What is RealCentralVA?

Thanks to Marijean and WCAV for the profile during their Blog of the Week segment (no longer available).

Know this – some of the most informative, educational and entertaining contributions to this blog are provided by the commenters, and for each and every one of them, I am grateful and humbled that they choose to spend time here.

RealCentralVA is a real estate blog in Charlottesville that tracks the Charlottesville and Central Virginia real estate market … but there’s more than that. Since I founded this site in January 2005, I intended it to be an information resource for candid, honest opinion and dialogue about the local real estate market. NB: Jim Duncan is a Realtor.

I do not pander or condescend to my readers, and try my best to write at a reasonably high level – I figure if one can’t take the time to spell check a little old blog (which will be remembered by Google forever), what would one’s contracts look like?

I track home sales (or lack thereof), market trends, land use discussions, local politics – anything that is tangentially related to real estate.

First and foremost, I don’t sell – I hope to educate buyers, sellers, consumers, media – if people like what they read, they are free to contact me anytime.

Some of the more useful posts that I have written (after writing for nearly four and a half years, please feel free to dig around in the archives yourselves) –

– Posts with Enduring Interest – Just for Sellers

– Posts with Enduring Interest – Just for Buyers

– I really, really want consumers to search for homes without me – any Realtor whose core competency is the MLS should be searching for a new career. That’s why I have what I believe to be the best ways to search for homes in Charlottesville – Diverse Solutions and FranklyMLS (no longer available) – and tips on how to search for homes without a Realtor.

– I’m an advocate for transparency in real estate fees.

– I work as a Buyer’s Agent and am working to eliminate single agent dual agency, because the only one who benefits from Dual Agency is – guess who? – The Realtor.

– I market homes in new and different ways (property (archived: 2009) videos (archived: 2009) and personalized signs for two examples).

My goal – provide information and analysis for consumers to educate themselves … then we all benefit.

If you’re new here, please take the time to poke around, consider subscribing to my site (archived: 2015) or follow me on Twitter – this way you will always be among the first to know about what’s happening in the Charlottesville real estate market.

As I said in February when we announced Nest:

My name is Jim Duncan and we’re the Nest Real Estate Group (archived: 2011) and I intend to change the world.