Are homebuyers and sellers the only ones who need transportation?
It would appear that Gov. Kaine thinks so. (thanks to Richmond Sunlight for pointing out this article) Kaine is proposing a statewide 25-cent increase in the grantors tax, which is now 10 cents per $100 of assessed value, that owners pay on the sale of…
Where Will the Urban Cores Be? And why this Matters NOW
Get out your best Magic 8 Ball - He also observed the largest wave of Generation Y home purchasing begins in 2012, after experts think the housing market will have turned around. Although what qualifies as an "urban core area" may vary widely to different…
If you don’t think gas prices are affecting buyers
Update 4 March 2022 - all links were broken, including the one from the Virginia Realtors' site, so I had to spend time searching the Internet Archive. You're just not paying attention. Snip below is from an MSNBC story from 2008. In his hunt for…
A lifestyle shift – riding a bike
I rode from my office to a listing I am marketing the other day - all told it took me about forty five minutes, round trip - and added about 15 minutes to my traveling time. Was it worth it? Absolutely. I saved gas, burned…
Walk Score and Zillow sitting in a tree
And the results are fantastic. The data is a hair out-dated, but you can still get a very good feel for the walkability of a location. A sincere thank you to Zillow for making their neighborhood boundaries open source, and to Walk Score for their…
Transportation Town Hall on Monday
If you would like more bike lanes or rail service or other transportation concerns, take the time to tell some of the people whose voices matter (not that ours don't - they just have bigger and better targeted microphones). Town meeting on transportation with Delegate…
Government’s not going to do it – so why not Google?
I went to a meeting last week in Old Trail, a new urbanist development in Crozet, Virginia. It took me about ten minutes to ride my bike. What if Google, in addition to driving times, added a "biking" or "estimated walking" time, and highlighted appropriate…
Proximity to rail equals higher property values?
What's old is new again. Estately, one of the best real estate search sites out there puts forth this as fact - When buying a home, living near rail lines is better. I wrote about mass transit's ability to increase property values in May of…
Could this be part of the future of transportation?
Just wondering if this could work in the Charlottesville/Central Virginia area. I still think that an implementation of this type of system is among the best I've seen.
Bike Week in Charlottesville
Check it out at ACCT's site. Ride a bike on one errand every other day; start somewhere! (gas prices are absolutely impacting ever facet of our lives - real estate, too) "Many people did the 'drive to qualify,' " looking in farther-out suburbs to find…