Featured Home: 701 North Main, Elgin, Texas

by marsha on July 17, 2010

701 North Main, Elgin, Texas

701 North Main, Elgin, Texas

Fabulous Historic Home! Many wonderful touches will draw you into the heart of this home. You’ll love the spacious rooms, high ceilings, & wood floors. Dine with the finest in the formal dining room graced by a wide arch, columns, & antique lighting. The plantation shutters, French doors, & crystal doorknobs will take you back to a gentler time. The lovely master fireplace and walls of windows will relax you beyond words. The detached garage & apartment above have been rehabbed with new windows & paint. Use as a rental, (many have asked), create a studio space, or have an office away from it all. Appreciate the outdoor space, the recently added deck, the tall pecan trees, & room for a pool, garden or a whopping big barbecue with friends and family! You will fall in love! Come see it today!

{ 0 comments }

Austin home starts up 11%

by marsha on July 2, 2010

Austin-area residential construction is up 11% over last year, and it looks like we’ll continue to see activity even though the federal tax credit for home buyer expired, based on an article by Shonda Novak in the Austin American-Statesman. Novak quotes Tommy Tucker of Residential Strategies, Inc., who says that “buyers are coming back to the market for reasons apart from the tax credit.” Area builders “have shown discipline by not creating an oversupply of housing,” so prices should remain stable. The Austin housing market’s health relative to other parts of the country reflects the strength of Austin’s job market. The article mentions, as an example, Samsung’s $3.6 billion expansion here.

{ 0 comments }

FHA Reform Act

June 21, 2010

Last Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives passed the FHA Reform Act, establishing some new Federal Housing Administration (FHA) regulations and authorities. The bill will strengthen FHA’s capital base by raising mortgage insurance premiums, and will crack down on FHA-approved lenders.
According to a statement released by House Democrats, the reforms outlined in the bill will [...]

Read the full article →

New library for Kyle

May 24, 2010

I’ve been working a lot in the rapidly-growing town Kyle, just south of Austin. Kyle’s population has increased almost fivefold since 2000, which means there’s been an increasing demand for services, especially library services, hence the strong local commitment to construction of a new 20,000 square foot library, four times the size of the older [...]

Read the full article →

Suburbs are older, poorer, more diverse

May 20, 2010
Thumbnail image for Suburbs are older, poorer, more diverse

A Brookings Institution analysis of 2000-2008 census data show interesting trends. [Link] See also Brookings: State of Metro America
Highlights:

Suburbs are now more likely to be home to a poor, rapidly growing older population as younger, educated whites move to urban centers.
A majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metro areas live [...]

Read the full article →

Mayans had pressurized water systems

May 20, 2010

I found this pretty fascinating: A cross-disciplinary team including a two Penn State researchers, an archaeologist, and a hydrologist found the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the new world in the Mayan city of Palenque, an aqueduct and tunnel system, probably used to power a fountain or wastewater system. This [...]

Read the full article →

Single women buy more real estate!

May 14, 2010

Single women are buying more real estate than single men.
Per Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch,
Unmarried women accounted for 21% of home purchases in 2009, while unwed males were 10% of the buyers, according to a National Association of Realtors report in November. It’s a dramatic shift from 1981, the first year the numbers were tracked, when [...]

Read the full article →

Incredibility

May 14, 2010

From Lani Rosales at Agent Genius:
FHA Commissioner David Stevens spoke before the audience of Realtors and executives, calling the long term prospects for the real estate market “incredible,” according to NAR. Pointing to young households as a demographic that is growing larger than the baby boomer demographic, Stevens notes that their entry into the market [...]

Read the full article →

An ideal real estate search engine?

April 8, 2010

Marc Davison envisions an ideal system for real estate searches – wouldn’t this be grand? He imagines “a Pandora for real estate. A system that allowed users to tailor a search by liking and disliking the listing results the system provides them based on their broad parameters. By crunching our responses along with those collected [...]

Read the full article →

Job losses and foreclosure mitigation

March 30, 2010

Construction and manufacturing sectors lost 5,500 jobs from February 2009 to February 2010, according to Texas Workforce Commission statistics reported in the Austin American-Statesman. The leisure and hospitality sector gained 5,000 jobs over the same period. The statewide unemployment rate was 8.2 percent last month, holding steady, a sign that the labor market has bottomed [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries