Weekend Plans: May 14th, 2011

We’ve been spending a lot of time outside recently. For the most part we’ve been cleaning up the yard from the winter, but we have also begun to plant the flower gardens for the spring. Clean-up and gardens have overlapped a little bit this year. We had been concerned about the snow crushing our shrubs, but they bounced back surprisingly well. However, in other parts of the yard, we did lose a couple of garden

More on Demographics and Real Estate

Below is another article about demographics and other real estate trends that builds on the research of Arthur C. Nelson. It came to my attention after being posted by City of Hartford COO David Panagore. This continues on the themes of Mr. Condon’s piece from Sunday and our take on specific neighborhoods that may benefit from the market shifts. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t get through the whole thing in the first sitting, but when

Are You Real or Not?

I usually receive anywhere from 50 to 100 non-spam emails a day to my work account. These emails are from clients, other agents, and sometimes potential clients. The potential client emails come in two formats, directly from a person to my email address or through a real estate website like Realtor.com, Zillow, etc. to my email address. Emails that come from a person directly to my account are usually from “real” people. By “real” I

The Middle

We’ve been assisting buyers and sellers with negotiating a lot of contracts lately. One of the things we’ve noticed is that people tend to gravitate towards “The Middle.” What that means is, the middle between the buyer’s starting point and the seller’s listing price. For example, if a house is priced at $350,000 and the buyer starts at $320,000, you’re probably going to end up right around $335,000. The problem with The Middle is that

I Can Predict the Future!

My crystal ball says that closings in March are going to trail last year by a wide margin. Look for an article citing GHAR’s March stats to appear in the mainstream media early April, and then another one based on the Warren Group’s figures in May. Both will show a decrease in activity. April closings will trail last year by an even larger margin than March! But most people won’t hear about that until the