Call or Text Jim Duncan 434-242-7140
About Jim
Duncan
We’re doing it again … Matt Hodges and I will be on WNRN radio this Sunday morning at 11 o’clock. We’ve done this several times over the past few years and it’s always a good, thorough and in-depth conversation.
These are a few of the ideas that may come up …
If you have suggestions, please feel free to suggest them here, on Twitter, G+, Facebook … Continue reading
It’s not often that I get super-excited by real estate search and technology anymore; the last time I got excited was Realtor.com’s app. And sometimes implementing simplicity is brilliant
Diverse Solutions provides the “search for homes” tool that so many people use, and yesterday it got even better with their new release (researching this post, I realized that it’s only been a couple months since their last release).
- Radius search – check it out now! Walkability and proximity to stuff are two of the most important things my buyer clients are asking for.
- Search with polygons (only available on the backend by me for now … what polygons do you want?) and I imagine that soon it will likely be available to users
- Driving Directions
(have you seen that you can search for open houses as well? It’s an older feature but mighty useful!)
I have long wanted to provide the best real estate search tool in the Charlottesville area for my readers, visitors, buyers, etc – my role is a client representative, and I firmly believe that by empowering my clients, we all are better off.
Soon I might do a voice-over, but you really don’t want to listen to me, do you?
I’ll be testing this out myself (and implementing it more widely shortly)
C-Ville reports on the coming boom of hotels in Charlottesville-Albemarle.
In light of the Cavalier Inn’s reprieve, (from 2009) …
When the Board of Visitors first approved the Arts Gateway to the University of Virginia in 2007, the project—an estimated $118 million plan that would include, among other buildings, a new art museum at the current site of the Cavalier Inn—was slated to begin construction during the spring of 2009. Now, with renovations underway for the UVA Art Museum on Rugby Road, Vice Provost for the Arts Elizabeth Hutton Turner says that plans for the Arts Gateway are on “indefinite hold.”
… it seems there are going to be quite a supply of hotel rooms in Charlottesville. Continue reading
No we didn’t make another list (that I’m aware of), but this weekend my family went to a town in another state for my older daughter’s soccer tournament.
The contrasts between that town and ours are remarkable – ours is green, vibrant, thriving, with contrasts between city, country, mountains and flat land. Theirs is none of those. It’s interesting here, the topography, the culture, the things to do …
On the days where I read about a story about the stunning ineptitude of our politicians systems bureaucracy, the perspective of going to a place that is desolate, boring, depressed and uninteresting is immensely valuable.
For all of Charlottesville’s* faults and shortcomings (I’ll identify a few in a forthcoming story), we live in a pretty nice place and I count myself as damn lucky to live here.
Spend a few minutes browsing James Marshall’s photo stream on Flickr and tell me that Charlottesville’s not an awesome place to live. Seriously.
Charlottesville Tomorrow reports that the Best Buy ramp project is still delayed.
Is anyone surprised that the advice VDOT is offering is this?
“Rich suggested that acceptance might be the best response to distant construction dates.”
This seems par for the course in the Charlottesville – Albemarle area, when one of the three conditions set forth by the City of Charlottesville is to “have more meetings.” Continue reading
Concrete + 3D Printing =
It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle.
Wow.
So I might want to invest in concrete stocks.
As noted earlier today, this technology may one day become “normal” or the “new normal” or simply “what we’re building with now.”
It might take less than a week to build a concrete house using this technology, but I’d wager it would take at least three to five years to get approval from Albemarle’s Architectural Review Board. 
Continue reading
“Normal” is “now”.
- Human settlement patterns (where people are living and working)
- Gas prices
- Expectation of permanence/transience
- Interest rates
- Property tax rates
- Monetary supply
- The internet’s availability and impact
Those are just a few of the ways that 1999 differs from 2011, and makes application of “normal” challenging.
Here’s something that hasn’t changed – people need homes. Buying a house is a choice, and one that comes with greater responsibility than renting – you’re accepting on the maintenance, the permanence, the mortgage, the community, the risk. If you’re not ready for those, don’t buy a house. If you’re ready to buy a home, do your due diligence and consider it.
“New normal” is a shifting term, applicable to virtually every evolving industry.
Heck, I’ve been seeking “new normal” for years.
But I thought I’d look at the data and briefly compare the 1999 Charlottesville area real estate market with the 2011 one … keeping in mind that so many things are different, thus negating in a lot of ways the comparisons.
