At the “African Ice” Shack in Cottonwood Heights, after ordering your snow cone from a myrid of flavors you receive a coin; A shilling for each snow cone ordered. The customer then has a choice of three different loan participants in which to place the shilling. Why?

To “Shave the World” according to the sign at “African Ice”.  Insert your shilling into one of the three containers and you are helping to fund someone a loan to start a small business in Africa. Many of the participants are women in Africa trying to provide for their family by having a small businesses.

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 I ran across an article on a site called the Real Estate Radio Blog USA. I thought it was appropriate for our times.

Do You Know Where Your Cottonwood Heights Realtor Is?

The article talks about how many real estate agents are actually part time. What is the duty of an agent to tell a client that the agent does not have the time to devote to selling their home that they really deserve?

Do sellers ask the simple question of are you a full time Real Estate Agent? Or better to ask do you work any other jobs?

Usually the clues that they are working another job is when the always return your calls between 12-1 PM or after 5 PM. Or if you are trying to schedule a showing and they ask if that is for a pick up or delivery.

What about the broker’s role in this? Should the broker assign a full time person to the task and have the part timer as the co-agent?  

Can a seller sue for damages? Personally I think they could or at least should if they have been damaged. The argument that the broker has in court is that the home has been on a few web sites including the MLS so therefore it has been publically exposed and that the broker is actively trying to sell the house.

I think the real damage is in the missed opportunities. When an agent or a buyer calls with an interest in the property and no one returns their calls within a reasonable time they move on. My favorite is when you call an agent on a Friday afternoon to show over the weekend and they call you back Monday afternoon. They start talking to you as if you called them 3 minutes ago.

Do you want fries with that house?

Disclaimer: This is no way a discredit to those that are full time professionals working in the service industry. I am sure you are just as frustrated with all the real estate agents now working in your industry too.

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Schools Out in Cottonwood Heights. Families will start going on vacations, some will move to a larger home and some will down size. But it is very important to pay attention because there are kids on bikes and they are running around with the energy and excitement we wish we had.

So please drive careful

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Cottonwood Heights Home

Here is an article on Pricing Your Home from www.3PoundsOfRealEstate.com on doing a CMA.

The most common method for pricing a home is the CMA or the Comparative Market Analysis, Comparing the subject property to the homes that have recently sold.

Although an official appraisal can go back 6 months, I don’t like to go more than 3-4 months.

Once I have gathered the comparable sold data you will notice a range. I will then take the high and the low and then I will establish a center line. Then based on the … Continued

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Movies In The Parks Series

This Summerthe Cottonwood Heights Parks & Recreation Service Area Presents Movies In The Parks Series

Join the fun under the stars this summer! There will be a 30 ft. “screen on the green” FREE for young and old to enjoy at dusk! Bring a picnic dinner and enjoy the inflatable bouncy rides starting at 7pm. For more information, visit

http://www.cottonwoodheights.com/

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Cottonwood Heights Real Estate Market Statistics

Cottonwood Heights Statistics are not quite pure yet, not all databases track as Cottonwood Heights, as some still track as Salt Lake City. Our searching tools are grid based and of course the City of Cottonwood Heights does not follow straight lines.

But we are for the most part about 97-98% good.

Cottonwood Heights homes are selling at a normal and healthy pace. Of course there are homes ranging from 2 Bedroom 1 Bath Condos for $135,000 to $3,000,000 Mansions on 7 Acres overlooking the Valley.

Homes between $200-400,000 are selling in and around 39 days.

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Zillow is the most recent listing aggregator to enter into an agreement with Keller Williams Realty International to get a direct feed.

KW has created their own listing system called KWLS. This is in response to the fact that there are over 900 MLS’s in North America and that makes pushing listings up stream challenging to say the least. Besides once a listing is entered into the MLS the data belongs to the MLS and not the broker. Meaning if the broker wants to display their listings elsewhere they have re-create the data. So with the advent of the KWLS all KW agents in North America can enter their listings in one central database to push out to third parties. So KW agents are now marketing their listings on AOL, Google, Trulia, Yahoo Zillow and others.

Some of the features that the KW agents have at their disposal is they can have up to 30 images, multiple virtual tours, up to 20 documents, links to area information, open house banners.

While a lot of brokers are working hard and have created a web presence KW is the only one that is giving these tools directly to the agents that are out in the fields selling houses.

 It is going to be interesting to see how much more market share KW gains in this market cycle.

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Wow what a wonderful winter we have had from a snow perspective. The mountains were still getting snow after the resort’s scheduled time to close. It has definitely been wet, lawns are looking very green and all is good.

Then there is the law of cause and affect, or Newton’s third law “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

With all the snow in the mountains, if we get hot fast we can see some heavy runoff.

This may bring back scenes of the City Creek flood of 1983. This episode is obviously the extreme to what could happen.

The City of Cottonwood Heights has implemented the “Fill Your Own” sandbag program for this spring. The sand and bags will be just west Cottonwood Heights Elementary School by late April.

A quote from the City’s web site “It’s Better to have Sand Bags and No Runoff than Runoff and No Sand Bags”.

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The city of Cottonwood Heights has an ordinance 15.36.050

Cottonwood Heights

Maximum payment for tenant application fee

Apartment owners, operators and managers shall not charge an application fee in excess of twenty-five dollars per applicant.

Then it goes to say that “The fee charged reasonably represents the actual incremental costs of processing the application, including but not limited to, the cost of checking credit history, criminal history references, and verification of references and other information on the application.”

I don’t know about you but that looks a like a lot more than $25 worth of work. If the City of CWH were running an application I wonder if the same $25 would apply.

There is no reason that I can see to why a legitimate business owner cannot charge more if they wanted to.

It seems to me the city went to EBay and found some old set of city ordinances cheap and said these look good and used them.

Like the ordinance that was written about in the CWH Valley Journal on Snow Removal. The ordinance was 1 hour after it stops snowing. Three city officials were approached by TV Reporter right after a storm. The ordinance was changed.

I am not here to pick on the city, I personally think they are doing a great job and I am proud to be a citizen of Cottonwood Heights.

I just do not like any government agency telling any business what they can charge. I am in agreement with gouging laws, where it is illegal to charge excessive amounts for life sustaining essentials in the wake of a disaster.

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 Before You Remodel In

Cottonwood Heights

Watch The Video Below

 Spring starts many things in most areas, including Home Improvement Projects. From little landscapping projects to full room addittions.

I wrote an article last Novemeber on 3 Pounds of Real Estate  Why There Is A Lot Of Remodeling Going On In Cottonwood Heights (84121)*?
The prices have gone up so much in the last three - four years that selling and replacing the house is not much of an option.The average Sq Ft price in September 2004 was $94 and has gone to $151 per foot.
People are adding on to their houses, I have seen one that has doubled in size. More and more are adding over the garage in the multi levels. People are replacing windows, stuccoing, new kitchens, and new bathrooms. If you bought a small home in the early to mid ’90s, tearing it down would be a very viable option.Let’s face it, if you took the $57 per foot and added on to your existing Cottonwood Heights Home you could not go out and find a better deal. This a great place to live, named in the top 100 Cities by Money Magazine.*Because Cottonwood Heights as a City only goes back less than three years, we have to use the zip code which also includes Big Cottonwood Canyon. The Canyon activity is not enough to sway the prices for The City of Cottonwood Heights.

I found this little video on my friend Alex Goldie’s Site RealTopics from Chicago. It is about a web site that promotes itself as a pre-screener of Contractors.

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