Parks and Rec
This morning I was at a local town hall visiting the Assessor and Building departments when I saw the sign below. Unfortunately I did not see Ron Swanson or Leslie Knope. This saddened me. And now I feel like I need to eat some breakfast meat.
It’s a Brick. House.
I learned something interesting today during a home inspection, so I thought I would pass it along.
Take a look at the photo below. Is this house solely brick exterior construction or is it brick and stud construction (essentially the brick is only a veneer)? How can you tell?
This home, built in 1884 according to town records, is solely brick exterior construction. That means there are several layers of brick which make up the exterior/interior walls of the shell of the home. You can tell this because every few courses of brick there are bricks turned perpendicular to the other bricks. The brick is all structural in function and the method of laying the bricks provided stability and strength.
If the brick is all laid running the same direction, it’s a veneer and is only for aesthetics, the brick does not have a structural function.
Here’s an interesting website that talks more about older brick construction and how it works. There are also some helpful tips on how it should be properly maintained and repaired, if needed.
The more you know…
December Contracts: Making Up For November
December single-family contracts came in at 357 for Hartford County, which was slightly higher that the number of deals that came together in November.
December is traditionally the slowest month of the year, so having it outpace any other month is a bit of a surprise. We think that the usually large snow storm, which was felt through the beginning of November, worked to push some business into the year’s final month.
This December also showed an uptick in activity compared to December of 2010. The number of homes that went under contract this past month is nearly 10% higher than the total from the previous year. It’s difficult to know how much of this observation can also be attributed to the snow storm. Our feeling is that it is not a result that we should read too much meaning into.
Results were well distributed at the town level, though not over as extreme a range as we have seen in previous months. More interesting is that the number of homes actively for sale has come down to about 6.6 months worth of inventory. It was at 7.3 months in the November report, and peaked at 8.8 months in the June report.
Inventory levels should be lower at the beginning of the year. Many sellers take their properties off the market over the holidays so they don’t have to worry about keeping their home in “show condition” and accommodating visits from potential buyers. New listings will begin to come on the market at a steady pace, and the pace will increase as we get through the winter and closer to the traditional spring real estate season.
We’re working on our 2012 real estate predictions, and will hope to have some more analysis of 2011 available in the coming weeks.
Incandescent Light Bulbs
The incandescent light bulb. Once a symbol of American ingenuity, it is now under attack as a wasteful.
Just about everyone I know has strong feelings about the incandescent. Most prefer the light they provide. Most would also agree that they are inefficient compared to compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) and light emitting diode (LED) technologies. Some argue that the newer technologies are inferior due to their color spectrum and their turn on time, though both of those characteristics have been improving with each generation of the technologies. Others are just turned off by the higher prices of the newer bulbs.
Congress got involved with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was supposed to take effect at the beginning of 2012. The plan was to gradually halt the production of incandescents starting with the 100W bulb this year. The 75W would have been phased out in 2013, and the 60W and 40W in 2014. However, action by Congress during December of 2011 has effectively pushed out the start date until October 2012.
I have two perspectives on the matter. At the personal level, I think that efficiency is important and have been testing out the various CFL products for years. They were very poor at first, and I think they earned their bad reputation. Some of the newer bulbs I’ve bought have been much better, almost as good as the incandescents. I do still have a problem with the smaller specialty bulbs that are visible. Coiled CFLs just don’t look right in a nice chandelier, and I haven’t been impressed with the performance of “decorative” CFLs I’ve bought.
At the professional level I am a really big fan of incandescents. I’ve shown buyers enough homes to know that they are always more impressed with a property well lit by incandescents than they are by CFLs. One issue is that the quality of the CFLs vary depending on which generation technology the sellers have. So it’s common to see older CFLs that play right into the negative stereotype, which gets a buyer thinking about the lighting instead of the house.
My main recommendation at this point is to sellers. No matter how you feel about the different bulb technologies, you will make your home sell faster, and potentially for more money, by replacing all your CFL bulbs with warm incandescents. Think of it as part of the staging process, and remember that you can pack up your CFLs to bring to your new home.
A Hidden House
Ever since we lived in the Boston area, I have been interested in homes that were set back off the road on a lot that doesn’t have any real street frontage. I like to call them hidden houses. Take a look at this picture, can you see the house tucked between and behind the two on the street?
What I find interesting about hidden houses is that they each have an interesting story. How did they get there? Are they newer or older than the houses that surround them? If they’re newer, when did they get built and how was the building lot created?
There are many hidden houses in Greater Hartford if you know where to look. Our first example, in the above picture, is in the northern part of West Hartford. It was built in 2002, and is much newer than the 1950s vintage homes that surround it. The lot is just over an acre, large for West Hartford, and is set in the middle of an oversized block just off Main Street. Two other homeowners control an additional 2.1 acres (combined) of undeveloped land adjacent to this property.
It looks like this home is a very private set-up, yet still in a convenient location within town. The lot has its own driveway, which appears to be an easement over the home on the left’s property. And the undeveloped land behind the home probably gives it a really different feel from your typical West Hartford property.