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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
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Only one adult gets to be the Easter Parade bunny
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS BY COTY DOLORES MIRANDA AFN Contributor
T
he 41st annual Ahwatukee Kiwanis Easter Parade steps off Saturday with one Easter bunny – and only one. Limiting the parade to one adult-sized Easter bunny is a policy that the sponsoring Kiwanis Club of Ahwatukee is firm on – as one costumed adult discovered a few years back. “About three years ago, when Vision Community Management became the grand sponsor, they supplied the Official Easter Bunny. That was the year that we had an intimate conversation with an unofficial Easter bunny, who then left her float for other pursuits,” laughed
PARADE IT!
Mike Schmitt, Easter Parade Boss and longtime Kiwanian. Schmitt originated the term “Official Easter Bunny” in 2012 after it became a sponsored position. And then the unthinkable happened that year: seven full-size bunnies appeared on the scene – enough to make the Official Easter Bunny nearly hopping mad. To ensure against another proliferation of faux rabbits, the parade entry form now warns: “The ‘Official Easter Bunny’ is a parade sponsor, so no other adult-sized Easter bunny costumes, please.”
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DOGGONE FUN
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More inside
Parade schedule .................... p.17 The Parade Boss .................... p.18
BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
TEEN CEOS NAIL IT
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BUNNY on page 10 (Special to AFN)
Keeping tradition, only one adult bunny will be allowed to march in the Ahwatukee Kiwanis Easter Parade when it rolls out for the 41st consecutive year on Saturday,
High-end luxury homes hitting the Ahwatukee market
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YEA! teens shine in pitches to investors
See
A
hwatukee may be on the verge of a 21st century kind of gold rush. Suddenly, high-end luxury homes – at least a half dozen with multimilliondollar price tags – are hitting the market as the spring buying season peaks. Within the last five weeks or so, “For sale” signs have sprouted up at two homes priced at $6.5 million; at least four houses carrying $2 million price tags have gone on the market; five homes closed for prices between $1.2 million and $1.8 million. Four of those deals occurred last month.
Rolls Bowls.
“It’s very interesting,” said Ahwatukee Realtor Bonny Holland, who specializes in luxury homes and was the agent who sold two of the million-plus homes last month. “It’s good to see and exciting to see those numbers,” she added. Realtor Pam Eagan, who represents the seller of the latest $6.5 million Ahwatukee house to hit the market, thinks several factors are at play. “The older the subdivision, the more valuable it gets as years go on,” said Eagan, who has been selling homes in the community for 33 of the 36 years she has lived in Ahwatukee. Couple that with extensive remodeling
undertaken at some of these luxury homes, sellers think now is the time to act before rising mortgage interest rates get too high for buyers looking to move up. “So now these homes look like new and they’re in an old prime location like Ahwatukee,” she said. Since 2000, only 17 homes in Ahwatukee have sold for more than $2 million – and most of those sales were before 2010. Only three deals worth more than $2 million have closed since 2011, according to Holland and Mike Orr, a former Arizona State University housing market analyst whose Cromford
Rolls Bowls.
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See
LUXURY on page 14