I used to write for Austinist, and I still do their theatre/dance listings. I ~love~ their column: Hot Real Estate Listings. It was on hiatus for awhile. I hope it’s back to stay!

This place is phenomenal. Gorgeous. A steal, if ever one there was. ~sigh~ Wish I had a couple-hundred K, or five, laying around in cash!

Business Week has a list of the top 20 cities where it’s cheaper to buy than rent. Dallas is number 10. Most of the list is where you’d expect — Florida, California, Georgia. However, the top three are Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Rochester. Needless to say, Austin is not on the list.

There’s a woman I’ve met now at a couple of open houses I’ve hosted in N Central Austin. She’s really sweet. She likes to spend her time on Sunday afternoons driving around Allandale, Crestview, Brentwood, etc. looking at open houses. She’s very talkative, and enjoys sharing her opinion of what works, and what doesn’t, in [...]

Most of us have seen, first hand, the exemplification of our struggling economy in the specter of vacant strip mall after vacant strip mall. Drive around in La Frontera sometime. That’ll give you perspective. Along those lines, I just read an article in today’s Statesman about the ways in which the weak job market impacts [...]

This weekend is the annual tax-free weekend, nominally for back-to-school shopping, though all clothes & such are tax free. So either get out there and get some new duds OR avoid retail markets like the plague — whichever suits you best!

The funny thing is, I never shopped at S&H. Throw pillows for $50 are not my thing. Still, it’s a surprise to hear that they’ve gone totally out of business and are selling off their entire inventory. They were one of the first stores in the Gateway. To me, Whole Foods, REI, and Smith & [...]

Wow.  What a bunch of nonsense!  This landed in my Spam folder.  I’m not sure where to start….  First, Austin’s real estate market isn’t bad, so the email’s subject line is not only insulting, it’s inaccurate.  Second, what is this woman peddling?  I read the entire email several times over and I have no clue [...]

These numbers are being tossed about at the office a lot lately. Probably because they’re fairly striking. New homes built in the Austin area: 2006 = 17,000 2008 = 9,800 2009 = 6,400 projected There are a lot of ways to look at this, but one of the key reasons this is happening is that builders [...]

This site looks best, by far, in Google Chrome.  Hm.  Interesting. UPDATE: And now my tech support guru (also know as my husband) has set it up so I can run Chrome in 64-bit Windows Vista.  When I tried, the installer barked at me and refused to run, but he waved a magic wand and [...]