Coming on Monday – a comprehensive look at the first months’ real estate sales in the Charlottesville MSA, (following up on this weeks’ first look at the real estate market data) including median prices for attached and detached homes, Year over Year and 2011 versus 2000 transactional data. In short, even more Charlottesville real estate that you won’t find anywhere else.**

A tease: In Charlottesville, attached home sales are down 35% – from 17 to 10. In Albemarle, single family home sales are up 107% – from 269 to 289. More to come.

I’m trying to read more books.

I just finished The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better and now I’m reading The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, both of which are terrifying on different levels.*

Some linkage for you:– Home Sellers Step Up as Last-Resort Lender to Poor-Credit Buyers

– Harvard University’s annual housing report – Subsidence problem

– Harvard’s State of the Nation’s Housing – 2011 (PDF)

– America’s Infrastructure is Failing. But the US is spending $320 million per month to build Afghanistan’s infrastructure.

– Could civil unrest happen here?

– Don’t abandon a blog post; people might notice when an “educator” notes his fellow “Educator’s“. If I were a teacher, I’d be embarrassed. If I were a parent (in this school system), I’d be outraged.

– What looks to be a fascinating 3-part series at the Daily Progress – “College Just Isn’t What it Use to Be“. This part made me laugh, cry, cringe and fear:

A final interesting tidbit: Students come to college today expecting high grades. As Ms. Roksa noted: “Surveys … suggest that over two-thirds of students today expect to earn a B or higher average in college, compared to only 27 percent in 1971, when the study began.”

Critics of higher education might focus on a decline in academic rigor as the chief reason students are neither learning nor training themselves to learn.

* those are affiliate links to Amazon; I think I get a penny and a half or so if you buy the book through that link.

** Anyone can put up pictures and quote from the Realtor Party line to the media; I’m trying to put forth useful, transparent real estate analysis.