Tune in to Coy Barefoot’s Charlottesville – Right Now! program today on 1070 am at 5pm to hear a brief discussion about the Charlottesville real estate market, where we are, where we may be going, and where the market has come from. Better yet, WINA has recently entered the modern age and offers live streaming of their shows . If you have any questions, I’d love to hear them.
View from the Top of the Gleason Building in Downtown Charlottesville
I just wish it had been a less gray morning when I was on the roof of the Gleason for a home inspection. Either way, it’s a nice view .
Crozet Struggles With Growth – Now a Lack of Implementation of Promises
The Road to Somewhere (Nowhere?) raises questions, as do rumored roads .
Charlottesville is a Leader in Biotech
The greater Charlottesville region is home to more than 17 percent of the state’s biotech companies, based on information from the Virginia Bioscience Directory. It contains more than 20 percent of the state’s bioscience equipment companies, nearly 18 percent of its medical device companies and nearly 17 percent of its bioenergy companies. … Too often, our people — UVa post-docs, for instance — cannot remain in the commonwealth because the jobs aren’t here, and the jobs often aren’t here because the venture capital for exciting new startup companies comes from out of state. ( hat tip to the Virginia Bioscience Blog for pointing out the story ) The last snip is a challenge that the Charlottesville region faces, across industries. There is relatively little potential for growth, whether laterally or vertically. * no word on how they are defining “Charlottesville” – whether as ‘Charlottesville’ or ‘Charlottesville-Albemarle’ or ‘Charlottesville MSA’.
Cities Are Greener than the Suburbs. Apparently.
And that leads to lower electricity usage, lower home heating usage — and those are the facts that I think make cities seem, at least to my eyes, significantly greener. … … And let’s just go through this — more than 85 percent of single-family detached houses in this country are owner occupied. … If you rent out single-family detached housing, they depreciate on average, more than 1 percent a year, according to some studies. And that’s quite easy to understand: renters don’t do the maintenance that homeowners do, to keep taking care of their homes.
Monday Links – 14 March 2011
Dear National Association of Realtors: I hereby volunteer to serve again. 🙂 – How 20-somethings (and really, most of my buyer clients) approach the home-buying process . – In Heart and Mind, not brand, I apparently am a Redfin agent. … Numbers 8 and 9 are dead-on advice for the Charlottesville real estate market. #10 is telling as well, particularly coming from one of the most disruptive forces in the real estate space in a decade.
…When you over-price by $10,000, you can lose much more: after a month the listing loses its luster, mortgage and staging costs pile up, and price-reductions signal buyers to ask for more reductions .
– The Landmark continues to be an eyesore (and now tagged with unsavory, not for kids’ eyes graffiti ) – Great comments and discussion at cvillenews about Trader Joe’s merits . – My favorite recent search terms to bring visitors to this here Charlottesville real estate blog:
Albemarle May Have a Higher Tax Rate
Snow told supervisors this morning that he’s willing to support a tax rate of 75.2 cents per $100 of assessed value, up from the 2010 rate of 74.2 cents. … Rooker, an independent, proposed the rate increase to provide funding primarily for about a $1 million local transportation fund that could be matched with state funds, doubling its value, and about $450,000 to provide the first year of annual financing of a new Crozet library. I’d be inclined to support this if I trusted the politicians/bureaucracy/system to dedicate the increased revenue to specific projects. But I don’t.