From the monthly archives:

March 2009

Craigslist – I am thinking of firing you!

March 27, 2009

For about 4 years now I’ve been posting all of our listings in Austin Craigslist. It seems like once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I received a call or two, and even a bonafide lead from one of our Craigslist property listing ads. I honestly can’t remember the last time it’s happened [...]

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Open House activity brisk in Austin and Round Rock

March 23, 2009

Steve and I have a few listings that have not had as much “traffic” as we would like, so the last few weeks I held open houses in a couple of our vacant staged listings just to get a feel for foot traffic in the neighborhoods and to hear what buyers are saying.
The first [...]

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Austin real estate sales last 12 months

March 20, 2009

I prepared the graph below for a presentation I did last night to a local Austin real estate investor club. I’ve been commenting to buyers and sellers lately that the Austin real estate market has been “drawing W’s”, which is to say that average sold prices have been taking big swings up and down each [...]

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Protecting Your Business Name and Reputation via Google Alerts

March 18, 2009

There is an article in the Sept/Oct edition of the Austin Apartment Association magazine “Window on Rental Housing”, written by Austin Attorney Bill Warren, which addresses the growing problem in the apartment industry of rouge reviews and rants about apartment complexes and the management. 
As a renter moving to Austin, you can go online and find [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market – Feb 2009 Update

March 9, 2009

The average and median sold prices in Austin are up for February 2009. Average sold price is up 6.29% from Feb a year ago and median sold price is up 2.65% from last year. Last month (Jan 2009) you might remember sold prices had dropped about 5%. So the Austin market is “undulating” a bit, [...]

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Why picky buyers pay more for Austin real estate

March 7, 2009

It’s called a “buyer’s market” because real estate buyers have a market advantage over sellers. The buyer advantage is a result of high inventory and lower demand. Buyers have a lot of Austin homes to pick from, and there are more homes for sale than there are buyers to buy them. This means Austin buyers [...]

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Study Finds 20 Percent of Mortgage Underwater – I say so what?

March 4, 2009

From my Realtor email newsletter today:
Nearly 20 percent of home owners owe more on their homes than their properties are worth, finds a new study by First American CoreLogic. About 8.31 million properties were underwater at the end of 2008, up 9 percent from 7.63 million at the end of September. Corelogic predicts about 2.16 [...]

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