Wow, it almost has already been a year again since I have blogged about where to celebrate Forth of July in the Phoenix Metro area.

Most of the links in last years post point to updated information, however Scottsdale’s Family Barbecue will be celebrated at the Scottsdale Stadium.

photo credit: phxpma

If you are not sure where to celebrate Independence Day in the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area and looking for another 4th of July community or special event then go check out phoenix.about.com.

The Arizona Republic has also a list of events here.

There is a very good chance that the Phoenix DUI Taskforce saturation Patrols and other law enforcement will be out and around the valley this coming holiday. Needless to say who they will be targeting…So if you are going to party make sure you have a designated driver or use public transportation. Some of yo may think there is not much public transportation action going on in the valley, however the light rail is coming very soon. Having said that, RailLife.com is a great source for learning more about the areas and venues surrounding the light rail line and Nick Bastian covers the 4th of July festivities in Tempe on the RailLife Blog.

Enjoy Independence Day 2008 and be safe!

The Valley of the Sun is a great place for outdoor activities and sporting events all year round. This coming weekend, Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe are jointly hosting the P.F. Chang Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon.

This fun event (and I freely admit that I prefer being a spectator) is not only for endurance junkies but also for music junkies alike. Over 60 bands will turn 39.3 miles into one big street fest. There are two routes; one is a full marathon and the other is a half marathon.

On the Friday and Saturday before the marathon, near the start line at 14th Avenue and Washington in downtown Phoenix, over 100 exhibitors will be present at the Health and Fitness Expo inside the Phoenix Convention Center. The post-race concert celebration will be held at the Tempe Beach Park.

For all of you who have to go places and things to see in the Phoenix Metro Area, Be Warned!!! There are going to be a lot of road closures and so if you thought about holding an open house anywhere near the marathon routes (the full course and half course), you might want to re-think it as it will probably not be a good idea this Sunday… even though it is on the lucky 13th.

Our house is right near mile marker 22, near the end of the marathon course. We will literally be able to see a lot of the action from our front porch and a genre of R & B, Alternative Pop Rock, Christian Rock, Americana and Blue Grass is just within a short walking distance. However the question of where the beer tasting is remains open. After all, it is a healthy beverage but a driver license will be required for the sampling…

It has been approximately two months since Tempe Market Place officially opened. The open-air shopping and entertainment destination sits on piece of real estate which once encompassed five landfills and had 52 different landowners. After 4 years of development, Tempe Marketplace officially opened September 28th and is currently gearing up for the holiday season. Approximately 120 stores and a gazillion restaurants make this a one stop destination to do all or most of ones holiday-shopping.

Personally, I am not a big fan of strip malls and the cookie-cutter franchise approach that include big-box stores, however, it sure beats having a nasty looking landfill to look at. In retrospect, it must have been a daunting task to redevelop 1.3 million square feet of hazardous waste land; and building a mega mall probably was the only way to generate investment and tax dollars to make it happen.

Check out this video about the project:

Joe and Rudy, of Blog Tour USA and Sellsius Real Estate Blog pulled into the Macyo’s parking lot earlier this afternoon for a little pit-stop in Arizona.

Damon Pace of IncredibleAgent.com, a sponsor of the Blog Tour USA hosted the get-together and also introduced the free Incredible Agent website platform at this event.

Of course a lot of people turned up at this event and it is needless to say that Jonathan was absolutely correct with his prediction and this turned out to be a very fun evening.

Rudy interviewing John L. Wake

John L. Wake

Rudy the Cameraman

Greg Gotcher and (hopefully I remembered correctly) Monique

Joe with John

Damon Pace of Incredible Agent

Jonathan Dalton & Dave Smith

Jay Thompson & ???

Now, Joe and Rudy are headed for San Diego and still have plenty of miles to cover until they reach their final destination in San Francisco for BloggersConnect.

Have a save trip!

Michael explained all the features and possibilities while we were chatting on meebo on his blog. During our chat conversation Michael surprised me by offering accssess to the Altos Reports while they were betatesting- I was thrilled and offered to help during betatesting and on several occasions I helped by comparing MLS data to the Altos reports.

Finally, Altos Research Reports are available for Phoenix and I could not resist displaying the median home price charts on the blog.

Look over at the right side of this page, and scroll down until you see the Market Stats heading with a chart right under it. That chart shows you the median price of real estate. The range of prices is on the left axis, and the time span is on the bottom.

Pause for a moment and you’ll see that the chart changes every couple of seconds, and scrolls through Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Gilbert, Glendale, Peoria, Avondale, Surprise, and Buckeye, AZ. You’ll also see a significant difference in the charted line depending on which chart you’re looking at.

For instance, Mesa and Glendale show a steady decline, Scottsdale shows a sharp drop and steep recovery, and Paradise Valley keeps going up. Of course, you have to look at the price ranges to get a clear picture.

• That decline in Glendale is $7,000 down from a high of $300,000, or about 2.3%.
• But the range for Scottsdale is only $5,000 with a high of $799,000, which is only 0.63%.
• And in Paradise Valley that increase is $150,000 but it’s on a base of $2,825,000, so that’s 5.3%.

This is just the surface and a sample of the excellent work done by Altos Research. Their real time real estate market intelligence makes fascinating reading, even for people who are not turned on by statistics. Most important, the information can help keep you ahead of the curve whether you are a home seller, buyer, or real estate investor. Their weekly market profiles show pricing trends, and the executive summary shows not just median home price trends, but also other important measures such as days on the market and inventory. So why are Altos Reports different?

A lot of systems will provide you with an estimate of a home’s price using previously sold properties as sales comparables. While this number is nice to know, it lacks in a few critical areas. For example, the sample size of comparable sales is often too small (just a handful of homes that sold over a given time period) to draw any reasonable conclusions about what the market is doing right now. In a real estate market that may change rapidly, this information is insufficient to help you make informed decisions .

In other words, most people are too focused on recent sales data versus looking at absorption rates and the trend of asking prices when trying to predict where the market is headed.

I admit it, I love this kind of in-depth information. Thanks to Altos Research, I’m able to make it available to my blog visitors, too. Just click on the chart in the sidebar and select “Please send me the Altos Research Report” in the Required Contact Reason dropdown-box and don’t forget to include your ZIP code……

Liking what I read I decided to give my link-love to both of them.

This was the cause to the effect and I received an email directly to me from my blog.

Hallo Chris, Ich las schließlich mehr über dich. Du kommst aus Österreich. Quellen meine Frau aufwuchs in Österreich hervor. Wir waren dort letzter Winter gerecht. Groß, dich zu treffen. Dank für die Verbindung übrigens. Danke, Shailesh

The “bad German” cought my attention and by reading it to the end I figured out it was a machine-translation from the Google Translator. Translating it to English it says: Hi Chris, I finally read more about you. You are from Austria. Sources my wife grew out of in Austria. Big meeting you. Thank for the connection by the way.

The machine did actually a pretty good job translating and I recognized the URL in the email signature. It was from the Arizona Mortgage Guru, the blog I just read the day before thanks to Jay Thompson’s previous blog post Blogs of the Week: Two More Arizona Real Estate Blogs.

Not having explored Shailesh’s blog entirely yet, I was excited to find out that his wife his from the home country - Austria. You know, “birds of a feather - flock together” and I sent Shailesh an email back (unfortunately Google does not offer Nepalese to English machine-translations) and next thing I know we are meeting at a Starbucks.

Sometimes it is crazy how small this world is and we discovered so many commonalities. We both are expatriates, English is our second language, we have ties to Austria and education, different previous careers and detours, and we both blog about real estate.

There were too many things to talk about and so little time, so I hope that we’ll continue our conversations.

Of course Shailesh beat me to writing a blog post about our meeting and I would not know where to start to return his kind words about me. But I have a feeling that this causality may lead to something…….thanks to Jay…