Jim Smith – Page 45 – Jim Smith's Blog

LED Lighting Has Some Health & Vision Side Effects Worth Considering

In my July 18th column, online at www.JimSmithColumns.com, I wrote about my favorite home improvements, including the adoption of LED lighting, which I prefer to CFL lighting and is far more energy efficient than incandescent lighting. In particular, I wrote glowingly, so to speak, about “daylight” LEDs — the whitest light available, so well-named for how it matches the color of bright sunlight.

In our office, I replaced all our “soft white” LEDs with “daylight” LEDs to match the color of sunlight coming through our four Velux sun tunnels.

A reader of that column alerted me to some recent research which showed “daylight” LEDs to be harmful to vision, exacerbating macular degeneration, and disruptive of our circadian rhythm (important for good sleep) specifically because it simulates full natural sunlight.

I urge you to Google “daylight LEDs and health,” as I did, and you’ll find that one of the top links is for a June 2016 American Medical Association policy statement (adopted unanimously at their annual meeting) warning about health and safety problems associated with white LED lighting, so common now in the lighting of American streets.

It was right after learning of this research that I bought a new HP laptop computer and noticed that it offers a “nightlight” setting which automatically changes the screen lighting from white to yellow LED light at sunset. It made me wonder why I was so late to learn about this issue!

The reader who alerted me to this topic suffers from early stage macular degeneration. He said he has replaced all the LED lights in his home with incandescent bulbs. I’m satisfied that changing back to the lower “color temperature” LEDs will be enough. I have noticed that some LED fixtures (like the ones I installed in our conference room) have a switch allowing you to choose between “soft white,” “warm white” and “daylight” temperature settings.

What Requires a Permit, & Does Unpermitted Work Affect Your Ability to Sell?

My July 25th column described how a seller got into a legal dispute from not having disclosed an unpermitted basement finish done decades earlier. That story raised a question common among homeowners — what work requires a permit, and does failure to obtain a permit make it harder to sell a home?

Incorporated cities like Denver, Arvada, Lakewood and Golden issue the permits within their jurisdiction, but residents of unincorporated areas must get permits from their county’s planning and zoning office.

Each jurisdiction has slightly different requirements. For example, Golden lets you install a backyard fence up to 7’ without a permit (unless on a corner lot or in an historic district), but Jeffco requires a permit for any fence over 42 inches tall. Denver is more generous, exempting “posthole-dug fences” up to 8 feet high.

When it comes to structures, whether habitable or not, the requirements are fairly consistent. There is an International Residential Code (IRC) which is updated regularly, and most jurisdictions adopt the updated code with only minor adjustments.

I found only one jurisdiction, Golden, which provides a simple one-page PDF listing what does and does not require a permit. Click here for a link to that PDF. If you are in another city or unincorporated area, you can still expect that document to reflect what your jurisdiction might require of you.

Basically, any modifications to the walls, windows, roof, plumbing or electrical system of a home requires a permit, and it’s a good idea to obtain one, even though you can sell a home which had unpermitted work done, so long as you disclose that fact to your buyer.

Call or visit your jurisdiction’s planning department to find out what permits are and are not required for your home. You’ll find that most jurisdictions don’t require a permit for replacing cabinets, countertops, light fixtures, ceiling fans or plumbing fixtures in existing locations, or for roof or siding repairs/replacement (10% or less).

Denver exempts oil derricks, which I found to be a strange inclusion in its list of exemptions.

As mentioned in my earlier column, the standard Seller’s Property Disclosure form provided in the course of a real estate transaction asks the seller to disclose any work done without the required permit in the previous 12 months. If so, the seller should check “Yes” and use the space provided on the form to describe what was done.

If, however, the seller had work done more than 12 months prior to completing that disclosure form, I recommend that he or she use the comments column to describe the work done without a permit and when it was done.

Typically, this disclosure form is provided to the buyer prior to hiring a professional inspector to conduct a thorough inspection of all the home’s components. That way, the disclosure can be given to the inspector, which would cause him or her to pay special attention to the area of unpermitted work to determine if the work was done “to code” and without defects that the buyer might then ask the seller to fix.

By disclosing all unpermitted work in that document, the seller can forestall any claim after closing such as I described in my July 25th column. Listing agents should ask that question about older unpermitted work and handle it in this manner. I certainly will from now on!

If you’re in an HOA, you probably will need to get approval for repainting the outside of your house, concrete repairs, landscaping changes or even the location and color of exterior radon mitigation equipment — things that don’t typically require a city or county permit.

The reasons that permits are required make sense. Consider, for example, replacing a water heater or furnace. If they are gas appliances, today’s code requires that outside combustion air be provided so that the appliances don’t deplete the oxygen in your home, and gas-fired devices emit deadly carbon monoxide, so it’s important that they be installed correctly. It is only by getting a permit that you ensure the work is inspected by the city or county, which is a good thing, especially when it comes to health and safety.

In those cases, you’re probably hiring a contractor to do the work, and the contractor should be licensed with the city or county where the work is being done and should obtain the permit for you. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, you can get the permit as a homeowner, but the city or county may have you take a written test to show that you’re competent at the work being done — and it will be inspected. (I remember taking such a test when applying for an electrical permit in Denver — I failed the test…)

Permitting fees and requirements cause some homeowners to do work without getting a permit and hope they’re not caught. If the city or county catches you mid-project without a permit — something that happened to me in Denver in the 1990’s — expect them to issue a stop-work order and to double the permit fee.

At least in Golden (speaking again from experience), you can turn yourself in and get a post-facto permit without paying a penalty, but you’ll need to show that the work was done to code and have it inspected.

Property taxes are based on a market valuation of your home by the county assessor, and getting a permit for your finished basement, new deck or detached garage, etc. could result in a higher valuation and therefore higher property taxes for your home, but that’s not a good reason to avoid going through the permitting process. How much will your taxes go up? Let’s say your basement finish cost $50,000. It’s unlikely your home’s value will increase by the full amount of any renovation, but even if it did, the assessment rate is now 7.15%, which means your assessed valuation would only increase by $3,575. If your mill levy rate is, say, 100 mills, that means your annual property taxes would increase by only $357. But it won’t. And if you were to spend the same $50,000 on a kitchen or bathroom remodel, it might not increase the assessor’s valuation of your home at all, even though it was permitted, because it didn’t add any finished square footage to your home.

What the assessor values your home at is not based on what you paid for it, and neither is it based on what you spend to improve it. Your home’s valuation is based on the sale of comparable homes to determine what your home might have sold for on June 30th of the most recent even numbered year. Thus, even if you purchased your home on June 30, 2018 (the valuation date), the assessor won’t use what you paid for your home as the value of your home.

Theoretically, the county assessor’s office could monitor MLS listings and compare the description of your home with what their records show. But I have never heard of anyone’s assessor records being changed based solely on an MLS listing of their house.

If you have any questions that this column did not answer, please feel free to call me or any of our agents at the phone numbers below. I’m always happy to hear from my readers, and all of us are happy to answer your real estate questions.

Jim Smith, Broker/Owner, 303-525-1851

Broker Associates:

Carol Milan — 720-982-4941
Norm Kowitz — 303-229-3891
Andrew Lesko — 720-710-1000
David Dlugasch — 303-908-4835
Chuck Brown — 303-885-7855
Kristi Brunel — 303-525-2520
Carrie Lovingier — 303-907-1278
Jim Swanson — 303-929-2727

Amazon’s Deal With Real Estate Megafirm Realogy Could Be a Game Changer

Maybe you’ve heard about the recent deal between Amazon and Realogy in which they give buyers $1,000 to $5,000 in smart-home products if you let them assign you an agent.

Unless you’re in real estate, you probably never heard of Realogy. They’re a holding company which owns multiple real estate franchisers that you have heard of — Century 21, Coldwell Banker, Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate, Sotheby’s International Realty and ERA Real Estate.

Denver is one of 15 markets where Amazon’s “Turnkey” program is being rolled out, with the intention of making it nationwide.

Putting on my journalist hat, I pretended to be a home buyer and went to Amazon’s website for this program. I filled in my name, my non-Realtor email address, and cell number, and within a minute received a screening call from a man at Realogy affiliate OJO Labs, who asked me where I was looking (Golden & Arvada), price range ($500,000), and whether I owned and would be selling my current home. (I said yes.) Note: Since many or most buyers have homes to sell, this program is effective at generating seller leads, too.

Then he explained (because I asked) that he was sending a text message to all the participating agents in my market and the first agent who responded to the text would be my agent. I would not be able to select the agent.

Before he connected me to that agent, I asked her name and Googled it. She’s with a brokerage in Longmont, 45 miles by car from Golden. Of course, she didn’t tell me that herself, hoping I’d hire her to buy a home and probably to sell my current home. She also overstated her experience, which I was able to check online.

After saying I wouldn’t work with her, I received a call from a second agent. This one was from a Denver office of the same brokerage and knew me, so my pretense ended with her, but I was able to interview her about the program.

She confirmed that the program is run through Realogy’s relocation business called Cartus and that the participating agents are the ones who already get relocation leads. This program will be a windfall for those agents because the leads could result in both a listing and a purchase, whereas relocation leads are only for a either a listing or a purchase. It will be a windfall for Cartus, too, since, like all relocation companies, they take 30% or more of the agent’s commission. Amazon must be getting a big fee, too, which ultimately comes from the commission paid by sellers to the participating agents.

As I told Aldo Svaldi of the Denver Post when he interviewed me, this is a really smart move for Amazon and a great deal for Realogy, and I suppose companies like Golden Real Estate could lose market share, even though we do offer other advantages to using us, including free use of our own moving trucks, boxes and packing materials. And when a buyer also lists his or her home with us, we also provide free labor, saving our clients thousands of dollars.

In Real Estate, Truth Matters, Unlike in Politics and the Legal Profession

I was brought up to respect the truth by always telling the truth and expecting others to tell the truth. My father drummed this into me, as did the private schools that I attended. My boarding school, Choate, had an honor code (and still does) that required students to handwrite on every test or paper submitted, “I pledge this paper on my honor,” which we knew was shorthand for the following longer statement, “I pledge upon my honor as a gentleman that I have neither given nor received help on this paper.” (The phrasing has changed a little since the school went coed, but I’m told by the school that it’s still used and is, in fact, framed on the wall in every classroom and academic space: “On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid.” In language classes, it’s posted in the language being taught – even in Latin!)

To this day, it upsets me when someone knowingly lies, and it pains me that some of America’s leaders, who serve as role models, have made lying in the face of clear evidence acceptable instead of condemned, as it should be.

So, I’m glad that I ended up in the real estate profession, where truth is important and is still honored. The National Association of Realtors, to which we agents are required to belong if we join any major and most minor brokerages, has a Code of Ethics to which we swear allegiance upon induction as members. In the preamble to the Code, the word “integrity” appears twice, including in this paragraph:

“The term REALTOR® has come to connote competency, fairness, and high integrity resulting from adherence to a lofty ideal of moral conduct in business relations. No inducement of profit and no instruction from clients ever can justify departure from this ideal.”

The Code of Ethics even commands Realtors to take action when they find another Realtor violating the Code. I myself have filed (and won) an ethics complaint against another Realtor who advertised that he was selling “4 homes every week,” violating the article which says members shall not misrepresent their level of success. That agent was ordered to stop making that claim in his advertising.

With the bidding wars of recent years, buyer clients have understandably wondered whether other agents were telling the truth when claiming multiple above-listing-price offers on a listing. I am pleased to tell them, and to state here, that I don’t recall ever being lied to by another Realtor, although I do worry on occasion when the agent on the other side of a transaction is a non-Realtor. Agents who are not NAR members don’t have a code of ethics to which they subscribe, which is why NAR advertising has often urged consumers to “make sure your agent is a Realtor.”

State laws regarding real estate do impose requirements of an ethical nature that aren’t imposed on other professions such as car sales. When you buy a used car (or anything else), it’s usually without any disclosure of past or current defects, but state law, like the Realtor Code of Ethics, requires that sellers of existing homes disclose all known past or current defects, and we can be disciplined even to the extent of losing our real estate license if we, as listing agents, fail to disclose a defect, past or present, of which we are aware.

Since every brokerage is also responsible for the actions of its agents (another term for the managing broker is “responsible broker”), every brokerage should instruct its broker associates to refuse to list any property where the owner is unwilling to fully disclose all problems or defects with the home. I’m happy to report that I have never had a seller who didn’t recognize and accept his or her obligation to disclose known defects.

One of the standard forms for every listing is the “Seller’s Property Disclosure” (SPD). The document itself is voluntary, but (1) I’ve never had a seller who refused to complete it, and (2) failure to complete it does not relieve the seller and his/her listing agent of their responsibility to disclose all known defects or problems.

The SPD is very thorough in the questions it asks, but one shortcoming is when it asks about unpermitted renovations. It only asks the seller to disclose renovations done without a permit in the last 12 months. This creates a loophole which can be exploited by an unscrupulous buyer after closing.

Consider the following scenario: the seller does not disclose a basement that was finished decades earlier because it was done professionally — and the SPD didn’t ask about it. A few weeks after closing there’s a plumbing leak in the renovation. The buyer hires a lawyer who takes the seller into mediation (required by the contract), where the lawyer asserts that the seller told a neighbor, “There’s a plumbing problem, but we’ll let the buyer take care of it.” The lawyer had requested separate rooms for the mediation, so there is no way to confront the buyer or lawyer on what the seller knows is a totally bogus assertion. The seller would have to reject mediation and go to trial, at great expense, to make the buyer produce the false claim from a neighbor. So the seller agrees to settle for a 5-figure amount, plus his already high legal fees.

To me, this is legal bullying, but such tactics are sadly a tool that some lawyers are willing to utilize.

Minneapolis Ends Single-Family Zoning — But Why?

I was surprised to read that Minneapolis has “become the first major U.S. city to end single-family zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.”

The premise that single-family zoning was actually intended as a tool of de jure racial segregation was news to me, but that’s what the article said.

Influencing the Minneapolis action was a 2017 book, The Color of Law, by Richard Rosenstein. The book’s subtitle is “A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”

I’m not saying that I agree with the premise, but I find the argument both interesting and somewhat compelling.

The Dec. 7, 2018, article in Slate said, “Opening up Minneapolis’ wealthiest, most exclusive districts to triplexes, the theory goes, will create new opportunities for people to move for schools or a job, provide a way for aging residents to downsize without leaving their neighborhoods, help ease the affordability crunch citywide, and stem the displacement of lower-income residents in gentrifying areas.”

Slate describes Minneapolis as a “staunchly liberal” city, so this may be an isolated action, not likely to be replicated elsewhere, including here.

Some Favorite Home Improvements When Purchasing a New-to-Me Home

Who doesn’t want to make some improvements on a home they have just purchased? Here are some of my personal favorites.

Energy efficiency is very important to Rita and me, so the first thing we do is pay for an energy audit by someone like Andrew Sams of Alpine Building Performance to identify opportunities for making the home more air-tight. This would likely include blowing more insulation into walls or ceilings and caulking around windows. It might also include installing an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) to bring fresh air into the home. This device warms cold outside air in the winter and cools hot outside air in the summer by means of a heat exchanger.

I love bringing sunlight into a home, not with traditional skylights but with sun tunnels. Most people are familiar with the Solatube brand, but I prefer the Velux brand. I had Mark Lundquist of Design Skylights install a 22-inch Velux sun tunnel in my windowless garage and a 14-inch sun tunnel in my windowless laundry room — and four large Velux sun tunnels in the Golden Real Estate office. Ah, sunlight!

Speaking of sunlight, we replaced every light bulb is our house with LEDs which are “daylight” color (like sunlight), not cool white or warm white. CFLs and incandescent bulbs are so 2010!

Installing solar photovoltaic panels is a no-brainer for us, especially now that the cost has dropped so much. Your roof doesn’t have to face due south. Southeast and southwest are good enough. (That’s our situation.) Since you might be driving an electric car someday, install as much PV as Xcel Energy allows to cover that future load. If you have just purchased an EV, Xcel will allow you to install more panels based on anticipated future use.

Don’t you hate climbing a curb to enter your driveway? Developers install those mountable curbs the entire length of the streets in new subdivisions, not knowing exactly where each driveway will be. One of the first things I would do (and have done) is to hire a concrete company to replace the mountable curb with a smooth entrance. It cost over $2,000 for our 3-car-wide driveway, but I love it every time I enter from the street! Caution: the sidewalk will now be sloped slightly and pedestrians could more easily slip on ice, so be prepared to salt your sidewalk to eliminate icing!

When your gas forced air furnace needs replacing, consider replacing it with a heat-pump furnace or mini-splits. And when your gas water heater needs replacing, I suggest buying a heat-pump water heater. The cost is about the same, and, by converting to electricity for both, you will have eliminated the most common sources of carbon monoxide poisoning in your home.

Other improvements I’d consider include: Replacing carpeting with tile in bathrooms; and replacing regular glass with Low-E glass on south-facing windows to reduce the harmful effects of sunlight on furniture, hardwood floors and artwork.

Video Is Finding Its Way Into Buyer Inspection Reports to Illustrate Issues

Video has been a great listing tool at Golden Real Estate for a decade, but it is finding its way into other aspects of real estate, too. For example, we will often shoot a rough-cut video tour of a listing for an out-of-town buyer who has asked us to preview a property for them.

At a closing last Wednesday, the wife of the out-of-state buyer told me that she saw the listing for the first time in person during the final walk-through. The husband had seen it in person, but she said our narrated video tour was enough for her to agree with her husband to submit an offer..

So, yes, narrated videos like ours are a great listing and selling tool.

But last week, a home inspector came to our office seeking our patronage and said he includes videos in his inspection reports. What a great idea!

I had been so used to getting printed inspection reports (PDFs) that it hadn’t occurred to me that reports could include video. But an increasingly common delivery method for inspection reports is to have the report “in the cloud” and provide a link to it. That approach opens up the possibility of having video clips and not just still photos. I will recommend that inspector to a future buyer, but you can be sure that I also got on the phone and shared that idea with the inspectors I’ve been referring heretofore, some of them for over a decade.

I’ve received inspection reports that were in the cloud before, but none of them contained links to video clips, which could really help to illustrate some of the defects which inspectors uncover.

I hope this idea takes off and becomes a standard in the inspection industry. Now that every cell phone and every digital camera has video capability, it would require no additional hardware for an inspector to shoot video instead of still photos when a video would do a better job of illustrating the issue or defect being described.

One of the advantages of videos is that they include sound. It’s a great way, for example, to illustrate an overly noisy fan motor or garage door opener or the sound as well as the motion of water under a plastic vapor barrier.

With narration by the inspector, a video can also provide more context to a problem, such as its location.

Digital Editions & Email Newsletters Are the Future of Newspapers

Are you taking advantage of the “Digital Replica Edition” of the Denver Post? You will not only be able to page through today’s paper, including every YourHub section, but also 30 days of past issues.

As you page through the digital replica of each section, you can single click on any article or ad to make it larger, or double-click on it for more features including printing. On articles, you can enlarge type size for readability.

As subscription prices rise and the circulation of newspapers keeps declining, digital editions are becoming more and more popular. The Denver Post, like other daily newspapers and magazines (and the Denver Business Journal), charges for access to its digital edition, but it is free with any print subscription, even if you pay for less than 7-day home delivery.

Email newsletters and alerts are another digital frontier for newspapers. They contain links that take you to the full articles on their websites. Digital is increasingly how news will be delivered and how newspapers will survive.

If you’re dropping your print subscriptions to newspapers, remember that you can receive my “Real Estate Today” column by email, too. Send your request to me at Jim@GoldenRealEstate.com!

Renovate Your Home for Your Own Enjoyment, Not to Help It Sell Better

Sellers often ask whether they should renovate prior to putting their home on the market. The short answer is “no.” Unless you’re fixing an eyesore, you will be wasting your money.

So, what’s an “eyesore”? I use the term to define something that draws a buyer’s immediate attention in a negative way — a torn carpet, a damaged countertop, a broken window, a weathered and peeling front door, etc.

The closer an eyesore is to the home’s entrance, the more important it will be to fix. If the eyesore is in a far-flung bedroom or the basement, I’m less concerned, so long as the main part of the house is really attractive. By the time a buyer gets to that eyesore, they will either have fallen in love with the house or not. If they have fallen in love by then, the buyer’s response will be more forgiving — “Oh, that’s easy to fix.”

Eliminating eyesores is worth every penny. Other improvements, such as updating a bathroom or kitchen that’s not an eyesore, may return some or much of what you spend, but probably not all. On such improvements, consider the condition of the real estate market. If there’s a shortage of homes like yours — say, a ranch-style home in a desirable neighborhood — then you could probably minimize even the eyesore fixes. If your home will have lots of competition, fixing those eyesores becomes far more important. This is a topic on which you benefit from speaking with a Realtor, given our ready access to such data.

Committed as we at Golden Real Estate are to sustainability, I hate to say it, but installing solar panels produces about the lowest return on investment when it comes to selling your home. You should only invest in solar if you intend to stay in your home for at least five years. You will get your return on investment from the reduced energy bills, not in a higher sale price for your home. In our case, we installed 10 kilowatts of solar at our home, but that was seven years ago, and we don’t plan to sell anytime soon. If you make the same decision, please buy solar instead of leasing. Selling a home with a leased solar system is not as attractive to buyers.

As stated in the headline, make improvements that you want to live with and enjoy, and make them now, not when you’re about to sell. It matters little to Rita and me whether our wonderful new kitchen will return the $40,000 we spent on renovating it, since we will have enjoyed it ourselves for many years. And if you know you’re going to sell eventually, but not soon, spend the money now and enjoy the improvement!

Some of the other improvements Rita and I made soon after buying our home and continue to appreciate over 7 years later include installing Solatubes (to bring sunlight into our windowless garage and laundry room) and an energy audit followed by weatherization improvements. We had acacia hardwood flooring installed, and retrofitted the south-facing windows with Low-E glass. A hybrid gas furnace/heat pump system heats and cools our home. We also installed a hot water recirculation line to provide instant hot water at all faucets.

How to Research Potential Listing Agents

A shortcut that I created, www.Find DenverRealtors.com, takes you to the page on Denver’s MLS for searching agents by name. Note: If you don’t find the agent you’re looking for right away, try entering only their last name, since they may use a nickname or have an initial you didn’t enter. When the agent’s name appears, click on his/her name to go to another web page where you can read his or her profile (assuming they created one) and see current and sold listings, unless they have none.

Click on their listings to see how the agent described each home on the MLS. Did they list all the rooms, not just bedrooms and bathrooms, providing dimensions, or just enter the mandatory fields? Keep in mind that the best indicator of how listing agents will serve you is how they have served previous sellers.

Looking at those listings will answer the most important questions which you’d ask in person, but you won’t have to take their word — the truth is right there in front of you. You’ll learn, for example, whether they did point-and-shoot pictures or had a professional photographer shoot magazine quality photos, and whether they created a real narrated video tour, as we do, or merely a slide show with music.