October 2007

Inverted Pricing Cascade Showing up in Austin Real Estate Prices

October 31, 2007

I ran a CMA (Comparative Market Analysis) the other day for someone. The CMA revealed what I call an inverted pricing cascade. That is, when looking at the pricing of the Active, Pending and Sold listings, the lowest average prices and prices per square foot for this particular neighborhood started with the Active listings, next [...]

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Austin Rental Market Update – September 2007

October 29, 2007

The rental market in Austin remains strong, helped further by the fact that there are in fact some qualified buyers who are electing to rent instead of buy because they fear that there is an Austin Real Estate bubble, and they don’t want to buy into that bubble. I’m not going to go into several [...]

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Computer Disasters Less Painful that in Past

October 25, 2007

Sylvia’s work computer crapped out on us yesterday. It won’t boot. Now it’s in the shop and probably has a bad motherboard. We’ll get it back, if it’s worth repairing, by Saturday or Monday, but it’s really no big deal. Not many years ago, a PC going belly up meant that most productivity came to [...]

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Austin Real Estate Sold vs. Expired Comparison

October 22, 2007

Let’s take a look at the number of Austin Homes that sell versus the number that don’t sell. The graph above shows Sold and Not Sold (Expired or Withdrawn) counts for 2006 and 2007. The dark green bar represents the number of listings sold in 2007, the light green bar represents the number of listings [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market Sales Update – Sept 2007 and YTD

October 22, 2007

The Austin real estate market is a set of markets within a market. Trying to describe what’s going on is like trying to say what the weather is like right now in the U.S. What is true in one area often does not apply to another. Overall in Austin, the number of sales have dropped, [...]

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September Austin home sales drop 22 percent

October 19, 2007

The real estate slowdown crept up on us, but it’s really here for sure, despite the fact that the headlines say it (see below). Yet prices in Austin keep rising. A buyer a couple of weeks ago told me “I’m going to wait to buy because the bubble in Austin is going to burst soon”. [...]

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When Real Estate Bloggers go Wild

October 17, 2007

I was recently challenged about a blog article I wrote. I was told that the references to the “bozo agent” along with the accompanying visual graphic of Bozo the Clown was over the line and damaging to the real estate industry and the reputation of all Realtors. It was suggested that unflattering stories about the [...]

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So you want to take the leap and become a Realtor

October 16, 2007

When I was a small boy, 9 years old, my family was traveling on summer vacation and we stopped at a campground that had a huge pool with a high dive. It was 1972. There were a ton of older kids lined up to jump and dive off the high dive into the pool. I [...]

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Diary of a Busted Austin Real Estate Deal

October 11, 2007

Well meaning Agent blows deal for Buyer Recently a buyer on one of our listings terminated the contract, and then threatened to sue us and the Seller after the property was placed back on the market and a new offer was accepted. As is often the case with deals that go sideways, the buyer’s misfortune [...]

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Quantitative vs. Qualitative Data Analysis and Real Estate

October 9, 2007

Never has so much real estate data been so available to so many people. Most large US Metro areas have most Realtor listings online for public search (Austin has AustinHomeSearch.com). States that have mandatory disclosure on sales prices (Texas is not one of them) offer consumers a lot of sales data to peruse via aggregators [...]

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