True, you can buy a distressed home cheaply. However it will cost more than you think to render it liveable. There are two reasons for this. First, foreclosures in the Taos market are collectively in worse condition than other fixer uppers. Often the plumbing has frozen and flooded the home, causing structural damage and mold. Second, all renovations run over budget. I know this from personal experience. It took me about four remodels to learn this lesson. The Taos real estate market has been a demanding teacher.

You do not want any market to teach you things. Markets teach by beating you up and taking your lunch money. Here’s a better idea. Enlist the weak real estate market to be your servant. What do I mean by that? Allow the market to bring you a house which has been impacted by the horrendous downturn. Distressed properties have impacted healthy homes by lowering their prices. And tight credit markets have raised lending standards so that even qualified buyers have trouble borrowing. Thus there are fewer buyers and prices continue to drop. At some point all property owners find the need to sell. Eventually those sellers run into this bottleneck.

If a buyer is patient and can wait for these owners to throw in the towel, he may get the buy of a lifetime. In the Taos real estate market prices are down to levels where they were before the bubble began in 2002. So instead of fighting over foreclosures and fixer uppers why not wait. Wait for the market to bring you a home whose price has been brought down to 2002 levels.  You may pay more, but you will have a better quality home with a lot less work ahead of you.

That Taos is an art colony is well known, yet many travel articles focus on Taos’s  outdoor activities, soaring, skiing, hiking and biking, and almost always mention Taos Pueblo’s designation as a United Nations World Heritage Site. But the Smithsonian’s focus on culture mostly ignores our cultural activities. Despite the slow economy our art scene remains vibrant, with artists working everywhere, painting along highways, sketching in coffee houses, and selling their crafts in one of the many craft fairs that take place all year. About half of our galleries have closed, but the Taos Fall Art Festival in late September and Spring Arts and Crafts in May forge ahead just as they have for decades.

If performing arts light your candle, we have multiple theater companies including Metta Theater and Working Class Theater who stage a wide variety of works from Beckett to Broadway. In summer, touring theater companies pass through. And last summer we saw an entirely local production of Shakespeare’s “Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Music is abundant too. We have our own Taos Chamber Music Group, which puts on several concerts each year. Solar Music Fest, a summer rock concert in Kit Carson park, will be headed up this year by Lyle Lovett and Los Lobos. Also in summer, Music from Angel Fire, a chamber festival unites all-star musicians from the world over and performs in many venues around Northern New Mexico.

Unfortunately the Taos Mountain Film Festival succumbed to the proliferation of film festivals in more accessible towns. Taking up the slack is the Taos Shortz Film Festival, three and a half days of short films. Included this year was one full program of locally-made productions.

Writers are the most under-the-radar of artists who inhabit Taos. But if one pays attention to the calendars on radio and newspaper you’ll find dozens of readings, book signings and workshops devoted to written word. Small town, big literary scene.

Lastly, museums. In a town of 6,000 there’s a museum for every thousand residents. In no particular order they are: Harwood Museum of Art; E.I. Blumenschein Home and Museum; La Hacienda de los Martinez;  Kit Carson Home and Museum; Millicent Rogers Museum; Taos Art Museum and Fechin House.

Now you see how Taos made a Best Small Town list based on cultural activities.  And we came in at #2.

Olick’s Tale of Two Markets is that those who’ve lost their homes through foreclosure need places to live.  (Read her article)  So while we steadily build apartments to fill that void, single family housing starts have stalled. Well, of course they have. The builders who pulled permits and threw up spec houses early last fall have experienced sluggish sales. First, there are fewer buyers and second, those who attempt to purchase face impossible lending standards. The Tale of Two Markets that I identified on 28 February are the culprit: the distressed market weighs on the individual homeowners who struggle to sell because they must. This is the Tale of Two Taos Markets. What I call the “shadow inventory” grows daily. It is comprised not only of homes just starting the foreclosure process, but also homes owned by older Americans or families who need to cash out through death or relocation. In other words, the best of times for buyers and the worst of times for sellers.

Diana Olick didn’t really steal my title. Sometimes two people have similar ideas independently of each other. She is a terrific reporter, and CNBC offers terrific programming on real estate, most of which has been grim for years. As I have opined, we may soon claw out of this deep dark hole. It’s been like a bad movie of the Charles Dickens’s novel, a Tale of Two Cities. In this movie real people and real property have been harmed in the making of it.

For the last 25 years lenders have been profiting mightily as homeowners refinanced over and over. But now with interest rates so exorbitantly low, lenders are understandably skittish about holding mortgages for longer durations, such as 30 years.  Interest rates though, like all other facets of our economy, have cycles. And the likelihood that interest rates are at the bottom of a cyclical upswing is very great. The good old days of declining interest rates are probably coming to an end.

This could be a positive development.  When rates begin to move up, housing may well be the beneficiary. First, a rising rate environment will provide lenders with greater margins on their loans and thus more incentive to lend. This could lead to a loosening in the credit markets.

Second, the day will come when rates spike more than just a few basis points. It may coincide with the first couple of Fed rate hikes. Sooner or later, investors and individuals who want a piece of the housing action will get scared that the “cheap-money train” is leaving without them.  As rates rise, so will new loan applications. The recovery in housing will have begun.

You can wait to be sure the recovery is underway, or you can take advantage of the exorbitantly low interest rates now. Bear in mind that the Taos real estate market is extremely small. It doesn’t take very many buyers with the same idea to move the needle. We’ve had major real estate booms after earthquakes, riots, and hurricanes. When they occur, they always lead to a spike in prices. A rise in interest rates may spur enough sales that we get a bump. Then we’ll be looking at higher borrowing costs AND higher prices. You’ll be buying higher-priced property and paying more to borrow.

The flyer discusses how valuations are determined, the limits on valuations, taxpayer exemptions, how to calculate your tax bill, and disclosure of sales prices–among other things. It also addresses the common complaint: “Why did my property value increase…when the market has been declining?” The flyer coaches property owners who wish to protest their taxes.  The flyer should be helpful to those who disagree with their assessments. And it will also help those of us who have simply been confused by it for so long.  Kudos to the Taos County Assessor.

This is fantastic news here at CENTURY21Success in Taos, New Mexico, where several of us are ex-soccer moms and dads. One of us played pro-soccer in Mexico. So the news brings us great joy. We’re surprised and thrilled that the Mother Ship, Century21 Real Estate, is supporting such an increasingly popular game, especially among young people, who may one day need our assistance in buying or selling Taos real estate.

There is a strong affinity between soccer and Taos. The town completed Eco Park, the highest elevation soccer training facility in North America, last year. Already some international soccer clubs in need of high altitude training have visited. Our high school teams are always competitive. The Lady Tigers, our high school team, finished second in the state last fall, defeating schools with enrollments several times that of Taos High. Katy, the freshman daughter of a Century 21 agent, played goalie on that team. She had several shutouts on the way to the championship game. All of the above just adds to Taos’s reputation as Soccertown, U.S.A.

Angel Fire and Colfax County volumes held steady. Winter quarters are slower there. I expect that Colfax County volumes will steadily improve as well. Judging by the number of Texas residents who told me they would not spend another summer there, Angel Fire and environs could see a substantial uptick in sales.

“But it’s so expensive,” most sellers say.

First of all, it doesn’t have to cost you much. If you go through my seller’s tips and really try to weed out your clutter, it will cost only your time and maybe a short-term storage locker. The locker is in case you can’t part with your clutter forever. If you take the next step, hiring a person who stages homes, the cost will be much less than if you hadn’t cleaned out first.

Go through the seller’s tips and follow my steps for cleaning out one-half of the “stuff” you have. Believe me, de-cluttering is the hardest part. Once you finish you will be very happy it’s over. If you have the eye of a decorator you will now be able to rearrange the furniture in an attractive and tasteful manner that makes your home seem larger and more inviting. You would be surprised by how many sellers would rather do nothing and then keep lowering the price until the buyer appears who can “see through” the mess, or imagine what the home could be. Whatever you spend will come back to you and more.

True story: an agent and personal decorator/organizer I know in California offered free staging to sellers who listed with her. One time she listed a particularly cluttered home and, using only the furniture the seller owned, staged it. The seller then decided he liked the home so much that he no longer wanted to sell. This illustrates the power of de-cluttering and staging.

As with Curb Appeal, a staged interior leaves enough to the imagination that buyers can envision how the home will look with them in it. Without de-cluttering and staging, buyers only see how the home looks with you in it.  In this challenging environment Sellers need a leg up on their competitors.  Staging can provide it.