by Jay on December 16, 2010
OK, I’ve been slack
I’ve missed two quarterly reports, but frankly there hasn’t been much to report. For at least the last 5 years there have been 30 homes sold in Durham for over $700,000 each year. When I did the quarterly report for the 1st quarter only three had been sold and it hasn’t gotten much better. 5 were sold in each of the 2nd and 3rd quarters and 2 in the final quarter. I’m writing this 9 days before Christmas and there are two homes under contract with contingencies and 1 pending but none of them are scheduled to close before the end of the year. So the total for the year is likely to remain 15, less than half of the average for the last five or six years. But it gets even more dreary.
Pricing
In this crop of sales only 1 home closed at a price over $1,000,000. Every single one of the sales had been reduced in price. The lowest price drop was $23,000 and the highest was $1,015,000. That’s not a typo, that price drop was almost equal to the highest sale. The average price drop was $282,400. Even when you take the highest and the lowest out of the calculation, the average is still $246,000…almost a quarter of a million dollars. The total of the price drops was over $4.2 M. All but 4 of the price drops were six figures or more. [click to continue…]
by Jay on December 2, 2010
Architecture in the Blood
My original interest in real estate had nothing to do with selling homes or becoming a Realtor but from my mother’s father, my grandfather, Aldoph Otto Budina, who was an architect. Although my siblings don’t necessarily agree, pictures of him when he was the age I am now, look eerily familiar…like me with hair.
Nobody called him Adolph…it was always AO or Bud. Grampy (to us) was a man of few words but still managed to make a mark in the world. From his library I have a biography of the famous architect Louis Sullivan, who my grandfather worked for in New York, that mentions him several times. Thumbing through it a few years ago I found a letter folded between the pages from Sullivan to my grandfather full of affection and good wishes.
Grampy didn’t talk much about these things but from what I could piece together, he ended up in Richmond where my mother met my father at a USO event at nearby Fort Lee during World War II. It was because of his association with Sullivan or another prominent architect of the time by the name of John Eberson, that he was on the team that designed the Central National Bank building in downtown, a building with a strong resemblance to the Empire State Building. He also worked on the Lowes Theater in Richmond which has now been restored and is known as the Carpenter Performing Arts Center. [click to continue…]
