July Update

It has been a wonderful summer, so far…let’s finish it out well!

One of my favorite little trite sayings is “finish well”. It is hard sometimes in the middle of a difficult situation to think about the end or finish line, by keeping in mind the “finish well” phrase it helps me keep on task ensuring the work and toil in the middle is done well also. Don’t give up, finish well!

Speaking of projects my pheasant project is continuing to go strong. I’ve learned a lot about how easy it is for these little guys to die, and how easily they can escape from what I thought was pretty secure area. And man are they fast. They are now about 7 weeks old. In another couple of weeks I’m going to have to either open up the pen and allow them to start to disperse on their own, or release about 1/2 of the remaining birds to the wild and hold onto the other 1/2 for another couple of months. From everything I’m reading on the subject it seems they do best to be released at 8-10 weeks or adulthood. I like the idea of seeing some of these guys in their full color, but don’t have enough space to keep the 28 that are still alive as they get bigger.

We had a great 4th of July weekend just outside of Weaverville CA, We rode our horses in a fifty mile race on Saturday and then again on Sunday. We had the pleasure of riding along some of the gold mining ditches. In this part of the country the miners would divert water from streams and put them through huge water guns to wash down the mountainside to get at the gold in the ground. It was terribly destructive but the residual ditches sure make for great trails.

I did get a couple of  correct answers to last months trivia question, so I think this month I thought you might enjoy a little history trivia.

In July of  1850, a doctor at the “Mansion House” in Apalachicola, Florida amazed some guests whom he had invited by serving them drinks with ice. They were amazed not because it was a dry town…..it was not….the guests were amazed because this was Apalachicola, this was Florida, this was July…..yet here was ice. How deep could his icehouse go…..how many feet of sawdust had he needed to pile up to save these few cubes of ice?

Then the doctor (Dr. John Gorrie) further amazed his guests by bringing more ice…..he brought out whole brick-like blocks of it. The guests were stunned. How had he managed to save this much ice…..in Florida…..into July! Dr. Gorrie laughed and told them he had made the ice only yesterday. “Sure!” they said. “You made ice in July?” “Who the hell are you…..Mother Nature with a bad calendar watch?”

Dr. Gorrie must have laughed again and told them he had found a way of compressing water and then air in a way to chill things enough to produce ice. “Wow!” said the guests “Now you can open a bar!” Dr. Gorrie looked at them strangely…..”Bar?…..This is a cure for malaria!”

Dr. Gorrie had noticed that malaria (a big problem in 1850) seemed to happen near wetlands (like Apalachicola) when it was warm. So he determined it must be the hot air that caused malaria. So, if you cooled the hot air down…..you should be able to stop malaria. That night Gorrie raised enough funds to install his ice-making, anti-malaria machine at the United States Marine Hospital. The main effect was that the rooms were cooler and the patients were cooler but the “yellow fever” continued. (It would be a half century later until Walter Reed would prove that the cause was mosquitoes who thrived in the hot weather…..not the weather itself.)

I’m watching the Gilroy area and it looks to me like prices are cooled a little, nothing in terms of a downward trend but the basic cost per sq.ft number is stabilized over the last few months at $337-$340. 

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Market data for Gilroy CA July 2015

• 110 homes on the market, flat from a month ago and down 21% from last year
• 38 median days on market compared to 34 a year ago
• Median price: $758,400 vs $729,000 a year earlier
• Median size: 2,280 sq. ft.

This includes condo’s and single family homes. Data pulled from Movoto.com

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Mortgage rates are moving around in a plus or minus .25% range. They are actually almost flat from 30 days ago. We are still expecting an up tick by the end of the year. Let the market’s settle out on Greece and expect to see more pressure for higher mortgage rates.