Courtesy of Feedraider, here they are.
Posts Published by Jim Duncan
A Charlottesville Realtor who tries to stay on the bleeding/cutting/functional edge of technology and real estate trends. I have been selling real estate for the past 10 years, lived in C'Ville for twenty+ and am married to one of few Charlottesville natives left.
Monday links 10-16-2006
Reduce your energy costs and get a tax creditExotic loan programs and potential foreclosuresThe Downtown Mall shows signs of wear – from all the vehicular traffic. What a shame that the hub of the City is encouraged to deteriorate.If only more writers/bloggers (myself included) would take the time to research effectively …Hybrid fee structures and flat fee representation – there is a future in this, and I think I am going to develop this as a component of my business. Soon.Blog integrity is important. If readers question your motives, that trust, the trust that helps define blogging as different than other media, is lost.
Carnival of RE 10-16-2006
Procuring cause, best consumer web sites, flat fee brokerage and more. Inman hosts.
Housing and Transportation costs
The Center for Housing Policy has released a fascinating report titled: A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families (PDF). It’s 32 pages long, so I have not had time yet to fully digest it, but the premise is fairly commonsense: It typically costs less to live farther from urban centers…. Driving farther costs more money.As I have noted before, important and clear parallels may be drawn between the Central Virginia and the Northern Virginia market:Among the regions studied,the Washington,D.C.–Baltimore has one of the least affordable housing markets. Both housing costs and housing as a share of income are especially high among the region’s outer suburban and suburban fringe areas.Except for married couples with children who bear the brunt ofthese high costs, Working Families are more likely to live in central city and inner suburban neighborhoods where housing costs and cost burdens are somewhat lower…. This is as true in central city neighborhoods as it is on the suburban fringe.In our market, by contrast, many of those in the City have taken advantage of the recent housing boom and sold their houses and moved out into th Counties…. Locally, just look at the numbers of people who are commuting into Charlottesville/Albemarle (CharlAlbemarle!).These are a few of the stories from my feed reader about this story:Bacon’s RebellionBusiness WeekCommenter EM Risse notes on Bacon’s Rebellion:Of course, as we all know by now, Autonomobility is a dead end. But shared-vehicle systems (aka, “mass transit”) cannot overcome random distribution of origins and destinations.For this reason, studies such as Albemarle’s recent one on residents’ opinions regarding growth serve only to perpetuate the myopic view which local governments continue to reinforce. Unless there is region-wide cooperation, transportation will remain as inefficient as it is today – and will only get worse.
Blogging’s expectations (it’s local)
So much so, that after more than a year of regular blogging, she and her partner were losing their zeal as daily contributors to the real estate blogosphere …Read Jim’s post. It is excellent.Second was a post at Mike’s site, a request for opinions on the national real estate “web 2.0” sites that led to this comment response:The business is, and will always remain, local and relationship based. I could come up with a list of dozens of sites that I think do a much better job of providing a good consumer experience at a local level than any national site.The same can be said for real estate blogs. Many provide an extraordinary top-level view of the real estate industry, with the occasional (not yet rare) post focusing on their local trends. Some of these blogs have moved the real estate conversation forward faster and more intelligently than anybody (at least I) could have imagined.I have noticed a recent shift in the real estate blogosphere to a more broad-based focus on national and industry-wide trends rather than local real estate trends…. As more and more information comes online, the best real estate information may be somewhat self-selecting – readers will visit because somebody else told them to…. I have found that local clients do not care so much about one’s prominence nation-wide, but they do care about how much you know about planning, infrastructure, tax bases, employment centers, schools, a property’s potential appreciation rate …… I’d bet that if 500 real estate bloggers were surveyed as to whey they continue to blog (not why they started), that they enjoy it and are passionate about what they do would be in the top two responses.
Pockets of Pain
Irresponsibly, it has taken me until now to write about those pockets.Understanding that the market has shifted from a pure Sellers’ market to more of a Buyers’ market, and that this flip was mostly unexpected is the start of this analysis. The only ones who had predicted the “bubble” bursting/hissing/leaking – whatever analogy you want to use – were the ones who had been saying the same thing for years…. There is one condo development in town that has multiple condos on the market – at a very wide price disparity…. $80k sweet?This article from the WSJ is particularly relevant.– “Flips”Those who purchased with the intent to do some minor renovations, when major ones are warranted…. The primary reason is that my market analysis said that the market value was $40k less than what their market price turned out to be. They purchased the property six months ago for $100k less than they are asking and did about $30k in renovations. This market is no longer able to absorb this type of investment.Unless you can find the perfect property for flipping, your time, money, energy and emotions will be best spent elsewhere.– Those who purchased purely with the intent to sell in six or twelve months.This mindset was quite common, and equally feasible. Not so much anymore.If you are able to comfortably live in and afford your house, then it was a smart investment.
How much is one person’s honor worth?
Five dollars. Maybe I am too harsh in my assessment. But I don’t think so.