The Eagle's View

According to a report released yesterday by the PMI Mortgage Insurance Company, the Denver-Aurora metro area has a 14.9 percent chance of experiencing a decline in home prices in the next two years.

Nationally, the chance that home prices will drop is 28.8 percent and last year Denver had a 16.9 percent risk of dropping prices.

If you are selling a Denver area home, you may have already felt the effects of our soft market. It's a great time to be a buyer, with interest rates still historically low and so much inventory to choose from, sellers are more willing to accept a lower price on their home.

Selling a home is still a matter of finding the right combination of price, location, and condition. Price being the easiest thing you can control, if you have a home on the market that's not selling, re-evaluate your price and condition. There's not much you can do about your location, but make the condition of your home so attractive that a buyer won't want to pass it up, then make sure you are priced realistically for the market. Gone are the days when you could ask and get $10,000+ more than the most recently sold comparable home.

Those acoustical "popcorn" ceilings that so many homes built in the 1970s and 80s (and even some in the 90s) have throughout the home are no longer very popular with home buyers. Builders loved it as a fast and inexpensive way to texture ceilings, but by 1980 word got out that the materials often used in the popcorn material contained the cancer-causing material, asbestos.

Asbestos however, from what I've read, isn't as deadly as the media would like you to believe. In fact, in one report I read published by the EPA, of the four variations of asbestos, the most common one, called "Chrysotile" is the least toxic and has only been proven to cause cancer if it's airborn and a person is exposed to it over several decades...and also regularly smokes!

Curious if your popcorn ceiling contains asbestos? First, read what the EPA says about it, then contact me and I can give you the name of a company that'll test your ceiling for just $35.

I had the test done for my home, which was built in 1973 and sure enough, it's got asbestos! I was especially surprised because several neighors I talked to had scraped their ceilings of the popcorn texture without ever testing and each one of them said the same thing, "I doubt the builder of these homes would have used asbestos containing materials." How wrong they were.

I've opted to have the popcorn ceiling sealed/painted rather than removed. It was far less expensive to do that and really, I don't even notice the ceiling anymore.

Since January 1, 2006 we real estate agents have been required to have an additional form completed and signed by buyers and sellers called CIC 33-10-05, or more commonly known as the "Common Interest Community Document Receipt and Disclosure to Buyer".

The purpose of this form was to eliminate the risk of having a buyer purchase a home without knowing and understanding the rules and regulations of the local homeowners association if one existed.

The purpose of the form, while seemingly a good idea, caused increased paperwork and opened the door to potential liability to real estate agents and sellers.

On May 26, 2006, Governer Bill Ownes signed Senate Bill 06-89, which immediately repealed the requirement to use this form. In it's place will be a new paragraph (required on and after January 01, 2007) in the Contract to Buy-and-Sell Real Estate that discloses the same information.