Connecting you to Bullhead City, Arizona

In every town, in some out of the way location, there’s a good place to eat that only the locals know about. Bullhead City is no exception, and House of Siam is one such place.

Welcome to the third installment of “Where to eat in Bullhead City”, a series in which I highlight some local places worth checking out. The first two places I’ve covered can be found here:

• Pit Stop Grill
• Antonucci’s Restautant

And now for this week’s entry:

House of Siam

Map to House of Siam in Bullhead City, Arizona

680 Hancock Rd
Bullhead City, AZ 86442
(928) 758-9333

House of Siam is a small, family run Thai restaurant that serves good food at a great price. It’s location on Hancock Rd. puts it a couple miles from the main road of Highway 95 and makes it one of those places you have to know about to know about.

They have most of the dishes you would expect to find at a quality Thai restaurant, including some excellent soups and salads. And lunch specials. You know those lunch specials that most of the Chinese places have, with soup, an egg roll, and rice for five or six bucks? House of Siam has those as well, and at similar prices. They just taste better.

You can grab a beer or wine, or better yet go for the Thai Iced Tea.

Keep in mind this is a small, casual, neighborhood restaurant. You’ll find nothing fancy here. Just good food at great prices.

I’ve been eating at House of Siam for ten years and I’ve never once had a bad meal. If you like Thai food, I think you’ll like it.

Having just returned from fulfilling my civic duty for the day, and armed with my “I voted” sticker, I have the following thoughts to offer:

• Nice to see a good turn out at my voting place in Bullhead City. I’d estimate there were close to 100 people there, as opposed to the 2-3 I usually see.
• Primaries - Can we stop moving them up earlier and earlier every year? Seriously, this mass diversion of attention has been going FOREVER!
• No matter who you voted for. No matter who wins. With any luck, there will be no claims of fraud or mischief, no circus stunts, and tonight this election will come to a close.

Then we can get on with our lives. And for that reason I declare us all winners today!

Crunch the numbers. Glue your eyes to CNN, or Fox, or your high octane “news” assault of choice. And for the love of all things holy, do not go 4 minutes without checking the stock ticker. Do so and run the risk of letting the panic subside, if only for a moment.

We’ve moved beyond rational thought and action into an area where questions are not answered with projections, forecasts, or even editorials, and this Time magazine article nails it.

But fear is a persistent emotion, one embedded by evolution in our lizard brains. That’s why there’s no precise economic definition of a market panic; it’s more a psychological than a fiscal phenomenon, simultaneously anticipatory (you think something terrible will happen) and retrospective (you think you have waited too long to avert disaster). Swimmers being dragged to sea in a rip current often try to swim directly to shore–against the current–and end up exhausting themselves. Panic can kill.

Panic. Can. Kill.

Isn’t this what we’re watching unfold day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute?

Watching. Waiting. Swimming against the current.

We’re not talking about Bullhead City, or Arizona, or even the United States. It’s gone global. This market panic has spread beyond real estate and mortgages, to stocks, oil, energy, currency, elections, and every recess of everything. That’s an elephant we can’t eat in one bite. So we keep swimming directly to shore, exhausting ourselves.

So what happens next? Better yet, when?

Let’s get back to real estate for a moment and recognize that there is no global or national real estate market. One does not go out and buy or sell national real estate.

Real estate is local.

It is in these local real estate markets that this all began - and where it will end, too. The question is when.

A half century ago, Kennedy said the Chinese word for crisis is represented by the characters for danger and opportunity.

One of these days some smart people are going to get sick and tired of watching and waiting and swimming against the current. Sometime just this side of exhausting themselves, they will act on the opportunity in this crisis while everyone else is still focusing on the danger. Some time later things will calm down, and the news will tell us it’s OK to go back in the water. The crisis will have passed. The danger gone.

Oh, and the opportunity? You guessed it.

This Bullhead City foreclosure report covers Single Family Homes only, since Manufactured Homes and Condominiums represent a very small portion of overall foreclosure sales in Bullhead City.

44% of Bullhead City houses sold in September were foreclosures

Nearly half of the Single Family Homes sold last month were foreclosures. Not startling considering foreclosures have now accounted for at least 40% of the Single Family Home sales in Bullhead City for five of the last six months.

I feel the need to mention that the point in tracking foreclosures is not to be sensational or contribute to the gloom and doom we hear/read/see about the economy. The point is that foreclosures are real. Lots of people got in too deep and/or got hammered by unforeseen shifts in the real estate market and lost or walked away from lots of houses.

As I said when I first wrote about foreclosures in Bullhead City in detail back in June:

However, with foreclosures representing 37% of the Single Family home sales in the last 90 days, if you are a seller in today’s market they are the competition.

Until foreclosures work through the market, sellers will have to compete with them for buyers. There 76 of the 568 houses on the market in Bullhead City at the end of September. Here’s the breakdown for September:

Foreclosures Sold

Sold: 14
Median Sale Price: 125,000
Avg. Price per Square Foot: $93.09
Avg.  List/Sale Ratio: 93.5%
Avg. Days on Market: 119

Non-Foreclosures Sold

Sold: 18
Median Sale Price: 185,000
Avg. Price per Square Foot: $128.88
Avg.  List/Sale Ratio: 96.3%
Avg. Days on Market: 243

Remember, there are lot’s of good deals out there, and not all of them are foreclosures. If you’re in the market looking for those good deals, be sure to talk to your agent about opportunities in both foreclosure and non-foreclosure properties.