The Orlando Housing Market report for May 2015 is promising. It states “Orlando’s housing market is riding its traditional summertime wave of home sales — fueled in part by both low interest rates and more inventory — and posted positive numbers for the month of May.” The real estate market in our area continues full[…]
The two best predictors of future real estate value and appreciation a home are
(1) the quality of schools nearby, and
(2) the rent that home will receive if it were a rental.
Is that tried and true formula changing?
How’s my cell phone coverage here? People regularly hold up their cell phone in the middle of a home they are looking at to see if they get good coverage. Root metrics surveyed 2,000 U.S. adults and found that 76 percent ranked mobile services as important. By comparison, 60 percent identified good schools as important.
U.S. adults in all age groups ranked mobile phone service higher than schools. […]
It was once common to make an offer on another house that was contingent on the sale of your current home in order to close. For over 5 years since the downturn in 2008, contingent offers of this kind have been unheard of. Part of this had to do with so many owners with no equity or negative equity, and part of it was because average marketing time was months and months and few sellers wanted the entanglement.
All that has been gradually changing over the last year, and many sellers are again ready to entertain offers contingent on another sale. Recently we have been involved in three sell-and-buy transactions like this that were contingent on the buyers first selling their own homes. This is a strong indicator that the overall real estate market in our area is returning to a more normal function.
A property owner recently emailed me to send them our “tenant relations program.” I responded with an email that began, “Our tenant relations program?” I asked. “Uh, we don’t have a tenant relations program. It is not a list of tasks that we do. It is more foundational than that. It is who we are and permeates all our relations with tenants.” The email went on to list what follows:
All of our service staff who relate to tenants (Brian, Ingrid, Sarah, Jessica, Julia, Marc, Luis, Matt & Kelly Kelly and the 30 vendors we employ on a regular basis such as plumbing or a/c service) have a service rather than a sales orientation. Jessica, for example, has worked as a genius at Apple. Luis, one of our two in-house handymen, is a paramedic/firefighter and spent seven years working for ServPro doing the same kind of work he assists us with. I was a pastor for 20+ years. We are all people people.