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Charlottesville’s Coffee Shops
Are discovered by the Washington Post; yay.
Hat tip: Dave at the HooK
It would have been nifty if they’d included links to the referenced coffee shops, so here they are:
They left out Shenandoah Joe’s, Greenberry’s and a few others, but it’s still nice to be noticed.
Surprised that Yun’s candor wasn’t noticed
From yesterday’s USA Today (fingered by a client):
Lawrence Yun: Consumers need to find out what is going on at the local level and not necessarily take national headline numbers as a point of reference. Sellers tend to be more stubborn in facing the reality of the market, so people who really need to sell need to come down on prices, given the high inventory and seller competition.
…
USA TODAY: Does the national median home price need to fall a lot more before the housing market can get moving again?
Yun: Prices need to adjust as the market dictates. Another 10% fall in some markets could occur. However, I doubt prices will or need to fall in the vast middle America. Indianapolis, Dallas, Kansas City, Omaha are, if anything, underpriced markets.
Calculated Risk on the Case-Shiller index.
My take last week on the Case-Shiller index.
Monday Reading 04-28-2008
227+ Comments and Counting - The Commission Based Fee Structure - It’s Bad for Buyers.
EcoTech Daily’s Daily Five - Jetson Green’s Sprawl Home Discounts, Big City LEED and Codes, + Future of Green Buildings is good knowledge
The unlucky .2% at the Foxfield Races - See some videos at cVillain
The Real Cost of Tackling Climate Change - hint: it’s more than you might think (it’s a cultural change more than anything else)
Today, the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year (much more if you are Al Gore or John Edwards and live in a mansion). To stay within the magic number, average household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year. This is not enough juice to run the average hot water heater.
You can forget refrigerators, microwaves, clothes dryers and flat screen TVs. Even a house tricked out with all the latest high-efficiency EnergyStar appliances and compact fluorescent lights won’t come close. The same daunting energy math applies to the industrial, commercial and transportation sectors as well. The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all.
In the Charlottesville region, there are currently 2,409 properties on the market - ~30% of these are vacant. Will crime follow?
That $600 “rebate”? That’s about one month of gas, thankyouverymuch.
Why Good Realtors Hate Bad MLS Data
What will MLS data standards do for the consumers?
Hopefully, all of our lives - buyers, sellers, Realtors - will become more efficient.
With the recent talk of how forthcoming data standards are going to make property data sharing more efficient and thus better for consumers and Realtors, here is one of my requests -
I’d love to see a (Google) Mashup (or the MLS would be even better, and I think a no-brainer) providing an overlay of school districts. Albemarle County School Districts are here and the City of Charlottesville’s school districts are here. Even better, make it so that registered users could make their own pages with all their important locations to help them organize their thoughts and help their Realtor representatives better understand their thoughts and thought processes.
But here’s a problem - Albemarle’s maps are PDFs and the City’s districts are encased in a Java-heavy page. What’s the solution?
The number I have heard of common fields to be shared is around fourteen - methinks there’s some work to be done with this. I could think of fourteen fields pretty quickly …
Price, address/lat-long/parcel ID, bedrooms, baths, living room, dining room, fireplace, pool, garage, lot size, view, fenced yard?, flooring type?, room locations, laundry?, paved?
Ok, that’s 16 from a stream-of-consciousness, but you get my point.
From a consumer point of view - what are the most important pieces of data that help you get an initial picture of the property?
The lending environment is getting even more challenging
For some, that is.
Matt Carter at Inman news has this report:
Sliding home prices have made homes more affordable in some areas, though tighter lender requirements and bigger down payments have locked some buyers out of the market.
Real estate agents and brokers say they have seen some unconventional loan types, such as those higher-risk loans that have been blamed for bringing down the subprime and credit markets, largely vanish from the market while government loan products are becoming more prominent.
And this is my report from the front lines. I received this email yesterday (the second such email* I received yesterday) - both situations were with reputable lenders and Buyers’ Agents on the other side.
I just heard from my guys a few moments ago, I need to hold off no later than Monday possibly sooner, please let me know if you get even a sniff of any other offers. The reason for the delay is that that program they were going to use to fund the loan no longer exists so they want to get back with (their lender) and make sure everything works before we come back to you.
I am sorry about the delay here, there is really nothing we could do and I would rather this happen now and not a week before closing.
Whew. What a day. With such a fluid and ever-changing lending market, it’s getting harder to accurately vet offers coming in.
*Posted with permission
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This work by Jim Duncan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. -
