- I'm going to give you
the top five pros and cons of living here in my beautiful city. So I'm gonna start with the positives. So my number one pro, of course, is that it's beautiful here in Sedona, and just about every home here has a view. And if it doesn't have
a view, just go outside and walk a block away or
get in your car and drive and you're bound to see a view of the beautiful Red Rock
Mountains or Oak Creek and the beautiful oak trees
just everywhere you look. So that is definitely an
advantage of living here. Number two pro for living in Sedona is there is just a lot to do here. There are many hiking trails so that you can go
hiking and at any level. If you're a little out of
shape like me, for instance, there's the easy trails
and then you've got the really hard trail. I see people scaling the
mountain, I'm like, "You crazy," but, (laughing) there's
something there for every level. There's also you can go
on a guided Jeep tour. You could tour the vortex and
you can go shopping galore, stick your feet in Oak
Creek and just enjoy the cool breeze. So lots of stuff to do all the time. Every night of the week, you
could find something different. My number three is that Sedona, here, is a really good place for entrepreneurs to start a new business. There are two to four million
tourists that come here every year, and they are
hungry for things to do, for information, and
they're willing to spend. So if you could put together
some type of a tour, a tour of the sites, a
tour of the vortices, a tour of anything and
then maybe publish a book or a DVD, video to go along with it, you could probably do very well here. The other thing is if you work remotely, you can work a startup business here and your other people that work for you can live anywhere in the
country or the world. I do know people that do that, and they have employees
that live over in Europe. So a great place for entrepreneurs. Number four is the great weather. We are at 4,000-foot elevation, but let me rephrase that. I, myself live in the
Village of Oak Creek, which is one of the
unincorporated areas of Sedona. So I'm at 4,000-foot elevation, but if you go towards Uptown Sedona, it's about 4,500-foot elevation. So my friends in Phoenix today,
we're in the middle of June, they're gonna be like 107 degrees, which is actually a little
bit cool for Phoenix. But here in Sedona, it
will be about 90 degrees. So and it gets a little hotter, but not much hotter than that. And the nice thing is
by the end of the day, by 6:00, you can go out on your patio, sit out with a cocktail, and
there's a nice breeze going and you won't be uncomfortable at all. In fact, I sleep with
the windows open at night because it'll get down to like 69 and then you wake up
and the house is cool, and it's really nice. So the weather is good,
and in the wintertime, it's not all that cold. It does get cold, but
there are not a lotta days where it's below freezing. So it's not bad at all. And then my number five
pro of living in Sedona is there's a lot of very unique shopping, shopping, restaurants, and hotel/motels. So lots of little shops that
you don't find anywhere else, like crystal shops, unique
little clothing shops, bookstores that you don't see very much. There's a really cute motel
over between Uptown Sedona and Slide Rock that's your little motel right on the creek. It's so cute, lotta little Reiki places, restaurants that you
won't find anywhere else. So again, the unique things to do and places to shop make it
a really fun place to live. Now with every pro, there is a con, and so let me give you
the list of the negatives. So the very first thing
is the property prices and the cost of living is
higher there than other parts of the state. So I'm gonna give you my personal example. I moved here two years
ago and I rented a duplex for a year to see if
I liked it, and I did. The rent wasn't bad, but I
sold my house in Phoenix. I had a cute little house in
a nice suburb of Ahwatukee, three-bed, three-bath,
1,550 square feet, nice lot. I sold that for $290,000
and then bought one two months later here in the village about the same size, 1,600 square foot, three-bedroom, two-bath,
nice 1/4-acre lot, and I paid 395,000. So that's $105,000 more for just about the same sized property. Now, of course, what you have going here is that you've got, I
look out my back window and there's a beautiful
view, and of course, I'm here in Sedona. So I think it's worth it,
but that's just something to note that the cost of living is higher. The other thing is your
groceries, a little higher, mostly because they will have
higher quality meats here. They won't have a lot of the
lower quality fatty foods, so you'll pay a little more for groceries, about the same for gas and other things, not horribly bad, but
again, about 30, 35% higher than the rest of the state. The other thing is there are
very few high-tech jobs here. So like if you're a high-tech worker, you're a programmer, a DBA,
a network security guy, there are not shops here where you go in and you work all day. So you won't go into American
Express, Intel, PayPal, nothing like that here. Now, of course, if you can work remotely for one of those companies
and live here, that's great, but there are no big high-tech,
high-paying companies here. You know, there's the hotels, but no high-tech jobs here in Sedona. One another thing, number four, this is definitely a con to living here is if you live in a lotta places, you could get stuck next
to an Airbnb property, because a lot of investors have them here. They might rent them
out every single week. You could have a different
people living next to you and on the weekends, they might, you know, they're here on vacation. They might be up late partying
and they might disturb you. Of course, if you do your
research before you buy, you can keep that from happening. A lotta the subdivisions don't allow it, but if you're not careful,
that could happen. And of course, number
three, I skipped three and went to four, three
is that it's crowded on the weekend and
there's a lotta traffic. Not just the weekend, but the high seasons like October, November, March and April. A lot of tourists here, there'll be a lot of traffic on the road. It might take you twice as long. Takes me about 20 minutes
to get to West Sedona. It might take you twice that to get there in on the weekend, and you might have a
hard time getting a table at a restaurant and definitely a hard time finding parking spaces in
the heavy touristy areas. So that's just something, you know, can you live with the
crowdedness on the weekend? But, you know, the homes,
like my home is two blocks off the 179, and I never hear them on 79 and there are not a lotta
people driving around. So it's nice and peaceful. You just have to know on the weekend, if you wanna go out,
it's gonna be crowded. One more con, which might sound silly, but there's not a really great high-speed Internet provider here. So I know my neighbors
say they have Suddenlink, which is a DSL provider. It's probably better than what I have. I have HughesNet, which is good, but it's a satellite. So sounds weird, but if
it's cloudy and stormy, it'll slow down, and if there's
a billion tourists here, it will slow down and
sometimes it takes me a long time to upload files. Like this video could take me awhile. But it's still worth it. Not like Cox Internet home in Phoenix. You won't get any of that here. And here's the number six, I
added a bonus number six con. This is something you have
to be concerned about. If you have small pets, small dogs, a cat, I even have a parrot, I
have a pug and a poodle, you have to be careful
letting 'em out in your yard because there are predatory animals here. We have got coyotes,
bobcats, and javelina. Now the javelina really aren't predators, but you know how dogs are. Once I was looking out the back window and there was a huge javelina in the yard, and the neighbor's dog went
and just charged the javelina. Javelina, one bite, agh,
dog needed 140 stitches, expensive trip to the hospital, and had to wear the cone of
shame for at least four days. So again, watch out for predators. Sometimes, they'll just
go through the yard like there's no fence there. As long as you're careful, it's okay, but you can't just let them
in and out on their own through the dog door if you're
not gonna be home for awhile. So that is it. My name is Dawn Dickenson. I live here in Sedona,
the Village of Oak Creek. I sell real estate here. I also sell in the
neighboring Verde Valley, which would be Cottonwood,
Rimrock, Cornville. If you have any questions about, you know, living here in Northern
Arizona or real estate or anything like that, feel
free to post a comment below or even send me a text or an email. My information, my contact
information is down there. And if you liked this video, please do me a favor
and give me a thumbs up and maybe even subscribe. I post this type of
content every single week about things involving Northern Arizona, real estate in general, but
mostly Northern Arizona. So I post something next Thursday. I hope I will see you then.
