Toasty Toes with a Pellet Stove

The question I’m getting more and more these days is “Does this house run on gas or oil?” Buyers never seemed to care much about heating fuel type before, but now sky high oil prices are pushing it to the front of everyone’s mind. But this winter is going to be a rough one for heating costs, no matter what type of fuel you use. The Courant recently had an interesting article regarding homeowners looking

Test Scores and Home Prices

Last week the results for the Connecticut Mastery Test were released to the public.  The Courant has put together a nice page for quickly seeing data, while the official results website allows users to generate detailed reports. As expected, there has been a flurry of commentary on the results for different towns.  The West Hartford results are being debated on West Hartford Forums, Talk of West Hartford, and The West Hartford Blog.  I’m sure that there

A Glimpse at a Tough Real Estate Market

Last week I reported on real estate market statistics for the spring in a number towns in the Greater Hartford area. Most towns had seen a significant decline in the number of closed sales when comparing April through June of 2008 to 2007. While those statistics are troubling for sellers, they are also troubling for those who earn their living in the real estate industry; your local real estate agent, closing attorney, mortgage broker, home

The Incurables

I recently received showing feedback for one of my sellers. The buyer didn’t like the layout of the house. All I could conclude from the feedback was that the buyer didn’t like that very typical house style. There was nothing my seller could do to improve this objection for future showings. Which brings me to the subject of issues with a house that cannot be fixed. Some houses are cursed with in-cure-able conditions. Here are

Similar House, Higher Taxes. What Gives?

I recently received an email from a reader interested in the West Hartford market. Because their question was related to property taxes, something people are fixated on most of the time, I thought I would share the conversation with the masses… When looking online, every once in a while I am thrown off when i see two similar houses that have two totally different “estimated tax” amounts. A good example i found this morning is: