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Sheri’s Palm Springs Area Blog

Whether it be real estate updates, restaurant reviews, events, or highlights of unique homes in Palm Springs, follow Sheri as she covers all that Palm Springs and the surrounding area has to offer.

Dining Around The Desert: La Brasserie, La Quinta


Chef/Owner Emmanuel Janin & his family

Brasserie, the French term for brewery, refers to an unpretentious restaurant that serves drinks and classic Parisian bistro food. Newly opened this year, La Brasserie is a welcome addition to the La Quinta restaurant scene. Chef owner Emmanuel Janin and his wife Kara have succeeded in bringing a traditional French bistro to La Quinta and offer friendly service, reasonable prices and tasty food.

While my husband Bill and I find a few of the French dishes on the heavy side, we enjoyed some of the lighter fare over the course of our three visits. The Graved Lax from the appetizer menu is worth a repeat visit as is the Artisanal cheese platter with fig compote, honeycomb and seasonal garnish.

Bill enjoyed the six-hour brine pork chop with Chipotle mashed potato, grilled asparagus and Coachella Valley date chutney. That said, Bill still rates Lavender Bistro in La Quinta as serving the best pork chop in the valley to date.

The La Brasserie menu offers a good selection of meat, fish and poultry as well as several wonderful salad choices. Their Seafood Bar offers a selection of oysters and shellfish with a variety of sauces. We found the extensive wine list to offer reasonably priced selections, as well.

> View ALL Desert Dining Suggestions Here

La Brasserie Bistro & Bar is open year round and is located at 78-477 Highway 111 in La Quinta at the corner of Washington Street and Highway 111 and adjacent to the Beer Hunter. (760) 771-4400

Update on 2011-10-22 20:51 by Sheri Dettman

Two return visits this month to La Brasserie. And now that the weather has cooled a bit we enjoyed dining on the patio which featured a pianist on the nights we visited.

Selling Your Home: How To Maximize Your Selling Price

Selling Your Home: How To Maximize Your Selling Price

When most sellers interview real estate agents about selling their home, many get caught up in the process of choosing a sales price. The thought of receiving additional money for your home is a no brainer. Unfortunately many uniformed sellers often choose the listing agent who suggests the highest listing price. Realtors call this scenario ‘buying the listing’. These agents are hoping to sign the listing and then worry about getting the price reduced to the actual market value over the coming months when the seller doesn’t receive an offer.

Establishing The Right Value For Your Property

Truth is, the person whose opinion matters most is the buyer who makes an offer to purchase your property. Properties priced to high receive no offers. Properties priced a little to low generally receive multiple offers thereby driving the price up by receiving offers up to the real market value. There is little danger in pricing a home too low. The danger lies in over pricing and selecting your selling agent solely on their opinion of a higher value.

An agent’s job is to price the home competitively based on the most recent sales comps. Pricing a home is part science, part art and a whole lot of local market experience. It involves a combination of comparing similar properties, tracking the most recent market movement, evaluating current inventory and making adjustments for any differences between comparable properties.

Some Agents Specialize In Expired Listings

Hundreds of agents here in the Palm Springs area real estate market actually make their living by contacting the sellers of expired listings and then relisting these properties at market value. This process is called ‘re-packaging’ an overpriced property. Don’t let this happen to you. Don’t be the owner of an expired listing.

WestJet Adds Winnipeg Service To Palm Springs

WestJet Adds Winnipeg Service To Palm Springs

WestJet announced this week that it will begin additional service to Palm Springs International Airport from Winnipeg, Canada. My thinking is that this is a great public service that should help to warm Canadian’s up during the coming winter.

The new flights are in addition to seasonal flights already flying from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto.


Not The Palm Springs Airport!

Service from Winnipeg will start December 15th with fares from $219. Flights to WestJet’s hub in Calgary will be increased to two daily round-trips during the peak tourist season.

In the Palm Springs market alone WestJet has seen the number of passengers it serves rise to 120,205 in the first six months of 2011.

Will keep the sunscreen out for you!

Coachella Valley Sales Best State & National Numbers Again

DataQuick Information Systems reported on May 24th that sales of resale homes here in the Coachella Valley fell 0.5% during April compared to April 2010. Here’s how our local Palm Springs area real estate market did compared to the national and state numbers for the month of April:

April 2011 versus April 2010 Re-sales:

Coachella Valley: -0.5%

California state-wide: -6.1%

Nationwide: -12.9%

Palm Springs Modern Home Sells at $4.9 million

In Palm Springs modern real estate news, the 7,000 square foot residence originally designed for Dinah Shore in 1963 has sold for $4.9 million. This iconic Donald Wexler design is located in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood of Palm Springs. The home was built in 1965 and features six bedrooms, eight baths, two guesthouses, a tennis court, pool and spa on 1.3 acres of land.

According to our Desert Area MLS the home was extensively remodeled. The home is considered an important and architecturally significant estate. Jerry Herman who is known for the stage hits of Mame and Hello Dolly also once owned the home.

City of Palms Springs Luxury Real Estate Update
23 homes within the city of Palms Springs have sold for over $1,000,000 to date in 2011. This compares to 23 million plus sales during the same period in the prior year. Average selling prices for luxury homes in the city of Palm Springs have remained fairly stable from last year. $1,503,738 was the average in 2010 versus $1,485,620 year to date in 2011.

Sheri Dettman & Associates Ranked #50 by Keller Williams

Sheri Dettman & Associates was recently awarded the #50 position in the United States and Canada for sales teams during the first quarter of 2011 by Keller Williams Realty. Keller Williams has almost 80,000 agents in over 700 offices in the U.S. and Canada.

Sheri Dettman & Associates is modeled after progressive companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon. Sheri’s team fully utilizes mobile technology and new marketing tools, and has a proven track record to ensure high quality client services and communication for buyers and sellers of resort lifestyle real estate in the Palm Springs area cities of La Quinta, Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indio and Palm Springs.

Mid-Year 2011 Palm Springs Area Real Estate Update

Palmilla waterfront homes in La Quinta

90% Year-To-Date Sales Increase Over 2010
With our mid-year date of June 30th about a week away we (Sheri Dettman & Associates) are experiencing a whopping 90% increase in sales volume year-to-date versus the same period of 2010. We’ve noticed that many of our buyers this year actually started their property searches with us in ‘08 or ‘09. They had been watching and waiting and are now taking advantage of some great real estate opportunities that our team helped them to discover.

Contrary to many of the national real estate stories, I will again go on record as saying that real estate is indeed local. And our real estate gets even more locally-dependent based on the price segment, the city, the gated community and even each individual property. These are just a few of the things we consider for each of our clients.

Palm Springs Area Inventory Improving From The Bottom Up

Inventory levels here in the desert continue to improve from the bottom up with some gated communities reporting supplies lasting just a few months. And so far this year we have also recorded a 300% increase in our home luxury sales (over $1 million) over the same period of 2010.

Buyers in increasing numbers from all over the world continue to have our Palm Springs area on their radar and don’t seem to be the least bit interested in being cold or wet again next winter. Many people are surprised to hear that our summer sales typically only decrease 7% from winter, so 2011 looks to be a stellar year for us proving once again that real estate is local.

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