November and December are traditionally slow months for real estate sales. People would rather focus on the various holidays, rather than think about buying and selling houses. Well, this year things appear to have slowed a little bit earlier than usual. Based on the towns I’m tracking below, the number of closed sales for single family homes was down 31% overall when comparing November 2008 to November 2007. That’s fairly significant. Here are the monthly
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Gallup recently released the 2008 results of their annual Honesty and Ethics of Professions poll. Real estate agents came out in the middle of the pack of the polled professions, with the majority of those polled indicating that they felt the real estate profession has average integrity. This year’s results are not substantially different for real estate agents than surveys of years past. I never used to think much about these polls when I worked
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If there’s one mantra that you’ll hear from the real estate community, it’s that “Real Estate is local.” We don’t want you looking at what’s going on in California and Arizona and extrapolating that the same behavior is happening in your market. Because most likely, it’s not. Each market reacts differently based on the local economy, housing stock, demographics, and a host of other factors. Unfortunately, I believe there is another equally important phenomenon that
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My husband, Kyle, makes me laugh. He likes to think of himself as a handy type of guy and prides himself on being able to do things around the house, rather than having to hire others. So twice a year, he has to do one of his least favorite home maintenance projects, but really an important one; cleaning the gutters. Cleaning our gutters presents quite the challenge because they’re a good 30 feet off the
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This post will probably solidify my standing as a big house dork, but frankly, I don’t care. This is how much I admire, and envy those that have, PEX water piping. Unless you live in a new construction home, your water pipes are most likely made of copper or old galvanized iron. They run along your basement ceiling, sometimes cutting into joists, making various twists and turns before they disappear into the floor above and
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