We had the rumors at the Nest Report a few days ago and Charlottesville Tomorrow reports this morning that the “Fifth and Avon Center is Moving Forward.“

Stay tuned – the neighborhoods in the Fifth Street and Avon Street corridors are about to get closer to stuff – which is mostly good … except for the trees and nature that will have to be destroyed to make way for said stuff.

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He had me at the warm, thick cut bacon that topped my chicken sandwich.

Note that that is chicken breast, bacon and a hard boiled egg.

Lots of whisky, and the desserts sounded tremendous … but those will have to wait for a dinner visit.

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With that preface, there are negatives about Charlottesville and while they’re all relative (traffic) I’d like to think there are solutions.

I’ve been having this conversation on Google+ and on Facebook in advance of posting here.

My answer to the question: Perhaps the single greatest negative with living in CharlAlbemarle is the collective inability of the City and County to implement plans – specifically for infrastructure. Their constant bickering, planning, fighting, planning, discussing, planning and then planning some more is remarkably irresponsible.

My other response was – when I have the free time, choosing what to do from the plethora of options – sporting events, theater, music, arts, etc. Seriously. There is so much to do that choosing how to fill my limited free time is challenging.

The responses have varied from lack of Implementation of infrastructure plans to bickering of the localities.

I said last year: When explaining the City/County relationship to relocating buyers, I often describe the governments as being akin to estranged husbands and wives who are sharing custody of the kids. Or as brothers and sisters who occasionally poke each other in the eye, just to see what will happen.

It’s true, and it’s pathetic. And ultimately detrimental to the quality of life.

Or, as the UVA Law Blog’s title says: On Consideration, Charlottesville is Awful Actually OK

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First there are two bottoms for housing. The first is for new home sales, housing starts and residential investment. The second bottom is for prices. Sometimes these bottoms can happen years apart.

…
For new home sales and housing starts, it appears the bottom is in, and I expect an increase in both starts and sales in 2012.

I place a great deal of credibility in Calculated Risk; I’ve learned a tremendous amount there over the years. I’m not certain the bottom is quite here in the Charlottesville area, but I’m inclined to think we’re close.

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In today’s market, much more so than the previous one(s), buyers are much more cognizant of the costs to operate a home.

Everyone can calculate the PITI payment – Principal + Interest + Taxes + Insurance

What’s not easily calculable by buyers is -

- How drafty is the house?

- What’s the natural gas bill?

- What’s the electric bill?

- What’s the water bill?

- Trash/recycling is a fairly fixed cost.

- Do the parents scrap over the thermostat?

- How much is my commute going to cost? (this is huge; many of my buyer clients are looking forward to the time when gas goes to $6/gallon … )

If the mortgage is going to be $2500 per month, but the utilities are $900/month, I’m thinking that my clients may be disinclined to move forward with an offer … or they might knock $30k (or some other number) off the offer price.

I said late last year that I suspect 2012 will be the year when buyers start doing energy audits as part of the home inspection process … sellers need to be prepared for this component to the home selling process.

If you’re interested in learning more about your home’s energy efficiency, Charlottesville’s Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP) is a great place to start.

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I’ve said it before. Case Shiller’s Perspective on the Charlottesville real estate market summed up in one phrase: it doesn’t exist.

As I said this morning on Google+ -

So we’re getting ready to widely release Nest Realty’s 4th Quarter 2012 Nest Report … there’s some interesting data and analysis in there.

Combined with the reports I’m hearing from agents about the massive traffic at open houses, I’m thinking that *pockets* of the Charlottesville – Albemarle real estate markets are likely to see some stability & even price increases this year.

As far as Case-Shiller and the NAR? They don’t track our market. They’re good insofar as they give insight into other markets and their respective psychological impacts are interesting but not particularly relevant to our local market.

Here’s Nest’s 4th Quarter report – (Download your copy of the PDF here)

What we’re seeing is this:

- Buyer activity is up. Way up, over the past few months and years

- Multiple offers on desirable properties are becoming almost common place

- Foreclosures and short sales are going to be with us for a long time

- Buyers want to buy. They just don’t want to buy crap or overpriced homes.

- (some) Sellers are becoming more realistic.

As a sign of positivity:

In the Charlottesville MSA in Jan 1-30 2011, 161 properties went under contract. This year, that # is 183. Not bad.Ed Skykes with NBC 29 reported on the Nest Report and this is one of the key snips:

But even with good news, he says there is still uncertainty.  Duncan stated, “No one’s calling a bottom by any stretch. I’ve written and said for years that we’re not going to know bottom until we have a year or two of hindsight. But right now, in our microcosm, we’re seeing very positive activity.”

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If you’re looking for new ways to get around for fun or to work, or might be trying to live a greener lifestyle in 2012, why not try biking? In March 2010 we introduced biking directions and since then Google Maps has been sharing biking directions with cyclists across the U.S and Canada.

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I’m going to listen to the show (thanks to Charlottesville Podcast) and put up some show notes, but in the meantime, feel free to what I think was a pretty interesting hour of real estate.

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This stuff matters, not simply because the assessed values affect homeowners’ taxes, but the County’s entire budget and to a certain degree property values in that buyers look to assessments for an indication as to what market value may be. My opinion that that the assessment rarely is equivalent to true market value.

Aaron Richardson at the Daily Progress reported last week:

Albemarle’s county executive, Tom Foley, has told the Board of Supervisors he was basing his budget request for next fiscal year, which is still in the works, on an equalized tax rate of 76.5 cents per $100 of assessed real estate value.

Schools Superintendent Pam Moran based her budget request for next fiscal year on the same figure.

For now, the tax rate sits at 74.2 cents per $100. The equalized tax rate is the rate that would have property owners paying basically the same amount of taxes as the previous year, the side-effect of falling property values. That equalized rate is also in the county’s five-year financial plan.

County spokeswoman Lee Catlin said that the 76.5 cent rate is a “working” figure that will be finalized in the next couple of weeks as the county finishes this year’s assessments.

Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Ann H. Mallek said she is in favor of the equalized rate. Moving to the new rate, she said, will make possible long-neglected capital improvements such as the Crozet Library and a police firing range.

Assessed values have been declining for years, and they absolutely matter – to local budgets, to schools’ budgets and quality, and to communities’ qualities of life.

I’ve written about real estate assessments many times over the years; if you’re interested in this subject, you may want to spend some time reading some of those stories.

From 2007: Assessments, property taxes and shifting market values in Albemarle County and also from 2007: basing budgets on hopes rather than actuality isn’t the best approach.

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These are a few of the ideas that may come up …

If you have suggestions, please feel free to suggest them here, on Twitter, G+, Facebook …- Albemarle County real estate assessments are out … what did your house’s assessment do?
- @JimDuncan the disparity between assessments (higher) and selling price (lower)? When and why that happens.
- Seller tips on preparing your home for the spring market.
- getting sellers to understand where prices are
- Overview of numbers – transactions and prices this year versus last year
- Foreclosures and short sales’ impact
- Interest rates’ irrelevance
- The National Association of Realtors’ revisions
- Consumer confidence and expectations
- People choosing to stay put longer

Looking forward:

- When will we bottom? (not for a while)
- gas prices’ impact on housing trends
- What is next year going to look like?
- Peoples’ timelines for buying or selling (start now)

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Diverse Solutions provides the “search for homes” tool that so many people use, and yesterday it got even better with their new release (researching this post, I realized that it’s only been a couple months since their last release).

- Radius search – check it out now! Walkability and proximity to stuff are two of the most important things my buyer clients are asking for.

- Search with polygons (only available on the backend by me for now … what polygons do you want?) and I imagine that soon it will likely be available to users

- Driving Directions

(have you seen that you can search for open houses as well? It’s an older feature but mighty useful!)

I have long wanted to provide the best real estate search tool in the Charlottesville area for my readers, visitors, buyers, etc – my role is a client representative, and I firmly believe that by empowering my clients, we all are better off.

Soon I might do a voice-over, but you really don’t want to listen to me, do you?

I’ll be testing this out myself (and implementing it more widely shortly)

As an aside … I don’t treat the visitors/readers/clients as “leads” despite this term’s persistence in the real estate vernacular.

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In light of the Cavalier Inn’s reprieve, (from 2009) …

When the Board of Visitors first approved the Arts Gateway to the University of Virginia in 2007, the project—an estimated $118 million plan that would include, among other buildings, a new art museum at the current site of the Cavalier Inn—was slated to begin construction during the spring of 2009. Now, with renovations underway for the UVA Art Museum on Rugby Road, Vice Provost for the Arts Elizabeth Hutton Turner says that plans for the Arts Gateway are on “indefinite hold.”

… it seems there are going to be quite a supply of hotel rooms in Charlottesville.

As an aside, it’s a damn shame that the only working outbound links in the story I wrote in 2005 about the Cavalier Inn’s plans are to my own site and to cvillenews, not to the Cavalier Daily and not, in cvillenews’ case, to the Richmond Times Dispatch. Links are historical references.

As I said on Twitter:

“Media that break links are damaging history; links are historical references. @DailyProgress @cavalierdaily @RTDnews”

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The contrasts between that town and ours are remarkable – ours is green, vibrant, thriving, with contrasts between city, country, mountains and flat land. Theirs is none of those. It’s interesting here, the topography, the culture, the things to do …

On the days where I read about a story about the stunning ineptitude of our politicians systems bureaucracy, the perspective of going to a place that is desolate, boring, depressed and uninteresting is immensely valuable.

For all of Charlottesville’s* faults and shortcomings (I’ll identify a few in a forthcoming story), we live in a pretty nice place and I count myself as damn lucky to live here.

Spend a few minutes browsing James Marshall’s photo stream on Flickr and tell me that Charlottesville’s not an awesome place to live. Seriously.

* Charlottesville = Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Nelson and sometimes Louisa

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Is anyone surprised that the advice VDOT is offering is this?

“Rich suggested that acceptance might be the best response to distant construction dates.”

This seems par for the course in the Charlottesville – Albemarle area, when one of the three conditions set forth by the City of Charlottesville is to “have more meetings.”I’ve been working on a story on and off for the past weeks, the working title of which is “What sucks about living in Charlottesville?” Transportation politics is an early leader.

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How cool is this?

It can take anywhere from six weeks to six months to build a 2,800-square-foot, two-story house in the U.S., mostly because human beings do all the work. Within the next five years, chances are that 3D printing (also known by the less catchy but more inclusive term additive manufacturing) will have become so advanced that we will be able to upload design specifications to a massive robot, press print, and watch as it spits out a concrete house in less than a day. Plenty of humans will be there, but just to ogle.

Wow.

So I might want to invest in concrete stocks.

As noted earlier today, this technology may one day become “normal” or the “new normal” or simply “what we’re building with now.”

It might take less than a week to build a concrete house using this technology, but I’d wager it would take at least three to five years to get approval from Albemarle’s Architectural Review Board.

h/t InstaPundit

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- Human settlement patterns (where people are living and working)

- Gas prices

- Expectation of permanence/transience

- Interest rates

- Property tax rates

- Monetary supply

- The internet’s availability and impact

Those are just a few of the ways that 1999 differs from 2011, and makes application of “normal” challenging.

Here’s something that hasn’t changed – people need homes. Buying a house is a choice, and one that comes with greater responsibility than renting – you’re accepting on the maintenance, the permanence, the mortgage, the community, the risk. If you’re not ready for those, don’t buy a house. If you’re ready to buy a home, do your due diligence and consider it.

“New normal” is a shifting term, applicable to virtually every evolving industry.

Heck, I’ve been seeking “new normal” for years.

But I thought I’d look at the data and briefly compare the 1999 Charlottesville area real estate market with the 2011 one … keeping in mind that so many things are different, thus negating in a lot of ways the comparisons.

And then, looking solely at single family home sales – 1999 versus 2011 in the Charlottesville MSA:

* I’m borrowing this theme from a speaker at a lunch I attended yesterday.

Keep in mind that this moving median home sale chart is for the Charlottesville MLS – not the Charlottesville MSA … meaning that more than anything it’s a trend line for the region.

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A reader asks –

Hi, Jim: I’m amazed and annoyed that most listings do not mention internet service, nor do RE sites include that information as a search parameter. Knowing the availability – and speed – of internet connection is especially necessary when seeking a home outside Charlottesville. Short of investigating through local ISP’s for particular addresses or neighborhoods, do you have any suggestion? I do not trust sellers or, frankly, seller’s agents, to know or tell the truth.

In the Charlottesville area, the City of Charlottesville and the urban ring definitely* have broadband connectivity, as do many (most?) of the more densely-populated areas of Greene, Louisa, Louisa. * Definitely = 99% sure.

My suggestions and insight to ascertain broadband connectivity in the Charlottesville area:

1a – Ask your buyer broker. A good one is going to know with reasonable accuracy whether an area is likely to have internet service.

1b – If you’re really interested, the only way to ensure there is broadband service is to contact the service provider. In the Charlottesville MSA, we have Comcast, Embarq, Blue Ridge Internetworks, Verizon in some of the outlying areas, and a couple smaller fiber providers. *Nelson County just lost some broadband connectivity.

2 – A note to listing agents: when a buyer asks, “does this house have internet?” they aren’t asking about Wildblue or dial-up.

3 – I’ve asked the fine folks who power the “search for homes” feature of my site to add internet availability as a search option, but here’s the problem: GIGO. Just last year, the Charlottesville MLS added “internet availability” to the list of features listing agents can select, joining the ranks of # of bedrooms, # of bathrooms, acreage, etc.
But … As “internet availability” isn’t a required field in the MLS, it’s liable to be left out. And as we all know – if it’s blank, it’s not searchable. Thus, the search and results will be inaccurate, not useful, frustrating and bad for everyone – buyers searching, sellers trying to sell and agents running real estate blogs.

4 – To the trust aspect – get a good buyer broker who you can trust. I’ll address this aspect in more detail with clients. As clients said recently about the photos some realtors take to market their properties – “All pictures tell a story, and some aren’t true.”

5 – I wish that the internet service providers would offer maps and overlays to let people determine where service is, but presumably that information is a competitive thing for them.

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