Browsing Category Albemarle

Buying Local – The Race to Homogeneity

in Albemarle Charlottesville General Real Estate on

Think about this the next time you shop at a chain.

One by one, store by store, the chains expand, earning a few more dollars a share and further insulating themselves from the communities they used to serve. No, my neighbors and I don’t need another drugstore, we have plenty. That’s not going to change Walgreen’s mind, and it’s not going to help Jimmy and his team, either. My heart goes out to them. Thanks for everything you did for our community, guys.

Admittedly, many of the chains are locally-owned; but they aren’t as locally-owned as true locally-owned stores. Think Mudhouse and Starbucks. CVS and Parkway Pharmacy in Crozet. The Markets and 7-11. Harris Teeter and Great Valu in Crozet.

In a related story, the developers at Stonefield are finding that their stores may be welcome but their architecture is not.

Read More

Charlottesville MSA Median Prices 2000 through 2011

in Albemarle Charlottesville Greene Market statistics on

Bear with me … I’m trying to make sense of the market.

Continuing my theme of looking at the Charlottesville real estate market data from a longer point of view, lest we track the housing market too closely …

It seems that we’re back (broadly) at 2004 – 2005 housing prices in Charlottesville.

Single family home median prices for Charlottesville MSA:

Median Sales Prices - Single Famliy Homes - 1st 5 Months - Charlottesville MSA

Attached home median prices for Charlottesville MSA:

Attached - Median Sales Price

I left off Greene and Louisa as they have negligible attached home inventories.

Read More

Seeking a Stable, Consistent Volume of Real Estate Transactions in Charlottesville

in Albemarle Charlottesville Market statistics on

I look at too much data. I admit it. In this post, I’m posing just a question – when looking at the past ten years of real estate data** in the Charlottesville, Virginia area, what is a “normal” level of real estate transactions and is there a correlation between transactions and population growth? And how can my buyer and seller clients (and readers) apply this knowledge?

My hypothesis is that once we achieve a stable, consistent volume of real estate transactions – equilibrium if you will – we’ll be able to definitively say that we reached “bottom” or “stagnation” and start to consider such things as “appreciation of real estate values.”

Read More

Batesville Store is Closing

in Albemarle Politics on

And it’s a damn shame. I find it inexplicable and infuriating that, if everything that is reported is true – that Friday was the owners’ first notice that they were in violation – then the State’s choice to enforce their rules and shut down the store is inexcusable and unacceptable. The Batesville Store is part of what makes Albemarle Albemarle.

The Batesville Store is was an integral part of the community. Personally, I’d like to see the community of Batesville, if they were so inclined, refuse to let the state shut the store down.

At RealCrozetVA – read the letters from the owners.

Read More