If you were an elected official and wanted to know what’s going on in a neighborhood, wouldn’t you ask those who are “on the ground” and doing business in that neighborhood every day?
Indeed, that kind of common sense approach is what the Centennial City Council has displayed in partnering with local Realtors to learn how to help keep property values high.
The idea began in April when the council set a goal of ensuring that the average home prices in Centennial would be at least 1 percent higher than the surrounding communities of Littleton, Highlands Ranch and Aurora.
To reach that goal, the city felt it was important to develop partnerships with stakeholders, according to Wayne Reed, Centennial’s director of planning and development. “We saw the Realtors as important stakeholders who work in our neighborhoods every day,” he said. So Centennial approached the South Metro Denver Realtors Association to ask if it would survey the Realtors who sell homes in Centennial.
CEO Rohn Goldstein said the city staff developed a set of 12 questions, and the association sent them to its members online to gauge their buyers’ and sellers’ impressions of Centennial. During August and September, 129 Realtors responded.
The results, according to the survey: The overall perception of Centennial neighborhoods is positive (69 percent); the majority (more than 80 percent) of buyers are looking for a home priced from $200,000 to $400,000; and the majority of buyers in Centennial are between 36 and 45 years old. The school district was seen as an important motivation for buyers, as were proximity to jobs and lot size.
Aging housing stock and taxes were detriments to buying a home, as were poor or declining landscaping and poorly maintained perimeter fences.
The city council felt the survey provided “valuable insights into how the city can set priorities and provide services,” Reed said. The council suggested that in 2009, the survey be expanded to include Realtors in Aurora who sell homes in Centennial.
Meanwhile, Centennial staff has recommended that the city address concerns expressed in the survey by rewriting the city’s land development code, making code enforcement a higher priority and conducting planning for small neighborhood areas.
Goldstein said the Realtors association was excited about partnering with the city. Board members were so pleased, in fact, that they asked to be put on the list of agencies that are asked to offer comments to Centennial whenever any new development is proposed.
In a sense, Realtors are the “canaries in the coal mine,” first sensing trouble in neighborhoods and able to alert city officials when and where action is needed. Centennial, with its many older neighborhoods, traditional lack of strong code enforcement, and neighborhoods with aging wooden fences, is in need of those strategic alerts, but any community could benefit from them.
It takes a certain amount of courage for politicians to seek feedback from outsiders, knowing that what they hear may put them in a bad light. Centennial’s mayor and council should be applauded for being willing to take such a risk in the interest of improving their com- munity.
Reed and Goldstein were not aware of any other metro area cities seeking insights from Realtors in a similar fashion. Using the electronic survey costs little more than staff time, and is something officials in other cities might want to consider.
Who knows? They might just learn something from local Realtors that would lead to a better quality of life for their citizens.
Susan Thornton (smthornton@aol.com) served 16 years on the Littleton City Council, including eight years as mayor. Her column appears twice a month.
