The Limits of Triangulating Now that Congress has passed financial reform legislation, aren’t people upset about past Wall Street abuses just being scolds and cranks? Shouldn’t they — we — just get over ourselves? My answer is “no,” because the abuses aren’t past. On the contrary, shockingly little has changed (never mind accountability for misdeeds)....Read More
Putting a Price Tag on Proximity to Cedar Lake A client of mine says his engineer son-in-law has done a regression analysis calculating the premium associated with proximity to Minneapolis’ Cedar Lake. His number? $11,000 per block. If that’s correct, that’s a very valuable number to have, because lots of Realtors, appraisers — and their...Read More
Motivated Buyers In my post, “Labor Day Weekend Traffic,” I offered up the (Realtor) conventional wisdom about open houses during holiday weekends and other traditionally slow periods. Namely, that such open houses often make up in quality what they lack in quantity. So who came through my Golden Valley open house today? –A “downsizer” who...Read More
You Read it Here First In the course of helping clients find a rental property the last 2 weeks, it’s become abundantly clear that the rental market is much more fragmented and chaotic than the For Sale market. And pricing is much sloppier (what you get for, say, $2,500/mth runs the gamut from properties worth...Read More
“Heart of Community?” Not Exactly When it comes to development vs. preservation . . . I’m strictly an agnostic (or maybe the term should be “ad hoc-ist,” given that I favor a case-by-case analysis). So, when developers want to replace a decrepit, generic-looking hardware store at 26th & Lyndale with something newer and more functional,...Read More
(That’s) One Way to Cut Your Property Taxes To: the anonymous neighbor(?) who toppled all my “Open House” signs the other morning From: your friendly neighborhood Realtor (me) Date: 7/30/2010 Re: my Open House signs Dear Neighbor: I’m sure you thought you thought you were striking a blow against obnoxious advertising the other morning when...Read More
