Or not!  Say what you will about the new health care law, it will not add ad additional 3.8% sales tax burden to the majority of home sales.  Brooks Jackson spells it out very clearly on FactCheck.org.  Among his comments: …Only those with incomes over $200,000 a year ($250,000 for married couples filing jointly) will [...]

When the current or former home of an entertainer goes on sale, we get to sneak a peek into the celeb lifestyle.  I love checking out the staging photos and such on Celebrity Real Estate Highlights. For this week, I’m partial to Sacha Baron Cohen & Isla Fisher’s house, though none of the listings is [...]

Ohhhhh nooooooooo.  Good friends of mine struggled all day today with no water at home. A main in their neighborhood had broken, so the city did an emergency-fix type of thing.  Oddly, their neighborhood did NOT make the city’s Water Shut Off list.  So frustrating. And in a hot climate, it’s almost a crime to [...]

As an unofficial Ask a Realtor response here on my blog, i’m covering a question from local Austin investor, My Uncle B. J :”It’s good to hear from you, Uncle B! What’s on your mind?” B: “Well, lately we’ve seen houses with ‘for sale’ signs but with ‘coming soon’ tacked on. What’s that all about?” Great [...]

I heard a radio DJ say today, “Hey! Houses are the cheapest they’ve been since the 1950′s!  Wish my salary was enough to buy one!” Without commenting on his total lack of awareness about the housing and mortgage markets, he did have one thing right — apparently buyers aren’t lining up, even though interest rates [...]

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) started a program last month that will ultimately release $500M of funds as downpayment assistance for homebuyers.  Currently available funds are listed here. At the moment, it looks like the program has about $50M in its coffers.  If you’re buying a home in Austin, you owe [...]

Things have suddenly (or so it seems, based on conversations with colleagues) gotten ridiculously tight in the rental market for single-family homes in Central Austin.  Consider the evidence! Exhibit A: An unsolicited email blast from a fellow Realtor. Subject: Immediate Move-in, 2 or 3 bedroom house, not duplex, <$1800. I have clients looking  for a house for [...]

There was a great article in last month’s magazine for the Texas Association of Realtors about owner financing.  It’s a short, sweet, one-pager that spells out exactly why it’s hard to find an owner-financed home any more. The skinny is this: “To seller-finance a…residential transaction involving property other than the seller’s primary residence, the seller must now [...]

Sometimes I hesitate to tell people that I’m a huge Clark Howard fan.  First of all, here in Austin, his show is on the Conservative Talk Radio Station. Not that there’s anything wrong with listening to conservative talk radio — but it IS a bad idea to mix politics with business.  Secondly, Clark is a [...]

Travis County property tax appraisals are out. It’s not even been half a day, and my immediate area is seeing 2010 values range from +10% to -5% from last year. As I wrote to my neighborhood group, I wish I could shed some light, but I don’t think that’s possible when it comes to the [...]