Have you ever wished that you could get straight up advise about purchasing a home?
Washington state offers just such a class and taking the class meets one requirement for getting a home loan from the Washington State House Key program. That program offers borrowers who have not owned a home in the last three years a thirty year fixed interest rate that is often about a point lower than the regular market.
Find out more about the house key program and check their current rates here!
The best news for you! Lynn Posselt from Eagle Home Mortgage and I are not allowed to sell our services in the class. You can request more information about us, and we want to assist you in getting the perfect home but we are not allowed to solicit your business while teaching.
That means that the quality of our work has to be demonstrated by the quality of our class! Come check us out! It is a great way to learn about home buying without feeling like you are being pushed or obligated to anyone.
Classes will be held on February 24th and March 24th, 2007. For more information or to sign up contact Lynn Posselt at (360)573-4112 or Erik Wecks at (360)624-3674.
Erik Wecks
Providing the information you need to make great decisions
I think many sellers find the advice they get regarding preparing their home for sale confusing. Some agents will tell you to just leave your home as it is, and some seem to tell you that you must put in a completely new kitchen if you have any hope at all of selling your home. Well I hope that I am not here to add to the confusion. My hope here is to give you as a seller a framework from which you can make your own decisions about how to improve the positive feedback on your showings.
If you have read the first two articles in this series you might have some idea of what I am about to say. (Article 1, Article 2) In the first article, I argued that the only reliable way to price your home is to compare it to other similar homes which have already closed, not to homes currently on the market. In the second article I argued that location remained an important feature of your property in a buyer's market but that it may not allow you to demand the previous premium that your neighborhood commanded during the seller's market. I encouraged sellers to consider location along with other factors as loss leaders which are used to make your home a better value than other similar homes on the market. In a buyer's market issues of quality may also be considered loss leaders.
Let me start by defining my term. When I am writing about issues of quality I am talking about your homes cleanliness, general maintenance and upkeep, as well as the value or perceived value of the finishes in the home. Besides location these are probably the two most important factors in any showing which give the client either a good feeling or a bad feeling about your home. While staging can make a difference and is another good tool to have in your toolkit, it is really the cleanness, the perceived care, and the value of the finishes for the price which give your home an edge when comparing it to the competition.
Let's take each of these three items one at a time. The first, cleanliness is at once the most obvious and the most inconsistent of my three areas of quality. I have three children. My oldest is seven and my youngest is under a year. I understand how difficult it can be for some of my clients to keep up on their homes and I work hard not to expect of them more than I expect of myself when it comes to cleanliness. Yet, it is just a fact, that for most of my buyer clients a clean home makes them more comfortable. Probably the most important thing you can do to sell your home is to thoroughly clean it. Why does this matter so much? To be honest I am not sure. The cleanliness of a home has very little to do with its maintenance. It can be perfectly clean but falling down and that is by far better for perceived value than if it is dirty and perfectly maintained. I think that it has much to do with lifestyle. The person who is perceived as messy is thought incapable of doing maintenance. The person who is clean is perceived as doing a good job on home maintenance. It also may have to do with the person coming into the home imagining what it will be like to live in the home. That is harder when the home is dirty and overly cluttered.
The perceived lifestyle of the person who is selling the home also is a good guide to the maintenance projects which should be considered. I once sold a home which continually got feedback as worn and "showing rough." The home was owned by a single mom who needed to get out from under a huge mortgage that her husband had taken out weeks before he died on a fishing trip. (It was a good reminder to me to make sure that I had enough life insurance to take care of my children. Are you covered?) I couldn't figure out why we kept getting the "rough showing" feedback. Yes it was a home with four children, and it wasn't always picked up perfectly, but it was clean and the walls had been freshly painted thanks to some neighbors. Yet I felt it too. It looked like a worn home which had been freshly painted. One day while standing in the kitchen I finally perceived what had been bothering me unconsciously. The trim was beaten up and scuffed. Four kids had taken their toll. I gave the home owner my tape gun for painting and suggested that she take a brush and touch up the trim as she had time. Wow! I was surprised just how much of a difference a little touch up painting could make. It was great! The whole home sparkled and we didn't get any more feedback that the home looked worn. So once you have taken care of the cleaning, it is time to move to the maintenance and, in particular, those perception issues which allow a buyer to feel comfortable about the quality of the home. Remember, when a buyer walks through your home they are not only looking at how they will fit their furniture. They are also looking at how much it will cost and how much time it will take to paint and put in new carpet. The more you can do upfront to address these issues the more the potential buyer's will relax when they look at your home.
So far, did we really change actual real quality of the home? Not significantly, but we can sure changed buyer's perceptions of a home and that can make thousands of dollars worth of difference. I have argued that this is because buyers make inferences about themselves living in that home and about the quality of the home based on the perceived lifestyle of the current owner. Now the question becomes whether or not it is worth the money to do major upgrades to a home just before you sell. In most cases I would say no. Many remodeling projects take time before you actually get back the full value of the project from the home. On the other hand, there are two reasons I could think of which might make these upgrades worth it. First, I have talked in other places about seeing some upgrades as loss leaders to make your home stand out in a flooded market. The same goes here for upgrades. You may choose to upgrade your choice of flooring because it will make your home stand out from the competition. That is a great reason to do an upgrade or two in a buyer's market. Just don't get carried away. The second reason to do an upgrade might be that your home nearly reaches another tier of quality but is just missing that one upgrade which would take it over the top. Maybe it might need that granite counter to go with the upgraded cabinets. Or it might support a quality crown molding. Again ever so careful here, most of the time you will spend too much money on these upgrades and end up dropping back to the loss leader idea for these finishes in a buyer's market. That may not be a bad way to look at upgrades but it can sure be disappointing when you were hoping to either make money on the investment or at least make dollar for dollar on that new countertop.
So to sum up, when considering how to prepare your home for sale, your goal is to give the potential buyer the sense that your home has been properly maintained. Cleaning is the most important thing you can do here. Secondly, take care of those maintenance issues which directly affect the perceptions of the seller as they walk through a home, dirty carpets, walls and trim should be high on the list. Finally, while upgrades right before selling do have their place they can often hurt you financially in the end becoming loss leaders used to make a home stand out from the crowd rather than dollar for dollar investments.
I received an interesting call yesterday from a sales representative for a local builder. He explained that the builder would not be able to close on a home that my client was purchasing by the original closing date. He explained that the seller did not have the money to purchase the needed air conditioning unit and that until they could purchase the air conditioning unit they would not be able to complete the transaction. He said that he thought that the investor behind the company would keep them solvent but he would know more tomorrow.
Well I guess it didn't come as a surprise. I had been watching the company closely and I had put my clients on notice that it might happen. There were nearly $60,000 in mechanics leans on our initial title report. Just about every agent I know in Clark County Washington had been waiting for that to happen to some builder. The home market over $400,000 had been dramatically over built in the last years of the boom market and there are way too many homes sitting vacant. Worse then that, some of the builders still seem to keep churning out these homes even though sales in that price range are completely flat.
The good news for my clients is that the home is basically finished and so there should be no problem for either the builder or the investor to finish off the property and get this thing closed. The not so good news this afternoon is that the title company is no longer issuing title policies for this builder because they have had exposure based upon mechanics leans filed after closing. So as of this point my clients will have to make a decision on whether or not they sign an extension to see if this company can provide clean title after the original closing date. My clients are not in a rush because they have a home they are renting currently so we don't have any real pressures on our side that keep us from waiting. The question becomes how long will we wait, and will we have to sign a new purchase and sales agreement if the investor takes over the property?
So Clark County Washington buyers and agents, you are on notice.... What we as agents thought might happen is beginning to happen, and with the continued slow market you will need to be careful and make sure that your builders are still able ot keep their financial promises. Don't panic yet but dot all your "I"s and cross all your "T"s and if you look at it another way the builders are giving some great concessions. Just consider this one of the places you have to be careful in a buyer's market.
I don't yet know HTML which means I don't write code. However, I am very picky about my web presence. Which means that I do try and create my own websites etc. Last week I found two tools which I thought were really useful and reasonably priced.
The first is GIMP 2.0 which is a photo manipulation program intended to rival Adobe's Photoshop. The best part is that it is free. Considering the photoship runs in the hundreds of dollars I think that this is a great deal. Good photo manipulation software is an absolute must for any agent trying to improve their sales in a down market. We have all seen the listings with the bad photos where the lighting was wrong etc. Photo manipulation software can help correct some of these problems for your web photos and give prospective buyers a better look at your listing.
The second program is a flash animation program which cost me $70 dollars, which is an inexpensive price considering Dream Weaver the industry standard also runs in the hundreds of dollars. This program called KoolMoves allows you to create both flash based websites and website components such as movies. I really have enjoyed getting to know this program and I have found its interface pretty intuitive. The big advantage I found here over other freeware software is that it has a tremendously greater amount of flexibilty. Many freeware programs aproach creating flash based web "stuff" as a series of templates which your text or banner or website must fit within. Although KoolMoves does contain the same kind of template based system, it has so many templates and you can change the indivdual features of these templates to create nearly and infinite number of possibilities for the look movement and feel of what ever web component you are creating. If you go to the KoolMoves site look at the gallery of flash objects and websites which were created with the program. It is worth checking out.
I am sure that with a little practice I will be able to use both KoolMoves and GIMP to create online content that will make both my listings and my promotional materials stand out from the crowd.... I am really looking forward to using them.
This fall I received a listing from a floor call. The client was being relocated, jumped the gun and got an agent before the relocation company could go through the process of giving him one of their vetted agents. So I thought that I had the usual 35% fee to pay. I could handle that.
But wait...Then I found out that his relocation company had a reciprocal agreement with my companies' relocation arm and that I would owe them a fee.
But wait...Then the sellers took a buyout and my own company's relo arm raised their fee to 50% of the remaining 65%.
So lets do the math...I am now down to 32.5% of the original listing side commission....before I pay any brokerage fees on the transaction.
You can bet I didn't pay for any advertising after that came down. They could fire me if they wanted and I didn't fill out any of their obnoxious weekly updates either.
Can you believe the arrogance? Between the two companies they are taking nearly 70% of my pay and they want me to happily waste my time filling out paperwork every week on what I have done to market their property. Just say NO!
So I am sitting here thinking that I am the only one who is getting bloodied in this transaction. Then because of the soft market we get an offer in which is lower than the buyout price.
The relo company decides to take it...on the condition that the corporation behind the relocation coughs up the difference. Remember it wasn't the corporation who decided what to pay the owner in the buyout. That came from the relocation company. Then when the market doesn't support the buyout they have the arrogance to go back and demand money from their client who has already signed up under a contract with them for a period of years which cannot have been cheap to begin with!!! It was at that point that the light bulb went on. It wasn't just me who was ripped off. There must be some very unhappy HR directors and personnel out there who don't like relo-companies either.
So how does all of this greasing of wheels and outright theft work? As soon as I got a call from the first relo company they really emphasized that the get smart "cone of silence" was to descend upon my head and that in no way was the client to know that I was getting ripped off on my commission. (I obeyed...but I didn't like it.) Remember that was the client who found me!
Erik's Business Theory Number One: Any business which has to require silence about its business model is ripe for a new business model.
Rainers I have had enough. Between all of us there must be some better business models which better serve the corporations, the agents and most importantly the clients!
No more cone of silence!
Here is my weak idea to replace relocation companies. There are two things the corporations get out of this whole deal. First they get a single phone number (they can call relo and move someone anywhere in the country) and the instant buyout when necessary. For these two items they pay money-and I would bet it is a whole lot of money.
I don't think that national brokerages are the solution here. If my own brokerage treated me this way, then I have no doubt that it is "industry standard." No if we want our commissions back we will have to figure out a way to take them back on corporation at at time.
Erik's Business Theory Number Two: Anything which is justified as being industry standard means that it is bad for the employee/independent contractor and the manager feels guilty about doing it so they cannot defend it directly.
What if that single number was your number? What if individual agents made a business model out of collecting a few corporations and being that number. They call you and you are the one who arranges the referral or takes the lead yourself. You get the money and charge a more reasonable referral fee than the thirty-five percent. (Or will you let your geed take over and make your business model ripe for a shake up?)
Then there is the matter of the buyout. That is where my plan gets weak. Individual agents probably don't have a pool of resources big enough to buy homes for corporations and hold them until they sell. Maybe the wealthiest of us could swing one or two but what happens when a whole wing of a company moves out of town? What would we do then...likely disappoint the corporation and send them back into the hands of the relo companies.
Here is my thought. What if the corporation placed a pool of money in escrow which it used to purchase the homes but place them in either the title company's name or in the agent's name? The best thing would be for the HR director to be a signer for the company then the company could hold the properties until they sold. The corporation receives any profits on the sale and takes the risk for the losses. After all, my experience this fall taught me that they are already taking the risk for the losses and probably footing the bill for my commission as well.
I think this idea is progress but is also so full of holes that it makes Swiss cheese look solid. It seems to me there is lots of room for lawyers and fraud here but it is the best that I have come up with so far.
Someone else out there must have a better idea than mine but at least it is something to bouce off of.
No more cone of silence!
I am also going to post a question on LinkedIn and see if we can get some HR types to weigh in. (I will update this post when I have the question up and running so you can follow it there as well.) I want to know what they want as well so that we can make sure this is a win/win.
In my first post on selling your home in a buyer's market I examined three different pricing strategies I have been taught over my career as a REALTOR®. I argued that the one reliable strategy for pricing a home is to find comparable homes which have already sold and base your pricing upon these comps. If you didn't get a chance to see that article you can find it here.
In this post I have two points which I want to make in relationship to location and selling your home in a Buyer's market. First, your improvements must be in line with your neighborhood if you expect to get full value for them. Second, your neighborhood may not earn you extra money in a buyer's market but it still adds value to your property.
Let me begin writing about improvements with an obvious example. A granite kitchen in my neighborhood just wouldn't make sense. I live in a neighborhood of starter homes which almost universally have Formica on their counters. If I put granite on mine, I cannot expect to get full value for it.
However, I don't think that is the end of the story when you consider improvements and neighborhood, especially in a buyer's market. I think that sometimes you need to look at improvements as a loss leader. For instance if I were to sell my home in my neighborhood, I would be tempted to put in the cheapest laminate possible in my kitchen. It needs a new floor and laminate is cheap, cheap, cheap. However, if I have an understanding of how location and upgrades work in a buyers market I wouldn't make that mistake. First time buyers have many, many homes to choose from. It is the home with the upgrades that catches a buyer's eye. Since I am in a starter home neighborhood I have to stand out from the Formica and Laminate competition down the street. One great way to do that is with say a real wood floor in my kitchen or since my brother cuts granite for a living and I can get it cheap I might put in that granite counter after all. I may not be getting "full price" for the upgrades I have put in. However, I will be getting a sale while the Formica and laminate homes down the street are sitting vacant.
Don't get me wrong. I actually mean upgrades not incentives. I am not a big fan of incentives. Save the plasma TVs for yourself. At least in the Vancouver market a buyer would rather see an upgraded lighting package or living room floor than a plasma TV. It's all about perceived value. If your home is perceived to be the best value on the market for the price it will sell. Plasma TVs can't turn a fixer into a turn key home. Sellers aren't biting on the plasma TVs they want value instead.
My second point on location in a buyer's market has to do with premiums for neighborhoods and it is similar to the previous point I just made about upgrades. During a buyer's market neighborhood should be seen as a loss leader to create a sale not as a premium to increase value. During a seller's market certain neighborhoods can seem to demand any price they want. I remember two summers ago entering a new listing in a highly desirable neighborhood next to Washington State University Vancouver and asking the party who arrived just after us to wait outside as we had waited while another REALTOR® had gone in ahead of us. By the time we came out 10 minutes later there were seven groups waiting on the steps to come in. Now that is neighborhood appeal! I ended up writing one of three offers on that home that evening, and I presented the offer personally to the seller and their REALTOR® the next day. We didn't get that home, and my buyer's moved on to a neighborhood that had a little less appeal but also a little less demand. We got them the next home that we wrote on.
However, we don't have that market any more, and neighborhood appeal doesn't seem to show up as much in price. In fact when prices are equal many buyers are choosing to go with an upgraded home rather than that top of the line neighborhood. When two neighborhoods are right next to each other and one offers kitchen upgrades and the other offers prestige but no upgrades for the same price, buyers in this market are gravitating to the actual upgrades instead of the prestige.
So what does that mean for our prestigious neighborhoods? Are they no longer prestigious? Absolutely not. However, their prestige is measured in time on the market not in the price of the home. Again from the buyer's perspective prestige isn't necessarily as valuable as upgrades. However, if two homes have equal fixtures and equal pricing then the neighborhood may make one a better value than another. So as a seller remember that your location in a prestigious neighborhood does give you an advantage in a buyer's market it is just that advantage is going to be reflected in time on market not necessarily in price.
Next time I would like to talk about the issue of perceived quality in a buyer's market. Thanks for your time and interest. If you have any questions feel free to call me or email me.
[Originally posted the week of 01/06/07- 01/13/07. Apparently there is a 10 post limit if you want full credit. I am reposting this on for this week because I worked hard on it and want the points. (I won't worry about the one for my new daughter.) Sorry if this seems a little lazy and I won't make the same mistake in the future. Always something new to learn here at AR. I am sure that I will get the hang of it. --Erik]
A wise man once said, "A wise servant will rule over a disgraceful son, and will share the inheritance as one of the brothers." I take from this ancient saying that someone who is a good servant-that is, someone who watches out for the interests of those they serve-will be valued more highly than a son who has not cared about the interests of his family.
Sometimes when I listen to people teach seminars about getting referrals, I have to laugh to myself. Being consumer-centric (as Ardell puts it) often doesn't seem to be part of their three step, thirty-three touch, marketing magic, career coaching system to making bucket loads of money.
Talk about treating people well is often replaced with scripts and market research about the best words to use to get your desired results. I have heard all about what the focus groups say and what kind of picture to have on your business card and web site. I have even heard big long speeches about how my particular personality type is unable to negotiate well. The speaker's ex-husband had my same "personality profile" and the three of us in the room with that profile got to hear all about how that profile was unreasonable. Her speech was very passive aggressive...something mentioned in the speakers profile...hmmmm. ;-)
The worst I ever heard was a seminar teacher recommend that you join a church simply and purely to milk it for leads. Similar beliefs were not necessary but helpful. It was a kick to look around the room. You could tell the people of faith and the people with integrity because every one of their mouths were on the floor. The others were madly writing down the idea. I think he lost half his class that day and never recovered for the rest of the seminar.
I say that all the seminar training and coaching in the world is a waste without the right core in the apple. Bad core, bad apple. Good core, good apple. Consumer-centric servanthood is the heart of every successful referral based business. You just have to treat people well and care about their interests along side your own. That cannot be taught in three steps or thirty two touches because it is a matter of character and while character can be taught it is a difficult and humbling experience to learn. But, if the saying is true, in the end your bucket might have more money than the guy next to you who had all the training but didn't understand the heart of the matter.
2 Comments on One Reason Every Referral Based Real Estate System Can Fail
Amen brother. You are right on here.
Boittom line, even if you don't have more money in your bucket, you will have done the right thing for the right reasons and that's what really counts.
You are right that doing the right thing in the end is more valuable. However, I think you have to be careful what you define as the right thing. I am the sole provider for a family of five and I work to feed my childern. That means that I exist as a REALTOR in order to make a profit. My clients then are not even the primary people I serve in Real Estate, I exist to serve my childern and make money for them. During my first year in the business, I spent a long time thinkng about how I was going to do that without becoming consumed by greed. Let me give you a quick story and then I will conclude by giving you the mission statement which captures that idea.
Since we do so much stuff in our industry before we get paid I think that some of the public doesn't understand or respect our need for profit. For instance, I get many people who assume that my company reimburses me for milage on my vehicle and that I get paid a salary plus commission for my work. These clients do not respect my time at all. When I was first in the business I met a great couple who I liked a lot. She was a professor and he taught high school science. They were avid mountain climbers and had some money. They really wanted a view of Mt. Hood in our area. Well they didn't quite have enough money to get their view, plus the land, plus the absolutely perfect home they wanted. They were by far the pickiest buyers I had ever met. Worse yet they were based out of Wisconsin. They would call up say every few months and say they were interested in seeing homes. They would say that they were going to be in town for a week. They would come out and look for maybe a day turn down eveything I showed them and then spend the rest of the week hiking. Then when they got home their criteria would change slightly but never become financially realistic. They were not making the compromises necessary to get a home in Clark County, Washington.
As a new REALTOR I made a mistake and didn't explain to them that they were not profitable for me. I would certainly have had that conversation today. That conversation might have reshaped how they thought about my time and saved the relationship. However, I did do something which I think was equally valuable for me as a new agent. I fired the buyer because if I were to continue to serve them I would not have been helping my children.
I actually fired them mid-way through my second year in the business but thinking about them and thinking about these issues led to the mission statement below. It was the mission statement which gave me the courage to fire them.
"I hold a real estate license in order to create opportunities to assist individuals in achieving their goals as buyers and sellers of real estate. I always seek to have my customer's financial interests at heart. As an agent working to serve the total real estate needs of my clients I expect to earn a reasonable wage for my professional services."
Today I would have handling things differently and had a conversation about how I need to make money before I fired them. Making money is one vital part of my business and I make no apologies for it. However finding a way to do that without being consumed by greed is the trick. For me the mission statement above has been a really good thinking tool for how to do that.
I guess I am confused? I have seen a whole bunch of conversation on AR recently about how there are agents and brokers out there who believe that the end of the world is coming because of the information super highway. I guess I just haven't met them and I am wondering who they are?
OK that isn't quite true. I still know of markets who have yet to join a computer based MLS system. These tend to be small coastal markets in our area and yes there the brokers are frightened by losing control of the book of listings and making it public. But.... isn't it really only these guys who are crying about the internet? Are there really any reasonable agents who can make an intelligent argument that the internet will replace us one day? I guess I must be blind but I cannot see it happening. I guess in the end I think that no one is actually afraid the the internet will put them out of business. I think that these petty brokers and agents who talk that way are actually afraid of having to do legitimate real estat work to get paid. It is really about greed and not the internet.
Which brings me to my next question. If there aren't any real concerns, I wonder why we are wasting so much time on AR and in other venues fighting windmills? Greedy brokers and agents are just part of the business. I guess I don't see why I should argue with them anyways because the problem isn't the internet for them it is the greed. Why waste my breath?
I have not yet bragged on my new daughter on this site. Here she is. Stephanie Ruth Wecks my third child and third girl was born on December 10. She and mama are doing well. Although we are all a little sleepy in my household these days.
I have a funny theory about why 18th century doctors started removing men from the birthing process. If you look back at the history of Patriarchy. The really nasty stuff, the legal discrimination against women ironically comes from the enlightenment. (That is one that historians have been grappling with for a while.--We are all equal as long as we are white and male. How come that made sense in the 18th century?) So my humorous theory about why guys weren't allowed to see their women give birth is that if the patriarchal doctors allowed them to watch their women give birth the myth of male superiority would vanish. Men would know that many many women are mentally stronger than they are and can endure pain which would have caused most men to curl up in a little ball and whine for their mother. How could you deny them the vote? Men had to go!
My wife Jaylene is my hero and she is stronger than me. I have not doubts about that!
Here is the view from my front porch this afternoon. That is Mt. St. Helens of the famous 1980 eruption. Did you know that it has been continuously erupting since 2004. (It hasn't made any spectacular plumes recently for the national media to pick up upon. That may be why they haven't noticed.)
I really want to have the view from the house across the street where the living room window looks striaght out on the Mountain. The view was more spectacular in March of 2005 when the mountain gave us a bit of a show. Here is the veiw from the Cascades Volcano Observatory in east Vancouver.
I love waking up on a summer morning and seeing the mountain silhouetted by the rising sun. It can be really beautiful when there is a steam plume coming off the growing lava dome. Just a quick primer on cascade eruptions. They can be extemely violent like 1980. The lava that comes out of the volcano can be extremely explosive. However, this eruption so far has had non-explosive lava and thus it is coming out onto the floor of the crater in the volcano and building up a lava dome which could eventually fill up the hole left by the 1980 eruption. (Cascade volcanos often put out solid lava which doesn't flow like Hawaiian volcanos. Think toothpaste not milk)
The scientists say that the new dome could be visible above the south rim (from my house) within about 10 years. Now I am looking forward to seeing that. There is a volcano in Siberia which has completely rebuilt itself after an eruption similar to Mt. St. Helens in 1980. It only took about 40 years. If it sounds like a long time then you need to come and see the volcano up close. The eruption in 1980 was the largest recorded landslide in human history. One quarter of the moutain slide away in about thirty seconds. Here is a computer enhanced video made from pictures taken on May 18, 1980. (requires Real Player)
If you haven't been to the Johnston Ridge observatory you need to come next summer. The observatory is named after a scientist killed in the explosion and sits only five miles from the mouth of the volcano. It is a beautiful and amazing place. There are some great places to hike around the volcano and it has even been reopened for climbing. Here is the link to the forest service Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument which runs the actual sites around the volcano. While you are there check out the volcano cam. It gives you updated views every five minutes from Johnston Ridge. (While creating the link to the volcano cam I happened to catch the moutain right at dusk. You could see the glow off the new lava dome. Sometimes it is really fun to check it after dark so you can see the glow)
Here is a picture of my family and I at Johnston Ridge, labor day weekend this year. It really is a once in a lifetime thing to see an erupting volcano. I strongly encourage you to go and check it out.
Erik Wecks
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