Thanks for Reading RealCentralVA in 2013 – and Hopefully 2014

Thank you. Thank you for reading this year. Your time, your insight – on and offline – is a huge part of why I do what I do here.

I’m planning some stories for 2014 – obviously a bunch of new stories but also quite a few that have never made it out of “draft” status in my moleskin or my writing program.

The wonderful thing about real estate – both as a career to practice and as something about which to write – is that every year is different and interesting. Having written well over 4,000 stories since January 2005 here (some of which are pretty good) there remains plenty to write.

Some of the things that are on my list for 2014 –

– Unemployment and its affect on the housing market

– New construction – more is coming – what will its impact be on infrastructure and the resale housing market?

– The impact of new mortgage rules – Qualified Residential Mortgages are finally being implemented, and while the rules haven’t yet been finalized (or written) (archived: 2022) this new wrinkle will affect the housing market.

– The new proposed legislation that affects real estate stuff

– I’ll continue to localize national real estate advice. This is a wonderfully useful overview of the home buying process, with at least one detail that doesn’t apply to the CharlAlbemarle area – when buying a home, you wire the money.

– What do you want to read about? What interests you?

And next-to-lastly, a request:

If you want to stay informed every time I write a story, I’m asking you to consider subscribing; you can do so here (it’s the second option).

If that’s too much email (and for me, it probably would be) – you can subscribe to my monthly note , which is where I write some of my best (and definitely my best-edited) stuff.

This time of year is as good as any to reflect on what went well here and what I can improve on. But one thing remains – I’ll keep writing, for at least three reasons.

1) This little corner of the internet is my pensieve, my repository to which I refer many, many times a week, both as an archive for the Charlottesville – Albemarle real estate market and region and as a means by which I educate my clients.

2) So long as I can afford to do so, RealCentralVA will stay up.

It’s important to me that my corner not go away.

For many building long-term business and brand presences on social platforms, not abdicating control over the data to the platforms themselves becomes something critical to consider, especially in an age where the content is decay at 11% each year.

In other words,

In fact, the researchers said that within a year of these events, an average of 11 percent of the material that was linked to had disappeared completely (and another 20 percent had been archived), and after two-and-a-half years, close to 30 percent had been lost altogether and 41 percent had been archived. Based on this rate of information decay, the authors predicted that more than 10 percent of the information about a major news event will likely be gone within a year, and the remainder will continue to vanish at the rate of .02 percent per day.

3) The blog is dead, long live the blog. If everyone is linking and sharing and pinning and, and and … to what are they ultimately linking? (blogs and original content, one hopes – I do).