While we recycle our bottled water bottles, yesterday my daughter and I went to Blue Ridge and bought Nalgene bottles for every member of the family. Every little bit helps.Is America headed for a rail renaissance?Debunking Portland, The City That Doesn’t Work (PDF)Unspoilt land is valuable, but not priceless.Doomsday in October for subprime?Regarding Facebook:… regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities.Sprint was justified in canceling some of its customers…. Now I need to find someone in Charlottesville who installs them.And I couldn’t post on 7-11-07 without including a few stories about former 7-11’s, now Kwik-E-Marts.
Date Archives July 2007
A logo for RealCentralVA.com – reworked
Well? Reworked by a local firm in Charlottesville.What do you think? (there’s a poll below){democracy:8}*I wish I could get rid of those silly bullets.
Got Pownce
And I got 6 invites to boot; let me know if you want one…. – start here) Who knows if this social network will be any better than the others?… One thing that Facebook, Twitter, Pownce and the like have done? Devalued what a “friend” means via the race to add as many “friends” as possible.
Steering buyers’ agents
In a presumably-paid-for-piece in the “Business Journal” section of the DP a local Realtor says:”The commissions offered in a buyer’s market to participating agents are very important…. This quoted sentiment may be applicable to some Realtors, but I would argue that it’s not for most of the good Realtors in the Charlottesville area.Here are two questions for real estate consumers to ask -1…. – Do you get a higher commission if you sell one of your company’s listings?- How many buyers are even told anything about co-brokerage other than “don’t worry, the seller pays the commission.”?2…. (note: in my company, we practiced Dual Agency about 8.5% of the time in the same time period – which is still too high in my opinion, and I haven’t done it yet).As a buying or selling client – do you really think you are getting 100% representation from your contracted representative if your agent is “representing” both parties?Earlier this year I wrote A Call for and End to Cooperative Compensation.
Two Carnivals
The Carnival of Real Estate #49 and the Carnival of the Green #85 make their appearances this week. There’s a carnival for everything.
A glut of condos in Charlottesville
However, it’s hard to look at these numbers any other way.First – generally, new condo developments are not subject to the impact of the surge in inventory caused by the condo conversions. I’d show this data, but not a high enough percentage of Realtors mark their properties as “new” for me to be able to trust the output. Garbage in, Garbage out.In Charlottesville/Albemarle, consider these numbers -There are currently 223 active condos on the market.There are 136 condos under contract.167 condos have sold so far this year.138 condos are currently on the market under $225k.131 condos under $225k have sold this year.*191 condos in Charlottesville/Albemarle have expired or have been withdrawn from the market this year; I assume that most of these have been re-listed.Breaking the numbers down further by each individual development shows the situation even more dramatically. If I were to tell the sellers in these developments that everything is “fine;” I’d look like either a liar or a fool.Why some Charlottesville condos are riskyAre condos a good investment?
Quick market update for Charlottesville
The first-half market report for the Charlottesville region will be released in seven days. Leading up to the report’s release, I’ll be posting my brief market reports this week.About 36% of the active listings in Charlottesville/Albemarle are priced between $280k and $500k.The median price for all listings in Charlottesville/Albemarle is $369k. Median price for sold listings is $299k.Courtesy of my favorite new statistical report. (PDF) Look at the graphs for quick insight into where the bulk the market activity is.