date home pricing -even a map of each area.

Let me know if you have an interest in recieving a Guide to San Jose. I hope to have it up on my site soon.

Buying in the $100,000 range

Holly Barr — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:35:05 +0000

A new buyer came to me the other day… actually, I was picking up my open house signs, she liked my aura and said I had something positive about me and she asked me for my card. Anyway, she is interested in finding a property in the $100,000 range. Suprised to say, there are over 15 condo’s available in Santa Clara County in that price range. Amazing!

The condo’s tend to be in the eastern area and over 20 years old. I am happy to send you a list of them if you are interested.

What is up with rates

Holly Barr — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:23:28 +0000

From my in house lender at Intero Jadell Schadewitz jschadewitz@theloansource.com there is good and bad … mostly good news on the horizon…

There are greener pastures ahead of us in the Real Estate business in 2009. As of Monday January 5th the Federal Government has started buying Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac mortgage securities at a very low price. This action has brought tremendous support to conforming mortgage bonds this week. The Fed plans to buy mortgage securities for the next six month and essentially force mortgage rates to stay low for that period of time. There was talk of them doing this for 1 year, but the latest seems to be for six months.

What does that mean to you and me??? Well basically we will probably see the lowest 30 year fixed confirming interest rates in our life time. Forget about the all time low, this will be a record breaking year. And that means people will be buying! Now is the time to get out there and meet some buyers in the conforming loan price range. This range is basically $695,000 and below purchase price for those with 10% down, and $781,000 purchase price and below for those with 20% down. This is based on a max conforming/jumbo loan of $625,500. I would be out meeting people in the price range as much as possible.

Now for the not so good news. You and your buyers must come to expect massive volatility in mortgage rates and processing turn times for the next two months. Here’s the problem we are facing as lenders right now. The rates should actually be even lower than they are today, but they are artificially high due to a couple reasons. First, is that the lenders have hemorrhaged losses and are trying to take some profit off the table while its available. The second and most important reason the rates are artificially high is because the lenders can’t possibly handle the volume of people who want to get a loan. So in order to slow down people from submitting applications they will increase rates. We even saw a lender this week completely cut off locks mid day because they just can’t handle anymore. Because of this phenomenon lenders can quote 5.0% in the morning and 5.875% in that afternoon on the same day, and thus the massive volatility.

How did it get this bad with lenders being backed up? Well lenders have been cutting cost for the past year by laying people off. Everyone from loan originators, underwriters, doc drawers, funders, and processors. In addition to that about 70% of the institutions have gone out of business in 2007 and 2008. That leaves the people left to handle all the demand, and it’s not nearly enough. I talked to one lender who is currently doubling their staff to try to keep up. I personally believe it will be at least two months until the lenders and staff up and get caught up with the demand.

Time to buy is drawing near my friends!