Kid’s Calendar of Activities
Being the proud parent of a growing and curious 2 year old, we can be challenged with finding things for her to do.  Recently a friend of ours sent us a link to Raising Arizona Kids website where we found a great calendar that shows activities by day.  We’ve found all sorts of things to do to keep our little one happy and challenged. Raising Arizona Kids Calendar I will warn you that this site doesn’t play well with Internet Explorer (can’t blame it), so use Firefox or Safari.

Vacant House Scam
This isn’t a new scam and probably under our current market conditions, isn’t likely to go away soon.  As a property owner that leases property, I’ve had applicants verify my status as the owner on several occasions.  Here is the alert straight from ARMLS: A recent scam reported to ARMLS® involves tenants moving into a pending short sale listing. The surprised listing agent contacted the owner who had not rented the property to anyone. The tenants (two women with two children) were physically moving in and had turned on utilities in their name. The sign and the lock box were removed, and all locks were re-keyed.  The tenants responded to a

Interesting Green Site
While I was doing some research from an article I was reading, I ran across a rather interesting and appealling site on Green topics.  Sustain Lane on this site I learned how to make a temporary indoor composite container to how McDonald’s is going green.  It was easy to burn a couple of hours looking around this site and picking up little bits of info on Green.  So if you are looking for a new website on green topics, check it out. Search Phoenix, AZ MLSCopyright © 2009

Phoenix Rank as a Safe City
Forbes.com published their list of the 40 safest cities in America.  They took the 40 largest cities and looked at data from crime stats, work-place deaths, traffic deaths, and natural disaster risk .  While we weren’t the safest city out there, we did come in at 14th, just above Chicago. I have to agree, I do think Phoenix is a safe place to live and think Forbes did a good job of building the list. Arizona Republic Article

Yorkshire Estates HOA Election and Meeting
Recently the Yorkshire Estates Home Owner’s Association held their annual meeting and elections.  What a turn out, I’d say about half of the development was present.  I would characterize the meeting as typical with the normal concerns about barking dogs and portable basketball hoops the topic of discussions. The most notable item to me was that this HOA, despite the typical market challenges, has been able to manage the budget and not require or request a rate increase.  I consider this to be the single biggest challenge facing all HOAs right now and I commend the out-going board, Chris, David and Todd for a job well done. I also understand that the new budg